Armchairrealist.com

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

We have a Winner!

C&J Tuesday:

CHEERS to the silly season. Congress is back in session today, half of its members still nursing bite marks on their asses from the August town hall astroturfer riots. … Republicans will follow tradition and draw straws to determine who gets to be the first to say something so crude and outlandish that it causes Keith Olbermann to take the secret “Olbervator” down to his lair to crank out a Special Comment.

And the jerk who drew the short-straw is…Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC), for interrupting the president’s speech—breaking House rules in the process?—to yell, “YOU LIE!!!” as a way of gently correcting Obama on something he said about illegal immigrants that was true. Politico:

FactCheck.org described those claims as “false” and noted that one version of the legislation already includes an explicit bar on federal funding for illegal immigrants’ health care.

As Keith pointed out last night, Wilson is throwing hand grenades in a glass house. It was a mere 15 days ago that the congressman wrote this:

[C]itizens have discovered and brought to light numerous aspects of the health care overhaul (H.R. 3200) that are deeply troubling. These include the end of life counseling program, which has been correctly highlighted by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a program which could lead to seniors being encouraged to seek less care in order to protect the government’s bottom line.

Now that’s a lie. Palin doesn’t correctly highlight things. Period.

Normally this would be excellent news for John McCain. But in this case, it could very well put Rob Miller—after draining a couple cans of Lysol on it—in Wilson’s seat. Send Rob five or ten bucks and share in this joyfully unexpected opening of a can ‘o whupass.

Oh, and let’s hope this diary comment I read last night by Kossack MikeVA isn’t an isolated incident:

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Thanks Joe—I just converted my dad to D!
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As for Obama: Good speech, I thought. Stirring, clear, concise, tough. A spirited but wiggle-room-leaving (grrr…) pitch for the American Health Freedom Act (as James Wolcott so elegantly rebrands the public option). But that and five bucks’ll get you a dollop of whipped cream on your latte at Starbucks. It was, shall we say, a “sliver in the basket” of what he needs to do to get a good bill passed. Let the arm-twisting commence. Hopefully conservative Democrat arms, not progressive ones. (The Republicans politely excused themselves from participating in the history-making process last night and will be off playing golf for the next three months except for when they’re swarming the Sunday news shows.)

As always: call your congresscritters and senatecritters. Give ‘em an earful. They’re lonely and they need to hear your voice.

P.S. If you play “You Lie!” backwards it says “Paul is dead.” Freaky, man.

Cheers and Jeers starts in There’s Moreville… [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

Here we go:

Adam Nagourney:

For nearly an hour, Mr. Obama spoke strongly and passionately, pausing only to acknowledge the repeated cheers from his audience as he made what appeared to be his clearest and most concise case yet on a complicated issue that had repeatedly defied his communications skills.

He managed to invest his case with both economic and emotional urgency — particularly when he invoked the memory of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, whose widow, Victoria, was in the audience — without getting bogged down in too many details.

Kaiser health news:

Obama To Congress And The Nation: ‘I Will Not Accept The Status Quo’

News round-up by AP and others.

The day after The Speech:

Obama’s offer to back an effort to limit malpractice verdicts against physicians may have been devised as a carrot to attract Republicans to his side, and it could also attract support from another key constituency, says William O’Neill, dean of clinical affairs at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine. “It could make doctors stand up and take notice,” he said. “If the administration could get physicians enthused, then they would enthuse their patients.”

And a round-up by The Health Care Reform Debate Blog shows that the docs are there.

Today, the American Medical Association sent a letter to House leaders supporting H.R. 3200, “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009.” “This legislation includes a broad range of provisions that are key to effective, comprehensive health system reform,” said J. James Rohack, MD, AMA president. “We urge the House committees of jurisdiction to pass the bill for consideration by the full House.”

Chris Cillizza:

• Republicans’ Audio-Visual Problem: It’s always a mistake to assume that the only thing viewers take from a nationally televised speech is the words the president is using. If so, the White House could simply release the remarks and be done with it. Visuals (and audio) matter. And, the two most compelling pieces of audio-visual that came out of tonight’s speech — House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) checking his blackberry and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shouting “you lie” at Obama — don’t work in Republicans’ favor.

In fact, it makes them look like petulant adolescents compared to the grown-up in the room.

Ezra:

In this speech, in fact, Obama needed to do the precise opposite of what he’s best at. He needed to bring health-care reform down to earth rather than launch it into orbit. He needed to make it seem less dramatic and unknown. He needed to cast it not as change, but as improvement.

All of which he did.

Nate Silver:

I called the speech a triple, because I think it was about 10 minutes too long. Andrew Sullivan’s readers call it a home run. FOX News, I’m sure, will call it a long fly-out to the warning track. The bottom line: it was a well-delivered speech, and a very, very smart speech. It will remind people of what they liked about Obama. It won’t do miracles. But it will increase, perhaps substantially, the odds of meaningful health care reform passing.

Tom Schaller:

That said, Obama is trying to win an argument on its merits, on logic, and statistics and projections. In an ideal world, that sort of pragmatic rationality would be enough. But we don’t live in such a world.

Errington Thompson, MD:

As I see it, Republicans are playing some type of child’s game where they claim to support healthcare reform. I don’t see any real effort to support healthcare reform. Senator Mike Enzi is probably the best example of this. He is supposedly negotiating for a bipartisan reform bill. Just last week he told a group of supporters at a rally that he was sure that healthcare reform was going to fail. Unfortunately, Mike Enzi is a very important senator, on the Finance Committee and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Some Republican senators have said they won’t even read the final bill. Democrats, liberals and progressives need to read the writing on the wall. If we truly want change, we’re going to have to push for it. We are going have to march for it. We are going to have to pull the rest of the country kicking and screaming to get it. This is the only way that we are going to prevent the USS Healthcare from sinking.

Below is the text of the letter from Senator Edward M. Kennedy referenced by the President in tonight’s address to a Joint Session of Congress.

Bill Kristol apparently thinks Obama’s Wednesday night speech should have announced the imminent bombing of Iran. Which is something this unrepentant neo-conservative has been promoting for quite some time now. He writes in the Washington Post:

So President Obama invited himself into our living rooms tonight…why? Not to address questions of war and peace — even though we are fighting two wars overseas, and even though an avowed enemy and terror sponsor is rushing towards nuclear weapons. Not to address the economy — even though unemployment continues to rise, the deficit is at an all-time high, and we face a truly worrisome debt burden in the years ahead. And not to rally the nation in the face of some other crisis.

But isn’t health care a crisis? No.

Indeed, the president acknowledged it isn’t: “But we did not come here just to clean up crises. We came to build a future. So tonight, I return to speak to all of you about an issue that is central to that future — and that is the issue of health care.” In other words, health care — unlike, say, the financial system a few months ago — is not in a state of crisis. …

The real “public option” is to scrap the current grandiose plans and to start over. There is no health care crisis, and doing no harm is far preferable to doing real damage to a good health care system.

In other words, Kristol offered a more sophisticated version of “You lie.”

