The Washington Post wrote a “news story” that is little but a thinly-veiled press release for the National Tea Party Convention now underway. So, let’s see, 600 people showed up there. And the crowd might double or triple by the time Sarah Palin shows up to deliver her $100k keynote speech.   Give me en effin’ break. That’s a smaller crowd that hundreds of large urban churches get from one neighborhood every Sunday.  Imagine sending three WaPo reporters to the services of the Crenshaw Christian Center in South Central L.A. so it could breathlessly report about how the election of Barack Obama was driving crowds of 10,000 people to gather every Sunday and demand an end to White Supremacist rule.

Look, anyone and everyone living in the U.S. right now has the right to be angry and frustrated. There’d be something wrong with you if you weren’t. The question is: what are you angry about and who do you blame and what do you propose?

The fact that Tea party wingers dressed up as Minutemen and like, trained seals, applauding overt racists like Tom Tancredo and ignorant crackpots like Barracuda Palin seem to have what you might call misplaced priorities.  They’re angry alright.

Angry that the president of the U.S. is black.

Angry that the same president isn’t really an American.

Angry that the same president wants the terrorists to win.

Angry that the president and half of congress are Socialists (even though the entire congress are servants of Goldman-Sachs).

Angry that the people who do all their dirty work for them speak Spanish.

Angry that the Judeo-Christian ethos (at best) isn’t made mandatory (though many aren’t so sure about that first half of that hyphenate).

Angry that their tax dollars might be used to bring us a civilized health care system but have no problem pissing away a trillion dollars in Iraq.

The Tea Partiers are, overwhelmingly, what we used to call white, right-wing Republicans (who historically are always angry when liberal Democrats are in power, even if unemployment was at 2%).

Are there some other, less ideological folks among them?  No doubt there is a minority of such.  But I am ready to affirm that those less ideologically inclined who show up at gatherings like the one in Nashville this weekend are what pollsters and consultants politely call “low-information voters.” The rest of us call them dumb-asses.

When you applaud for a jerk like Tancredo. And when you stand in line and pay real money to be educated by such an obvious fraud as Ms. Palin, you surrender any rights to claiming to be an “independent.” Independent, my ass.

You become an official Fool.

What liberals have to worry about isn’t the support of the Tea Party fools (who would never support them in any case). What they have to worry about is their inability and unwillingness to fire up what could have been and should have been a much larger and powerful constituency who didn’t feel the need to don a Paul Revere costume but who were lined up to hell push the real reform that a majority of Americans voted for a mere year ago.

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February 3, 2010

We live in a world that increasingly demands more dialogue than monologue. President Obama’s January 29th question-and-answer session with Republican leaders gave the public a remarkable window into the state of our union and governing process. It was riveting and educational. The exchanges were substantive, civil and candid. And in a rare break from our modern politics, sharp differences between elected leaders were on full public display without rancor or ridicule.

This was one of the best national political debates in many years. Citizens who watched the event were impressed, by many accounts. Journalists and commentators immediately responded by continuing the conversation of the ideas put forward by the president and his opponents — even the cable news cycle was disrupted for a day.

America could use more of this — an unfettered and public airing of political differences by our elected representatives. So we call on President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader John Boehner to hold these sessions regularly — and allow them to be broadcast and webcast live and without commercial interruption, sponsorship or intermediaries. We also urge the President and the Republican Senate caucus to follow suit. And we ask the President and the House and Senate caucuses of his own party to consider mounting similar direct question-and-answer sessions. We will ask future Presidents and Congresses to do the same.

It is time to make Question Time a regular feature of our democracy.

Please join us by signing the Demand Question Time petition.

Kate Albright-Hanna, Former Director of Online Video, Obama ‘08
David All, President, David All Group
David Almacy, White House Internet Director, 2005-2007
Michael Bassik, Former Chief Digital Officer of Air America; SVP at Global Strategy Group
Ralph Benko, author, The Websters’ Dictionary: How to Use the Web to Transform the World
L. Brent Bozell III, Founder and President, Media Research Center
Cheryl Contee, Co-founder, Jack & Jill Politics
David Corn, Washington Bureau Chief, Mother Jones, and columnist, PoliticsDaily.com
Ana Marie Cox, Founding editor of Wonkette
Susan Crawford, University of Michigan; former staff member, National Economic Council
Esther Dyson, chairman, EDventure Holdings; director, Sunlight Foundation
Allison Fine, Senior fellow, Demos
Mindy Finn, Republican political consultant, co-founder, Engage
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University
Scott Heiferman, Founder and CEO, Meetup
Jon Henke, Arts & Labs
Andrew Keen, Author and entrepreneur
Phil Kerpen, Vice President, Policy; Americans for Prosperity
Mark McKinnon, Former media advisor to President Bush
Ari Melber, Net movement correspondent, The Nation
Mike Moffo, VP at SS+K
David Moore, Director, OpenCongress.org
Ed Morrissey, Blogger, HotAir.com
Markos Moulitsas, Blogger, DailyKos
Craig Newmark, Founder and consumer service representative, Craigslist
Phil Noble, Founder, PoliticsOnline.com
Grover Norquist, President, Americans for Tax Reform
Pierre Omidyar, Founder, eBay
Tim O’Reilly, Founder & CEO O’Reilly Media
Eli Pariser, President of MoveOn.org
James Pinkerton, Fellow, New America Foundation
Harold Pollack, University of Chicago
Andrew Rasiej, Founder, Personal Democracy Forum
Glenn Reynolds, Blogger, Instapundit
James Rucker, Executive Director, Color of Change
Patrick Ruffini, Republican consultant, former Republican National Committee eCampaign Director
Leslie Sanchez, Author and Republican strategist
Clay Shirky, New York University
Nate Silver, Blogger, Fivethirtyeight.com
David L. Sifry, Founder of Technorati, CEO of Offbeat Guides
Micah L. Sifry, Editor, techPresident.com
Zephyr Teachout, Fordham University
Baratunde Thurston, Co-founder, Jack & Jill Politics
Mike Turk, Former e-Campaign Director, Bush-Cheney ‘04 and former RNC e-Campaign Director
Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor, The Nation
Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
Michael Wesch, Kansas State UniversityDeman

No poofters among this sweaty bunch of fierce, manly soldiers. That much you can bank on.  At least none that were public. You know than men never had sex with men in the year 1356.

