The Dish

Just for the record, in November 2003, when Ramesh Ponnuru was defending a travesty of parliamentary procedure to pass a completely-unfunded multi-trillion-dollar, Rove-inspired pre-election bribe to seniors, this far leftist was writing:

We're beginning to realize that GOP has nothing to do with small government or fiscal sobriety. It's a vehicle for massive debt and catering to the worst forms of corporate welfare. Thank God for McCain. Bush should veto this [energy] bill, until it is de-porked. He won't, of course. He has yet to veto a single big-spending bill. He doesn't seem to give a damn about what is happening to the fiscal health of this country.

On the Medicare bill, the Dish was virulently opposed on fiscal grounds, and didn't let the Democrats off either:

Their paleo response to the Medicare bill is truly depressing. There are many reasons to oppose this bill – most importantly that it wll destroy the remaining threads of fiscal hope. But to oppose even experimentation with cost-cutting reforms reveals a party completely bankrupt of new ideas… The GOP has now no crediibility as a party of fiscal discipline or small government. It's just another tool of special interests – as beholden to them as the Dems are to theirs. Its pork barrel excesses may now be worse than the Dems, and the president seems completely unable or unwilling to restrain them. I know I'm a broken record on this but we truly need some kind of third force again in American politics – fiscally conservative, socially inclusive, and vigilant against terror. Last week has shown us why.

I guess I want to reiterate my consistent fiscal conservatism, against the smears of the bloggy right. And that's why I support this health insurance reform bill, because it promises to actually cut Medicare and to experiment with serious cost-controls. Obama is to the fiscal right of Kerry in 2003, and, of course, to the fiscal right of Sarah "Death Panels" Palin in 2010.

One other thing worth noting from that November. The partisan right have long tried to argue that my position on Iraq shifted because of the FMA on marriage equality. But you'll see from the archives that I'm up in arms about the amendment and still embarrassingly pro-Bush on the war.

Calculated Risk contrasts unemployment rates with levels of education. Ryan Avent has further unemployment thoughts.

"We have no time — time works against us. The conflict can be transferred from a national conflict to a religious one, which is unsolvable, and this is something that we cannot afford," – Tzipi Livni, Kadima leader and former Israeli prime minister, understanding why Netanyahu's intransigence is so dangerous for all of us.

Greenwald wants action:

There is a real opportunity here to cause that rarest of political events:  namely, having someone's credibility and standing be diminished by virtue of repugnant acts.  Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol and Andy McCarthy (with whom it originated) have so transparently crossed every line with this ugly smear campaign that they are being condemned across the political spectrum. 

Only the hardest-core ideological dead-enders are defending them. It would therefore not only be politically plausible, but valuable, for the Congress to officially condemn these McCarthyite attacks on Justice Department lawyers.  If the Democratic Congress was willing (indeed eager) to do so against the nation's leading progressive group, why wouldn't it do the same in response to a far more repugnant and potentially destructive campaign launched by a Far Right group?  In 1954, the U.S. Senate condemned the original Joe McCarthy, so why not his progeny?

Kristol, Cheney and McCarthy need to be named and shamed. I'm all for this, of course. And it would be a way for the Democrats to actually regain some balls and initiative on the vital question of the compatibility between American values and national defense against Jihadist terrorism.

Obama did yesterday what he will do this fall if the Democrats have the common sense to pass the health insurance reform bill. Start watching the video above at 9.30. I love his jab at Washington pundit bullshit. As I wrote in my column last Sunday,

The polling shows the bill isn’t as unpopular as the Republicans insist it is. In the latest poll of polls, about 48% oppose it and about 43% support it. That has been stable since November, as Nate Silver, the blogger, has noted. A Wall Street Journal poll found support at a mere 36%. But when the same sample was told what was in the bill — everyone gets insurance; it does not end when you lose your job; no one gets denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition — the support went up 20 points. Its component parts are far more popular than the total concept — and more easily explained to the public. Just because Obama hasn’t done this so far doesn’t mean he won’t.