As CA Berkeley WV points out in the comments, Kristol is just recycling what he wrote in a memorandum to Republican leaders in December 1993:

Any Republican urge to negotiate a “least bad” compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president “do something” about health care, should also be resisted. Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent an unprecedented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy–and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security. Its success would signal a rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment we have begun rolling back that idea in other areas. And, not least, it would destroy the present breadth and quality of the American health care system, still the world’s finest. On grounds of national policy alone, the plan should not be amended; it should be erased.

But the Clinton proposal is also a serious political threat to the Republican Party. Republicans must therefore clearly understand the political strategy implicit in the Clinton plan–and then adopt an aggressive and uncompromising counterstrategy designed to delegitimize the proposal and defeat its partisan purpose.

Sixteen years later and, for Bill Kristol, the strategy is the same.

As nearly everyone in the political universe has noted by now, President Barack Obama got disrespected Wednesday night. If Congress were Parliament and the President were Prime Minister, the guy who called him a liar wouldn’t really have been out of line, would scarcely have been noticed. Heckling of each other from the back benches is more of a time-honored practice among our elected English brethren. They do tend to be somewhat more erudite about it.

So why get hot and bothered by the jackassery of a single Congressman from the Party of No? I think it has to do with the truckloads of lies and despicable slurs dropped on Obama in the past few months, many of them overtly racist. Our fury at Rep. Addison “Joe” Wilson’s blurted “You lie!” is not just a response to him, but to the never-ending feces-throwing by the GOP and a right-wing media engaged in a full-court smear fest of our first African American President. How many of the death threats the President has received that can be chalked up to this spray of attacks is anybody’s guess. It’s not all about racism, of course. In the bizarre world of right-wing delusion, scarcely any Democrat in the White House can escape charges of “socialism,” no matter what his views.

But whether it’s racist tropes or moronic red-baiting, the right-wing media and way too many supposedly honorable Republicans have done nothing to tone down this rancid display. Plus the fact that if a Democratic Representative had yelled “You lie!” during a Bush speech, she’d still be doing time in a secret prison. So, the looks and words directed at Representative Wilson surely are somewhat based on this outrageous spectacle we’ve witnessed for months, not just his screech.

Happily, Wilson has already gotten what we can hope is the first round of a well-deserved comeuppance. He got dagger stares from Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and a lot of boos from that part of the media not (yet) beholden to Rupert Murdoch. Best of all a bunch of money has been raised for his opponent in the next election. That two-word outburst could be the most expensive Wilson ever makes in his life. Welcome to the viral smackdown, Congressman.

But, as diarist Frank wisely says, let’s not let this screamer steal the headlines for the next few days. Because that was not what Wednesday night was about; it’s not what all the wrangling has been about for the past several months. As President Obama pointed out, doing something about our broken health care system is not an issue that just appeared on the scene. Efforts have been made for decades. But because of past obstructionism, uncounted numbers of American have died, gone bankrupt, lived misery-filled lives, all because they were denied medical treatment based solely on their inability to pay for it.

We shouldn’t allow one of the latest cohort of obstructionists to divert  us from the task at hand. As Frank put it:

Now is not the time to be distracted again. Now is the time to organize, and support health care reform. I don’t know if we get all that we want. Quite possibly not. But if we let people like Wilson steal our thunder again, we will most certainly not get what we want.

Yes, take action against Wilson, by supporting his opponent. But tonight, get your anger at him out of your system. Then, take Obama’s energy in his speech and make it your own. Show up at rallies that are being planned. Keep calling Congress.

Don’t let some jerk derail you.

We’ll have plenty of time to derail that jerk over the next 14 months.

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[Update]: As of 11:15 p.m. PDT, ActBlue has tallied $72,178 for Rob Miller, Wilson’s foe in the next election. Kossacks for Democrat Rob Miller have raised $38,474 of that total.    

In the House, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:

FLOOR SCHEDULE FOR FRIDAY, JULY 31, 2009
House Meets At… 9:00 a.m.: Legislative Business
Five “One Minutes” Per Side
Last Vote Predicted… 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.

H.R. 3269 – Corporate and Financial Institution Compensation Fairness Act of 2009 (Rep. Frank – Financial Services) (Subject to a Rule)

In the Senate, courtesy of the Secretary of the Senate:

Convenes: 9:30am

Resume consideration of H.R.2997, Agriculture Appropriations.

There will be no roll call votes during today’s session.

In the Committees:

House

No Senate committee meetings are scheduled.

As you can see, a light day overall, so I moved the committee schedule up above the fold. At “press time,” there was no schedule for today for the House Energy & Commerce Committee, but since there are votes scheduled on the House floor, chances are they’ll use the fact that they’re stuck in DC until the early afternoon anyway to come back and finish up, rather than work through the night.

This will wrap things up going into the August recess for the House. The Senate will be back next week to finish up another appropriations bill before heading home for the rest of August.

I will probably sleep sometime this month, too.

Julian Zelizer Professor of History and Public Affairs, Princeton:

Many Democrats must be wondering–where are Senators Baucus, Reid, Conrad and Speaker Pelosi, Representative Waxman and the now famous Blue Dog Democrats? This is the White House beer summit the president needs to be having. Going into August, Democrats need to find a way to bridge their differences on health care. There is evidence that even the deals of the past week are much more fragile than has been suggested. The president needs to devote some time to this kind of discussion group with members of his own party, and soon.

Paul Krugman:

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”

It’s a funny story — but it illustrates the extent to which health reform must climb a wall of misinformation. It’s not just that many Americans don’t understand what President Obama is proposing; many people don’t understand the way American health care works right now.

It’s made funnier by the realization that 29% of Americans are on government insurance.

Pew Poll:

Although the public has a more negative than positive general reaction to the health care proposals being debated on Capitol Hill, there is broad support for many of the core elements of the legislation currently before Congress. Nearly two-in-three (65%) favor requiring that all Americans have health insurance, with the government aiding those who cannot afford it. Nearly as many (61%) favor requiring employers who do not provide insurance to pay into a government health care fund. And there is broad support (79%) for prohibiting insurance companies from denying insurance to people with pre-existing conditions.

Of course, the issue is that no one can agree on how to pay for it.

But, critically, increased attention to the health care legislation among independents is associated with more opposition, not more support. Independents who have heard a lot about the bills oppose them by a 70% to 27% margin. Independents who have heard little or nothing are divided evenly (38% favor, 35% oppose). Overall, the more attentive independents have a lot more in common with Republicans than with Democrats when it comes to the current legislation in Congress, which tips the overall public balance of opinion in the direction of opposition.

Overall, Obama’s approval has dropped 9 points to 54. As has been commented on before, Obama is getting the people who voted for him, and losing the people who didn’t vote for him – especially 30-49 year olds (check out the 18-29 year olds.) But the optimism for the future is still there and Obama still has a reserve of good will. The country just wants to see better economic numbers and agreement on a health plan. More on this later today.

Joe Klein:

One of the most difficult things to do in a democracy is react to a problem that is real, but not immediately threatening. Obama is trying to do this in two monster areas, health care and climate change. “He’s killing me,” says Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, referring to the hordes of special-interest groups that have camped on her doorstep and clogged her phone lines. Stabenow is smiling as she says it. She supports the broad thrust of Obama’s initiatives. “But you can’t believe all the groups that want to make their case. There are the doctors, the nurses, the cancer society,” she continues, raising the specter of a conga line of disease groups bending her ear. “All of them have legitimate concerns. And that’s just health care.”

