The Dish

Nate Silver thinks health care has better than a 75 percent chance of passing:

Over the last 24-48 hours — coinciding with the release of the CBO score — we've now moved into the second phase, which is counting up the yesses. And so far, Democrats are doing a pretty good job of it. Firm-seeming yes votes from different people representing different constituencies — Kucinich (wavering liberals), Markey (swing-district), Gordon (retirees), Gutierrez (Hispanics) have been unveiled, with one or two others looking likely to follow. As Dayen pointed out earlier today, if you take the seeming yes votes and add them to the people who are uncommitted but voted for the bill last time around, they add up to 217. This math isn't foolproof but by any means but that's a pretty important threshold to pass.

(Photo: US President Barack Obama delivers remarks on health insurance reform at George Mason University's Patriot Center in Fairfax, Virgina, on March 19, 2010. Obama hailed this weekend's 'historic' congressional vote on his health plan as the culmination of a century of struggle, at a euphoric campaign-style rally. By Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

Via Yglesias, National Catholic Reporter has endorsed health care reform:

Bottom line: The current legislation is not “pro-abortion,” and there is no, repeat no, federal funding of abortion in the bill.

Meanwhile, writing in The Washington Post last Sunday, T.R. Reid, a first-rate journalist, a Catholic, and author of “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care,” argues persuasively that industrialized countries that achieve universal or near-universal insurance coverage have a demonstrably lower abortion rate than we have in the United States. It should matter to those who believe in the sacredness of all human life that this legislation will not only provide health care to those who don’t currently possess it, but will encourage women facing crisis pregnancies to choose life. Given the intractable nature of the abortion debate in the United States, this amounts to a pro-life victory of historic proportion.

When you realize what Netanyahu was doing the night before Irish-Catholic Zionist Joe Biden (yes, we still exist) came to visit, you begin to see how entwined the politics of the Israeli and American far right have become:

A day before Biden’s arrival, Netanyahu appeared onstage with Pastor John Hagee in Jerusalem. The occasion was Hagee’s Night To Honor Israel, an event the far-right Texas-based preacher arranged to tout his ministry’s millions in donations to Israeli organizations and to level bellicose rhetoric against Israel’s perceived enemies.

At the gathering, Hagee called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “the Hitler of the Middle East” and denounced the Goldstone Report as “character assassination by an unbiased and uninformed committee. "Netanyahu welcomed the crowd of 1000 American evangelicals to Jerusalem, a city he described as “the undivided, eternal capitol of the Jewish people. Then, he told them, “I salute you! The Jewish people salute you!” In the audience were top-level members of the Israeli government, from Ambassador Michael Oren to Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat to Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.

So Michael Oren is honoring an anti-Catholic fundamentalist bigot in order to affirm Israel's claim to all of Jerusalem for ever. And the rest of us are not supposed to notice, while he channels the Likud line directly to the Washington Post.

There's a reason that Sarah Palin wore a twinned US-Israeli flag-pin to address the Tea Party Convention.

The evangelicals see permanent Israeli colonization of the West Bank as critical to End-times theology; and they are helping fund it with millions. The neocon gamble – that uniting Jewish fundamentalists with Christian fundamentalists is an international project for greater Israel and permanent Republican majorities in the US – is still in play. And it makes a two-state solution impossible. 

This is why Obama matters as much now as ever. Only he can save us from this fundamentalist politics and the religious wars it can and will unleash even further unless restrained and blocked. There are increasingly fewer ways for pro-Israel American moderates to stay silent or dodge this question. Lashing out at realists as anti-Semites is not the answer. It is a distraction. They have to take a stand. Or Israel will be as polluted by the fumes of Christianism as the GOP.

Obama is Israel's last chance to dial back this vicious fundamentalist cycle. And if israel doesn't, the consequences for all of us are grave. Petraeus gets this. When will the neocons?

"It’s not possible – is it? – that the conservative world will just pass by the affair in embarrassed silence?" – David Frum on reports of alleged financial shenanigans in the Empire of Hannity.

A poignant question in so many ways.

Keith Hennessey, who has been among the more intellectually honest opponents of health care, makes his final pitch:

The pending legislation slows the growth of Medicare spending, but then spends that money on the new promise.  We still have the old unfunded promises, and those relatively easy Medicare policy changes will no longer be available to fund them.

When you or your successors choose or are forced to solve our long-term fiscal problem, these tools will be unavailable.

You will have to reduce benefits and charge seniors higher premiums, copayments, and deductibles.  You will have to cut provider payments even more.  You will have to means-test benefits more aggressively.  You will have to raise the eligibility age for these programs.  If you favor tax increases, you will find yourself evaluating options to raise them not just on the rich, but also on the middle class. The arithmetic will force you to do these things.

A reader writes:

I was struck by this quote in your post on “The Pope’s Defenders”: “there were more than 1,000 priests in the archdiocese at the time and that Ratzinger entrusted that kind of personnel matter to subordinates.” 

Having recently supervised 1,000 subordinates in positions of public trust—law enforcement officers, who are placed in much more difficult circumstances than priests—I found this “excuse” appalling.  I knew (and responded, and followed up) when one of my officers spoke intemperately to a member of the public, which was normally met with formal discipline. More serious cases, such as an off-duty assault, often resulted in counseling which was carefully tracked and progress assessed as final disciplinary decisions were made and meted out. 

Child rape? 

Put aside the horrible truth that the Church is an organization that puts someone guilty of an act like that back into a position of public trust at all, and just ask why the head executive wouldn’t bother to monitor the most serious misconduct and discipline case under his purview.  Just the fact that an organization with this much importance to so many people has not had a system or process for managing these cases is negligence of the highest order. 

