New York District 23 a Tossup?

The bombshell news this afternoon is that Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava has withdrawn from the New York 23rd district congressional race, which makes the teabagger candidate, Doug Hoffman, the favorite. Conventional wisdom said she and Hoffman were splitting the Republican vote and possibly giving the district to the Democrat, Bill Owens. With Scozzafava gone, conventional wisdom says Hoffman ought to be a clear winner. “Republicans catch a big break” says Chuck Todd.

Nate Silver argues that the picture is murkier, and that Scozzafava supporters may not move toward Hoffman.

The reality is that a lot of Scozzafava’s ex-supporters, many of whom don’t like either Hoffman or Owens, simply won’t vote. And some of them will still wind up casting their ballots for Scozzafava undaunted, as she’ll still appear on the ballot and may have made herself something of a sympathetic figure. … only 15 percent of Scozzafava’s voters had a favorable view of Hoffman, so they aren’t going to come over easily, if at all.

Hoffman would still have to be considered the likely winner, Nate says, but it’s likely to be closer than people think.

In an earlier post, Nate said that the polls suggested much of Hoffman’s support was coming from people who don’t normally vote, and since special elections tend to be low turn-out affairs, Hoffman’s voters might be more motivated to turn out on Tuesday — it’s for the teabagging cause, after all. I don’t know the district at all, so I’m making no predictions about the outcome.

I will say, however, that this shows us how much Republican party officials have lost control of their own party.

The New Jersey governor’s race between Corzine and Christie is messy, also. The closeness of the race, IMO, reflects general disappointment with Corzine. But Christie may be too right-wing for the state as a whole. Parts of New Jersey are quite conservative, but the more populated counties hugging the northeastern part of the state — the ones closest to Manhattan — don’t like extreme right-wingers. Those counties will elect Republicans who can pass themselves off as being reasonably moderate, but in a choice between a right-winger and just about any sort of Democrat they will vote for the Democrat. Anything is possible, but I will be surprised if Corzine loses.

From Cell Phones to Health Care — Americans Are Rubes

Last August the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) came out with a survey showing that Americans pay way more for cell phone service than just about anyone else. To which Cactus at Angry Bear responded, sarcastically, that this means the U.S. must have the best cell phone service in the world.

I’m just now catching up to this, but I think Cactus could have taken the analogy further.

In the early 1980s, most European countries decided to adopt a uniform GSM system for cell phone service, so that any cell phone would work anywhere in those countries on the same network. Today this GSM system is the most popular standard for cell phones in the world, used by 80 percent of the world’s cell phone users in at least 100 countries.

And then there is the U.S. Our Congress didn’t want to adopt standards — that would be government regulation, you know, which is bad — so it let the free market come up with our standards. So we have a tangled mess of private and incompatible digital networks, and cell phones that don’t work anywhere but here, if then.

Providers like T-Mobile and AT&T do offer GSM service, but my understanding is that they use different frequency bands. So those phone still can’t tap into the standard GSM network that most of the world is using.

I found an article from 2005 on “Europe’s homogenous cell phone culture” that said,

Strangely, in the country that widely supported “universal” service in the early days of telephony, the United States’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided not to regulate cell standards, thus the inconsistent mix of separate systems.

Reuters cited an FCC report saying that its decision was correct since it found Americans talk more on their phones and pay less than Europeans do.

Reuters pointed out, though, that 8 of 10 people in Europe have cell phones while only 6 of 10 people in the United States do.

The difference in service is dramatic. Cell phone coverage in the United States is thin and reception chancy in apartments and, says Reuters, land lines are necessary in ranch houses in Los Angeles.

GSM works everywhere in Europe, including at the bottom of a salt mine in Poland.

It may be that those ranch houses in Los Angeles have cell phone service now, assuming they weren’t destroyed in forest fires or mud slides. California seems like a chancy place to live. But now we don’t even get the cheaper prices. This guy says, “on average, the OECD found that Americans pay $635.85 on cell phone service, compared to $131.44 per year in the Netherlands or $137.94 per year in Sweden.”

Thus it is with health care. We’ve got a Rube Goldberg health care system held together with twine and duct tape, and it hemorrhages cost, and we pay more and get less than anywhere else. And why? Because Congress wouldn’t step in and regulate it.

Yes, Congress will intervene — reluctantly — to patch up parts of the system that are utterly failing. This is how we got Medicare; millions of seniors had no health insurance and the private market wouldn’t sell it to them.

But these measures amount to band-aids that keep the ugly beast alive, so to speak. Taxpayers step in where the private system fails, and then the private system blames government interference for its failures.

Face it — we’re a nation of rubes.

Update: And other people get more paid sick days, too.

How Much Do We Dislike Joe Lieberman? Let Me Count the Ways.