Rep. Jared Polis, CO-02:

I am happy to say that significant progress has been made on making sure that health care reform is good for small business and good for the economy. Since I recently raised the issue of the impact of the reforms on small business, I have met withPresident Obama, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Speaker Pelosi and House leadership several times. They were very responsive to my concerns and assured me that every step will be taken to equitably pay for health care reform.

Nate Silver:

Instead of Grassley and Enzi, Baucus should be sitting in a room with Ben Nelson and Mary Landireu — and maybe Olympia Snowe. Those are the swing votes — the pressure points — the people with whom there’s actually something to be negotiated. If Grassley wants to come in and snack on beef jerky and spitball a few ideas, then sure — door’s always open. But I don’t know what good he’s doing the Democrats by being given so leverage over the process.

Nate will be joining me at Netroots Nation for a panel on how to get the most out of polling.

Another Netroots Nation panel will feature mcjoan and David Waldman:
Outside Getting In: Tying the Progressive Movement to Congress for Policymaking
Sat, 08/15/2009 – 3:00pm, Hall B

Due to vacation and travel, Abbreviated Pundit may not appear daily for the next two weeks. It will resume as a daily feature at the conclusion of Netroots Nation.

Back in late 2007, Alan Durning was eager to stop the incessant flow of junk mail to his door. So he used Catalog Choice, the free service that helps reduce what merchants send you, and the Direct Mail Association’s opt-out service, as primary tools to reduce the arrival of throwaway advertising and his burden on the waste-stream.

Results?

Durning goes on to say how much he received in unsolicited neighborhood advertisers, catalogues, political mail, et cetera, and what action he took to try to stop them.

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The diary rescue begins below and continues in the jump.

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Belle Ame posted a Photo Diary of America’s First National Park: “I hope most people read the title and thought ‘Yellowstone!’”

Greg306 was one of the lucky ones apparently, having decided early on to Change My Behavior for “Cash for clunkers”: “I don’t like buying new cars.  And while my family’s current financial situation is better than that facing many others, with two kids in private college this fall and economic uncertainty that could affect both my job and my wife’s, we are trying to be financially cautious.  And I don’t like buying new cars.  That being said, I went out and bought a new car on Monday – the first new car I have ever had (and I am 47 years old).  The Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), also known as “Cash for Clunkers” paid me $4,500 to turn in my 1994 Mercury Villager (rated at 18 mpg, probably getting much less) for a 2010 Toyota Corolla rated at 28 mpg.  I was motivated by three factors …”

Lucky, because as ultrageek in What the hell is happening with Cash for Clunkers?, Trobone in Cash for Clunkers – Suspended??????, and turneresq in AP/Politico Attack Overwhelming Success of ‘Clunkers’ Program wrote, it appears the less-than-week-old program, which had numerous green critics, has been suspended because of being so successful.

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The Overnight News Digest is posted. Included is the story, U.S. Adviser’s Blunt Memo on Iraq: Time ‘to Go Home’..

Tonight’s production of Diary Rescue is brought Elise, ItsJessMe, jlms qkw, ybruti, noddem and shayera.  dadanation shared the the role of the editor with shayera.

the rescues

• one pissed off democrat’s ex-father-in-law Poppop Died and she shares memories of the man who showed her what a real man is. (ItsJessMe)
• NY brit expat continues her enlightening series with Classical Economics: The Right of Subsistence and Natural Rights Theories. (ybruti)
• With this entertaining title, Stranded Wind illustrates the nuts and bolts of wireless access in Illinois Zebra Hunt. (jlms qkw)
• Explorer8939 presents a method for Winning the Health Care Battle for the Public Option. (ybruti)
• dlcox1958 shares the abhorrent actions taken in Japan to round up dolphins, “audition” them for a potential life spent as entertainment, and the slaughter of those that do not make the cut in The Cove: Unbelievable and heart breaking. (noddem)
• While orbiting the economic sun, Pluto shares and explains some Down and Dirty Charts. (jlms qkw)
• david78209, a physician, joins the health care debate with Dropping Medicare’s fee system — a great leap backward. (ybruti)
• teacherken writes about what he sees as The real issues of national security. (shayera)
• Not for NN attendees ONLY, jdn74 is writing a thorough series on Pittsburgh. Today’s entry is For Netroots Nation: A Guide to Pittsburgh, Part Six; with Update. (jlms qkw)

the regulars

jotter delivers the goods with High Impact Diaries: July 29, 2009.

emeraldmaiden has tonight’s Top Comments 7-30-09 – Emergency Edition.

the ropes

Please use this as an Open Thread as well as your chance to promote your favorite diaries of the day. Respectful engagement is most welcome here. Please keep in mind that each Diary Rescue’s daily purview extends from 3pm PST yesterday to 3pm PST today.

Shamelessly self-promote or pimp for a friend in this Open Thread!

Media Matters catches Fox News in a full display of geographical ignorance:

Makes you wonder where they’ve been sending their embedded war correspondents all these years.

The White House has named sixteen men and woman to receive the 2009 Medal of Freedom, and in a refreshing change from the past eight years, there’s not a warmongering Secretary of Defense, a war-enabling head of the CIA, a bootlicking ally, or a delusional neo-con hawk in the bunch.

This year’s recipients are:

Edward Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, Harvey Milk, Desmond Tutu, Jack Kemp, Janet Davison Rowley, Nancy Goodman Brinker, Pedro Jose Greer, Jr., Stephen Hawking, Billie Jean King, Rev. Joseph Lowery, Joe Medicine Crow – High Bird, Sidney Poitier, Chita Rivera, Mary Robinson, Muhammad Yunus

According to a White House press release, President Obama made the announcement, saying:

These outstanding men and women represent an incredible diversity of backgrounds.  Their tremendous accomplishments span fields from science to sports, from fine arts to foreign affairs.  Yet they share one overarching trait: Each has been an agent of change.  Each saw an imperfect world and set about improving it, often overcoming great obstacles along the way.

Their relentless devotion to breaking down barriers and lifting up their fellow citizens sets a standard to which we all should strive.  It is my great honor to award them the Medal of Freedom.

Biographies of the recipients are below the fold, and additional discussion of the recipients is going on in the recommended diary by Momus.

The White House beerfest tonight between President Obama, Officer Crowley, and Professor Gates has been getting a lot of media attention, to be sure. It has also spawned what might be the stupidest criticism of Obama this year, and from a member of his own political party:

In a letter to Obama dated Wednesday, Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal strongly urges the president not to drink Budweiser, now owned by a Belgian company. Nor should the White House consider serving Miller or Coors, Neal writes, both owned by a United Kingdom conglomerate.

Instead, the White House should serve the three men — all with ties to Massachusetts — the local favorite (Sam Adams), not only because of its popularity in the region but also because it remains the largest American-owned and brewed beer, Neal says.

