For those who didn’t have a chance to watch over the weekend, via Paul Constant at the Stranger. I particularly like the ‘Man Show’ joke at the six-minute mark…
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What’s on the agenda for the start of another week?
Proud to Be A Democrat
Early Morning Open Thread: “Ready for the Fight”
Jann Wenner’s new Rolling Stone interview with President Obama is online:
The president was more somber than in our past interviews – and less inclined to depart from the handful of themes he had been concentrating on in recent weeks. He avoided discussing Mitt Romney, even when asked a direct question, and focused primarily on the very real constraints he operates under as president, from the intransigence of Congress to the dilemma of America’s anti-drug laws. He also seemed intent on summing up the arguments he’ll soon be taking out on the campaign trail, making clear that he plans to run on his remarkable record of accomplishments: extending health insurance to 32 million Americans, staving off a major economic collapse, rescuing the auto industry, reforming student loans, ending discrimination against gay soldiers, pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, killing Osama bin Laden, and passing one of the largest middle-class tax cuts in history…
One snippet that’s probably gonna cause some heartburn on the internets:
Do you read Paul Krugman?
I read all of the New York Times columnists. Krugman’s obviously one of the smartest economic reporters out there, but I also read some of the conservative columnists, just to get a sense of where those arguments are going. There are a handful of blogs, Andrew Sullivan’s on the Daily Beast being an example, that combine thoughtful analysis with a sampling of lots of essays that are out there. The New Yorker and The Atlantic still do terrific work. Every once in a while, I sneak in a novel or a nonfiction book.
Early Morning Open Thread: “Ready for the Fight”Post + Comments (78)
Tuesday Morning Open Thread
Jonathan Chait at NYMag‘s Dail Intel has a cheerful perspective on “The Obama-Romney Confidence Gap“:
As the general election begins, it’s apparent that a wide gap in confidence has opened up between the two campaigns. The Obama campaign is bordering on cocky, utterly dismissive of Mitt Romney and warning against overconfidence. Obviously, campaigns always strive to convey confidence, with even the slightest hints of pessimism seen as potentially unleashing a self-defeating cycle of doom.
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So this admission, from the director of the Karl Rove–affiliated Republican Super-PAC “American Crossroads,” is unusual and telling:Mr. Law said, Crossroads research suggests that Mr. Obama’s campaign has started to gain traction among critical swing voters by arguing that Republicans, including Mr. Romney, favor an “economic plutocracy” in which middle-class voters can no longer count on financial security, even though they work hard and play by the rules.
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“His argument is: ‘The reason you feel bad is not because I’ve been an inadequate president but because the rules of the game are stacked against you,’ ” Mr. Law said. Calling it a “dystopian vision,” he added, “that narrative has some gravitational pull.”In other words, their research shows that Obama’s campaign to frame the economic debate is working. It’s genuinely quite rare for campaigns (or, in this case, quasi-campaigns) to make that sort of confession…
From the Buzzfeed article, “It’s ‘Game On’ in Chicago“:
… The Obama machine’s singular goal: to keep the president in his job by raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to recreate the momentum of 2008. There are now close to 700 hundred full time employees, an entire floor of office space, thousands of volunteers in well over 100 field offices across all 50 states, and the most impressive digital team a presidential campaign has ever assembled. There’s been experimentation—the tech team figured out a way to make the Obama website display perfectly on any device, a feat that wouldn’t have been possible even a year ago—and the entire office was designed to resemble a Silicon Valley start-up. The digital department is the largest in headquarters. Messina even consulted with Palo Alto execs to find the “best practices,” says an Obama official, including carpets (quieter), mixing the staffs on the floor into teams rather than departments, bouncy balls, and communicating with instant messages and Twitter. “We ensure maximum collaboration so people don’t sit with their departments, they sit in teams,” Messina told BuzzFeed…
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These days, the campaign’s Rapid Response team has reached out to reporters covering Romney, providing a rebuttal to every speech. They’re also in full-on courtship mode with a press that complains of a lack of access to Romney and his top aides. Obama’s headquarters averaged about ten visits a week from reporters over the past month, aides said. David Axelrod, whose official title of “senior campaign advisor” understates his role as guru and decision-maker, was at the office everyday last month. (On Thursday “Axe,” as he is known among the staff, took the afternoon off to attend the Cubs opening day with Mayor Rahm Emanuel; at his seats over the dugout, he caught a foul ball.)
Too, also, there’s this in our favor:
Hurts Too Much To Laugh; I’m Too Old To Cry
This is how one sad story begins:
May the justices please meet my sister-in-law. On Feb. 8, she was a healthy 32-year-old, who was seven and a half months pregnant with her first baby. On Feb. 9, she was a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the chest down by a car accident that damaged her spine. Miraculously, the baby, born by emergency C-section, is healthy.
This is what follows that terrible moment:
My brother’s small employer — he is the manager of a metal-fabrication shop — does not offer health insurance, which was too expensive for them to buy on their own. Fortunately, my sister-in-law had enrolled in the Access for Infants and Mothers program, California’s insurance plan for middle-income pregnant women. AIM coverage extends 60 days postpartum and paid for her stay in intensive care and early rehabilitation. But when the 60 days is up next week, the family will fall through the welfare medicine rabbit hole.
