Pufferfish

Good Night...

Well, I have a bittersweet announcement to make: this will be my last blog post. I'm starting a new job that will require my full attention and firing off pseudonymous postings no longer looks to be in the cards. The good news is that the job involves writing about politics and policy full-time. I couldn't be more excited.

But I want to say thanks to the readers of this blog for stopping in from time to time. That definitely goes for the folks who emailed to let me know when I got something right and, especially, when I got something wrong. I've had a great time writing Pufferfish and enjoyed all the hours put into it; though my girlfriend would often wonder why she was competing with a computer. To Davenport, who just started blogging here, I apologize. I owe you a beer.

Now it's on to the next thing. Take care.

Well Said

I'm sick of doing these posts. Now comes word that today's killer was an Obama birther, someone who thinks the president isn't an American citizen. This is also well put:

How many acts of right-wing terrorism have to occur before DHS is allowed to start keeping track of it?

I really don’t get the conservative reaction to the original DHS pronouncement. No one is trying to lump angry Red State commenters in with honest-to-God terrorists…except, weirdly enough, the Red State commenters themselves.

There are crazy people out there shooting up abortion clinics and Holocaust museums. These people identify with causes normally described as right-wing. Deal with it. Tea bag away to your heart’s content. It’s not til you start plotting to kill people that DHS should take an interest. If anyone starts spying on you prior to that, then I, the ACLU, and dirty hippies everywhere will support your grievances.

Last July, Jim David Adkisson allegedly entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and killed two people and wounded six others during the presentation of a children's musical because he hated gays and liberals.Two months ago, Richard Poplawski allegedly gunned down three police officers in Pittsburgh because he feared the government was going to take away his guns. A few weeks ago, Scott Roeder allegedly assassinated Dr. George Tiller in Kansas. A few hours ago, Von Brunn allegedly opened fire at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The far right wing in this country is responding violently to the overheated rhetoric emanating from politicians and pundits. The leaders on the right need to go further than renouncing acts of terrorism. They need to tone down the fearmongering that makes the Fox News crowd actually believe Obama is a Marxist terrorist bent on destroying the country from within. They're playing with the feeble minds of morons.

What more needs to happen?

Creating Their Own Reality

It's what Republicans do best. And in the case of this country's massive debt, Republicans shouldn't be able to ignore legacy costs that they alone are primarily responsible for:

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

If the analysis is extended further into the future, well beyond 2012, the Obama agenda accounts for only a slightly higher share of the projected deficits.

You can be sure that the GOP will attack Democrats in 2010 and 2012 on the idea that the White House and Congress are wreck-less spenders. Never mind who rang up most of the tab.

Virtually Latina

Yesterday, Sullivan wrote that Judge Sotomayor's "constant, oppressive consciousness of her identity - racial and gender - and the harping on it so aggressively so often does strike me as a classic mode of victimology deeply entrenched in her generation." A few readers correctly pointed out that it isn't Sotomayor's harping on race that we've been hearing about insomuch as its the racist Latina characterization by Republicans that has become a central theme during her confirmation. But Sullivan's response to his readers isn't satisfactory:

The distinction I draw is the distinction made in Virtually Normal. I do not consider myself better than anyone because I'm gay; I do not think gay people have some superior wisdom; I seek civil equality so the sharp division between homosexuality and heterosexuality can eventually be elided. I've never shied from being honest or talking and writing about being gay, but I hope the goal of all of it is to move beyond the reductionism of the victimology of the left, not to entrench it. If Sotomayor had written an essay called "The End Of Latino Culture" or had written of the day she hopes Latino-specific political organizations disappear, I'd feel differently about her non-judicial record. 

Sullivan makes a fair argument about our culture of victimization, but in the context of Sotomayor's comments, I think he misses the mark. Sotomayor's "wise Latina" remark carried with it the view that she has the potential to have better judgment on issues involving race and gender because, as a minority, she understands how the law effects the disenfranchised. And so I wonder if Sullivan, as a gay man, feels that he has the potential to exercise better judgment than a straight man otherwise might on issues that involve gay rights/gay marriage/the HIV travel ban, etc.?