A comforting thought we’ve made zero progress on that front in, say, the last 7-800 years. And if such Real Men as John McCain have their way, we will continue in the darkness.  No matter that McCain has repeatedly said he was ready to scrap the absurd Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell policy as soon as U.S. military commanders said it was time.

Today, the top U.S. military uniformed and civilian officials – Admiral Mike Mullen and Republican Defense Secretary Robert Gates – declared that such a time had come. And there was John McCain and the whole rest of the Republican pack saying no, no, a thousand times no.

Is there anybody at all in American politics today that has so squandered more of his moral capital that McCain? Here’s a guy who really had a lot to admire some time back and now can be described as little more than a pathetic stumble-bum hack. He didn’t even have the nuts to speak out forcefully against the gutting of his own campaign reform legislation by the conservative Supreme Court.  Maybe, he’s a poofter?

P.S. Of course, McCain has a growing base for his sort of unhinged politics. A new poll by Daily Kos reveals some pretty far-friggin’-out attitudes now popular among Republicans. Man, it really IS like the Dark Ages. Move over, Sarah Palin and let’s get some real alchemists and wizards on the next ticket!  Here are some highlights:

• 39 percent of Republicans believe Obama should be impeached, 29 percent are not sure, 32 percent said he should not be voted out of office.
• 36 percent of Republicans believe Obama was not born in the United States, 22 percent are not sure, 42 percent think he is a natural citizen.
• 31 percent of Republicans believe Obama is a “Racist who hates White people” — the description once adopted by Fox News’s Glenn Beck. 33 percent were not sure, and 36 percent said he was not a racist.
• 63 percent of Republicans think Obama is a socialist, 16 percent are not sure, 21 percent say he is not
• 24 percent of Republicans believe Obama wants “the terrorists to win,” 33 percent aren’t sure, 43 percent said he did not want the terrorist to win.
• 21 percent of Republicans believe ACORN stole the 2008 election, 55 percent are not sure, 24 percent said the community organizing group did not steal the election.
• 23 percent of Republicans believe that their state should secede from the United States, 19 percent aren’t sure, 58 percent said no.
• 53 percent of Republicans said they believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Obama.
• Still tabulating the percentage who believes the world is flat (waiting for the late returns from Wasilla).

P.P.S. Talking about politicians living on Mars or in some twisted time warp… as Health Care in any form, even the most-watered down form, begins to sink below the horizon, the Democratic Progressive Caucus made a tragi-comic stab today to revive the public option!  Fantastic. We can’t even get the House to pass the crappy Senate bill (which would be a whole lot better than the current void) and now we have a letter from progressives saying there should be a separate bill mandating a public option.  In that case, why not a separate bill for single payer? They have equal chances of passage — zero.

Is everyone into game playing rather than getting something done? And then you wonder why Americans don’t give two flips about politics?

———————————————————

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In short, a family of  four making about $55,000 a year will not be living in Socialist Paradise because of the Senate version of the health care bill. But their premium will be between $4500 and $9,000 a year LESS than with Nothing. Their out of pocket cost for the premium will be about $300 a month — too much but still affordable if you have two kids.

That’s a whole lot of Something. Then Nate followed up a few days later with this post systematically knocking down the 20 biggest myths propagated by denialists among the Netroots (all of whom you can be sure have private health insurance of their own!).

Now that the bill is coming out of the Senate, Silver has yet another follow-up on the same subject.

One great rhetorical point that Silver makes about those refusing to see anything but horror in this bill: one reason the Republicans HATE it so much (almost as much as Kos and Firedoglake) is that it IS perhaps the largest social welfare bill in modern times. It is putting $900b worth of government subsidies in the hands of lower and middle income individuals to provide them at least minimal coverage albeit through private AND non-profit insurers. And now liberals are opposing it?  Fantastic, really.  Would liberals now also oppose a trillion dollars in subsidies for low income people having trouble meeting the current legal mandate on PRIVATE and outrageously priced auto insurance (for which there is no public option, no equivalent of Medicare, no nothing)?  Would the Netroots be saying such an auto insurance subsidy was a sham sell out because it didn’t nationalize Geico?

Is raising the minimum wage to $9 a crime against humanity because it leaves capitalism unscathed and helps dissipate natural class resentment of the working class (who presumably otherwise be spending their weekends constructing The Dictatorship of the Proletariat?).

My new criteria for entering this debate: if you want to argue to vote down this bill I am going to require that you disclose what kind of health insurance you currently have and why you think that those who don’t have coverage should not have the opportunity to buy at least the same crappy policy you have — but now with a government subsidy and a substantially elevated level of federal regulation of the industry?

No disclosure = denial of speech benefits.

All appeals to my ruling will be passed to the appropriate Death Panel.

Update:  Matt Yglesias has a similar chart and analysis to those of Silver.

The health care bill remains alive if rather unstable and probably permanently deformed.