Now, perhaps the genesis of this comes from the fact that Congressman Neal has his first Republican opponent since 1996, and thus felt that a good pander was in order to the hometown brew (although his district is actually to the southwest of the Boston metro area).

But, really, Congressman? Dinging the President for his choice of beer? The President has the fairly inspired idea to bring a simmering culture battle to a halt over a cold one, and you feel the need to pen a letter criticizing him for not patronizing a brewer in your home state? I know members of the House are supposed to have parochial interests, but this is one step beyond ridiculous.

I would fully expect some right-wing mouth-breather to go after Gates for his choices of Red Stripe or Beck’s (beers from decadent, foreign lands like Jamaica and Germany are so thoroughly anti-American).

But actually taking the time to write a letter to the President to steer him away from Bud Light?

Was Wednesday that slow a day in the halls of Congress?

Honest question: how was Dana Bash able to deliver this report without bursting into laughter?

You know, in the same breath, as he made that announcement to try to, you know, push some progress and give the idea of momentum, in the same breath he cautioned, “Well, you know, we’re not there yet and we still have a lot more work to do,” and I can tell you, Tony, talking to Republicans, there are three Republicans and three Democrats in that room, talking to Republicans, there is a lot of consternation among Republicans that Democrats may be pushing a little too fast and trying to potentially get headlines saying that they’re going to come close to a deal. Because those three Republicans in that room are under a lot of pressure by their own party and their own party leadership not to give too much, to give too much of the store away. So that’s what’s going on there.

Seriously, Dana? After Baucus and Conrad have done all but present the Republicans with golden keys to the store? What are they under pressure not to give up? Who springs for lunch?

Totally unsurprising at this point:

Several financial giants that received federal bailout money in the last year paid out bonuses to employees in 2008 that greatly exceeded the amount of profit generated by the banks, according to a study on executive compensation released by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo Thursday.

Despite claims by bank executives that bonuses are tied to the company’s performance, the report states that “there is no clear rhyme or reason to how the banks compensate or reward their employees.”

Cuomo’s investigation “suggests a disconnect between compensation and bank performance that resulted in a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ bonus system.”

We’re talking Goldman Sachs here, of course, which earned $2.3 billion, received $10 billion in TARP funds and doled out more than double its earnings — $4.8 billion, to be exact — in bonus booty. But they weren’t alone: Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch … a veritable festival of handouts to the very people who steered the economic Titanic into the financial iceberg.

Please, tell us all again how much more efficient private industry is at sorting out the worthy in competitive markets ….

Here’s a late-breaking head’s up that our own David Waldman, also known as KagroX, also known as the master of Congress Matters, will be on Countdown tonight to discuss (in his own words)… “the GOP birther problem, why they can’t shed them, and what it means that Coulter, O’Reilly, etc. are the ’sane’ ones now.”

Which gives me the excuse to repost one of my favorite smackdowns ever, blogger-style, on CNN:

Sunday, with a cloudy aspect and a bit of rain on the horizon. Better get the punditry in before we get wet.

Barack Obama: Rebuilding something better. And excerpts from the Ghana speech, w/live blog.

Andrew Alexander (WaPo Ombudsman):

The Washington Post’s ill-fated plan to sell sponsorships of off-the-record “salons” was an ethical lapse of monumental proportions.

Frank Rich:

In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era.

Indeed. But it’s small. And it can’t win elections. And it should not be pandered to by the press any more, as if it’s still in power.

Maureen Dowd:

PALIN: @SenJohnMcCain — How the heck are ya, ya big hero?? Long time no hear, pardner. Y did u defriend me on Facebook?

MCCAIN: @AKGovSarahPalin — I needed room for Kissinger

Andrew Sullivan:

Writing about Sarah Palin always presents a quandary. Does one operate under the usual assumption that this is a rational figure, a serious politician, a rising Republican star . . . or do you acknowledge the copious evidence that she cannot tell the truth, has delusions of grandeur, has no policy record to speak of and quit her job as Alaska governor halfway through her first term because she is, in her own explanation, “not a quitter”? I think that you have to proceed under the assumption that this is a joke of a candidate and a symptom of a political party in the middle of a mental breakdown…

But trying to makes sense of Sarah Palin is a fool’s errand. I spent a lot of time last year trying to figure out how her bizarre pregnancy story could make any sense at all — it doesn’t — and came up with nothing but a suspicion that large parts of it were made up. If you present the facts to Palin spokespeople, they seem offended and regard you as some liberal hater. But the facts reveal she lies all the time about almost everything and so is probably improvising about her reasons for resigning.

Peggy Noonan: You go, Andrew!

“The elites hate her.” The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

“She makes the Republican Party look inclusive.” She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

David Broder: Achieving health reform will be difficult and it will cost money, so Congress is nervous. Breaking.

George Will:

Before he became an economic adviser in the Obama White House, where wit can be dangerous, Larry Summers said: Liberals oppose a VAT because it is regressive and conservatives oppose it because it is a money machine, but a VAT might come when liberals realize it is a money machine and conservatives realize it is regressive.

Greg Dworkin:

Teens and young adults are disproportionately affected by this H1N1 flu, and adults much less so. That means that the recommendations for flu vaccine will change this fall for pandemic vaccine, separate from the usual drive to vaccinate the over 65’s (if you were born before 1957, you likely have some cross-protection from a previous version of this virus.) $350 million in extra funds for this shovel-ready project have just been made available to cash-starved states ($30 million to California alone.) Expect to hear more, but the possibility of a worsening picture in early fall, with more school closures and, alas, more deaths and illness in a younger cohort, is very real. Interestingly, the on line reaction was: how can we help get the message out?

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future
By Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books, New York, July 2009
Hardcover, 209 Pages, $ 24.00 New
Extended Author Q & A Here

Forty years after Apollo 11 half of all Americans believe that humans were created in their present form less than ten thousand years ago. Senators, Representatives, and influential pundits proudly deride global warming and ridicule the overwhelming scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change. Science sections in traditional media outlets are reduced or eliminated completely, while virtually every newspaper runs a daily astrology column. How did the most advanced scientific nation on earth end up like this, what are the consequences, and what can or should be done about it?

Unscientific America by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum is a must read for anyone who cares about understanding or reversing the long national slide into pseudoscience and willful ignorance that has periodically gripped America. The book neatly follows up Mooney’s best seller, The Republican War on Science, into a broader, nonpartisan narrative of an entire nation enamored by the nifty gizmos and life saving applications of science, yet saddled with a long history of anti-intellectualism that periodically spills over into open contempt. It’s a dose of stiff but sorely needed medicine for baby boomers and genx’ers who grew up during a short thaw in that icy antiscience trend by way of a cold war, a hot space race, and one great communicator named Carl Sagan.

The book is full of delightfully written examples of assaults on science, each ripe with opportunity for anyone wise enough to seize it. The demotion of Pluto produced sacks of angry mail, and ignited a wave of interest in planetary astronomy from kindergartens to grad schools. Hollywood needlessly butchers science and scientists on the alter of cinematic appeal, but special effects wizardry in movies like Jurassic Park by-passed the usual media filters and stereotypes to kick-start a whole new generation of paleontologists and geneticists. The Bush administration’s authoritarian disregard for science was legendary, but it galvanized the scientific community into action like no other Presidency.

