Health Care Reform passes

The Democrats finally did it, passing health care reform. Props to Nancy Pelosi for bringing it through the House. Props to all the Dems in the House who voted the right way, which was most of them, and enough of them. There are some other procedural votes in the Senate, and then Obama has to sign it. But it's done.

The details of what this bill covers have been examined in excruciating detail in many, many places. Andrew Sullivan rounds up the usual suspects and their reactions. I'm just thrilled that we finally have something - anything - different from the status quo. I don't know whether or not this bill will solve the problems we hope it will. I hope it will. I have a certain amount of faith. For various reasons, I haven't followed the ins and outs of this debate as closely as I could have. I understand the basic outline, the amount of detail has been mind-numbing. I started following politics seriously when all you had to do was read The New York Times and a couple of other sources, and you knew all you had to know. I still haven't learned how to drink from the firehose that is the Internet.

What I do know, or at least what I feel comfortable theorizing about, is that this isn't just about healthcare, as broad as that topic may be. This may be the last great victory in the culture wars that started almost 50 years ago. Liberals have won on almost every issue in those wars: they have won on feminism, civil rights, the environment, abortion, and separation of church and state. They're winning on gay rights. They've essentially lost on gun control, but they're starting to win on crime, after losing for decades. Some would argue that they lost on the very broad issue of capitalism, but I don't think that was really up for debate. As frustrated as liberals are by corporations, only the wackiest have really seriously contemplated any kind of alternative to capitalism.

This is not just a political, legislative, or even cultural victory. This is a philosophical victory, an ideological one. What won tonight was the idea that government can improve the lives of its citizens. That's an idea that has been around for a long time, and there have been many victories on that front along the way. But this may be the ultimate victory for that idea. Which may be one reason Republicans fought this legislation so hard: they knew what was at stake, and they knew how badly they were losing. And now they have lost. Take it away, Mr. President:

Save Poetry From The Professors

Andrew Sullivan points to an interesting blog post about the sorry state of modern poetry. I'm requoting what Sully liked:

The best thing that could happen to poetry is to drive it out of the universities with burning pitch forks. Starve the lavish grants. Strangle them all in a barrel of water.

Couldn't agree more. I studied a fair amount of poetry in college, and still own at least a couple of books of poetry. I can quote some Keats, and thoroughly enjoyed Bright Star. I've written a fair amount myself, and once spent three years working on one poem. But I can't stand most current American poetry. Here's how most poetry sounds to me:

I am a poet (pause, deep breath, sigh)
and you (pause) are who I am thinking of (pause, another sigh)
because (pause)
we are both (pause)
depressed.

Most poetry seems to be written by people who are scared of their own shadows, and are creating a space for themselves to be still, and quiet, and mostly alone. It's very inward-directed, and seems to be written by people who are anxious about even going outside. That's probably too harsh, and I'm sure there are thousands of great counterexamples. But that's what a lot of it sounds like to me. The writer of this blog post believes that the source of the problem is that many poets are comfortably ensconced in universities, and that poetry journals end up publishing poetry written by and for these university-bound folks.

Again, couldn't agree more. Except that I don't think this is anywhere nearly radical enough in its definition of poetry. It limits "poetry" to what is being published in books and journals. I think that's absurd. The English-speaking world has a great tradition of poetry called rock and roll. Consider this line:

"The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive."

Millions of people have heard that line hundreds of times each. It's from Bruce Springsteen's "Born To Run." It could easily be one of the most overplayed songs in history. But try to think about that image without the context of FM radio. There's a reason it's overplayed - it's a great line for a rock song.

So I don't think the problem with American poetry is that Americans aren't interested in poetry. I think the problem is that a few people who are decent writers have managed to convince the rest of us that it's worthwhile to subsidize them so they can talk to each other about how special they are. And some of those people have convinved themselves that they are the ones who determine what is and is not considered "art."

What this writer fails to realize is that the disconnect and the concern is mostly one-sided. He's worried that Americans don't connect with contemporary poets. But the concern is not reciprocated. Most Americans don't read poetry because it doesn't speak to them - he's right there. But most of them also don't care that contemporary poetry doesn't speak to them. I'm perfectly capable of reading and understanding contemporary American poetry. I've even bought "Best American Poetry" books before. But I don't read contemporary American poetry not only because it doesn't speak to me, but because I don't care about it. Two sides of the same coin, I suppose.

But I'm falling into the same trap - defining "poetry" as what is published by people who call themselves poets, and is published in poetry journals. It's not that I don't care about contemporary poetry. It's that I don't care about a particular brand of poery.

Marianne Moore said it best:

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.

Quote of the Day

"Well, no one said it would be easy."

-Andrew Sullivan, in his excellent assessment of Obama's first year. He makes the very good point - which should be obvious - that one of Obama's great achievements this year was preventing a second Great Depression.