I think the best lesson to derive from all this is summed up rather well by E.J. Dionne and  Paul Krugman,

Here are a few other random lessons dished out over the past year.

1. The system was unresponsive BEFORE and DURING the reign of GW Bush. Not surprising it remains so AFTER.

2. The system is not changed by people voicing or blogging their support or opposition for this or that. It is changed when people change it. Voting for a candidate is the first, not the last, step in engaging in real political reform.

3. The powerful special interests are called that because they are. They did not evaporate a year ago November.  They had to be negotiated with not because it was a pleasant task. Negotiating and compromising with and to a degree capitulating to them is an accurate reflection of the real balance of political forces.  Too bad but true.  It is also an accurate reflection of the degree to which principals in the political system are willing to represent those interests. That was true before Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid assumed congressional leadership and they hardly were inclined to change it.

4. The bill taking shape in Congress will not provide Single Payer coverage because there was nothing near the mass political support needed to force Congress to pass such a sweeping measure. Indeed, there wasn’t even enough pressure to force a “public option.” Too bad but true.  Don’t tell me about polls supposedly showing this or that level of support. Show me what political and organizing action was taken to make those opinions count, please.

5. The overall effects of this bill are yet to be seen. But anyone who underestimates the “trickle-down” reform of erasing recision and pre-existing conditions is not an adult who has ever had to battle with a vulture insurance company.

6. Anyone who writes off expanded access to health care to the currently uninsured as merely “more corporate health insurance” either already has his or her own such insurance or needs to get to a doctor real quick. When my 25 year old daughter left her corporate job early this year and I helped her look to buy her own insurance, as a young healthy person it was still hell on wheels. And the benefits, as compromised as they might be, have already greatly outweighed what would have been the cost of basic care of the last 10 months.

7. The bill shaping up in Congress, by expanding Medicaid and providing sliding subsidies to those families making up to $88,000  per year will make insurance available now to as many as 30 million who have no coverage.  Sitting on one’s own ass and saying that doesn’t mean much is akin to saying that someone who is currently unemployed is better off than getting a $9 an hour job at Wal-Mart. Easy for you to say. Perhaps you would like trying to live on air or paying the ER with…. what?

8. Those additional 30 million will be, in many cases, overcharged, short-changed, co-payed to death and denied essential services just like all of us are who are currently subject to coverage by for-profit insurers. No doubt about it.

9. Neither is there any doubt that given the choice between having a half-assed private policy that covers catastrophic illness and having a bunch of lefties throwing hissy fits and telling you that it is better to have nothing rather than something is in itself a form of mental illness.

10. As a client of an employer-based private insurance plan, my stay in the CCU two-and-a-half years ago ran up a tab of about $117,000 which cost me, out of pocket, about $1700 plus a couple of thousand a year for my portion of the premiums.  A $50,000 medical device for my heart cost me $150. Was that great? Hardly.  Was it socialism, no? Am I grateful to my all-powerful insurer who holds my life in its hands? Fuck no! Health care is a right, not a privilege (at least by moral accounting) But  was it better having this “corporate, private health insurance,” than having a speech from Dennis Kucinich “supporting single payer” in my back pocket as I was admitted to the hospital? Um, yes.

11. I now have a Pre-Existing Condition. Even comfy, solidly-middle-class-me is happy that about the time this bill comes into effect I might be retiring and an insurer won’t be able to deny me coverage based on that history. I, at least, hope that is true.

12. Seven previous presidents have tried or claimed to try to get some form of national health care. This is the first president to succeed in at least an initial form.

13. Long walks begin with first, stumbling steps. Not with one snap of the finger.

14. If my aunt had balls she would be my uncle.

Class Dismissed.

Dead Newspapers

Jay Rosen interviews Clay Shirky on “newspapers and thinking the unthinkable.”

Neon Tommy | Promote Your Page Too

I love the name of my friend Tim’s blog – Biped Twilight.  I felt reaffirmed in this pleasure this evening during a chat with my shrink.

We heartily agreed that, in the end, it’s up to people. And people don’t always come through. Better said, they rarely come through.

It’s not that humans are born bad. They are merely born weak. They are not born corrupt. But, damn, how easily they are corrupted!

Humans are not doomed. They are way too resilient. Way to able and even willing to live in muck.

In that context, I have to admit I am rapidly losing interest in the current spectacle known as the National Health Care Debate.

Some think the problem is Joe Lieberman. Or maybe Ben Nelson.

Today, it looked like knuckle-dragger Tom Coburn became The Problem.

Bernie Sanders laments that the reconciliation process hasn’t been used which requires only 51 votes in the Senate.

Howard Dean agrees with him.

Jay Rockefeller thinks they’re wrong.

I have my own views on this minutia which I have made well known. But it is minutia. None of these individuals are the problem per se.

The problem is a broken system, run by broken people and submitted to by a broken populace.

The Grand Spectacle is there for all to see in glaring daylight. And people stand and stare or simply avert their glance.

What could be more amusing and revealing than  the most recent national poll?  For the first time in three years an equal number of Americans are ready

to elect a generic Republican to Congress as they are a generic Democrat. More clearly put: half the country is ready to elect a brain-dead zombie party.

And the other half wants to elect the other brain-dead zombie party.

Bipeds, all.

P.S. Thanks to the bipeds who came out to the REDCAT last night to hear me mumble. Hope you had a good time.

The corpse in the middle, in the blue shirt, was a friend of mine. Spanish-born Jesuit priest Ignacio Martin-Baro.

It was twenty years ago today that he and five other Jesuit clergy were dragged from their beds at the Central American University in San Salvador by national army troops and, in cold blood, were shot to death along with their housekeeping staff.