And now he has. This is the kind of argument that, in a recovering economy, could shift the dynamic back to the president’s party. This is the Obama many of you voted for. Money quote (as inspiring as the campaign):

The insurance companies continue to ration health care based on who’s sick and who’s healthy; on who can pay and who can’t pay.  That’s the status quo in America, and it is a status quo that is unsustainable for this country.  We can’t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people.  (Applause.)  We need to give families and businesses more control over their own health insurance. And that’s why we need to pass health care reform — not next year, not five years from now, not 10 years from now, but now.

Now, since we took this issue on a year ago, there have been plenty of folks in Washington who’ve said that the politics is just too hard.  They’ve warned us we may not win.  They’ve argued now is not the time for reform.  It’s going to hurt your poll numbers.  How is it going to affect Democrats in November?  Don’t do it now.

My question to them is:  When is the right time?  If not now, when?  If not us, who?

So how much higher do premiums have to rise until we do something about it? How many more Americans have to lose their health insurance? How many more businesses have to drop coverage?

Think about it.  We’ve been talking about health care for nearly a century.  I’m reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt right now.  He was talking about it.  Teddy Roosevelt.  We have failed to meet this challenge during periods of prosperity and also during periods of decline.  Some people say, well, don’t do it right now because the economy is weak.  When the economy was strong, we didn’t do it.  We’ve talked about it during Democratic administrations and Republican administrations.  I got all my Republican colleagues out there saying, well, no, no, no, we want to focus on things like cost.  You had 10 years.  What happened? What were you doing?  (Applause.)

Every year, the problem gets worse.  Every year, insurance companies deny more people coverage because they’ve got preexisting conditions.  Every year, they drop more people’s coverage when they get sick right when they need it most.  Every year, they raise premiums higher and higher and higher.

Just last month, Anthem Blue Cross in California tried to jack up rates by nearly 40 percent — 40 percent.  Anybody’s paycheck gone up 40 percent?

Attaboy. There is a very easy way to seize back the initiative: not Rahm-style surrenders to the Cheney right; not some kind of reframing. The same frame he won the election on: you want change or do you want nothing?

David Jarman criticizes National Journal's rankings of politicians:

[W]hen Kucinich votes against healthcare reform for not being single-payer, it’s notched as a conservative vote rather than a lefty one. And when Paul votes against military adventurism, it’s recorded as a liberal vote rather than modern-day isolationism. In other words, because they break with their party on principle, National Journal ends up classifying ideologues as centrists.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Writing in the Fred Hiatt chair for Bush-Cheney Mediocrities, Marc Thiessen continues his work as a Cheney mouthpiece, under the preposterous guise of being a journalist. This may win the False Equivalence Award this year:

Where was the moral outrage when fine lawyers like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Steve Bradbury and others came under vicious personal attack? Their critics did not demand simple transparency; they demanded heads. They called these individuals “war criminals” and sought to have them fired, disbarred, impeached and even jailed. Where were the defenders of the “al-Qaeda seven” when a Spanish judge tried to indict the “Bush six“? Philippe Sands, author of the “Torture Team,” crowed: “This is the end of these people’s professional reputations!” I don’t recall anyone accusing him of “shameful” personal attacks.

A small difference. None of these lawyers did commit war crimes, or rigged the plain meaning of the law to allow their political masters to torture anyone they wanted. Friedersdorf and Greenwald pounce.

Time reports:

About a year ago, her partner's father assaulted [Pepe Julian Onziema] when he saw the couple walking down the street together. She ended up bruised and battered, her clothes torn and with a mild concussion. 

In comparison to the open hostility Onziema faces from the outside world, at her and her girlfriend's airy apartment in a Kampala, life is beautifully mundane domesticity. Her partner cooks, and Onziema chimes in that she does too in a way that makes it obvious that she doesn't. They both clean, they have friends over for beers, they watch music videos. Onziema wants more. She bought her girlfriend a ring and hopes to get married. "But if we get married, her dad has to give her away," Onziema says, discouraged by the torn jeans she keeps from the night of the attack.

(Hat tip: BTB)

A tumblr.

(Hat tip: Ezra)