Enter the era of cable television and the Internet: alas, as the book honestly explains, in today’s fractured information landscape, science friendly mags, TV programs, and blogs are preaching to the choir. It’s just as easy, if not more so, for a creationist or moon landing hoaxer to find websites that cater to their predispositions as it is to find Science Blogs or Discover Online.

As to who is too blame, the short answer, presented with convincing research and rationale, is everyone. Politicians poorly trained in science have little to gain and much to lose by taking firm positions, a point well illustrated by the brick wall Mooney and others ran into when they tried to arrange a science debate during the 2008 Presidential campaign. Mainstream media is consumed by presenting both sides of an issue — even when one of them is ridiculous — while less objective media venues suffer no corresponding ethical dilemma and blasts out misinformation like a howitzer. Science writers get wrapped up in the culture war over science and atheism. Scientists and academia share responsibility for not engaging the public and the media more forcefully, or blazing a viable career path for charismatic scientists with a flair for public speaking.

Scattered throughout the book and summarized in the last chapter are ideas on how science might raise, or re-raise, its profile and once again become a vibrant, central component in American culture. My one constructive suggestion would be that those ideas were more fleshed out, but that can hardly be the authors’ fault. They dwell in the reality based community where,  as the book spells out, there is no unified, coordinated effort to cool off our latest national affair with know nothingism and pseudoscience.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum complement one another seamlessly in Unscientific America to deliver a hard hitting message informed by their years of experience in the public eye and behind a lab bench. The writing is superb, the narratives concise and easy to follow, and at 132 pages plus footnotes it is easily digested by readers of all ages and backgrounds. Order it, read it, and hope this book serves as a wake up call to Americans, and a catalyst to politicians, before it’s too late.

Sheril Kirshenbaum is a marine biologist and Associate at Duke University whose next book is ‘The Science of Kissing’! Chris Mooney is a frequent public speaker on science and science policy and best selling author of The Republican War on Science. Chris and Sheril can be found at Discover Magazine’s popular blog The Intersection. More info on the book and tour dates here, additional Q & A here, and both authors are available to respond to a few of your questions or comments below.

As a pediatric subspecialist in practice for twenty years (pediatric pulmonology), I have been a long time member of the American Academy of Pediatrics. I have been proud of their advocacy for children, including their being a reputable source of information and a strong voice for pandemic preparedness from a pediatric perspective (special thanks to the Committee on Infectious Diseases for that work), as well as keeping an eye on teen smoking risks, well before it was fashionable to do so.

Professional organizations like the AAP are very important to practicing docs, and there are as many professional organizations as there are specialties. Many practicing docs belong to one or more professional organizations; some are more politically active than others. Recently, I wrote about why I have not been a member of the American Medical Association. Few, if any, of the professional societies are more patient-focused than the AAP, which helps to establish practice standards for pediatricians all over the country, and advocates for issues as diverse as lead screening, autism recognition, health reform and nutrition in schools.

I had the opportunity to discuss some of these issues with the President Elect of the AAP, Dr. Judith Palfrey, FAAP (Fellow, American Academy of Pediatrics.) Dr. Palfrey has a distinguished record from Radcliffe, Columbia and Children’s Hospital, Boston, where she is based, and is all too familiar with the issues and barriers that pediatricians, specialists and primary care docs face in practicing modern medicine today, issues that are at the heart of health reform.

Daily Kos: Thanks for making yourself available. Let’s talk some about health reform, and how it relates to children.

Does the AAP have specific concerns about how the health reform debate is playing out in regard to the needs of children and adolescents? What are we not talking enough about?

The AAP supports the current effort to reform our health care system, particularly as it relates to improved access, benefits, quality, efficiency and appropriate payment for services. We do have concerns that policy-makers and the general public think that the reauthorization of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) earlier this year accomplished all the goals of health reform for children. It was an important step forward, but CHIP was not health reform for children. There are still millions of uninsured children. With the recession and its effects on states, even with Medicaid and CHIP, there are woefully inadequate funds to provide high quality health services to children. Also, privately insured children are not assured the age-appropriate pediatric benefits. Our state immunization programs are not well funded and we lack registry functions to track and monitor vaccines.

We are also very concerned that policymakers and the general public do not understand that pediatric services are undervalued. In many states, children cannot get access to health care because Medicaid rates are at 60-70 percent of Medicare (which, by the way, is often considerably lower than private insurance).

Finally, we do have effective, proven methods of prevention and care delivery that are not fully deployed because of mal-alignment of incentives in our current system. We are eager to see explicit recognition of the importance of maternity benefits, the Medical Home, Bright Futures and support for pediatric subspecialists and pediatric emergency and hospital services.

Daily Kos: The AMA recently made news with opposition to a public option. Other specialty groups like the American Academy of Family Physicians appear more open to a public plan (  http://www.aafp.org/…  ) Does the AAP have a position?

Our position is that we want to remove all barriers to full access to age-appropriate benefits with appropriate payment. We will accept any program that delivers on those goals.

Daily Kos: There appears to be a shortage of primary care doctors looming. Are there enough pediatricians and pediatric specialists to meet future needs, including after universal care is achieved? Is it the right mix? If not, what do we need to do to fix the problem?

You are right. Because of all the hassles and difficulties in our current system, many young people have opted not to go into primary care. They see a life that is filled with administrative forms, telephone trees to authorize medications, inadequate payment for services provided and too little time to practice the kind of high quality medicine they have been taught. Reforming the system will do a great deal to bring people back into primary care.

We also have a real problem with the mal-distribution of pediatric subspecialists. Rural areas and some poor urban areas find it hard to attract and retain pediatric subspecialists. In some ways, this is a much harder nut to crack because it has to do with the low volume of cases in the lower population areas as well as the desire of subspecialists to be affiliated with research universities where they can be involved in working on the latest science. The advent of electronic medical records and telemedicine should provide some relief for this problem, but we will probably not solve it entirely without serious attention to regionalization of services and more attention to epidemiology, demographics and placing doctors where they can reach out most effectively to the greatest number of patients through techniques such as circuit riding and co-management.

Finally, young people who are interested in medicine in general are being turned off and are turning away from potential careers in pediatrics (both primary care and subspecialty) because of the enormous debt burden they face…now in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Obama administration’s recognition of this problem and attention to it is most welcome and should help the situation if there is adequate funding for loan repayment.

Daily Kos: We have a new head of the FDA (Margaret Hamburg). What message would you give her regarding the availability and approval of medications for children, particularly new medications that come on board that may or may not have been tested in children, or come in child-friendly forms?

The FDA serves the very important function of assuring the safety and efficacy of drugs and medical devices. Children’s bodies are different from those of adults and they handle medications differently. If children are not involved in drug trials, many life saving and health promoting medicines and medical devices remain unavailable to children. For more than a decade AAP has been on the forefront of legislative initiatives to improve children’s access to medicines and devices that are labeled for their use. We have made progress legislatively in getting more access to needed testing and FDA has been a good partner in implementing appropriate policies regarding children.  We welcome Dr. Hamburg and encourage FDA to continue to involve children and adolescents in the FDA’s priorities.