This was an act of a government that the Reagan administration was funding in the name of fighting International Terrorism.

Though their murder was ordered by the highest levels of the Salvadoran Army, only a few lower ranking officers did a very short stretch behind bars and then were let go.

For two decades. succeeding right-wing governments in El Salvador have refused to deal with this case in a serious manner.  This week, however,  the new left-0f-center president, Mauricio Funes, posthumously bestowed the highest national honor on the slain priests.

The murders were a desperate response by a terrified regime faced with a “final offensive” by a leftist insurgency.  The killing of the pacifist priests, the intellectual and moral heart of El Salvador,  was so barbaric that it set in motion the beginning of the end of a civil war that took the lives of 100,000 people.  Even the U.S. had to start re-thinking its open-ended support for the corrupt Salvadoran regime. By 1992 a formal peace accord was reached, the guerrillas were folded into national life, and the army was cut by 2/3 and removed from political life. Today, El Salvador is ruled by the former guerrillas’ political party, the FMLN. Marc Cooper

During the 1980′s, I suppose I met with, interviewed or had a meal with Father Martin-Baro at least fifteen times. Sadly, I was the producer of a CBS documentary segment in which he gave his last formal interview — shortly before he was murdered.

Some critics in El Salvador believe that rendering homage to these martyrs is an empty gesture and what is really required is aggressive prosecution of their case.  A 1993 amnesty of both sides in the conflict stands in the middle of such an act and it is unlikely, to say the least, that the shield of impunity will be lifted. It would jeopardize not only former top  Salvadoran Army brass but also a number of former guerrilla commanders. No one in the Salvadoran political establishment, of the right or left, would be very enthusiastic.

Spanish courts, as was the case with former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, are vigorously pursuing the case.  Next week the relatives of the slain priests will present formal evidence against the Salvadoran bigwigs who planned this atrocity twenty years ago.

It’s one more reminder that the color of blood is rarely forgotten. And while justice is often painfully slow, it is usually inevitable.

Martin-Baro was one of the most gentle, compassionate and courageous individuals I have ever met.

Neon Tommy | Promote Your Page Too

A few years back, as a heat wave swept the California central valley taking the lives of three farm workers, I wrote a long feature piece lamenting how very little the plight of the Golden State’s campesinos had improved. The piece inevitably included some reporting on what is unquestionably the historic failure of Cesar Chavez’ United Farm Workers.

A few months latter, then-L.A. Times reporter Miriam Pawel unleashed a devastating series of investigative stories detailing the rampant nepotism and corruption inside the UFW which had morphed from a union into a direct mail fund raising operation capitalizing on  Chavez’ iconic legacy.

The union threatened to sue both of us but never did. We were telling the truth.

Now, Pawel, who left the Times shortly after her series was published, has come out with an innovative and heartbreaking social biography of the union and eight of its core leaders.

Here is my extended essay review of Pawel’s book as it appears on Truthdig.

The Senate is about to take up debate on the historic issue of health care but in case you haven’t noticed, next week will be  Sarah’s Week.

The Oprah show.

Barbara Walters.

A rolling bus/book tour through battleground states, trying to push 1.5 million copies of her ghost-written book.  A few excerpts have dribbled out and by Friday morning, now that the AP has a copy of the book, we should know everything (as if there is anything to know).  Palin has been busy making the most of this spin blitz. She has even released a list of books she has claimed to have read over her lifetime! Not surprisingly, the list is populated with such classics as The Pearl, which is required reading in junior high school.

I think she’s a joke, frankly. But I will confess that she is more vexing than your usual right-wing zealot. Many of them are fall into the category of certifiable ignoramus or the consciously pander to that ilk. Palin is in a different category. She flaunts and celebrates her ignorance, albeit in sometimes quite clever ways.

I don’t see her, however, as any sort of threat — at least to the Republic. She is, in fact, too blatantly ignorant and petty and vicious to ever be elected to any prominent post again. There just aren’t that many stupid people who are that stupid out there to get her elected.

Palin is a threat, however, to the Republican Party. While the Dems are thrashing back and forth in their own self-created doldrums, the only real energy within the Republican tent is coming from the Palin-Beck sort of fringe.  Beck ain’t runnin’ for anything — except to cash his paychecks. But I think it’s an even money bet that Palin actually intends to run in 2012. Sure smells like it.

What a dilemma for the GOP. No one in the party has the cojones to openly denounce her, even though the very title of her book refers to her breaking the binds of the 1008 Republican campaign. She’s going to tour the country now and stir up the tea baggers, birthers and other delusionals that now constitute the most energized slice of the Republican base. And with the quiet complacency of the Republican leadership, she just might talk herself –and the party– to accepting her as the leading face of the GOP, if not it’s actual candidate.

I mean, who is Mitt Romney going to get excited? Or Tim What’s-His-Name Pawlenty?

It’s not a very happy time, is it, to be a true believer Democrat or Republican. The former see their party leaders hostage to insurance companies and Wall Street. The latter have the same problem, of course, but they also have Sarah.

I wish her well. The more successful her book tour, the bigger a problem she is for the GOP.

Godspeed.

P.S. One amendment to the above. There is ONE celebrity who is dumber than Palin and more egregious in her flaunting of it: Carrie Prejean. My God, did you see her on Larry King?

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Neighboring San Bernardino County has just declared a state of emergency over the spread of Swine Flu and here in L.A. County several dozen people have already succumbed to the same. I’d like to give you the exact figure, but the Director of the L.A. County Health Department has decided to play hard to get on the issue.