Taking The Hill

It has been 16 years since another young, ambitious Democratic president with a Democratic Congress tried to change the way this country deals with health care. That didn't end well for Bill Clinton. In the New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai took a look at the Obama administration's relationship with Congress and how it reflects lessons learned from Clinton:

The first senator elected directly to the Oval Office since 1960, Obama has an entirely different theory of how to exercise presidential power, and he has consciously designed his administration to avoid Clinton’s fate. After winning the office with the same kind of outsider appeal as his predecessors, he has quietly but methodically assembled the most Congress-centric administration in modern history. Obama’s White House is run by Rahm Emanuel, a former House leader who was generally considered to be on a fast track to the speakership before he resigned to become chief of staff, and it is teeming with aides plucked from the senior ranks of both chambers. Obama seems to think that the dysfunction in Washington isn’t only about the heightened enmity between the parties; it’s also about the longstanding mistrust between the two branches of government that stare each other down from twin peaks on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

And so, from Obama’s perspective, passing a health care plan this fall isn’t primarily a question of whether to include an “individual mandate” requiring every American to have insurance or how fully to regulate providers or even how to hit back against “Harry and Louise”–type attack ads, although his aides spend time contemplating all of those things. It’s more about navigating the dueling personalities and complex agendas within his own party’s Congress. Rather than laying out an intricate plan and then trying to sell it on the Hill, as Clinton did, Obama’s strategy seems to be exactly the opposite — to sell himself to Congress first and worry about the details later. As Emanuel likes to tell his West Wing staff: “The only nonnegotiable principle here is success. Everything else is negotiable.”

Bai has focused on an important aspect of Obama's administration: he designed it to work well with Congress, starting with his choice of Biden as VP, a point easily over-looked during the campaign while everyone wondered what the immediate political payoff would be. But that last quote from Rahm is lacking. Of course the details matter. If succeeding is nonnegotiable then there has to be a way of quantifying what is and isn't worthy of being deemed a success. And that is the inclusion of a strong public option. Private insurers competing with the government's coverage. The very thought has Republicans hyperventilating with spurious warnings of "socialized medicine." For the record, socialized medicine, like what the British have, would mean everything involved in the health care industry (nurses, doctors, hospitals, insurers) being owned and operated by the government. We're not getting close to that. What we're getting close to is threatening the profit margins of health insurers.

This also couldn't be more different than the way the Bush White House dictate its legislation to the Hill. For this to work, however, Obama will have to win over Blue Dog Dems. Republicans aren't the problem. Progressives would be better served focusing their ire on moderate Dems resisting the public option.

Blaming Choice

Ross Douthat would like you to know that the violence will stop once we start limiting access to abortions:

If anything, by enshrining a near-absolute right to abortion in the Constitution, the pro-choice side has ensured that the hard cases are more controversial than they otherwise would be. One reason there’s so much fierce argument about the latest of late-term abortions — Should there be a health exemption? A fetal deformity exemption? How broad should those exemptions be? — is that Americans aren’t permitted to debate anything else. Under current law, if you want to restrict abortion, post-viability procedures are the only kind you’re allowed to even regulate.

If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically. Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester — as many advanced democracies already do – would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.

The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases — and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller’s murder.

What transparent nonsense. Douthat is ignoring the abortion debate for what it is: religious zealots are determined to change the law so they can say it matches their interpretation of the bible. Limiting third trimester abortions, as Douthat suggests, isn't going to mollify that goal. This is an all or nothing issue for the anti-choice crowd. Tbogg reacts to Douthat's column with appropriate sarcasm: "The murder of George Tiller provides pro-choice advocates with a wonderful opportunity to bargain away some of their rights in return for less doctor killing. Total win-win."

'don't ask, don't tell'

 

The play:

The Supreme Court refused on Monday to hear a legal challenge to the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, a decision that allows the Obama administration to continue its slow, back-burner response to liberal activists who want gays to serve openly in the military.

The President is on record as opposing the law and would like to see it abolished, pending a Pentagon review.  Doing away with Dick Morris' triangulation policy would be a step in the right direction for the military and would improve national security.  Indeed, as a recent op-ed points out:

"Half a century ago the U.S. military was a trailblazer in ending legal segregation of African-Americans.  Some of the objections to that move then sounded a lot like the ones now against gays openly serving: that it would threaten military discipline, morale and cohesion.