He also mentions that the right is furious at Obama because they sense that he is changing the dialogue to a degree similar to how Reagan changed it. Except, of course, that Obama is swinging the pendulum back towards government activism, rather than away from it.

It has been said of FDR that he saved capitalism from itself. I think Obama is doing the same thing - he is preserving capitalism despite the best efforts of capitalists to wreck things.

What is driving conservatives nuts is that Obama is turning out to be better at saving capitalism than Republicans. That's gotta hurt.

The View From My Window

I took this picture from my office window a few days ago. It's not the best view from where I sit, but it does have the cool effect of showing snow visible from an office in downtown Los Angeles. I was going to take another picture today, since it's Christmas, and we have another clear view today (we usually have some kind of smog), but the batteries in my camera died. So hopefully tomorrow. Meanwhile, enjoy.

And, of course, props to Andrew Sullivan for his long-running feature "The View From Your Window." I'm going to order the book any day now.

Oh Sweet Automotive Irony: Porsche Sponsors Andrew Sullivan

I read Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish, several times a day. The Atlantic currently has a feature with him being interviewed by one of his co-bloggers, Ta-Nehisi Coates. I watched one and enjoyed it. It's nice to see some experimentation on a blog, even if it's not particularly creative. Sullivan has done this before, with Marc Ambinder. Sullivan has a good screen presence.

There's one slightly ironic detail. The series of video interviews is sponsored by Porsche. Nothing wrong with that. I like Porsches, and actually learned how to drive a stick on a 944. Except that, in a poll of bloggers, asking them what kind of car they drive, Andrew Sullivan replied thusly:

I don’t drive and cannot drive. I have no license and never learned. It’s saved me a fortune and the planet some grief.

Yes, that's right, Porsche, maker of high-end sports cars, the kind of automobiles driven by people who buy cars strictly because they love to drive these kinds of cars, is sponsoring probably the only high-profile blogger in the United States who not only does not own a car, but doesn't know how to drive.

So we know that there is no possible way that Sullivan is biased in favor of Porsches. Which is good. I'm sure the vast majority of his readers appreciate Porsches (although I am sure that there are a few who have issues with them). It's a very classy advertiser for an intellectually sophisticated blog.

But I just can't help but appreciate the irony.

Ultrafast Apple Pie

OMG does this look fun:

one minute Apple pie from Animi on Vimeo.

hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

Off the grid

I am pulling an Andrew Sullivan and going off the grid for a few days. I'm not just not blogging; I'm trying to ignore news as much as I can. Haven't looked at TPM, Andrew Sullivan, or Daily Kos for a couple of days. I haven't even watched or read Obama's speech on health care.

I think it's been at least two years, since the summer of 2007, when I got involved in the Obama campaign, since I have really given myself a sustained break from worrying about the rest of the world. It feels really good.

It's a little late to be taking a break, since the rest of the world did so in August, but better late than never.

In other news, I was at Starbucks today and bought an album you may have heard of, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It's amazing to realize that I actually know every single song on the album. There are damn few albums that I do not own that I can say that about. And I know every single song really well. And probably just about every person I know knows every song really well. It's a digitally remastered edition, with a mini-documentary. I haven't watched that yet.

Unfortunately, unlike Andrew Sullivan, I don't have an under-blogger to cover for me, so commentary on health care and the latest Republican idiocy will be forthcoming in a few days.

Also, tomorrow USC continues its march towards its next national title by taking on Ohio State, and that, of course, is much more important than something like health care reform. I bought a new USC t-shirt today. I also learned that the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, oldest and greatest film school in the world, got its own star today from the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. When you walk around Hollywood, there are stars in the pavement with the names of famous celebrities. Now USC has one, but it is actually on the USC film school campus. Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. would be proud - he founded the school and taught the first course. He had some pull within the industry at the time - he was the president of a new group called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Go Trojans!

Finally, Some Substance on Health Care

It has taken a while, but we finally have some substantive discussions going on about health care. A real, honest-to-goodness Canadian writes in The Denver Post about the differences between the US and Canadian health care systems (thanks to my Uncle Lenny for forwarding it to me). Bottom line: Canada spends less money for better health. She takes apart all of the myths about the Canadian system. My response is simple: ADT (About Damn Time). Most of the stories and myths about Canadian health care that I've heard are strictly anecdotal, the "I heard about this one guy who came to America because he couldn't get the surgery that he needed in Canada" variety. So it's nice to see some myths debunked.

Of course, many conservatives will dismiss this out of hand, but it will also give liberals more ammunition, make them more confident, and maybe even convince a few independents. Probably the strongest point in the piece is the one about doctors not needing any kind of pre-authorization to practice the medicine that they think is appropriate.