For those of you who were paying attention, late last week our USC-based Neon Tommy news site (published by Annenberg Digital News where I am director)  ran a major package on the 44 deaths (or is it 52 or 78?) in L.A. County we could confirm via the review of available death certificates. But before our reporters finished the package, the health department abruptly cut off access to the death certificates.

Tuesday night, our lead writer on the story, Callie Schweitzer, an already very accomplished 20 year old undergraduate, was interviewed on the local public radio show Which Way L.A.? Host Warren Olney invited Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of the county health department, to join the show and clarify the issues at hand. Most importantly, just exactly who has died from the flu and how serious a threat it is or isn’t.  Our review of the death certificates revealed that it wasn’t always very clear, even to the families of the victims, if the flu was or was not the cause of death. This is something that Dr. Fielding has acknowledged but he has not offered much information on how to sort through the problem. Indeed, he would not answer any of the queries from our reporters.

Consistent with our previous experience, Dr. Fielding, responsible for the health of millions of Angelenos,  refused to be interviewed in the same radio segment Tuesday as reporter Schweitzer.  He agreed to come on to the show only if he could appear solo and after the interview with our reporter.  He couldn’t or wouldn’t take the heat from a USC student reporter?  This is not a very comforting thought and it does little to bolster faith in what we loosely call “the institutions.”  I am sure the doctor is a decent and compassionate man who currently has his hands full with a major public health problem. But it seems, at a minimum, rather arrogant to not consent to enter a public dialogue with reporters who are only trying to get the basic facts.

Now, reporter Schweitzer has published an open letter to Dr. Fielding politely imploring him to meet with our reporters to discuss how the media and the citizenry can judge the severity (or not) of the flu.  Seems reasonable to me (my personal interest in this aside). Here’s an excerpt:

I wanted to ask you some of the remaining questions my colleagues and I have about L.A. County’s response to the H1N1 epidemic: What is the process for hospitals and physicians reporting swine flu deaths?  What exactly are the 2,000 health department workers devoted to the influenza epidemic doing? What’s the process for fixing death certificates so that they accurately list H1N1 after post-death tests, which can take up to eight weeks?

So, yes, I was more than a little irritated when I heard Olney say Tuesday night, on air, that you had declined the invitation to converse directly with me. But I’m moving on. Consider this my formal invitation to bring three of my colleagues from Neon Tommy to your offices sometime this week for a summit meeting. We can hash out your differences with our report, which was based on the 44 death certificates for Los Angeles county residents who died from the onset of the epidemic in April through Oct. 9.

In your segment you said the death toll has now reached 78 and that death certificates are not the appropriate way to gauge the nature of the virus in L.A. County. Your argument was that death certificates are “not fully accurate.” I wholeheartedly agree with this fact, as 20 of the 44 swine flu death certificates issued by the county fail to mention the virus as a cause of death. Not fully accurate indeed.

I’m not overly concerned with legal jargon, but I am mildly curious about why your department, midway through the project, changed its legal position on releasing death certificates. In the future,  your people told us that they would only provide us with certificates that initially list swine flu as one of the causes of death. Wouldn’t that make any future reporting we do even more inaccurate, since many of the certificates initially do not blame H1N1 for the victims’ deaths? This is very puzzling. Please help.

The questions being posed here are ones that are literally owed to the citizenry. The call for Dr. Fielding to be more transparent were amplified on Wednesday when the most important aggregator of local L.A. news, LAObserved, linked to Schweitzer’s letter.  We’ll see if the good doctor has time to meet with the media as the numbers slowly climb.

P.S. This is a time, as you know, where it’s quite in fashion to moan and groan over the state of a collapsing media. It’s a nice way for baby boomers to fill idle time, I suppose. But I want to tell my readers about the enormous privilege I feel I have in being able to spend my days working with a new generation of reporters who have NO time to dwell in mournful nostalgia. They are way too busy doing the hard work of digging up facts, fighting for transparency, and generating information in the public interest.

I want to ask you to show your support for them, at a minimum, by clicking on the button below and joining the Neon Tommy facebook fan page. It means a lot to them. And once you join, you might even want to leave them a message of encouragement.  Don’t mourn. Organize. Report. And Publish.

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Now that was helpful, wasn’t it?  Rep. Dennis Kucinich took a knife-edged vote to pass historic health care reform and turned it into a razor-edge win by joining with knuckle-dragging Repubicans and shivering Blue Dogs to vote NO.    Dennis has a long and articulate justification for what was, in reality, an asinine vote.

Frankly, I agree with much of his analysis but with none of his conclusions.

Marc Cooper

The health care bill passed by the House is, indeed,  a compromised, incomplete and less than satisfactory piece of legislation that was produced by a compromised, dysfunctional and less than responsive political system. That is for sure.  It was also one of three real-world alternatives: the status quo, a Republican substitute that would have been worse than the status quo, or the House Democatic bill which –with all of its flaws– embodies the first, incremental, concrete step TOWARD more health care for more people.  The preferred alternative of a single-payer universal coverage scheme was not up for a vote on the House floor and will not be for any time in the short or mid-term future.  Period. New paragraph.

If Saturday’s vote on the House floor was a late night parlor game or a student debating society exercise, Kucinich’s position would have been a lot of fun to assume. Unfortunately, it was a vote on the House floor and the lives and futures of real people were at stake.

Will insurance companies benefit from the reform as currently posed? Yes.  Will the system of private insurance continue to dominate the market? Yes. Will millions still find proper insurance unattainable or unfair? No doubt.