And here is what those people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives:
When the AIM coverage expires, my sister-in-law will be covered by Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid, because she is disabled and has limited income. But because my brother works, they are subject to cost-sharing: they pay the first $1,100 of her health costs each month. Paying $1,100 leaves them with a monthly income of just 133 percent of the federal poverty level. If my brother makes more money, their share of the cost increases.
They must also meet the Medi-Cal asset test: beyond their house and one vehicle, they can hold $3,150 in total assets, a limit last adjusted in 1989. They cannot save for retirement (retirement plans are not exempt from the asset test in California, as they are in some states). They cannot save for college (California is not among the states that have exempted 529 college savings plans from their asset tests). They cannot establish an emergency fund. Family members like me cannot give them financial help, at least not officially. If either of them receives an inheritance, it will go to Medi-Cal. Medi-Cal services that my sister-in-law uses after age 55 will be added to a tab that she will rack up over the rest of her life. When she and my brother die, the state will put a lien on their estate; their child may inherit nothing. Even my brother’s hobby runs afoul of the asset test: he enjoys working on old cars, which he can no longer keep.
This is what this story reminds us: for too many of our fellow citizens, our health care system, when it delivers care at all, turns families permanently poor.
This is what “Repeal” means. Welcome to the Republican vision for health care.*
Oh — and, yes, of course, this is what the case before the Supreme Court is alll about. Which is why the willed and faux-naive ignorance of Scalia, Alito and others earns the name of evil.
Go read the whole piece. Get angry, then angrier. If you live with GOP representatives, send this column to them. If you have friends or family or acquaintances who might be able to make the same leap John managed, pass it on to them too. Pressure is a daily accumulation of little taps and nudges, and there is no time the present.
*I won’t insult you by adding the reflexive “and Replace,” as there is no replacement on offer; vouchers are not a health care system, and would, as now proposed, do for this family that quantity of good that asymptotically approaches zero.
Image: Gustave Doré, A Couple and Two Children Sleeping Under the London Bridge, 1871.
Hurts Too Much To Laugh; I’m Too Old To CryPost + Comments (144)
Pelosi: Healthcare “A Right for All, Not A Privilege for A Few”
Dan Amira at NYMag‘s Daily Intel spots Madame Pelosi talking about SCOTUS and the ACA:
Nancy Pelosi’s political predictions seem at times to be based more on wishful thinking than on an objective assessment of reality. “One thing I know for sure is that Democrats will retain their majority in the House of Representatives,” she said in May of 2010, a few months before the Democrats lost their majority in the House of Representatives. Yesterday, at the Paley Center for Media, she predicted that the Supreme Court would rule in favor of Obamacare in a 6-3 vote.
As some of the commentors there point out, Pelosi is a damned smart & effective leader, and not given to throwing around numbers just to hear her own voice. The hour-long “PALEY100: Private Luncheon in Conversation with Nancy Pelosi” video starts slow — no teleprompters! — but it’s a fun listen when you’ve got the time. The healthcare portion starts around the 26.00 mark, and Pelosi’s prediction falls at 33.36… followed by a couple of rude, thoughtless, unserious cracks about the family-planning choices of those individuals most invested in the GOP War Against Women, which made me LOL-for-true.
Pelosi: Healthcare “A Right for All, Not A Privilege for A Few”Post + Comments (45)
Late Night Open Thread: Moving Pictures
(h/t commentor Martin)
Also, (h/t commentor lamh), let the DVRs be programmed:
President Barack Obama will provide a special introduction to USA Network’s airing of the 1962 film adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Saturday at 8 p.m.
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“I’m deeply honored that President Obama will be celebrating the 50th Anniversary of To Kill A Mockingbird by introducing it to a national audience,” Pulitzer prize winner and famously media-shy Lee says. “I believe it remains the best translation of a book to film ever made and I’m proud to know that Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch lives on — in a world that needs him now more than ever.”
(If you click over to Paul Constant’s Stranger blog, you can vote for the movie Romney should introduce. I did not know that Mitt once told the NYTimes that his favorite novel was Battlefield Earth… )
Tuesday Morning Open Thread
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Also worth reading, if you missed it: Shelby Knox talks about “My Roommate, Gloria Steinem“:
IF young feminists believed in fairy tales, then moving to New York City and winding up with Gloria Steinem as your roommate would definitely count as one.
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That is what happened to Shelby Knox when she came here in 2007 from Lubbock, Tex., to work at a summer program dedicated to empowering teenage girls. Then 20, Ms. Knox was already somewhat known in the feminist world: In high school she was the subject of a documentary, “The Education of Shelby Knox,” about her fight to change Lubbock’s sex education curriculum, which taught abstinence-only, and how the battle gradually distanced her from the Baptist church in which she had been raised….
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At first, “I was incredibly intimidated,” said Ms. Knox, now 25. “As a 20-year-old would, I was like, ‘I’m not smart enough to talk to her.’ ”
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But then Ms. Steinem watched the documentary, and they started talking about Ms. Knox’s experience promoting it, when she traveled around the country talking to young people about her experience coming of age as a feminist in an evangelical community.
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“She said, ‘You’re an itinerant feminist organizer,’ ” Ms. Knox said. “And I was like: ‘What? This has a name? This isn’t just me avoiding getting a job?’ ” …
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“There’s all these stories about ‘someone will give you your chance,’ and she did,” Ms. Knox said. “It’s not like she did anything magical. It’s not like she anointed me ‘feminist whatever.’ She just said, ‘I’ll give you a roof over your head while you try to learn to make it in New York.’”