Daily Kos: Does the AAP have a position on the new law regarding tobacco products being regulated by the FDA? How about funding SCHIP through tobacco taxes?

Yes. The AAP has been a strong advocate for regarding tobacco as a product needing regulation. Tobacco manufacturers market tobacco aggressively to teen-agers by adding flavors and using teen-attracting slogans and other techniques. We know that people who start smoking in their adolescent years have a high likelihood of becoming addicted to cigarettes. Having the FDA regulate tobacco will have the benefit of governmental oversight on how the products are promoted.

Tobacco taxes have provided a double benefit. The tax has been a good source of revenue. And raising taxes deters smoking. We are actually supportive of this pro-health approach related to products such as sugar-sweetened beverages, which are associated with the obesity epidemic.  

Daily Kos: In a pandemic or other natural disaster, special needs children are among the most vulnerable populations. Are we doing enough to prepare for the needs of this population and their parents?

The American Academy of Pediatrics is very concerned that children are often not considered when disaster plans are being made. Disasters may happen during the day when children are in school and daycare and can become separated from their families. Systems for reunification are critically important. Stockpiles of medications in pediatric formulations should be a routine part of the disaster plan as well as high priority responses to address the needs of children who have special health care needs and may depend on technologies that require generator or other back-ups.

Thank you, Dr. Palfrey.

The American Academy of Pediatrics health reform links and web site can be found at www.aap.org

^{Previous Daily Kos interviews with health care and policy experts, including Erika Seward (American Lung Association), Jeff Levi (Trust For America’s Health), Georges Benjamin (American Public Health Association) and Scott Layne (UCLA School of Public Health) can be found by clicking the links.}

Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People
By Jon Jeter
Hardcover, $25.95, 256 pages
W.W. Norton: New York
May 2009

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States is giving birth to the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will be shorter, not longer, than their parents’. Our system of global finance has put us on the precipice, teetering on ruin. As of mid-2008, the United States has bequeathed to the world the biggest speculative bubble, the worst housing crisis, and the gravest economic meltdown in nearly eighty years, and the response from America’s political class has been the largest single transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in at least a century.

**

Globalization is an international shakedown, and its targets are ordinary people across the globe, men and women made sojourners in the country of their birth by global finance and its missionaries.

As Washington Post bureau chief first in southern Africa and later in South America, Jon Jeter has had a ringside seat watching the devastation unfold as a result of what he calls the “economic fundamentalism” that has created a “transnational underclass.”

“This book,” he writes, “takes the measure of that biblical cataclysm.”

And this book, with Jeters’ powerful writing and obvious empathy for the underdog, will break your heart.

Rather than relay dry statistics and charts alone, Jeters uses personal stories of the exploited and downtrodden worldwide to bring attention to the plight of the hundreds of millions suffering under the yoke of the new colonialism — economic imperialism spread by the cooperation of the World Bank, multinational corporations and the private/public elite who run the world. This is not to say he ignores stats altogether; there are end notes and attributions throughout.

But it’s people and their stories first for this former reporter, and his ability to put his subjects comfortably in their natural settings, in their normal routines, is magical.

The lives he has captured as vividly as Kodachrome include:

• Rose Shanzi of Zambia, who spends all afternoon praying to sell 75 cents worth of tomatoes so she and her five kids can eat that day, in a free-for-all market where every broke person is trying to sell pittances to every other broke person in the hot sun of an African afternoon. It’s a crap shoot, and more often than not, she loses.
• Sylvia Ozuna of Buenos Aires, a prostitute, turns over care of her child to a minder so she can hit the streets for $10 a throw. She originally moved to Argentina six years ago from Paraguay with a plan to go to medical school, and she’d worked cleaning offices until the peso was devalued and her economic world bottomed out.
• Miguel Machado of Buenos Aires, who takes five of his children each night with him to rummage through the garbage for recyclables while his wife takes care of babies at home. Originally a sugar cane field worker who bettered himself by moving to the city to work in a mill for $600 a month, his world collapsed like Ozuna’s with the Argentine peso.
• Isabella Lopes da Silva of Brazil, a former secretary who lost her job (as did her son-in-law and daughter) in the Brazilian GDP contraction of 2003, and now has been reduced to using local superstitious ritual and prayer to try and get relief.
• Paulo Roberto, a Brazilian cabdriver, son of a maid, with “four children, ulcers and a lot on his mind,” who celebrates his 46th birthday realizing he’ll never escape the grind of poverty as a fellow victim of the Brazilian economy.
• Agnes Mohapi, 58, living with her 24-year-old daughter in Soweto, suffering electricity outages and water contamination as the post-apartheid government of South Africa struggles to join the globalization game by putting the screws to its services to citizens while it tries to dress itself up to appeal to foreign investors.

There are others in these pages, too, all of whom are fighting in trenches they rarely realize are shared by others half a world away. Even the so-called First World is not immune; Jeters spends a whole chapter examining the role of former Black Panther Bobby Rush, rehabilitated now as a member of Congress who’s gotten in bed with telecoms and other corporations in troubled relationships Rush claims are designed to bring grants back to the South Side of Chicago. And Jeters looks at another Chicago native, Sonia, seemingly upwardly mobile with her current enrollment in graduate school, yet unable to find a man who is of her “class” and/or not threatened by her success.

Gentrification of both people and property, the author intimates, are hollowing out not just physical neighborhoods, but traditional emotional relationships as well, both familial and societal. As byproducts of a thoughtless, near-primeval drive toward globalization, anything that can’t be quantified–human awareness, the spirit of a public school, the historical meaning of place–is not even consciously discarded. It’s simply dumped. The aspects of human life that are important as lived are simply ignored, creating a fellowship of the dispossessed, even when, in cases like Sonia’s, her dispossession is created by her rising on the ladder of what is applauded as “success” in the imperial worldview.

And it’s undermining the foundations of democracy as well:

This is the new global class war, a conflict that increasingly recognizes neither race, nor geopgraphy nor traditional alliances. Worldwide, widening inequality has increasingly estranged ordinary working people from the proxies they choose to represent them in democratic discussion.

These characters in Flat Broke are painfully real, full of integrity and valor as they struggle to keep roofs over the heads of their children and aging parents–willing to dig through garbage, sell their bodies, kill their own dreams, pray to discredited gods for relief, barter over rotting vegetables.

Through these stories, we get a glimpse of what “hyperinflation” means when it’s at street and gut level. Far outside the ivory tower realms of Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago, these are how those “acceptable” levels of unemployment or deregulation or “destablization” play out, in the gutters and squalid homes of once-making-it families who have become, in the eyes of Masters of the Universe, disposable garbage.

Jeters tells these tales sadly and nobly, with a mingling of melancholy and anger. Ultimately, he points to efforts to revitalize local economies as the most likely way to gradually pull the miserable millions out of the morass created by the greedy. Chile, post-Friedman experimentation, when the state reverted back to using some common-sense protectionist policies and re-regulation of national assets, seems to be providing one clear example of a way forward.