It says something that I didn’t have to create a new “snake in the grass” image for Creepy Joe. I created one last year.

Lots of venting today, from the sarcastic (“In Defense of Joe Lieberman“), to the more sarcastic (“Surprise! Lieberman Stabs Dems in the Back!“) to the straight reporting — see Timothy Noah, “Did Lieberman Just Kill the Public Option?“:

Ezra Klein of Washingtonpost.com and Jonathan Chait of the New Republic both point out that Lieberman’s reason for opposing the public option—that it’s too expensive—makes no sense, because the public option actually lowers the cost of health reform by exerting downward competitive pressure on the private-insurance premiums whose purchase the government would subsidize. The Congressional Budget Office’s scoring of the Reid proposal is expected to show this. But any illogic in Lieberman’s position strikes me as evidence not that Lieberman is likely to change his mind when he becomes better acquainted with the facts but, rather, that Lieberman has already decided facts shouldn’t get in the way of his opposition.

Why would Lieberman want to sink health reform? Klein points out that in the pretty recent past, Lieberman has supported the general goal, if not the specifics, of Obamacare. But consider Lieberman’s political situation. He is no longer a Democrat. That means he no longer has a political base. In the future, he will have to rely more on constituencies and on cash. The White House suggests that Lieberman wouldn’t dare alienate voters by opposing health reform. But what’s the most cash-rich constituency in the Nutmeg State? The insurance industry, which is headquartered in Connecticut and employs 64,000 people.

Pretty much sums it up. See also “Is Anybody Still Surprised by Joe Lieberman?

I don’t expect Lieberman to back down under any circumstances.

The Future of the GOP

The meta-title of Bill Kristol’s most recent column is “The future of the GOP is outside the Beltway.” I saw this and thought, wow — Kristol is right. In fact, the future of the GOP is not only outside the Beltway, it is also outside anyplace with reliable cell phone service. The way it’s going, I expect the GOP to make a last stand somewhere near a bald cypress bog in rural Mississippi, no later than the end of 2016.

However, the perpetually sunny Kristol thinks it’s a great time to be a conservative. This is because more people self-identify as “conservative” than as “independent” or “liberal.” As I’ve said of such surveys in the past, nobody knows what those terms mean any more. Thus, the self-identification is meaningless.

To see what I mean, check out the comments to this Hot Air post. Allahpundit complains that the teabaggers are splitting the Republican vote in NY 23, making a Dem win likely. In Glenn Beck world, apparently it is more important to purge moderates from the Republican Party than to defeat Democrats.

“One crushing defeat away from total victory, in perpetuity,” Allah grumbles. “What is the endgame?”

The endgame, according to the commenters, is to cleanse the GOP of alleged RINOs. Once this has been done, the GOP then will retake its natural place as the dominant party, and liberals will once against be drop-kicked out of sight. “The end game is to make the GOP so afraid of a third party happening that they start articulating some coherent conservative arguments and principles and nominate candidates who are not liberals,” says one. Another says, “The end game is a break of the stranglehold the dem and repub parties maintain on the electoral process, financing system and electorate, returning a representative republic to the people.”

They’re sounding like Ralph Nader supporters ca. 2000. I’m not sure Kristol himself would qualify as a “conservative” with this crowd.

Kristol notes that the current front-runners for the 2012 Republican nomination are all people who are not in office at the moment — Huckabee, Romney, Gingrich, Palin, in no particular order. Steve M explains that current officeholders have a big disadvantage with the wingnuts:

“Current officeholders, even Republicans, have to act with some reference to objective reality.”

Clearly, a huge turn-off to teabaggers.

Steve compares wingnut government strategy to the Underpants Gnomes Business Model of South Park, which is:

  1. Collect underpants
  2. ?
  3. Profit

Look famaliar? How about —

  1. Get rid of Saddam Hussein
  2. ?
  3. Peace in the Middle East

or

  1. Cut taxes
  2. ?
  3. Revenues increase

It’s all so plain now. Why didn’t I see this before?

Reid Backs the Opt-Out

Harry Reid just announced the Senate bill will have a public option with an opt-out for states. No trigger. This is great news. Plus, he says he has the votes to pass the bill once it’s been run past the CBO for analysis.

Public Option News

There were rumors flying around last week that the White House was pushing back against the proposed state “opt out” provision in the public option, advocating for a trigger instead. Now the White House is trying to knock down those rumors and says it backs whatever Harry Reid is doing.

I suspect the Booman is right — the White House was holding back on endorsing a particular approach because it didn’t want to get boxed in, but as a result they were taking a beating in the media and making the Senate grumpy. The important point is that the White House is not, it seems, trying to block the opt-out provision.