But the same could be said for the consequences of every union contract that gets bargained out and signed. The workers get a raise (maybe). They get better benefits (or nowadays less of a reduction in same). And without a single exception we can affirm that every time a union contract gets finalized: capitalism is preserved, profitability is guaranteed, exploitation of labor is prolonged, and injustice continues.  But at the same time, the lives of unions members and their families are improved to some degree or another. That is what is called the politics of the possible. It’s usually not very pretty. Sometimes it’s downright ugly. But when you’ve fought the fight with enough strength and fortitude to get your enemy to the table and ready to make a deal with you, you’re not very pleased with the one guy on your side who’s ready to torpedo the whole thing because you didn’t get all that you wanted.

As it turned out, with a Democratic president, 60 Democratic senators, a huge Democratic majority in the House, and spurred by a crisis in medical coverage of titanic proportions, getting a watered-down half-assed first step toward some eventual form of universal coverage (perhaps over the next 25 years) was, in itself, barely possible. Damn lamentable by my reckoning but nevertheless true. Kucinich brought us one vote closer to not even achieving that much.

When I was 19 years old and inspired by the wonder of Paris ’68, I put up a poster in my dinky student apartment that read “Demand the Impossible!” That’s still not a bad principle to live by. But the second half of the formula was missing from the poster and from the head of yours truly who had not yet lived long enough to fill in the blank. It should have read: “Always Demand the Impossible and along the way vote for and achieve what is possible.”

Neon Tommy | Promote Your Page Too

Here’s the latest development from the First Free Territory in the Americas: Cuban security agents picked up prominent and dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez off the street and beat her when she resisted getting into the car.  She was later released but is still barred from traveling outside of Cuba.

Sanchez is guilty, of course, of what we generally calls Thought Crimes. She doesn’t do anything dangerous.  She does the same you thing you are doing. She sits at her computer and types on er keyboard. Of course, for governments that fear their own people, this IS dangerous

Yoani’s blog is one of the best available.  Before you spew your justifications for muzzling her, why don’t you take ten minutes to read what she writes and then ask yourself which side are you on?

UPDATE: Given the general blockade of outgoing information imposed by the Cuban government, there are conflicting reports now as to whether or not or to what degree Sanchez was beaten. We know she has a bruised shoulder and neck. It’s possible that State Security only roughly pushed her into a car against her will. New Socialist Man, and all. Or maybe just plain, old-fashioned and cowardly goons beating up a defenseless woman.

Neon Tommy | Promote Your Page Too

Spin Tuesday’s election results any way you wish, tell yourself any fair tale you please, but the hard, cold truth is that the Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey MUST be taken as a serious warning signal to Democrats.And more importantly, as a warning to the rest of us who are subject to the governance of either or both major parties.

True, Barack Obama, was not the issue in either election.  But that’s the crux of the problem.  Obama remains very popular and could probably win anywhere against anyone anytime between now and November 2o12. Obama, however, isn’t running again until then.  Bill Clinton, I will remind you, was re-elected in 1996 — two years after losing control of Congress to the Republicans and living with that reality for the near total remainder of his tenure.

And, yes, it is also true that favorability  ratings for Republicans are at an all time low, with only 20% of Americans identifying with the GOP.  Which means the problem is only bigger than one can imagine for Democrats.

With such a popular president and with such a comical opposition, why did the comical opposition win two new state houses?

The answer is not that there is a Republican resurgence. Rather, there is an incipient Democratic implosion. American politics is not necessarily a zero-sum game. One party’s decline does not automatically translate into the other’s gain. Apathy and disengagement are more likely winners.

Obama was a marvelously charismatic and inspiring candidate who promised sweeping change. He has engaged in his own personal sidestepping but more to the point it seems rather obvious that the Democrats are a party of the status quo, not of change.  There has been a remarkable failure to capitalize on the electrifying energy that swept Obama into office just one year ago. The effervescence that first erupted in Iowa has fizzled into too much apathy and lethargy. I believe that Obama, even with his compromises, remains an inspirational figure but his coat-tails are not even remotely long enough to carry along an entire brain dead and compromised Democratic Party.

Tonight’s election results are proof positive that there is NO national, popular movement that has been galvanized for change. While local factors and personalities (including the obnoxious one of jillionaire and soon to be ex-Governor John Corzine) figured heavily into both gubernatorial elections, it also true that if Democrats and independents were half as energized as they were a year ago, the Republican victories would have been thwarted.

Instead, millions who voted for Obama a year ago simply sat it out this time around. And who can blame them? Who is going to get off the couch to vote for such a poor candidate as Creigh Deeds who took pains to distance himself from Obama and who had vowed to opt Virginia out of an eventual public health care option? Or for the unpopular Corzine, a former CEO of, gulp, Goldman Sachs?

There is no question in my mind that the real underlying issues in tonight’s elections were neither Obama nor even those much-touted “local issues.” It was, as always, the economy, stupid. Anytime you’re looking at 10% national unemployment, a depressed housing market, devastated 401K’s and more general uncertainty than a shaky day on the San Andreas Fault, the incumbent party and its candidates are easy targets. I would maintain, however, that it didn’t really have to be that way. Obama came into office with the economy already in tatters and with a public that knew very well that it was the Bush crew that should be blamed.

The Obama  recovery bail-outs and the stimulus programs might, indeed, be necessary evils, or maybe even something better. Many economists now argue that the emergency economic measures he took may have saved us from a full-scale Depression or, at a minimum, we would be even worse off now than we are if hadn’t acted. But there aren’t that many economists who vote.