I have a question for conservatives about health care in Canada. Supposedly lots of Canadians are unhappy about health care in Canada, and they are coming to the United States. Where exactly are all these Canadian? Presumably they're coming across the border to Seattle, Detroit, Buffalo, and other border cities. Can we please get some statistics from conservatives proving that Canadians are coming to the US en masse for health care? Because if we can't get those statistics, I'm going to call it a myth.

Next, Patrick Appel, who is performing quite ably in the absence of his boss, Andrew Sullivan, writes a superb post about malpractice insurance and tort reform. This is another bogeyman of the right, largely derived from anecdotal evidence: there are too many frivolous lawsuits from ambulance-chasing lawyers, and the result of all those lawsuits is that malpractice insurance rates are going through the roof, which drives up health care costs. Maybe not so much.

Malpractice payments account for less than 1% of the nation's health care costs each year. Since 1987 medical malpractice insurance costs have risen just 52% despite the fact that medical costs have increased 113%. The size of malpractice damage awards has remained steady since 1991. Adjusted for inflation, the average malpractice payment has actually decreased since then. The number of payments for malpractice judgments of $1 million or more has never exceeded one-half of one percent of the annual total number of malpractice payments dating back to 1991.

The specific subject of the post is tort reform in Texas, which was supposed to solve the problem by limiting the size of malpractice awards. It hasn't, and there hasn't been the promised reduction in health care costs. The basic idea, which we also have in California, is that certain awards for damages in these suits are limited. The idea is that if the insurance company only pays out $250,000, instead of $5 million, malpractice premiums will decline. It hasn't worked out that way. The unintended consequence is that it is now more difficult for some patients to sue, because it's not worth it for the lawyers to sue, since there is a cap on how much money they can make.

I've always thot that the solution to absurdly high malpractice awards is to implement a better solution for disciplining doctors. Appel quotes a reader who wrote in with stats about how many doctors are disciplined. It's not much. Physician, heal thyself.

We owe Sarah Palin and the other wackjobs on the right a big thank you, because their ranting and raving have finally brought these arguments out of the woodwork. Rationality will eventually prevail, but it takes longer to deploy calmly constructed arguments than it does to throw out insane lies and bizarre innuendo. Palin, Glenn Beck, et al. have a slight advantage in this debate in terms of timing, because it takes them no time whatsoever to make something up and throw it out into the public discourse. Liberals, on the other hand, have to take the time to actually think and research and write. Fortunately, liberal arguments end up being much more persuasive, at least to people willing to listen to them.

Best. Pie. Chart. Ever.

Literally.

Beautiful Balloons

This may be one of the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen.

Another Shot of Weirdness From Sarah Palin

Well, that's weird. Just in time to make everyone's Fourth of July really interesting, Sarah Palin resigns as governor of Alaska. Her resignation speech, at least what I've read of it so far, is just bizarre. Here's a taste;

Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and "go with the flow".

Nah, only dead fish "go with the flow".

"[O]nly dead fish 'go with the flow.'" OK, first of all, somewhere Taoists and Buddhists are screaming, but I suppose Sarah Palin isn't worried about losing that constituency. But what is this nonsense about keeping your head down and plodding along being a "worthless, easy path?" Huh? I was under the impression that meeting your commitments was a fundamental part of "being responsible."

Speculation is flying as to why she's doing this. So she can spend more time campaigning for president? Maybe, but quitting your job as governor is not a great way to demonstrate effective leadership. I think there might be a clue in one line in her speech:

Todd and I are looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills in order to set the record straight.

She's referring to all of the ethics investigations that she is going through. That's a chunk of change. I think that might be part of it; she needs to make more money in the private sector to be able to pay all of these legal bills. But doesn't she have some kind of legal defense fund?

The speech is just riddled with the kind of boilerplate nonsense that is too stale to even pass off as cliched. But I love this euphemism:

In the words of General MacArthur said, "We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction."

Then there are lines that just befuddle:

I cannot stand here as your Governor and allow millions upon millions of our dollars go to waste just so I can hold the title of Governor.

Millions of dollars will go to waste if you hold the title of governor? She's found a way to sound noble and proud about the fact that she is quitting her job well before it's done. How does this woman stay sane?

Josh Marshall and his crew are having a field day with this. I'm having fun just reading the headlines of their posts. My favorite so far is "Surreality Only Beginning."

Andrew Sullivan, who has made chronicling her lies (he's up to #30) a mainstay of his blog, had this comment, which sums it up pretty well:

I'm too stunned to say anything else, to tell you the truth. And yet not surprised at all.

Sully also gets some style points for quoting Wittgenstein. The quote is in German, which I don't know at all, but there is really one line from Wittgenstein that is a famous quote, and is somehow appropo for today: "Beyond that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent."

Oh, no. There's a lot we can say about this. And will.

Daily Kos has a great poll about why she's quitting. The number #1 answer, with 70%, is "There's another shoe left to drop." There is something else going on here. Maybe it's another good sex scandal!!! Let's not think about that. It's tacky. Funny and potentially very entertaining, but tacky. Also possibly sexist.

