The Republican Media- no. 2

President Bush, a.k.a. "The Decider," often resorts to his status as "Commander in Chief" in order to suggest a lack of patriotism on the part of his critics. So let's look at the wording of a question by a reporter/anchor of MSNBC.

This from Contessa Brewer of MSNBC during the network's "Super Tuesday" coverage of politics today:
"Are we ever going to have a Commander-in-Chief who is not a white man?"

This from The United States Constitution- Article I- The Executive Branch, Section 2- Civilian Power over Military, Cabinet, Pardon Power, Appropriations:
"The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States..."

George W. Bush is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. He is not Commander in Chief of the United States.

Victim Politics, Pro-Life Style

In the United States Supreme Court's recent decision upholding the federal ban on partial-birth abortions, the majority opinion was famously rendered by Justice Anthony Kennedy. In the 5-4 decision in Gonzalez v. Carhart, Kennedy emphasized, as The New Republic Legal Affairs Editor Jeffrey Rosen termed it, the "abortion trauma syndrome." Although he conceded "no reliable data to measure the phenomenon," Kennedy wrote "it is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child..."
Justice Ginsburg termed this "an antiabortion shibboleth for which (the Court) concededly has no reliable evidence: women who have abortions come to regret their choices and consequently suffer from severe depression and loss of esteem." The decision, she continued, "deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety (and is) thinking (that) relects ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution- ideas that have long since been discredited."
Given that the partial-birth abortion controversy involves not whether an abortion should take place, or even when one may take place, but rather a procedure (intact dilation and evacuation), the emphasis placed on the issue has always struck me as slightly odd. Indeed, Justice Ginsburg noted the Court referred favorably to "Congress' purpose as to differentiate 'abortion and infanticide' not on whether a fetus can survive outside the womb but on where a fetus is anatomically located when a particular medical procedure is performed." Admittedly, a woman opting for this method of termination of pregnancy might find it traumatic, given that insincere (more on this later) pro-life activists and politicians try mightily to convince her that she is committing "murder" and in these instances, in a brutal way.
But the condescension directed by Justice Kennedy toward women has its parallel in another abortion controversy, that of the appropriate punishment when an illegal abortion takes place. Allow me this disgression: In 1982 New Jersey enacted a death penalty statute. The New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission noted that although juries returned death penalties in 60 cases, the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned 57 of those sentences. Finally, in 1992 the Court for the first time upheld a death penalty: that of Robert O. Marshall, a businessman who hired a man to kill his wife, subsequently murdered in 1984 in a picnic area on the Garden State Parkway. (After a federal appeals court judge decreed that Marshall had not enjoyed competent counsel and deserved a new hearing, the county prosecutor gave up and agreed to life in prison for the defendant.) The New Jersey high court had insisted that a particular defendant had clearly intended not to injure, maim, or debilitate a victim, but rather to kill him/her. So they finally found an eligible culprit- and it was no one who had committed a murder, but rather someone who had contracted for a killing.
So if Roe v. Wade is overturned and a state prohibits abortion, a doctor performing the procedure will be violating the law and committing murder. At the request of the woman who is pregnant. And for a fee. And what is the typical reaction of the pro-life advocate when asked if the woman, as well as the doctor, should then be prosecuted? Well, no, goes the usual response: she is a victim.
Let's go over this again. Declaring the fetus a human life, the state decrees abortion as murder. An individual travels to a professional and requests a baby be murdered. The pro-life community, viewing this murder-for-hire, declares the woman: a "victim." This is condescension fit for Justice Kennedy. It also must call into question the sincerity of much of the anti-abortion rights movement, which is adamant that abortion is killing- but believes the main culprit should not be held accountable.

The Republican Media- number 1:
And now, for an occasional feature entitled...... The Republican Media

In his weekly radio address today, President Bush criticized Democrats in Congress for being "behind schedule passing the individual spending bills needed to keep the Federal Government running." However, last year, reported The Washington Post, "Congress sent only two of eleven spending bills- those covering the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security- to President Bush, leaving much of the government operating under what is known as a continuing resolution." In so doing, "the Republicans intend to conclude the 109th Congress this week and leave Democrats stuck with the tab in the form of unfinished spending bills as the days of Republican rule draw to a close on Capitol Hill." President Bush was not exorcised about this irresponsibility and cowardice last year, in fact forgetting to mention it at all. Thus, faced with this context, what was the Associated Press' headline to today's Presidential press conference?
"Bush rips Democratic lawmakers' failures"
While they're at it, why not have Karl Rove write the entire article?