But in the end, it’s going to take political will, and attention to consequences, and demands for information and accountability of multi-nationals and government to find a way ahead for those suffering in poverty worldwide. It may not seem like much, but awareness of the scope and origin of the problem has got to be the first step, and Flat Broke is one of the best foundational platforms imaginable to get informed and viscerally connected with the depth of the crisis. It’s a marvelous book, tenderly written and passionately conceived.

• Two bomb blasts in southern Afghanistan killed four U.S. Marines.
• McCain was on the talk show circuit this morning, defending Sarah Palin.
• GOP leaders backed off calls for Sanford’s resignation after pleas from Jenny Sanford.
• A legal victory for pro-choice advocates in the state of Washington.
• A malfunction on a Obama campaign charter plane last summer was more serious than initially reported.
• The Franklin Park Zoo in Boston may be forced to close and euthanize some animals due to lack of funding.
• China just became the world’s largest auto market.

Sarah Palin is unqualified. She is at a minimum intellectually incurious. She is unethical. And calling these things for what they are is not an anti-feminist act. Nor is Sarah Palin the individual the real issue.

This can be a delicate question because qualified, honorable women have so often been called unqualified and attacked for their ambition or assertiveness. But…c’mon. Sarah Palin’s lack of qualification for high elected office is so patently clear in just about every one of her public statements and actions over the past 10 months that to not call it out as such is offensive to women (and men) who have worked hard to develop knowledge and mastery of any skill or body of knowledge. Of course there are lines of brutal personal attack that should never be crossed. But it’s not productive either to nutpick or to try to establish equivalencies. The question here is whether it is legitimate to call out the lack of qualification of a female politician for the role to which she aspires, and the answer is a clear yes.

Yet this idea persists, that we have to be somehow gentle with Palin because it would be sexist to call her for what she is: A national political figure of perhaps-unprecedented lack of qualification, thoughtfulness, or respect for the obligations of office. Back in the fall, we repeatedly saw the notion that if Joe Biden campaigned against her aggressively, he would suffer for the appearance of beating up on a helpless girl. Much more recently, Peter Daou has compared Palin’s treatment to that of his former employer, Hillary Clinton. This seems like a terrible insult to Clinton, who was attacked more pervasively, more personally, and by more prominent people over a period of more than a decade despite — and this is crucial — being a qualified, honorable person.

Of course, Palin has been criticized and mocked. But although she is criticized and mocked, she is also on many levels taken seriously as a national political figure. The discussion of her recognizes some of her shortcomings without connecting the dots to say what should be clear to even the most actual observer: Sarah Palin is not on the same continuum of qualification as almost any other national-level politician. (George W. Bush may represent the more-qualified end of the continuum on which Palin exists — and it is to the traditional media’s shame and the nation’s detriment that he wasn’t called out for what he was earlier and more clearly. Michele Bachmann’s on there somewhere too.)

But restricting this discussion to Palin herself misses the larger point — why are we talking about her?

Sarah Palin got to the governorship of Alaska on her own. At that point, political geeks and people in Alaska knew who she was, and that was about it. Palin became a national figure because John McCain selected her as his running mate. Why did he select her as his running mate, despite having barely spoken to her and not having vetted her? Because she was a woman. Because she would shake things up and get attention and seem unexpected. Out of the hope that PUMAs would flock to her. Because, more generally, the McCain campaign hoped that having a woman on the ticket would be an adequate stand-in for taking issue positions that women would vote for.

That’s where the real and massive sexism in how Palin has been treated lies, and while she was certainly affected by it, the real victims are women who have worked hard to get somewhere in politics, and women voters who were assumed by a major party presidential nominee to be stupid enough to vote for a woman without consideration of her positions.

There are plenty of Republican women who would have been reasonable choices for vice president. I would still disagree with almost all of their positions, but see them as competent and qualified. But they, for one reason or another, apparently didn’t measure up. And we can find hints of why that is in votes like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, on which the four Republican women in the Senate voted yes while the 36 men voted no. Those qualified women didn’t pass wingnut muster. Sarah Palin did.

So, yeah. As long as Republicans choose to elevate women based on the hope that voters will be fooled into thinking that woman on ticket = policy stances friendly to women, families, and working people, it is not only not sexist to call that out for what it is, it’s sexist not to.

Sadly, this is a question relevant not only to Palin; Republicans are not averse to running this play again and again. So we’re told by Republican commentators that, in New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte is a particularly strong candidate because she’s a mother of young children, that Ayotte, like Palin, is a strong candidate because she’s an outsider, because:

Like Obama, they don’t have to talk the talk of change. They are change.

That is what Republicans want us to believe, that policies don’t matter, that tokenism produces meaningful change. We see it too with RNC chair Michael Steele — Republicans responding to the election of an African American president by getting an African American spokesperson of their own…and not changing a thing about the policies that lead on the order of 90% of African American voters to vote for Democrats even when Barack Obama is not on the ticket.

If we pull back from criticizing the tokens Republicans throw up to stand in the way of real change, we legitimize the strategy. In discussing — mocking, criticizing — the tokens themselves, we of course must be respectful of their humanity, and should always remember that the individual is not the real issue. But unqualified is unqualified, unethical is unethical, bad on the issues is bad on the issues, and it would be a disservice to the nation not to say so.

For most folks on the left, consuming political opinion polling data has been a much less enjoyable exercise in 2009 than it has been for the past few cycles.

Call it the soft bigotry of high expectations–when you win everything not nailed down for four consecutive years, you begin to experience a deep sense of dread with every race where a double-digit lead is not present. Being down in a race brings nothing short of absolute panic.

The fact of the matter is that voter pessimism is translating to less than enviable numbers for many Democratic incumbents as we head into the 2010 election cycle. There is an inherent logic to that, of course. If voters are angry with “the guy in the office”, you are more likely to feel the wrath if you actually ARE the guy in the office.

Nowhere is this voter antipathy being felt more acutely than among the nation’s governors. 2009 polling data for our Democratic governors has been less than robust, as you can see from the following examples (source for polling data is here):

General Election Trial Heats: Democratic Governors

The above list, by the way, does not include Wisconsin, because the two recent polls here (ours and PPP’s) had widely disparate results. The Democratic incumbent, Jim Doyle, is either up by several or down by several, depending on your pollster.

It is a roll call of close races and deficits that is sobering, to be sure. It is also fairly understandable.

Check out the following headlines from recent newspapers across the country:

• “Budget ills invite debate over cuts, taxes”–Dayton (OH) Daily News
• “Budget panel told state is headed for cliff”–The Colorado Statesman
• “Rendell plans 13% cut in higher-education budget”–The Philadelphia Inquirer
• “Officials warn: Cuts would be dead-serious for zoos”–The Boston Herald
• “Md. Starts Fiscal Year $700 Million in Red”–The Washington Post
• “Job-training program a victim of budget battle”–The Connecticut Post

…and the list goes on and on.

If you are the chief executive of just about any American state at this moment, there are simply no good choices. At this point, it is down to deciding what tax to raise amid a deluge of wailing and shouting, or deciding which essential program is going to be cut beyond recognition.

There is virtually nothing to be done that it is not going to result in hard feelings and political peril. Such are the times that we live in and they govern in.