I think the person who may come out of this the best is David Letterman. I don't know this, but my guess is that he has felt somewhat chastised by his unfortunate encounter with her when he made that crack about her daughter. Not anymore! Now that she is, once again, proving herself to be a soap opera all by herself.

I think the best quote to sum all this up is from Hunter S. Thompson:

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

Obama and gay rights: Stonewall edition

Frank Rich wrote about gay rights and Obama yesterday, the anniversary of the Stonewall riots. He confessed that he didn't hear anything about Stonewall when it happened, despite his personal interest in civil rights. I don't blame him; I don't think I heard about Stonewall at the very least until I was in college. Rich is frustrated with Obama's lack of action on gay rights, as many liberals are. He comes up with a couple of explanations, and favors this one:

But the most prevalent theory is that Obama, surrounded by Clinton White House alumni with painful memories, doesn’t want to risk gay issues upending his presidency, as they did his predecessor’s in 1993.

Undoubtedly. But I cannot figure out why Rich doesn't go just a little deeper, and look into the Congressional politics. It's really quite simple. There are a number of Democratic senators and representatives, primarily from the South, who absolutely do not want to vote on any gay issues this year. Claire McCaskill from Missouri, Kay Hagan from North Carolina, and Mark Warner from Virginia are probably in this group. I haven't checked out their positions on gay rights, but I would be very surprised if they are pushing for the repeal of either DOMA or DADT. For Obama to push for the repeal of DOMA right now would be a gift to certain Republicans, to say nothing of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck. For some of those senators and congresspeople, voting for an expasion of gay rights, particularly gay marriage, might cost them enough votes to lose them an election. That's a very high price.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Obama is being very careful on the repeal of DOMA and DADT because he doesn't want to lose. If he pushes for a repeal of either, and it fails, there will not be another opportunity for at least five years.

Andrew Sullivan is, of course, passionate about this, but I also think he's a little blinded by his own passion. A couple of weeks ago, more frustrated than usual, he wrote

Of course these things can be done. If anyone high up in the Obama administration or the Pelosi-Reid Congress gave a damn, much would have been done.

No, they can't. There is still much work to be done, and there are still many people who are adamantly opposed to gay marriage. There has been amazing progress on gay rights just this year, but let's not forget that Prop. 8 passed in California last year. And it didn't just pass in California: it passed in Los Angeles County, one of the most liberal counties in the country.

Sullivan has a list of things that he thinks supporters of gay rights should do to pressure Obama and the Democrats. I think a much more fruitful approach would be to compile a list of minor things that Obama can do to support gay rights - a checklist, if you will, and then demand action on each of those. Many of them will not require Congressional action. Obama is already working through some of those, and they require a lot of work in the bureaucracy. There are two rationales for this approach. First, it gets a lot of things done. Second, it will lay the ground work for the more dramatic action of repealing DOMA and DADT by showing that gay rights can be expanded, and the politicians supporting such expansion can survive.

Revolution in Iran

I have to admit that I wasn't paying close attention to the elections in Iran until they started happening. I wasn't expecting much. Boy was I wrong.

I don't have much to say, except that, if you are at all interested in this story, just keep reading Andrew Sullivan. Constantly. The NY Times' blog The Lede has also been comprehensive and extraordinary.

The one thing that seems clear is that the people running Iran, the clerics, do not understand democracy. You can't promise a fair election, get people's hopes up, and then steal it this blatantly. People do not rebel when they are oppressed and beaten down; they rebel when they are hopeful that they are beaten down and oppressed and suddenly some kind of hope arrives. That's when they rebel.

I vaguely remember the Shah going down. What I remember is that it seemed to take a long time - he hung in there as long as he could. That will probably be what happens here. This is not over, not by a long shot. There are a number of Iranians who really did vote for Ahmadinejad and really do believe that he is on their side. He may very well be on their side, but there seem to be a lot more Iranians who believe that he stole this election.

One thing that makes me proud is that a lot of the inventions that are being used to circumvent the government's attempt to control the people - Twitter, Facebook, Flickr - were invented by Americans. If you really get down to it, the same can be said of the Internet itself. And, going way back, even the telephone.

I have to admit that when I first heard about Twitter, I didn't think it was an interesting idea. Too shallow, kind of silly. I don't think that any more.

As Andrew Sullivan keeps posting, "Know hope."

Obama losing ground on gay rights

I've been grudgingly supportive of some of Obama's positions on gay rights that I don't necessarily agree with. I can see why he's dragging his feet on repealing DADT, and I think he sees problems supporting gay marriage, because it will make him a lightning rod for homophobia, at a moment when he doesn't need another reason to piss off moderates and the right.

But he does owe his gay supporters, and he hasn't done much to repay them, or even much to advance the cause of gay rights. This is starting to disappoint.