GOP Senators: Still Pro-War

I write this blog with trepidation, and the hope that I am merely pessimistic. But here goes....


First it was Richard Lugar of Indiana. On June 26, 2007 the hawkish ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee stated from his chamber's floor "persisting indefinitely with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our vital interests over the long term." Later that day, Senator George Voinovich of Ohio, "concerned that we are running out of time," wrote President Bush "...we must begin to develop a comprehensive plan for our country's gradual military disengagement from Iraq." Then, on July 5, 2007 Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico announced at a news conference in Albuquerque "I do support a new strategy that will move our troops out of combat operations and on the path to coming home."

What do these three statements of Republican Senators have in common? Let's listen in:
Voinovich: "We must not abandon our mission... and I have openly opposed any form of precipitous withdrawal...." Domenici: "I do not support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq or a reduction in funding for our troops." And, according to MSNBC.com, Lugar spokesman Andy Fisher "says the speech does not mean Lugar would switch his vote on the war or embrace Democratic measures setting a deadline for troop withdrawals."

All three statements are rather vague and do little to suggest how either Senator will vote on any substantive measure which might be introduced this autumn to end Gulf War II.
And certainly nothing about redeployment of troops in the region to combat Al-Quaeda, a critical failure considering the Administration's lack of concern with any of the terrorist organization's members outside of Iraq.
We already know from Ron Suskind in The One Percent Doctrine that George W. Bush let Osama bin Laden get out of Tora Bora in late 2001. According to The Left Coaster.com, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign in the wake of the 9/11/01 attacks brought a detailed map to the President and Dick Cheney along with the message that the Pakistan army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias assigned to nail bin Laden were incapable of doing so. The official, Henry A. Crumpton, stated that American forces were required to capture the terrorist, but Bush declined to follow the advice.
Now we learn from Steve Benen of Political Animal of further incompetence of the President in pursuing the "War on Terror." In the first Bush-Kerry debate of 2004, Mr. Bush boasted "We busted the A.Q. Khan network. This was a proliferator out of Pakistan that was selling secrets to places like North Korea and Libya." Bush actually had agreed to a deal in which Khan had "been slapped on the wrist" by Pakistani officials and now is "virtually a free citizen."
So the Administration continues to emphasize the threat that al Qaeda poses in Iraq- and ignores the threat it poses in Afghanistan and Pakistan, probably with the support of A.Q. Khan and his proliferation business.
The Taliban is reportedly making a comeback in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, we are supplying Pakistan with approximately eighty million dollars a month in counter-terrorism aid, and in September, 2006 the Musharraf regime stikes a deal to cede all control in northwestern Pakistan (where bin Laden is believed to have crossed from Afghanistan) with the tribal warlords.
And what is the bold, dynamic leadership coming from the Grand Old Party? As the words of George Voinovich to President Bush ring out: "I have consistently opposed efforts to limit your powers as our Commander-in-Chief." Pathetic.

Thompson: Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, Whatever

Former Senator Fred Thompson a former pro-choice lobbyist? Apparently so, according to the Los Angeles Times of 7/6/07. The Times reports that minutes of a 1991 meeting of the board of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assocition indicate verify the involvement of Thompson, assigned by his firm "to urge the administration of President George H.W. Bush to withdraw or relax a rule that barred abortion counseling at clinics that received federal money." Thompson's spokesman has denied the report and John Sununu, the Administration official who would have been lobbied, denied that he spoke to Thompson about it. However, others have stepped forward to express confidence in the report, and it appears that the former Senator's camp is intentionally misrepresenting objective reality.
Which reminds of a recent (7/1/07) posting in which I cast doubt on Fred Thompson's pro-life bonafides and argued that the GOP Presidential race would ultimately pit a cultural conservative (thinking former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney) against a faithful representative (i.e., Thompson) of corporate interests. It now appears that the former Tennessee Senator's pro-life record is even thinner than I had thought. Pro-life, pro-choice, it may not matter much: it's Anything for a Buck Fred.