Those recovery measures, however, were not enough. Maybe Obama should get the blame, or part of it. Maybe he was hostage to his own hidebound party or he is accomplice, or both. Either way, the conclusion is the same. The Democratic congress did damn little, if anything at all, to enact measures that boldly and openly defended the little guy. Billions were dished out to the most corrupt Wall Street thieves (again, perhaps as a necessity) but what did the Average Joe get out of it? A few more weeks of unemployment insurance, a couple of months more of discounted COBRA after getting laid off, and the right to watch the grotesque spectacle of a bought-off congress squabble and split hairs over a phantom health care bill — which we learn tonight is now likely to be postponed until next year.  Would you get off the couch for that?

Democrats began this year with history absolutely on their side. An awe-inspiring president. An unprecedented congressional majority. A deflated and disoriented AND marginalized Republican Party. And an historic economic crisis that could have and should have been exploited as a moment of historic re-ordering of national priorities — of  transformative change. Instead, we pretty much got business-as-usual from a business-as-usual party.  We all knew that the Democrats won in 2006 because the Republicans had exhausted themselves. And we all know that Obama, as formidable a candidate as he was in his own terms, was also the beneficiary of that same Republican collapse.

Tuesday’s election was not make or break. It was just a reminder that we live in a country whose politics are dominated by two dysfunctional parties — not just one.

P.S. Total up the campaign of Republican Mike Bloomberg (re-elected as Mayor of New York) and the defeated Democratic Governor of New Jersey John Corzine and you see they spent $340 million they earned on Wall Street. That’s some real change.

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Our Neon Tommy piece of the day is a poodcast discussion among reporters Kevin Grant, Kim Nowacki and Dominic Riley about the impact of new media tools.

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Gavin Newsom is out.  That was fast. And merciful.

Cancel the election.

It ain’t gonna be Whitman or that other Republican gal.

We could do worse than Jerry.

There is. however, this little burr in the saddle.

Well, after all the town hall hystrionoics of this past summer, after a tea-marinated series of accusations of creeping socialism, the rise of Birthers and Beck and the suggestion that the Presisdent of the United States is an illegal alien, the results are now in.

The number of Americans who now identify themselves as Republicans has reached a 26 year low coming in at a laughable 20%.  I guess you can say that the GOP has finally become what it has falsely claimed to be — a party of minorities. A slim minority.

Meanwhile, a new ABC-Washington Post poll reveals that a healthy majority of Americans now support a public option for coverage, something like 56%.

A tip of the hat to the teabaggers. Keep it up.

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Om Monday, the Obama administration Justice Department is announcing a clearer policy on handling medical marijuana sellers and users. It will no longer arrest or prosecute those who are in compliance with state laws. There are currently more than a dozen states where “medical marijuana” sales are legal.

The Bush administration, for the most part, ignored these state laws and let the DEA bust up otherwise legal grass dispensaries. It’s a policy that bled over for the first few weeks of the Obama administration but since then things have been rather hazy.

Especially here in California, and specifically in Los Angeles where dispensaries have blossomed like a dope crop after a rainstorm in Humboldt County. Indeed, just on Saturday (before the new Obama policy was announced), The New York Times ran a feature piece on the war over dispensaries in the L.A. area — where there are now literally hundreds of them.

Seems to me the more liberal Obama policy will make things out here on the Left Coast even more confusing. State Attorney General (and past and future Governor Jerry Brown) doesn’t seem much inclined to go after grass dispensaries.  But both the L.A. County District Attorney and the L.A. City Attorney have pretty much made a crusade on cracking down on dispensaries that make a profit (most of them).

Of course, the medical mairjuana lobby can’t do much but hesitantly agree with the tightening of the screws precisely because they sold the partial legalization of marijuana as a “medical” issue.

That was probably the only way to get it done politically, but it is unfortunate. MJ does have medical properties. So does alcohol.  But that should not be the basis of its legalization. Sure wasn’t and isn’t the case with booze.

I think that the dispensaries should be for-profit. Indeed, marijuana should simply be legalized, regulated and taxed like good old-fashioned beer. Anything short of that reeks of hypocrisy, denial and general stupidity. It also robs the public treasury of literally billions of dollars in tax revenue currently being siphoned off, ultimately, by organized crime.

Good for Obama for taking a small step forward. A very small step.

UPDATE: Here’s a good related blog entry.

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I watched Michael Moore’s latest, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” and found pretty much what I expected.  My short review is that if Michael Moore could only take himself out of his own films, and maybe even stop directing them, they’d be pretty good.

I’ll start with the positive: the cinema verite scenes of folks getting evicted from their homes, the detailed expose of big corporations clandestinely buying life insurance policies on their employees and bettting they will die, the compilation of data profiling the mountains of greed piled up in the last several decades by the top 1% of the population, the explanation of the favors extended to “liberal” pols like Chris Dodd by special interests are equally upsetting, gut-wrenching and infuriating.  If this film had been a straight-on documentary about hyper-capitalism, it might have been a great movie.

Unfortunately, this basket of goodness is offset by about 300 pounds of crud.  Twenty years after the innovative Roger & Me, Moore’s schtick of showing up at this or that  corporate headquarters with a bullhorn and a mike to make a “citiizen’s arrest” has grown tiresome, to say the least.  It’s 100% predictable and his hamming it up results in nothing but…hamming it up. I would have preferred he just stuck to the story line and had canned the all-too-well-known set pieces.

But therein resides the bigger problem with Moore’s latest. There is NO story line. Michael Moore is outraged, just plain outraged at the injustice around him. He even gets a few Catholic priests and a bishop on-camera to condemn the evil essence of capitalism.  But he offers absolutely no credible narrative of how we got where we are and what we should do to get somewhere else — though at the end of the film he warns, with a bit of self-martyrdom that he’s not gonna keep doing us these favors of social protest unless we follow his lead (to what? and where?).