The latest is a brief filed by the DoJ in a case in California. Andrew Sullivan, by far Obama's most articulate conservative gay supporter, is not happy. AmericaBlog rips the Administration's case to pieces.

A couple of thots, trying to square this with my admiration for Obama:

This is a brief written by someone in the DoJ. Obama quite probably didn't read it. I would be surprised if he were aware of it before today - the DoJ probably files briefs like this every day. In some sense, there is a principle that the civil service lawyers in the DoJ, not the political appointees, should be allowed to make the strongest case possible for the government. They do not care about the political consequences, and they shouldn't.

But this is policy by other means. The Obama DoJ can not make these arguments if they want to avoid the political headaches.

Even if the Obama administration wants to take a hands-off approach to letting the DoJ make the best argument the lawyers think they can, the administration should be prepared to deal with the fallout from the gay community. There are thousands of people who gave lots of time and money to Obama.

Now for some seriously counter-intuitive thinking: Maybe this is a tough-love move by the Obama administration. Maybe they are playing devil's advocate in public. Maybe they are saying to the gay community - OK, you want marriage, and repeal of DADT? Fight for it. Lay the groundwork. Provide us with some political cover.

This makes some sense, because the gay community did not do much fighting last fall over Prop 8. I got the feeling that many members of the gay community, and their liberal friends thot that gay rights in California were a done deal. I include myself in the latter group - I just about assumed that defeating Prop. 8 was a foregone conclusion - this is California in 2009, right?

I'm not sure the gay community realizes the stakes for the Obama administration. Obama won in 2008 because he won states like Indiana, Virginia, and North Carolina. If he is too closely associated with gay rights, he could easily lose those. And with them, the election.

If I sound schizophrenic on this issue, it's because I am. I am strongly supportive of gay rights, and I am strongly supportive of the Obama administration. I don't think Obama did the right thing with this brief in California, but I'm also not sure that Obama himself had much to do with it. But I do think he should do something about it. He needs to placate some very pissed off -and very legitimately pissed off - solid supporters.

Update: Laurence Tribe, the constitutional scholar at Harvard, is somewhat supportive of the Administration. He's paying attention to the details of this particular case. It's worth quoting him at length:

As someone who wants to see DOMA dismantled and invalidated, I would love it if this ninth circuit case would evaporate into the ether.

Even though I personally believe that DOMA is unconstitutional, I think that this particular lawsuit is very vulnerable; it’s not anywhere near as strong as the one that was brought in the federal district court in Massachusetts [a suit filed by Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders].

In an environment where the Supreme Court is still quite conservative, what makes a suit a strong one is that it finds a point of entry in which it’s possible to invalidate a law in a number of its applications by using more of a scalpel that might appeal to five justices rather than a bludgeon that will almost certainly ask more of the court than it is willing to do.

What’s strong about the Massachusetts case is that these are concrete situations of people who are legally married under the laws of states like Massachusetts or Vermont, and who are being discriminated against by the federal government with respect to federal benefits simply because they are same-sex couples. There’s no other difference between them and other couples in that state, and the court could agree with that without accepting any of the broader theories advanced in the [Smelt] lawsuit in the central district of California, which is basically a bet-the-farm lawsuit that almost dares a conservative Supreme Court to slap it down.

A strategic Justice Department interested in a litigation strategy that has some realistic chance of success certainly would not have taken [the Smelt] case as the one in which the constitutional vulnerabilities of DOMA should be explored.

He also understands the political reality, and sympathizes with gay groups. But he also understands the legal reality, and how it intersects with the political reality. This was not a good case for challenging DOMA. The disappointment of gay rights groups is an example of what I call the "magic wand" theory of social change. That's the idea that a president can arrive at the White House, start waving a magic wand, and voila! solve all the problems of the world. Doesn't work like that, folks. Again, Tribe is worth quoting at length:

The important point here is that the solicitor general traditionally seeks to dismiss lawsuits against federal laws whenever there is a plausible basis to do it. A lot of the outcry about the administration’s position doesn’t take that institutional reality into account.

It doesn’t surprise me very much because I understand the frustration of some of the groups. They have lived under the burden of DOMA, of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” for a long time, and they understandably hoped that this would be an administration that would side with them on these issues.

And I think the frustration of having to wait so long for a progressive and intelligent president who, nonetheless, occasionally does some things that people find disappointing on matters that cut deeply into where they live -- it’s understandable that would lead to some strong reactions in this case.

The other problem is that this is vastly more important to gay rights groups than it is to Obama. Whether or not a gay person can get married has a major impact on their lives. It has a much greater and more immediate impact than, say, whether or not there is peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. But peace in the Middle East is vastly more important to Obama than whether or not a couple million Americans can get married. It is also far more immediate for Obama; he has a chance to achieve peace in the Middle East right now, and he can't afford to let this chance slip away. Gay marriage is an issue that will be around for a long time. And the odds of repealing DOMA in the next year are, honestly, slim to none. Not while there are still something like 40 states with anti-gay marriage laws on their books.

