Happy Hour Roundup
* Senator David Vitter’s office refused to say word boo to MSNBC about the justice who denied an interracial marrage.
* Will other big news orgs pick up on Vitter’s refusal to condemn the justice?
* The DSCC pounces:
“David Vitter’s failure to condemn Keith Bardwell says all you need to know about David Vitter. Vitter has moved fast and furiously to the fringe of his party and is now squarely outside of the Louisiana mainstream.”
* Interesting catch by Eric Kleefeld: Liberal hero Alan Grayson unveils a new Web site offering tribute to those who died of lack of health insurance; promptly gets punked by joke names.
* Grayson blames Republicans for the prank, sans evidence:
“Well, this is typical of the Republicans. They show no respect, even for the dead.”
* It has been debunked by non-partisan sources, but the claim that you can’t get a hip replacement in Canada if you’re of retirement age just won’t die.
* John Aravosis: Why does the president keep telling Dems to come together on health care when they’re already mostly united — behind the public option?
* Weird. Public option hero Jay Rockefeller is suddenly sounding not so heroic, after all:
“You know, the public option — which I think in the end is going to prevail — is not actually the biggest thing in the entire bill,” Rockefeller told me. “I hate to hear myself say that, but it’s true.”
* Also interesting from that interview: Rockefeller questions Obama’s public option passivity.
* Dem Senator Frank Lautenberg explains why he’s calling for an investigation of GOP gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie on the eve of the election.
* And don’t miss Jason Linkins versus Mark Halperin.
What did I miss? Links!
Update: I forgot to include a real live one: Dick Cheney says Obama’s “afraid to make a decision” on Afghanistan, accuses him of “dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger.” Raises the question of whether they’d be facing the current levels of danger in the first place if it weren’t for the Iraq invasion…
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Now I may be wrongly informed about an Opt-out Public option, but it doesn’t seem too bad to me. It gives the states freedom to refuse a public option, but what state is really going to take something nice like that away from its people? I would think that any politician would consider it political suicide to revoke it. Therefore everyone can have it and people can’t complain that they HAVE to take it.
Sorry, didn’t read the entire Rockefeller part and thought you were talking about his Opt-out statement.
Argoth, you have that Rocky opt-out statement handy?
You can get a hip replacement in Canada. That is because they do not have AHIP in place there.
Argot,
State reps. are easy to buy off. The Health Insurance Lobby would have no trouble getting state legislatures to Opt-Out, and after they got a few big states to do so, then the Public Option would just not have enough members to sustain itself.
This is supposed to be a federal Health Care Reform Bill, with Federal Dollars going to The Insurance Companies. It makes no sense to let states have the final say in how a federal program gets run, or not. It is a national problem, and allowing some states to opt out would be setting up a form of medical apartheid.
check out update I just added. Cheney on Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan….
Greg,
It is amazing. Bush/Cheney abandoned Afghanistan to start their war of choice in Iraq. For more than six years they let Afghanistan fall apart, after they had let Bin Laden escape, and Dick Cheney has the nerve to claim President Obama is the one not doing the right thing now.
Apparently Dick Cheney has not noticed that their hand picked man, Karzai turned out to be an incompetent, corrupt, election rigging despot, which has left the USA with no real partner to work with in Afghanistan.
Bush/Cheney sure knew how to pick the incompetents for every task, be it Ahmed Chalabi in Iraq, Karzai in Afghanistan, or Brownie at FEMA.
Some one call out Cheney on the fact that it was him and Rumsfeld that did not provide enough troops for the Iraq occupation.
Rockefeller’s opt-out statement. Also on TPM
“I think there’s one way that could work very well and could pick up some of the moderates,” Rockefeller told reporters. “I’m looking very much now at this opt-out public option.” Under the alternative proposal, the public option would be available nationwide but individual states could decline to participate.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/64139-sen-rockefeller-warms-to-public-option-compromise
Re Cheney – this is interesting: “Recently, President Obama’s advisors have decided that it’s easier to blame the Bush Administration than support our troops. This weekend they leveled a charge that cannot go unanswered. The President’s chief of staff claimed that the Bush Administration hadn’t asked any tough questions about Afghanistan, and he complained that the Obama Administration had to start from scratch to put together a strategy.
“In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt. The new strategy they embraced in March, with a focus on counterinsurgency and an increase in the numbers of troops, bears a striking resemblance to the strategy we passed to them. They made a decision – a good one, I think – and sent a commander into the field to implement it.
“Now they seem to be pulling back and blaming others for their failure to implement the strategy they embraced.”