Despite that, there are two things to remember about all of this, at least from the standpoint of cold political analysis:

1. This is not solely a Democratic problem

The traditional media, and even a handful of Democratic commentators (the intellectual descendants of Eeyore, in most cases), seem intent on flogging the “2010 will be a GOP comeback year” scenario for all that it is worth.

While it is reasonable to conclude that it is unlikely for Democrats to have a third dominant cycle in a row, a lot of the doomsday scenarios are probably equally overblown.

For one thing, any growing discontent with the Democratic Party, and there certainly seems to be some, has not been countered by an increase in public esteem for the GOP. Instead, when you look at the Daily Kos/Research 2000 State of the Nation Tracking Poll trends from January to the present, you will see that the public opinion of the GOP has trended even lower than that of the Democratic Party:

Furthermore, it is not as if Republican Governors are beloved while their Democratic counterparts are reviled. Many Republican governors are also seeing their lowest job approval ratings in their statehouse tenures. Again, there is nothing surprising in any of this. They are also the ones making ugly decisions, and their esteem in the eyes of voters will suffer predictably.

As you can see below, the GOP is in mearly as much danger of losing governorships as the Democrats are. The absence of endangered incumbents (all of the polls below are open seat races) is owed to the fact that most of the GOP’s governors were either the casualties of term limits or (like Pawlenty and Palin) early retirements:

General Election Trial Heats: Republican Governors

And that doesn’t even count Nevada Republican Jim Gibbons, who (inexplicably) is planning on running for re-election with a 10% job approval rating.

2. With Time on The Clock, Circumstances Are Very Fluid

The mountain of polling data above, for both parties, should be accompanied with one monstrous caveat–Nobody wins an election in July of the off-year. There is a lot that can change between now and November of 2010.

On balance, that is probably good news for the Democrats. If the economy improves substantially in that time frame, the Democrats are liable to engage in the lions share of the credit-taking. Of course, the converse is also true–if the economy is worse or stagnant, voter patience may well run out. Most analysis suggests that the former is slightly more likely than the latter, with at least some recovery underway by the end of 2010.

Also, polling data right now in many of these races is predicated on voter sentiment towards the incumbent party. The challenger is still, in most cases, an undefined quantity. As challengers become known (via primaries and candidate entrances and exits), the polls are liable to change.

New Jersey may be an instructive example here. In March, Republican nominee Chris Christie had a fifteen-point lead over incumbent Democratic Governor Jon Corzine, according to Rasmussen. Corzine was, without question, being weighted down by grumpiness over the state of his state.

As the campaign has lurched forward, the lead has receded. One theory as to WHY it has receded is this: the challenger is now being defined. It is no longer “the governor whose state is in a budget stalemate over how much to cut” versus “the new guy”. It is Jon Corzine versus Chris Christie, who now has more eyes on him as he explains what HE would do if he were in this position. As he does so, his once sizeable lead over the incumbent has shrunk noticeably: down to seven points (46-39) in the latest Rasmussen Poll.

This could be mimicked in places like Colorado, Illinois, Ohio, and Massachusetts.

The bottom line is this: governors, because of their unloved role as hatchet-men in the current political/economic climate, are going to take their lumps. The tenor of the times would seem to demand at least one or two political careers on a stick.

Premature projections of absolute disaster, however, are probably errant.

Jeff Sessions (R-AL), on the upcoming Sotomayor hearings:

“I don’t think the outcome of this hearing is a foregone conclusion,” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the committee, told reporters Friday. “Judge Sotomayor has made some troubling statements. … She has ruled in some cases that are troubling and need to be examined.”

Sessions then gives the standard GOP laundry list:

• She’s a racist (a.k.a. “wise Latina woman” remark”),
• she’ll take away our guns (a.k.a a ruling that top conservative judges agreed with),
• she hates white people (a.k.a. following precedent in the Ricci case), and,
• she’s associated with a terrorist organization (a.k.a. the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund).

In other words, same crap, different day. Now, I can appreciate that Sessions has a job to do and wants to do it right. And if Sotomayor had said things like, oh, I don’t know, maybe calling the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people and the American Civil Liberties Union “un-American” and “Communist-inspired,” or, during a murder investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, said that she “used to think they [the Klan] were OK’ until (s)he found out some of them were ‘pot smokers,” or if she made a habit of calling African American men “boys,” and cautioned them about how they talked to “white folks,” she would be unfit to hold any position of power and respect. Right, Mr. Sessions?

This evening’s Rescue Rangers are YatPundit, vcmvo2, dadanation, mem from somerville, sunspark says, and srkp23, with watercarrier4diogenes at the wheel of the Editmobile, frantically chasing a vintage Perley A. Thomas streetcar on a hot New Orleans night, hoping to get its operator, YatPundit, back aboard before any of the passengers get wise.

Tonight’s diaries take us on a roller-coaster ride from prehistoric man to that legal neanderthal, John Yoo, from burquas to baseball. We hope you’ll enjoy this bounty of excellent reading.

• Avenging Angel addresses the topic of further revelations about the legal mind behind the Bush administration’s many civil rights abuses in John Yoo, the Right Man for the Job. (vcmvo2)
• Lib Dem FoP reminds us of an important story in Africa’s recent history, and asks us not to gloss over that, with Remember the San, Mr Obama. (mem from somerville)
• In an interesting diary about French President Nicholas Sarkosy’s controversial move, mosaicnews discusses the possible outcome of Sarkosy Hiding Behind the Burqua? (vcmvo2)
• In case you missed last night’s no-hitter at the San Francisco Giants’ baseball game, Alfonso Nevarez’s diary Jonathan Sanchez: Nearly Perfect! is the next best thing to being there. (dadanation)
• ramara writes about a recent school dress code issue involving Native Americans in Support for a Child’s Religious Freedom from Many Communities. (vcmvo2)
• In Savage Beasts, zwerlst muses on the development of teeth and ancient music. (watercarrier4diogenes)
• cosmic debris brings our attention to the hidden problems of economic hardship and homelessness in Home is a hotel without a lawyer: Slipping into America’s Crack. (vcmvo2)
• joetex scrutinizes an expensive technology, and examines how it fits into the health care crisis today, with Healthcare Cost: A Scanner Costly. (mem from somerville)
• beglin tackles the topic of student loan reform in The Educated Poor: Reforming Financial Aid. (vcmvo2)
• Lib Dem FoP discusses the equipment shortcomings of the British Army while reminding us that there are More British Dead in Afghanistan than Iraq. (YatPundit)
• In a beautifully written diary Marina Asbury tells us about losing her beloved cat in Saying goodbye to Malijah. (vcmvo2)

jotter delivers High Impact Diaries: July 10, 2009, while carolita has Top Comments 7-11-09 — Healthcare Edition.

Enjoy and please promote your own favorite diaries in this open thread (even if you’re the author! Here’s where that’s actually appreciated). And, of course, since it’s an open thread, PLAY NICE, OK? 8^)

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Severance package for your mistress: $25,000

Hush money for her family (paid by your parents): $96,000

FedEx shipping charges + gas money for your religious buddies: Unknown

…

Your recent trip to Iowa: Priceless