Indeed, there’s a strange mix of naivete, conspiracy theory and just plain ignorance in his awkward attempt to explain the current financial crisis and gross  institutional inequality in which we currently dwell.  In the initial “set-up” portion of the film, it is strongly suggested that while capitalism had some flaws here and there, it was really the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 that led to a “coup” by corporate America. Previous to that, it seems, Mike’s Dad was a happy auto industry worker and that just about everybody in the system got by on one salary, had a nice home and a pension.  That is, until, Reagan and his chief of staff Regan conspired to hand America over to the greed-heads.

This is, of course, a ridiculous fantasy and defies all history. A ten minute glance an Engels’ writings about the condition of the English working class during the capitalist revolution of 150 years ago would pretty much dispel most of this cotton candy. No need, even to go back that far. Somewhere around 1929 would be an acceptable starting point.

Moore can’t quite explain what’s so different about the last 30 years as compared to the previous 300 other than a pretty funny sequence of Wall Streeters making asses of themselves trying to explain what the derivatives market means.  A little more exposition about the effects of a globalized market for capital and labor, radical revision of tax policy and the demolition of social safety nets and a little less of Moore’s faux astonishment as he interviews actor Wallace Shawn as an economics expert would have gone a long way to clarify things.

Most frustrating, is Moore’s completely muddled politics. He’s rather ruthlessly exposes some leading Democrats as complicit enablers of the Era of Greed but then presents the election of Obama as the People Taking Back America. Except, of course, that the evil Goldman Sachs, which is evil, also turns up with a weighty presence in the new administration. He trashes the Bush admin for handing out billions to Wall Street in the first of the bail-outs but offers no discernible opinion as to whether or not Obama was right in continuing the practice with his stimulus. Moore, in fact, is oddly quiet about the current status of the subject he claims to know best, General Motors. Was it or was it not saved by Obama’s bail-out? Along with all those thousands of remaining auto jobs? Or should it have been allowed to sink along with the financial institutions Moore deems unworthy of government intervention?

I also found it rather disingenuous on his part to insert a segment suggesting there was some mounting wave of populist fight back by his blowing out of proportion a few small protests by well-meaning but tiny activist groups. Don’t know if he’s been reading the papers lately, but most of the street heat these days comes from a tea-baggin’ right-wing ready to wage a fight to the death for their right to be screwed over by greedy medical insurance companies!

Tune out here if you are sensitive to explicit language because I am about to get granular in my syntax.

In the movie business there’s a common phrase, one I even heard in several pitch meetings during my very brief venture into Hollywood in the mid 1980′s. “You’re jacking me off but you didn’t make me come,” they say.

In this case, if you are going to go to the trouble of making a movie, however clumsily denouncing capitalism per se, it seems to me that you have a responsibility to say what you would like to see in its place. The 800 lb gorilla sitting in every movie theater, naturally, even if unsaid, is the specter of socialism or communism which are assumed by most to be the antithesis of capitalism. Few Americans know the difference between one or another let alone any degrees of shading within the categories. But it’s fair to say that both notion –rightly and wrongly–  have a pretty negative connotation amongst most Americans and Moore does himself no good by not addressing that issue head on (I say that as a socialist by the way).

So after getting us all stroked and stoked, what’s Moore’s payoff? How does he answer his own self-posed question as to what capitalism should be replaced by?

“Democracy” is his answer.

Huh?

It sort of begs the question on behalf of any thinking person if Moore is using that word as a euphemism for some sort of socialism or is he just plain copping out?  Hell if I know!

I know that Moore is not a Stalinist-Communist and does not think American capitalism should be replaced by a North Korean model. I doubt if he’s really even some sort of socialist. There’s a 99% chance that he is what most learned folks refer to as a social democrat, which seems perfectly reasonable to me and which embodies more or less –policy wise– much of what Moore would prescribe to fix America (You know, European-style capitalism). So why not come out and say it? The closest he comes is to propose FDR’s second bill of rights which was never enacted.  But that’s all pretty gooey to an audience mostly born long after Roosevelt passed on; and as laudable as FDR’s proposal might have been at the time, it does nothing to grapple with a much more complex modern global economy 60 years later.

OK, enough nit-picking. I give the film a three out of five, just in terms of passing an idle two hours. It’s an OK 10$ ride for those who are already on board. But it will leave those genuinely hungry for enlightenment or those with germinating doubts about the sanity of our system mostly unmoved and untouched. The enormously wide-ranging subject of capitalism is just too big a subject for the more modest range of political talents possessed by Michael Moore.

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It all began woth GOP Party Leader Limbaugh wishing failure on the American presidency.  Yay!

Then increasingly fringe conservatives applauded when Obama’s plea for Chicago as home to the Olympics was rebuffed. Huzzah!

Now the Republican National Committee and its goofball leader calls the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to American President Obama “unfortunate. Booooo!

Here’s a few more things that could happen soon to lift the hearts of real patriots, true-red-white-and-bluers and obsessive teabaggers:

Health care fails leaving 50 million without coverage and average family policy rates topping $13,000.  Awesome!

The Dow plunges to 6,000 and unemployment hits 15%.  Fortunate!

Obama breaks a leg shooting hoops. Excellent!

The Taliban take over Afghanistan.  Fabulous!

Israel nukes Iran, starting World War III. Ecstay and Rapture (a twofer)!

Obama gets Swine Flu. Tough titties!

Nothing like a flag-lapel-wearing jingoist to best embody the worst in hypocrisy.