On Health Care

In an article that appeared on Slate.com on July 1, 2007, Austan Goolsbee, an economic advisor to Barack Obama, argued that Michael Moore's critique of the U.S. health care system was largely accurate but his prescription misguided. Here is the article, entitled Michael Moore and the Beige Bomber, and my rebuttal.

-At the most simplistic level, giving free health care to everyone costs a lot of money. Especially since people tend to use things more frequently when they are free. But people don't consume health care the way they do other goods (such as Pepsi), which Malcolm Gladwell identifies as "the moral hazard myth." They schedule doctor's appointments only when they are ill and go to the hospital only when they need to. Nevertheless, in our market-based system, individuals generally fail to distinguish necessary care from unnecessary care and thus "tend to cut down on mundane-but-important things like hypertension medicine, which leads to far costlier complications," according to Ezra Klein in The American Prospect. Costs escalate as individual patients pursue tests, drugs, and other goods and services which are unnecessary but artificially inexpensive to them because the cost is covered by insurance- and encouraged by their doctors, confident of reimbursement while fearful of lawsuits.

-To get costs down to a comparable level, a single-payer system in the United States would have to seriously cut doctors' pay. However, maintaining a large pool of doctors is becoming harder with the current system. In a study released in June, 2007, the American Medical Association contended that if reductions in Medicare reimbursements planned by Congress are made, up to 77% of physicians would limit the number of new or existing Medicare patients. A system in which doctors could concentrate on the health of their patients and not deal with insurance companies might enhance the desirability of the profession.

-Nor do these countries have the same costs associated with malpractice lawsuits that we do. A single-payer system here would have to also include some truly major rearrangement of the tort system to bring those costs down. Doctors can be indemnified from lawsuits and a panel established to determine validity of complaints, with settlements paid from public funds. And by the way, doesn't the relative paucity of malpractice lawsuits in other western nations suggest an advantage, rather than disadvantage, of their system? Perhaps our doctors and hospitals make more mistakes than in state-sponsored systems.

-You would also need to dramatically slash drug prices.... the problem is that (Canada and the United Kingdom) get cheap drugs only because they are free-riding of the massive profits made in the American market. If our government required medicine here to be sold at no more than the lowest price charged abroad, the drug companies would drive the costs up in the other markets rather than reduce them here. Although Medicare is thus far barred from negotiating drug prices, the latter would be lowered if any large organization- such as the U.S. government- is permitted to bargain down the cost. Klein notes this is done in the Canadian provinces, whose citizens pay 60% less for pharmaceuticals than do we. Currently, many Americans break the law by smuggling drugs across the border from Canada. And reducing prices for American consumers interests me more than maintaining low prices for consumers abroad.

-But the main problem with Moore's policy solution is that a national health system wouldn't fix one of our health care system's main flaws- one that people really hate- the denial of service. It just changes who decides, so that the government makes the call. The government, unlike an insurance company, is at least open to democratic controls. Leaving rationing decisions to insurance companies requires insurance salespeople, billing specialists in doctor's offices, and underwriters and contributes to health administration costs. So the United States, reports the New England Journal of Medicine, spends 345%more per capital on health administration than does Canada. And according to OECD. org, in 2003 health spending as a share of gross domestic product was: in Switzerland and Germany, 11%-12%; in Iceland, Norway, and France, 10.1%-10.5%; in Candada, 9.9%; and in the U.S. A., 15%. And insurance companies still deny, deny, deny.

-In those (nationalized health) systems, cost-effectiveness decisions get made all the time. Care is rationed. That's what happens if you offer something for free- you have to make rules about who is allowed to get it. Except in Germany. And France. And elsewhere. In Germany, the insurers are approximately 300 "sickness funds" (neither fully private or public), which ensure that the burdens of bad health are spread across the populace and everyone receives health care. Meanwhile, citizens anxious for more comprehensive coverage can choose to purchase private insurance, as a small minority do. The French government encourages its citizens to purchase supplementary insurance, as most do. And there are private options for the affluent in most western nations, cutting wait time for medical procedures. Even in Canada, the California Nurses Association cites Physicians for a National Health Program as finding "there are no waits for emergency surgeries, and the median time for non-emergency elective surgery has been dropping as a result of public pressure and increased funding so that it is now equal to or better than in the U.S. in most areas (and) median wait times for elective surgery in Canada is (sic) now three weeks." Moreover, wait times in a market-based system, such as in the U.S., are likely to be artificially low as many individuals never seek diagnosis, and hence are unaware of their need for surgery, because they lack health coverage. Instead, such consumers often use hospital emergency rooms as doctor's office, driving up costs and wasting resources.