In 1993, the U.S. General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) studied the militaries of four countries that allow gays to serve openly and found no negative impacts. The Rand Corp. did its own study and found no evidence that gays affected "unit cohesion and unit performance."

Now the ball is in President Obama's court.

Is That Enuf?

Sarah Smith is unimpressed:

Remember back in 1780-something, when we had actual smart people writing our founding documents in beautiful longhand when they weren’t inventing new kinds of ploughs and bifocals and shit? Now our nation’s top legislators just type away like petulant teenage girls, with their thumbs, about how the president is so awful for spending the weekend in Paris. We are all stupider for having read this.

I find Chuck Grassley's mastery of Twitter to be rather incredible. That a senator would resort to public messages written in teenage short-hand seems to both ill-suited to the stereotype of Republicans being out of touch, while at the same time playing into the anti-intellectual moniker now bestowed on many within the GOP. But above all that, it's simply a childish public display from an elected official who should be constantly worried about public displays of any kind, let alone those that could reasonably be described as petulant. More importantly, Grassley is the top Republican on the Finance Committee and key to any bipartisan health care deal. With that debate now taking center stage, Grassley doesn't seem inclined to be a willing participant in negotiations. Maybe that's a good thing. Passing health care with the inclusion of a strong public insurance option has become the determining factor for an Obama victory. If the public plan exists, progressives have won. If it's eliminated, or watered-down to an unrecognizable point, then conservatives and lobbyists can celebrate. The less likely Grassley is to deal from the outset, then perhaps Dems on the Hill will be more likely to go it alone without weakening the bill to get his vote.

For a nice overview of the health care debate, check out Ezra Klein's introductory post.

USA! USA!

Patriotic fail:

The Detroit Bureau reports that an idea seems to be picking up some cachet on the right-wing blogs and in talk radio: Fighting the "Government Motors" bailout by boycotting the company. Most of it so far is limited to relatively little-known writers, but two big names have picked up on it: Hugh Hewitt, who wants to save free enterprise -- and Rush Limbaugh, who wants anything President Obama does to fail, and is urging his listeners to help push towards that goal.

To review: The Obama administration intervened to prevent the collapse of a major American company, save jobs and perhaps the state of Michigan from becoming an uninhabited wasteland, while stating emphatically that it plans to see GM get back on its feet, allow for GM to restructure and then divest as quickly as possible. A boycott would serve only to hurt the investment already made by taxpayers and possibly send thousands more auto workers to the unemployment lines. It's one thing to fire off incoherent Tweets and not-so-silently root for the Obama administration's failure. It's another to actively work to produce the failure of an American company.

Not Your Older Brother's GOP

Any good head doctor can tell you that psychological projection is a defense mechanism where a person's personal attributes are ascribed onto someone else. It's commonly found within Rush Limbaugh led diatribes. And I don't know how else to classify the latest column from Andrew Breitbart:

Democrats long ago jettisoned America's melting-pot ideal - E Pluribus Unum ("Out of Many, One") - because it imperils their campaign for permanent rule. Splitting the country into separate identity groups and playing them against each other works a lot better. And anyone who disagrees is a racist.

Win. Win. Win.

This, from the proud member of a party that has been worn down to the Southern Strategy's bitter nub. Better still, Breitbart seems to refute his own claim a few paragraphs later:

When elected, the Democrats dole out billion-dollar bonuses to their core supporters at taxpayers' expense. Witness the $787 billion stimulus package, an orgy of special-interest payback for labor unions, liberal activist groups and multinational corporations.

So which is it? Is Obama trying to divide and conquer or is he bribing labor unions and multinational corporations to co-exist peacefully? I'm not sure there's much evidence for either. But Breitbart's initial hypothesis would be better served without the discrepancy. Here is Breitbart's parting thought:

In the next election cycle, things need to be drastically different. Democracy is not Augusta National Golf Club. It's a messy free-for-all, and in a two-party system, the GOP will not survive if it doesn't accept the fact that the Democrats are its enemy and that it must begin to play for keeps. That means finding another Lee Atwater - only meaner - and not apologizing when we get him.

Finding another Lee Atwater so the country's poweful elites don't resemble a whites only golf club?