Obama and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" - the go-slow policy

President Obama hasn't done much on the military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. Many liberals, and at least one conservative, are getting a little antsy. Andrew Sullivan is impatient.

My fear in this as with the economy is that Obama likes to tear band-aids off very, very slowly.

Matt Yglesias is particularly frustrated:

[U]ltimately delay does no one any favors. The change will have to come sooner or later. In political terms, the White House may as well act decisively, take whatever hits they're going to take, and be done with it rather than letting this fester like a sore. And substantively, if the military is going to have to adjust they may as well do it sooner rather than later rather than lose more valuable personnel.

That's an eloquent articulation of a simplistic idea. It's also an example of what I call the "magic wand" theory of political action. This can be done today, so why aren't we?

Yglesias realizes that lack of adequate planning is part of what got Clinton in trouble over this issue:

Obama's decision on a variety of fronts has been guided by a clear desire to avoid some of the early missteps made by Bill Clinton. And conventional accounts of Clinton’s early presidency put the way he got into an early dispute with the military brass over treatment of gay and lesbian servicemembers high on the list of missteps to be avoided.

Again, an eloquent articulation of a simplistic idea. Clinton's mistake was that he picked a fight with the military. Really not a good idea for a guy who was basically a draft dodger.

But Clinton's situation was a little more complicated than that, as is Obama's. It wasn't that Clinton picked a fight with the military; it was that both he and the gay community were totally unprepared for the fight. Allowing gays in the military wasn't a high priority of the gay community at the time; they were much more worried about other issues, particularly AIDS. Clinton had not laid any groundwork politically for allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military. When the backlash came, Clinton and his gay and liberal allies were quickly overwhelmed. The result was that we ended up with a bad policy that institutionalized discrimination.

For Clinton, gays in the military became a flashpoint, something for his enemies to focus on. It wasn't just that Clinton wasn't prepared for the fight; he had no idea there was going to be a fight at all.

That is exactly what Obama wants to avoid. Right now gay rights are a very, very touchy subject with a lot of people. The problem is not that they are angry. The problem is that they have nowhere to focus their anger. There are a lot of people in places like North Dakota who are willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, but who are also queasy with everything they are hearing about gay marriage. But there's nothing they can do about something happening in New Hampshire. If Obama takes a strong stand on DADT, or any gay issue, all of that anger is going to focus on him.

Clinton's first year in office was actually quite successful, but the gays in the military issue had a ridiculously outsized impact, coming, as it did, very early in his presidency. It threw him off his stride, and let his enemies gain some traction. And then the Democrats lost the House in 1994.

The political calculus for Obama is very straightforward. Eliminating DADT is the right thing to do. But timing in politics is crucial. Obama has a huge number of things on his plate. He doesn't want to risk support for his broader agenda on an issue that, let's face it, affects a few thousand people. Is that cold and calculating? Yes, it is. But guess what - it's also good politics.

The timing is also poor because we are fighting two wars. Obama's military priority right now is winning those wars, or at least getting us out of there. Once he does that, once he has credibility as a military leader, he will have more clout with the military.

Matt Yglesias makes one very problematic assumption: he assumes that Obama will win this issue. Obama cannot make that assumption.

Obama is being very careful with DADT because there is a very real possibility that he will not be successful. Obama is doing the exact opposite of Clinton for one very good reason: Clinton failed.

Hoping for a conservative "Sister Souljah" moment

Andrew Sullivan asks a question about conservatives - who will "Sister Souljah" them? It's a good question - regardless of what you think about Clinton's "Sister Souljah" moment, he went on to win the presidency. Twice.

He has a dream:

I'm waiting for the first leading Republican to do to these grandstanding goons what Clinton once did to the extremists in his own ranks: reject them, excoriate them, remind people that they do not have a monopoly on conservatism and that decent right-of-center people actually find their vision repellent. And then to articulate a positive vision for taking this country forward, expanding liberty, exposing corruption, reducing government's burden, unwinding ungovernable empire, and defending civic virtue without going on Jihads against other people's vices.

Who will take care of this? Who will marginalize these idiots?

The answer is simple. Someone with a chance of winning. Clinton was able to criticize a black woman because he had a very good record on civil rights, so he could legitimately claim that he was disagreeing with the content of Sister Souljah's comments, not being subtly racist. The conservative who can do the same will be someone who has a solid conservative record, but is also attractive to the mainstream, and has a chance to win a major race, like a governor's race, if not the presidency.

Who is this person? Where are they? We may not know that for a long time. Years, at the very least.

The torture memos

The Obama administration yesterday released the memos from the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel justifying torture.