The bad news is that even if health care reform passes this year, it will be three or four years before most of the benefits, including the public option, kick in. Carrie Brown at the Politico writes that some Dems are pushing for some provisions (althought not the public option) to kick by next year so the Dems have something tangible to show voters in the 2010 election campaigns.

Even so, Paul Krugman is optimistic. Krugmarn found poll numbers that say Massachusetts health care reform is enormously popular in Massachusetts. This is a good sign for national reform, he says. Conservatives want health care to fail and hope for a voter backlash against it, but the Massachusetts experience says that is unlikely.

Help! They’re Stealing My Home!

Update 10/26: Thanks to your help I am out of immediate danger, although I am not able to completely pay off the debt and I will remain in some jeopardy until I do. So more donations are welcome. I still hope to hear something from the state attorney general’s office, to which I sent a complaint several days ago.

Update: I’m keeping this at the top for a couple of days; check below for new posts.

I hate to ask for help again, but I’ve had a major setback and feel defeated. I posted the story below at Salon to see if it could get some attention, and so far I’ve just gotten snarky advice to get another lawyer. This is not helping. I am sincerely afraid I will be homeless by Christmas. At the very least, please help me get this linked around the blogosphere.

Continue reading

The War on Faux Nooz

Here’s the video of Faux Nooz clips shown on Countdown last night. I don’t have a transcript, but there’s a roundup of sorts at Media Matters.

There are those who don’t understand why the White House isn’t stoically putting up with whatever Faux dishes out. But Joan Walsh has a piece at Salon, a review of The Clinton Tapes by Taylor Branch, that clarifies things.

Joan isn’t writing about Faux, but about the rest of the media during the latter part of the Clinton Administration. She describes the “backdrop of childish media snickering” that enabled the “selection” of George W. Bush in 2000.

“The Clinton Tapes” makes clear that from start to finish, President Clinton was besieged by a vicious just-say-no GOP abetted by the perversely, inexplicably, cruelly anti-Clinton leaders of the so-called liberal media — from the New York Times’ lame crusades against Whitewater and Chinese donors and Wen Ho Lee, to the integrity-free “opinion” journalism by Maureen Dowd and, sadly, Frank Rich, to a whole host of other liberal media characters who couldn’t shake their feeling that Clinton was a fraud, a poseur, a hillbilly, a cynic. Their trashy eight-year oeuvre will likely go down in history as the most spectacularly malevolent and misguided White House coverage ever — and politically costly, since it also encompassed Vice President Al Gore and probably made George W. Bush president in 2000. …

… You find yourself wishing and hoping Branch could find some Washington pooh-bahs who’d realize they’d been played by the Republicans. Nope. None at all.

I think the White House is serving notice to the Media generally: Be serious. Stop acting like cliquey high schoolers. Stop enabling propaganda. Do your jobs.

Uncompromising Compromises on the Public Option

Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray write in the Washington Post:

House Democrats are coalescing around an $871 billion health-care package that would create a government-run insurance plan to help millions of Americans afford coverage, raise taxes on the nation’s richest families and impose an array of new regulations on private insurers, in part by stripping the industry of its long-standing exemption from federal antitrust laws.

Senate Democratic leaders, meanwhile, huddled with President Obama on Thursday, and lawmakers said Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) was increasingly leaning toward the idea of including a version of a public insurance option, albeit one that would allow states to opt out of such a system, in the chamber’s bill.

This sounds like great news, but as I read other stories this morning the air spluttered out of the balloon, so to speak.

Some reports are saying the House mostly seems ready, or close to ready, to pass a good bill. However, Mike Allen of The Politico says Pelosi doesn’t have the vote for a robust public option and is considering the “trigger” compromise as “the most likely compromise because it can probably satisfy liberals.”

Memo to Allen, Pelosi, et al. It will not satisfy liberals. We know a bait and switch when we see one. A public option subject to a “trigger” amounts to no public option at all, because the “trigger” will never be pulled without a bruising political fight.

For a rundown on the three compromises being proposed at the moment, see Ezra Klein. And then for the odds on which compromise will be accepted, see Nate Silver. If you go by Nate, Congress may pass something it can call a “public option,” but it won’t be what we want.

Matters are even more iffy in the Senate than in the House, as insurance industry lackeys like Olympia Snowe and Ben Nelson still refuse to support any bill with a public option, even with the state opt-out provision.

Robert Pear and David Herszenhorn write in the New York Times,

In pushing to include a government-run health insurance plan in the health care bill, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, is taking a calculated gamble that the 60 members of his caucus could support the plan if it included a way for states to opt out. … Mr. Reid’s outlook was shaped, in part, by opinion polls showing public support for a government insurance plan, which would compete with private insurers.

People watch Washington in wonder. A provision with huge public support is considered “risky” in Washington. We know why that’s true, but it still makes the Senate look like a cheap carnival sideshow.