The United States pays more than twice as much per capita on health care than most of the industrialized world and still has 46 million people uninsured. Other individuals remain tied to inadequate employment through which they receive their health insurance. Millions are relegated to ill health, or costly operations, because they never pursued the preventive care common in nations with single-payer systems but discouraged in the largely for-profit American system. Yet, reform of the health care system is attacked as "socialized medicine."

We already have socialized medicine in the U.S.A. It is called the Veterans Health Administration, which controls costs better than the private system, serves patients with shorter wait time and higher customer satisfaction, and is generally lauded for providing better care than most of the health care industry. (Walter Reed Army Hospital is not run by the Veterans Administration but by the Defense Department, with many functions outsourced to the private sector in recent years.)

The leading Republican candidate, Fred Thompson, recently wrote "our entire medical industry- which by the way is the best and most complex in the world...." We await further details from the Presidential candidates about their plans for health care. But it is likely that any major Democratic candidate will advocate, and as President would propose, more fundamental changes than any of the major Republican candidates. Meanwhile, the former actor-Senator-actor already has disqualified himself from consideration by anyone seriously concerned about the health of our nation.

Fred Thompson, Corporatist

Forget Molly Levinson, Mark Halperin, Chuck Todd, Chris Matthews, and all the other pols. They and others may tell you that the Republican Presidential race likely will come down to two candidates, one "moderate" and one conservative.

The problem, of course, is that none of the four leading GOP contenders is running as a moderate. Yes, Rudy Giuliani is a liberal on cultural issues, such as gay rights, abortion rights, and gun control. But, not surprisingly, he's downplaying his deviance from the Republican base on those issues and instead emphasizing the inheritance tax, which Republicans, famously and disingenously, like to refer to as the "Death Tax." Mitt Romney has been reborn as a pro-life, anti-gay rights activist and John McCain, who now supports Bush's income tax cuts for the wealthy, is arguably the most passionate supporter of the Iraq war in the U.S. Senate. And former Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee has expressed nary a moderate view as he has been increasingly, and effectively, promoted as the party's best hope to nominate a staunch conservative.

But what kind of conservative is Fred Thompson? Responding in 1996 to a survey by the Christian Coalition, Thompson checked "opposed" to an amendment to the United States Constituion "protecting the sanctity of human life" and explained "I do not believe abortion should be criminalized." And when asked by the Memphis group Family, Life, America, Responsible Education Under God Inc. (hardly pro-choice) if human life begins at conception, Thompson circled "N/A."

Thompson has spent several years as part of Hollywood, appearing both in films and on television, most notably in "Law and Order." It is hardly suprising, then, that he is comfortable with modern culture, at ease with a society many Republicans are not. On economic matters, however, he is a classic conservative. As a Senator, he voted to terminate Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards, to reauthorize fast track trading authority of the President, to restrict class action lawsuits, in favor of allowing personal retirement accounts and Medicare means-testing, and against allowing reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada. When Thompson recently cut a video ridiculing Michael Moore for traveling to Cuba for the making of his movie "Sicko," Moore responded in part by targeting the Republican's "box upon box of cigars- Montecristos from Havana that you have in your office have contributed to Castro's reported wealth."

Fred Thompson, Corporatist

It's an interesting habit on the part of a hawkish, conservative Republican- doing his small part to bolster the regime of the dreaded Communist dictator. But it's not out of character. Thompson is playing the part of the cultural conservative but is, at base, a corporatist. It's an act commonly played by GOP politicians, as portrayed by Thomas Frank in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" Thompson's appeal to conservatives reflects that of the larger conservative movement, which "depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that until recently were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet. For example, the conection between mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire capitalism, which they adore without reservation." The Republican race will not come down to a "moderate" and a conservative, but between two conservatives: one who represents cultural, "social" conservatism and the other, who, despite his image, represents corporate interests.