There is good news and bad news in this development. First, the good news is that Obama did the right thing in releasing the memos with minimal redactions. This is virtually unprecedented in American history. I'm sure that it never occurred to the Bush people that their successor would release these memos. In that respect, Obama is already breaking ground. Makes me proud that I voted for him and campaigned for him.

The bad news is that Obama made it clear that he does not intend to pursue prosecutions of the people who conducted the torture, at least not those who acted in "good faith." Many people on the left strongly disagree with this. Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent piece for Salon, on the one hand praising Obama for releasing the memos, and on the other hand criticizing him for not pursuing prosecutions. I disagree with Greenwald on one point. He writes that

there wasn't much political gain for Obama in releasing these documents.

I understand why he writes that; the right is strongly critical of him, while the left is just thankful that he did the right thing. I think it does benefit Obama somewhat in the short term, because it shores up his support from liberals. Not that he needed it, but he won't be criticized as much as he would have been if he had stonewalled. In the long term, however, I think Obama benefits substantially, because he has taken a good solid step towards rewarding Americans' faith in their government's ability to acknowledge its errors. Restoring even a tiny bit of faith in democracy is a Herculean task, and for that Obama deserves praise as well.

Andrew Sullivan has been all over this, as he has for years. He has done his adopted country a great service by relentlessly hammering home how despicable the Bush administration was.

Looked at from a distance, the Bush administration wanted to do two things at once: to declare to the world that freedom is on the march, and human rights are coming to the world with American help, while simultaneously declaring to captives that the US has no interest in the law, human rights, accountability, transparency or humanity. They wanted to give hope to all the oppressed of the planet, while surgically banishing all hope from the prisoners they captured and tortured. And the only way they could pull this off is by the total secrecy they constructed and defended. So we had a public government respectful of the rule of law, and a secret government whose main goal was persuading terror suspects that there was no rule of law at all. It is hard to convey just how dangerous this was and is.

What is key to remember at this juncture is that the release of these memos is the beginning, not the end, of the process of restoring the rule of law. I disagree with Obama's decision not to pursue prosecutions of the agents who engaged in torture, but I don't condemn him for it. First, it's not his job; the Presient does not make decisions about who to prosecute, although he clearly has influence. I usually agree with him on reaching out to people who disagree with him. This time, I think he did so not just out of concern for maintaining political peace. He is technically the boss of everyone at the CIA, and those are people you really don't want to piss off. On the other hand, you have to be prepared to piss them off; that's part of the job of the President.

But it's also clear that Obama is not foreclosing all options to hold people accountable. In a sense, I am glad that he is not proposing prosecutions for people who tortured, because I am not sure if that is the best way to hold people accountable for these atrocities. It may or may not be a good idea; I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know. But there are a number of avenues available to us, many outside the executive branch. Nature abhors a vacuum, as does a scandal. Ironically, by foreclosing the option of prosecution, Obama opens the door to many other possible solutions. Congress may appoint a special prosecutor; at the very least, I expect hearings to be held.

One great thing about Obama that I am appreciating more and more is that he has a very deep and abiding faith in both the American people and democracy. In both of these, he is the exact opposite of Bush and Cheney, who had so little faith in either. Obama cannot control what will happen now that these memos have been released, but he does not want to. He has given the American people permission to pass judgment, argue, and decide what should be done.

The worst news that we heard today is that what so many suspected was true; the Bush administration systematically authorized torture. The best news was that we heard about it from the President of the United States.

What was done in secret will be changed by what will be done in the open.

The American people are Obama's great secret weapon.

Did they have Darjeeling at the tea parties?

There were tea parties across the country today. Not the kind with scones and raspberry jam. These tea parties were supposed to remind people of the original Boston Tea Party, the one that started the American Revolution. Except that these people have taxation WITH representation, so it's not clear what the parallel is.

The big liberal blogs have been all over the story all day. Daily Kos provides a comparison with the original. TPM has a great photo gallery of some of the protests. HuffPost had several posts.

The point of all these is to protest taxes and the government in general and Obama. From some of the pictures, these protests attracted a fair people from the fringe of the radical right.

Andrew Sullivan tried to take these protesters seriously. He linked to an incredibly cool graphic of exactly how and on what the federal government spends money. He summed up the salient point well:

it seems odd to describe this as anything but a first stab at creating opposition to the Obama administration's spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush's.
. . .
All protests against spending that do not tell us how to reduce it are fatuous pieces of theater, not constructive acts of politics. And until the right is able to make a constructive and specific argument about how they intend to reduce spending and debt and borrowing, they deserve to be dismissed as performance artists in a desperate search for coherence in an age that has left them bewilderingly behind.

It's almost trivial to describe these protesters as whackjobs. Obama is a fascist/socialist? Huh? There were people on the left who used that kind of language to describe Bush. Both Bushes. And they were ignored, particularly the second time around, even though W. was a much worse president than his father. They were ignored because the vast majority of liberals and Democrats - the 99% who are sane, rational people - realized that the crazies tainted the movement. Apparently the right did not learn this lesson.