But I fear—as you have eloquently expressed about a Church that you still respect and love in many ways—that something worse than negligence is underlying these continued revelations of abuse.  When something this evil is endemic across multiple churches on different continents, there is an intrinsic cultural problem, perhaps with roots in the dual public commitments to celibacy and anti-homosexuality. 

The Church, and the Pope, must address this, NOW, or they will undermine the very commitments and teachings they have spent a lifetime serving.

Abe Foxman puts out a release:

Gen. Petraeus has simply erred in linking the challenges faced by the U.S. and coalition forces in the region to a solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and blaming extremist activities on the absence of peace and the perceived U.S. favoritism for Israel. This linkage is dangerous and counterproductive. Whenever the Israeli-Arab conflict is made a focal point, Israel comes to be seen as the problem. If only Israel would stop settlements, if only Israel would talk with Hamas, if only Israel would make concessions on refugees, if only it would share Jerusalem, everything in the region would then fall into line.

Yglesias:

I’ll be interested to see how Petraeus’ neocon fan base reacts.

By glossing over it. Max Boot:

General Petraeus obviously doesn’t see the Israeli-Arab “peace process” as a top issue for his command, because he didn’t even raise it in his opening statement. When he was pressed on it, he made a fairly anodyne statement about the need to encourage negotiations to help moderate Arab regimes. That’s it. He didn’t say that all settlements had to be stopped or that Israel is to blame for the lack of progress in negotiations. And he definitely didn’t say that the administration should engineer a crisis in Israeli-U.S. relations in order to end the construction of new housing for Jews in East Jerusalem.

Tokyo, Japan, 6 pm

John McWhorter rolls his eyes at Tavis Smiley's upcoming black leaders summit:

Based on my experience, I’ll take a guess as to how Smiley’s We Count! The Black Agenda is the American Agenda will go. I know I’m going out on a limb here. Stay with me, this is a little complex: I venture that a major thread of the discussion will be the observation that although we have a black President, racial disparities persist in America. Never mind that the number of people attending or watching the event on TV who won’t already be aware of this could barely fill a minivan. And then some other dependables at events like these – speakers and the audience will respond with especial fervor to points made with, at the finish, an edgy intonation conveying a streety brand of indignation. The actual content of the utterance will be of minor importance.

TNC takes Tavis to task over his claim that black politicians are "being targeted in some pretty significant ways by some pretty powerful forces":

[Smiley's] David Paterson defense strikes me as very, very wrong. Paterson is largely in trouble for attempting to influence a case in which one of his aides is accused of beating up his girlfriend. It's the need to see an abuse accusation through a racial lens that gives me pause. This is a politician whose approval rating is below 50 percent among black voters. I don't get how he fits into a narrative of black folks "getting crushed." I suspect the same of Charlie Rangel, though I haven't kept up enough to know for sure. I just don't see where the "black/white" angle is in this.

 A reader writes:

I’ve been thinking about the way the child abuse situation is playing out, and I’ve realized that one of the unaddressed problems in this situation is silence.

I’m not just talking about the silence of those who knew horrible things were happening and didn’t report it to civil authorities. I’m talking about the silence that has created this warped culture in the first place.

I’ve spent much of my life around Catholic priests, and teach religion at a Jesuit university. In dozens of conversations with priests, it is clear that so many of them don’t believe in an exclusively male priesthood, don’t believe in the church’s teaching that homosexuality is a “disorder,” reject the church’s absurd claims about masturbation, and some (though a smaller minority) don’t believe in the necessity of a celibate and chaste priesthood. But they keep their views to themselves. They remain silent.

The truth is that this silence is a form of acquiescence to the illusion of an asexual institution. And it is this illusion that has created this problem in the first place. 

People who feel compelled to molest children either enter the priesthood with the sincere hope that they can escape their sexuality altogether, or as a shield to enable their predatory behavior. The disproportionate extent to which this predatory behavior has taken place among gay men is only a function of the disproportionate degree to which the priesthood is the world’s biggest closet, and young gay men are encouraged to enter it as a way to “escape” their “disordered” tendencies (so yes, while same-sex child molestation can and does happen with otherwise heterosexual men, in a population in which a third?, a half?, or more? [it’s bound to be speculative] of the men are gay, it shouldn’t be surprising that a higher proportion of the predatory behavior will manifest itself in molestation of boys.

And to pretend that eliminating homosexuals from the priesthood will solve the problem is not only comical—it’s like a politician promising to clean up Washington—but will only assure the church is doubling-down on the fantasy of asexuality. It makes the invitation to predators even more appealing!).

If all of those priests who whispered in private conversations about their disapproval of the formal teachings of the Church regarding human sexuality were to make themselves known, and begin to work to publicly change the Church, who knows what the result might be? It wouldn’t be pretty, but it would be a start to an honest dialogue. Of course, this is a culture that values obedience over honesty, submission over truth telling, and it is set up in such a way to assure that deviating from this value structure will lead to great personal loss. But at a certain point, once we see the costs of this warped structure, isn’t it morally incumbent on the silent to speak?

I’ve always felt that “Silence=Death” was among the most powerful slogans ever. In the case of the Church, silence sometimes equals death, but it always equals pain, suffering, and the destruction of human souls whose lives will never be the same as a result of these acts.

So, yeah, keep stickin’ it to Ben XVI and his crew….but maybe, like MLK used to say of those who silently bent to the will of oppressors, the solution rests with them.