Wow! That’s the first I’ve heard of that!
Maddow/Olbermann Invited to White House Chat with Obama, But Fox Isn’t a News Organization?
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/fnc/maddowolbermann_invited_to_white_house_chat_with_obama_but_fox_isnt_a_news_organization_140839.asp
So more than six years after they went into Afghanistan, and after they abandoned it, to go invade Iraq, Dick Cheney suddenly became very concerned about thing were going in Afghanistan.
He finally wanted to do something about it, right as he was leaving office. Sure he did. A Dick by name, and a lying Dick, and a torture loving Dick, by nature.
The Chicago White Sox were invited to the White House, and they are not a news organization. What is your point you “old fat gay” Infidel?
Rep. Trent Franks still making some pretty strong statements. This time regarding the closing of Gitmo. Says the Administration is putting the rights of terrorists before the safety of the American People.
He and Cheney must be related.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/64135-gop-congressman-dems-put-terrorists-rights-before-americans-safety
I’m taking off for a couple of days. Out of state to give deposition in my nieces case against one of the big insurance companies. Talk to you all later. Liam, root for my Angels, they need all the help they can get.
@Imsinca
Have a safe trip. I will root for the Angels. Talk to you when you return.
A lot of quotables from Cheney. I’ll note just his one…
“For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings”
@sbj – as Matt Yglesias puts it…
“Someone replaced Mickey Kaus with this fellow making smart points about Fox News.”
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/archive/2009/10/20/what-s-your-beef-with-fox-mr-dem-basher.aspx
Yup, gotta hand it to Cheney, he wasn’t afraid to make decisions. Especially the kind of decisions that sucked ***.
@SBJ “Maddow/Olbermann Invited to White House Chat with Obama, But Fox Isn’t a News Organization?”
Are you simply trying to pass this off under misguided false equivalency? Or do YOU REALLY believe Faux Joke is a News organization? You don’t care about doctored video and outright lies?
Here’s an interesting perception/idea from Krugman’s blog (see last sentence)…
“Ezra Klein makes a good argument about why the Senate Finance Committee vote on health care mattered so much, but I’d add another: when legislation cleared that committee, health reform came to seem inevitable. It isn’t, not really, but it’s close enough that standing in the way of reform, as opposed to trying to tilt it in your direction, has ceased to seem practical. Two months ago Chuck Grassley was a man to be reckoned with; now he’s an old codger yelling “Get off my lawn!” It’s a crucial change in psychology.” http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
Greg, Look, darth & daughter made a plethora of teevee appearances a few months ago and couldn’t sway the public opinion even by a millimeter. So, why do you think his present idiotic statement would be a ‘live one’ ? The repugs are playing the same old and tired politics with war and the public, already weary of wars (as you yourself pointed out), doesn’t give a shite what that dick thinks. The idjit wingnutty trolls here might have an orga$m over dick but people are “meh”.
Bernie – Yes, I loved the way Obama played grossley and set him up as a fall guy.
You may find this LAT piece on how Obama has been playing the HCR game behind the scenes interesting
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-healthcare-team21-2009oct21,0,5592517,print.story
Money quote
“The key factor in all major legislation, particularly healthcare, is momentum,” (Dan) Pfeiffer said. “Healthcare is a boulder: You’re either pushing uphill or downhill. We’ve reached the top, we’re headed downhill now, and we want it to stay that way.”
These ReThuglicans! They cause no end of troubles…. getting people killed, causing our terrible economy.
They need to be rounded up, every last one of them… them and their supporters. Jail or worse for them. Outlaw that party of criminals.
Do it today.
@amk – Nice link, thanks!
There’s also the comment in there on winning/losing and the consequences for how an administration becomes regarded given a win or a loss. That’s clearly a broadly understood phenomenon and thus why we see politicians constantly arguing they are winning their battles. It plays to emotions (”leaders” win) and as Drew Weston and others have noted, in politics the emotional usually trumps the rational. Cheney is an interesting study in how this is done and it is why he never apologizes or admits he got something wrong. He’ll lie, he’ll spin, he’ll blame, he’ll bully, he’ll snowjob but he’ll never do or say anything that allows the perception that he or his policies are in some manner inferior. It’s a dominance game.
@Bernie
“He’ll lie, he’ll spin, he’ll blame, he’ll bully, he’ll snowjob but he’ll never do or say anything that allows the perception that he or his policies are in some manner inferior. It’s a dominance game”
And while that is Cheney…as you have pointed out it has spread to most of our political establishment…alas including many on the left.
And so I find it incredibly disturbing as an American who truly loves his country and is confident enough in our strengths to deal with our flaws.
It’s simply amazing that Obama goes to Cairo in an attempt to say…we intend to become better neighbors…we’ll stop invading sovereign nations on a whim and a pretense…and we’ll respect your religion…
but this gets tossed around on MSM as well. An apologist? C’mon can’t we move from the right versus the left and form the “Pragmatic Party”?
and for that he gets ripped by the right as being an “apologist” I understand the seriously disturbed like Bilgey who is still fighting the Civil War…on the LOSING side I might point out
“He’ll lie, he’ll spin, he’ll blame, he’ll bully, he’ll snowjob but he’ll never do or say anything that allows the perception that he or his policies are in some manner inferior. It’s a dominance game.”
Perfect summary of Obama’s “leadership” method. Remarkable that none of you has a comment about the duplicity and inconstancy of Obama revealed in the link provided by sbj. It’s typical of Obama to ask for nonpartisan, good faith cooperation behind the scenes to benefit himself and then publicly turn on the opposition to make them scapegoats for his own cop outs and flip flops. His problem is that Afghanistan was always just a political weapon for him. He beat his chest and mocked McCain as a coward, afraid to do what was necessary in Afghanistan, and you all know inside as well as I do he never meant a word of it.
The MSNBC ambush of Vitter is an interesting little case study. It is a perfect example of the liberal media/Dem Party apparatus at work, where MSNBC functions as the broadcast media arm of the Dem Party by generating talking points for the it to use?
Isn’t that how you claim it works in the other side? Aren’t you disturbed that the Dem Party and MSNBC work hand and glove like this, with Shuster asking Vitter irrelevant questions to set up DSCC press releases and talking points?
@rukidding – Yes. That is the dominance game transferred to international relations and it is a fundamental aspect of the Cheney/neoconservative philosophy. It is essentially lawless and is both self-defeating and uncivilizing for that (eg, everyone else now has licence to torture American soldiers…everyone else now has licence to unilaterally attack the US if the US is perceived to be a threat to THEIR dominance).
I mentioned on another day that I had heard Weston speak at a psychoanalytic conference. He argued that in the domestic politics/propaganda sphere the Republicans were much smarter as regards appeals to emotion. At the end of the talk, the lady next to me (a psychoanalyst) asked why that might be. The simplest (over-simple) way to understand this, I think, is the difference between academic processes and values versus business/marketing processes and values. The first is concerned with getting things right through careful analysis and evidence-gathering/checking. The second is concerned with getting a product/service well thought of quite regardless of its real inherent value (eg tobacco).
Business has had many decades of perfecting techniques of marketing through emotional appeals (blondes have more fun, coke is the real thing). Pre WW2 the marketing people referred to their expertise as ‘propaganda’ but stopped post-Goebbels.
Westen argues, and I think he’s right, that we have to become as capable at playing at this stuff as the other side even if we find it rather vulgar.
@Bernie
“Westen argues, and I think he’s right, that we have to become as capable at playing at this stuff as the other side even if we find it rather vulgar.”
I take your point and understand it…but that brings us to the classic conundrum…does the end justify the means?” I’m not going to say you and Westen are incorrect…in fact you have a very valid point. I’m just not sure I can descend to the “vulgar” level of the right. I know it’s the old fight fire with fire but I hope we can take the highest road possible in doing it. Unlike Bilgey’s ad hominem attacks at least the W.H. didn’t hit Fox with a bunch of name calling…they simply pointed out what is an obvious fact to anybody with critical thinking skills. I realize that leaves out some of our fellow bloggers. LMAO
“Unlike Bilgey’s ad hominem attacks at least the W.H. didn’t hit Fox with a bunch of name calling…they simply pointed out what is an obvious fact to anybody with critical thinking skills.”
Actually, ruk, the WH attack was pretty much the definition of ad hominem. They didn’t address any facts. They just declared Fox not a legitimate news organization. Again, that isn’t a “fact,” and anyone with “critical thinking skills” understands this.
<b<The Fox Republican Propaganda channel is literally run by Republican Nixon’s media strategist, Roger Ailes.
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox President Roger Ailes was the same Republican media strategist that created the infamously racist “Willie Horton” ad for Republican Bush I.
Fox Republican Roger Ailes was also the media strategist for Republican Giuliani.
How in the tank does one have to be not to acknowledge the reality that Fox is a Republican Propaganda channel?