I'm going to imagine for a moment that these folks are serious about cutting spending. Where have they been for the last 8 years? One of the largest items in the budget is interest on the debt. At the end of the Clinton administration, we were running a surplus. If we had kept doing that, we would have eliminated a huge chunk of the interest we pay on our debt, which would have made cutting taxes or dealing with this financial crisis even easier. Somehow this never comes up.

If these folks really wanted to cut the budget, they would have protested against Bush. But of course they didn't. And now that Obama is in office, with the horrendous problems he inherited from Bush, they're blaming him? Please.

They're angry about government spending, but of course they couldn't protest Bush, because they somehow see themselves as agreeing with him, even though he did the opposite of what they believe in. So Bush pissed them off, but they couldn't protest against him, so they are taking all their anger that was inspired by Bush, and aiming it at Obama.

Can you say dysfunctional?

This feels like one of those moments at a party when someone does something really embarrassing but doesn't realize it, so everyone else pastes uncomfortable smiles on their faces, waits for the moment to pass, and then doesn't say anything. Until maybe a few days later, when there is a hushed whisper here and there. And eventually the person somehow doesn't get invited to quite as many parties. Right now, many, many Republicans are incredibly embarrassed by this spectacle, but they're not saying anything, and they won't for a while. At least not in public. But this will have a strong impact on how many people vote.

What's unfortunate for those mainstream Republicans is that events like the ones today are great networking events. Thousands and thousands of business cards and phone numbers and emails were exchanged at these parties today. Which means that we have not heard the end of the tea partiers. It took many years and several devastating electoral defeats before the Democrats finally dealt with their nutcases. As Sullivan keeps writing, it is going to get worse before it gets better.

Obama Adjustment Syndrome and the OLC memos

I think I am suffering from Obama Adjustment Syndrome. The primary symptom of this syndrome is an inability to react to major policy initiatives from the Obama Administration in real time, because they come at you fast and furious. This was particularly acute last week, when I was sort of chilling after the Oscars. I blinked, and suddenly I missed Obama's major address to Congress, the not-quite-SOTU. So I started watching the video of that online.

Then all of a sudden there was the budget. OK, let me get a grip . . . Wham! We're pulling out of Iraq. Wow, that's great, can I get some details? . . . Bling! We're bailing out another one of the financial companies.

Plus there were a few other things that I'm sure were hugely important and that I have been waiting years for but that I can't quite recall.

Today it's the release of the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) memos. On this issue, attentoin must be paid to mcjoan at DailyKos, and Andrew Sullivan. And I must pay attention.

We cannot be thankful enough that the Obama Administration has begun to expose the criminal wrongdoings of the Bush Administration, and we cannot be too harsh in our condemnation of the crimes that were perpetuated by the Bushies, particularly Dick Cheney, David Addington, and John Yoo.

I have heard many calls for various levels of investigation into what happened under Bush. I have to admit that I have been somewhat reluctant to join the chorus, because I think there is a real temptation to "criminalize political differences," i.e. to make prosecutorial mountains out of the molehills of differences of opinion.

But when the conduct in question is criminal, then we have not just the right, but the responsibility to investigate and, if necessary, prosecute. We have done so before, during Watergate, and our democracy survived.

We are responsible in this respect not to ourselves or our constituents, but to our system of justice. We have certain responsibilities to democracy.

Democracy gives us the freedom to experiment with our politics, but then holds us accountable when those experiments fail. We are in such a moment right now.

In this democracy, we all have equal opportunities within this system, and we are all considered equal before the law. The problem with this is that we don't know how to ensure that all are equal before the law, and we have different opinions about what that means. Those in power tend to have very different ideas about what constitutes justice than those who are not in power.

The system works as long as enough of us believe that the system itself, despite all its flaws, is still better than any other system for giving us the closest we can come to equal opportunities. Essential to that ideal is the system of checks and balances. As long as most people have at least some voice within the system, they have an incentive to try and make the system work.

I have written before that the American system of democracy was designed to withstand the maximum damage that can be inflicted on it, either from outside, or from within. The Bush Administration's misdeeds have been one of the attempts to inflict severe damage on the system of American democracy. The release of these OLC memos demonstrates that. Unlike almost every other politician in our system, Bush and his cronies did not believe in the system of checks and balances. They did not believe that all people are equal before the law. They believed that the President, and, by extension, those who worked for him, was above the law. Perhaps the hideous implication of this idea is that it grants to the president the right to decide who is outside the law, who does not deserve the protection of the law. That is the definition of a dictatorship.

Investigating the abuses of the Bush Administration does not constitute "criminalizing political differences."

Criminalizing political differences is what the Bush Administration did.

A very British take on the crisis

I am poaching more from Andrew Sullivan today. This is apparently a British comedy show that I have never heard of, with a very funny take on the crisis: