Monthly Archives: January 2007

Dweebs in Space

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WSJ Opinion Journal:

To understand why the Founders put war powers in the hands of the Presidency, look no further than the current spectacle in Congress on Iraq. What we are witnessing is a Federalist Papers illustration of criticism and micromanagement without responsibility.

The Founders gave war powers to Congress, dweeb. Article I, Section 8, paragraphs 11-14; see Findlaw. And if you want a Federalist Paper, try #69, by Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton made it clear that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, was to have much less war power than that of a British king. The declaring of war and the raising and regulating of armies and navies are powers given to Congress.

The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first General and admiral of the Confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the DECLARING of war and to the RAISING and REGULATING of fleets and armies, all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.

The dweeb at WSJ continues. He both upbraids the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the non-binding resolution it passed yesterday and taunts Congress that if it really believed the Iraq War is so bad it should do something more drastic, like cut off funds.

By passing “non-binding resolutions,” they can assail Mr. Bush and put all of the burden of success or failure on his shoulders.

I ‘spect that was the idea. It’s Bush’s War, dweeb. I’m hoping that if Congress can pass one non-binding resolution it will go on to something bolder.

Minority Leader John Boehner is even asking Speaker Nancy Pelosi to create another special Congressional committee to look over the general’s shoulder. It’s a shame Ulysses S. Grant isn’t around to tell them where to put their special committee.

I believe the point of the committees is to look over Bush’s shoulders, not the generals’, and I ‘spect General Grant would have been OK with that. Right now I don’t have time to look up what precedents there might have been during the Civil War and what Grant thought about them.

Anyway, the dweeb continues,

In addition to being feckless, all of this is unconstitutional. As Commander-in-Chief, the President has the sole Constitutional authority to manage the war effort. Congress has two explicit war powers: It has the power to declare war, which in the case of Iraq it essentially did with its resolution of 2003. It also has the power to appropriate funds.

But Bush obtained that resolution on false pretenses, which as far as I’m concerned renders it null and void. The Iraq War we got was the result of a bait-and-switch. And while the President has the authority to manage the war effort, he does so with a military raised and managed by authority of Congress, and he goes to war only by the authority of Congress. To claim that a President can trick Congress into one war resolution and then treat that resolution as a carte blanch to make war as he pleases for the rest of his administration is stretching things a tad.

Update: Glenn Greenwald has more.

Elmer Fudd Nation

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What David Brooks wrote in his New York Times column today:

The Democratic approach, as articulated by Senator Jim Webb — simply get out of Iraq “in short order” — is a howl of pain that takes no note of the long-term political and humanitarian consequences.

What Jim Webb actually said in his rebuttal to the SOTU (emphasis added):

The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military. We need a new direction. Not one step back from the war against international terrorism. Not a precipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos. But an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq’s cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.

I know a lot of you don’t want to listen to any plan that doesn’t include a precipitous withdrawal, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But I want to bash David Brooks first. It’s been a while.

BrooksWorld is a place where critical thinking (along with accuracy) is in short supply. He spends the first half of his column whining that violence and disorder in Iraq are getting worse. Then he whines that Democrats are bad people because they don’t support the strategies that have allowed violence and disorder in Iraq to get worse.

“I for one have become disillusioned with dreams of transforming Iraqi society from the top down,” he says. “But it’s not too late to steer the situation in a less bad direction.” Coming from Brooks, that’s a big clue we’re looking at utter hopelessness. Then Brooks writes,

Increased American forces can do good — they are still, as David Ignatius says, the biggest militia on the block — provided they are directed toward realistic goals.

Ah yes, David Ignatius. How many ways has Ignatius been wrong on Iraq? I don’t know that numbers go that high. But here are some highlights of Ignatius’s Greatest Misses, compiled by Jeralyn of TalkLeft. Jeralyn concludes with some advice for Ignatius that we might also direct to Brooks. And a lot of other people who haven’t figured out when to STFU:

Don’t worry about what the Democrats might do. Try and figure out how you got it so spectacularly wrong first and explain to us why you did. Once you do that, then maybe we can talk.

Brooks admits that the Bush plan isn’t working —

The weakness of the Bush surge plan is that it relies on the Maliki government to somehow be above this vortex. But there are no impartial institutions in Iraq, ready to foster reconciliation. As ABC’s Jonathan Karl notes in The Weekly Standard, the Shiite finance ministries now close banks that may finance Sunni investments. The Saadrist health ministries dismiss Sunni doctors. The sectarian vortex is not fomented by extremists who are appendages to society. The vortex is through and through.

But Brooks has decided the way to straighten things out is by a “soft partition” of Iraq — dividing Iraq into separate sectarian sections to “restore order,” and then allowing the central government to “handle oil revenues and manage the currency, etc.” Exactly how that central government wouldn’t end up being dominated by Shiites, and exactly why those Shiites wouldn’t continue to make life hell for Sunnis, Brooks doesn’t say. He seems to think Iraqis are children who will settle down once they’re not sitting next to each other.

Upper-class white men have pretty much dominated the planet for the past couple of centuries or so; much longer, in some places. If you spend much time reading history, you’ll notice that those upper-class white men had a deep and largely misplaced faith in their own superiority of judgment. Their tendency to think well of themselves came from racism, sexism, and the fact that people born into privileged circumstances usually are sheltered from the consequences of their own mistakes. Thus, a whole lot of global history from 1800 to the current day consists of greedy delusional white male assholes mucking things up.

A large part of the crises we face in the world today — in Africa, the Middle East, Asia — can be traced back to The Day the White Man Came. Through the 19th and 20th centuries mostly European powers gained control of other nations, crushed their political and social infrastructures, stripped them of their resources, and left their people in abject poverty and political chaos.

Indeed, the nation of Iraq came into existence at the hands of Europeans, who re-drew the political borders of the Middle East as they fought World War I. “The borders were thus based on British imperial and commercial interests and the fortunes of war rather than being drawn along traditional frontiers or historic tribal or ethnic lines,” says this guy.

Juan Cole wrote in June 2002,

Such adventures as the Soviets in Afghanistan, the French in Algeria, and the British in the Gulf, Palestine and South Asia have unexpectedly given birth to demons for our 21st century world. Imperialism depended on dominating, humiliating and exploiting others, and on drawing artificial boundaries for European strategic purposes. The way out is not, as some are now saying, a new wave of Western imperialism. That is how we got here in the first place. It is the fashioning of a world of equals in which Muslims receive the same rights as others, to self-determination or enough autonomy to foster self-respect. Only when the age of colonialism is truly over can the postcolonial wars end.

Instead, we’ve got Brooks and Ignatius and others sitting in their leather chairs in their well-appointed offices and thinking that if we just keep tweaking, we’ll get those natives to settle down eventually.

Juan Cole pointed out yesterday, “It is odd that US media seem completely uninterested in how Bush’s State of the Union speech was received in Iraq, where half of it would be implemented.” Not odd at all; we still think of the populations of non-white places not as people we should work with, but as a problem to solve.

What’s rich about all this is that our country was founded after an overthrow of imperial rule. The indigenous populations of the Western Hemisphere were so decimated by war and disease that, in thirteen of the British colonies of North America, whites became the dominant and majority population. And lo, in the 18th century some of those whites felt that they were being jerked around and exploited by a far-away King, so they rebelled. As the colonies became a nation the former colonists adopted the mythos that Americans were better. Unlike the privileged dandies of Europe, Americans were tough and practical. Oh, and egalitarian, although how a people who kept slaves and marched the Cherokee to Oklahoma saw themselves as egalitarian is a testament to Man’s Capacity to Bullshit Himself. But we grew to love the Common Man, or so we thought, and to this day our political and business leaders just love to tell us how they rose from poverty and overcame hardship.

(If they can’t tell us they rose from poverty, then they tell us about the simple virtues of their immigrant grandparents. Barring that, they pretend Jesus helped them overcome alcoholism. They’ve got to overcome something.)

In American mythos European leaders were born in palaces, while our guys were born in log cabins. European leaders were a pack of inbred twits, while ours were street smart and hard working. They were Elmer Fudd; we were Bugs Bunny.

But the joke is that, somehow, we grew an aristocracy anyway. Our public intellectuals — i.e., Brooks and Ignatius — are twits. That they are respected for their insight just shows we ain’t livin’ in a meritocracy. And the President of the United States is the pure distillation of inbred classism and the arrogance of unearned privilege, albeit with an affected Texas accent.

Our government and its corporate backers treat the rest of the world and the poor of our own country with the same clueless arrogance we used to despise in Europeans. We aren’t Bugs Bunny any more.

I agree with Juan Cole — Only when the age of colonialism is truly over can the postcolonial wars end. And, applying that to Iraq, I think we need to extract ourselves in the least imperialist way possible.

And I think Webb (and Wesley Clark) is right that the first step to withdrawal is “an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy.” Just leaving is, I think, another form of imperialist arrogance. We need to consult — and that means listen to, not dictate — with the people who are going to be left with the mess. That includes the nations bordering Iraq, including Syria and Iran, as well as the various factions within Iraq.

Of course we can’t allow ourselves to be bogged down in endless negotiations; withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq must begin as soon as possible. But if the U.S. started to show some genuine respect for the sovereign nations and people of the Middle East it would do both us and them a world of good.

As for Brooks and Ignatius and the Bushies and the neocons — buy them some Risk board games and let them enjoy their fantasies in a less harmful way.

Barnburner

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Hagel is shrill.

[Video has disappeared.]

You can read the transcript at TPM Muckraker.

Bill Brubaker, Debbi Wilgoren and Howard Schneider write for the Washington Post:

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee today passed a nonbinding resolution opposing a troop surge in Iraq, rebuffing the key element of President Bush’s new strategy to end the 46-month-old war, which has claimed the lives of more than 3,000 U.S. service members.

The 12-9 vote came after committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) urged his colleagues to approve the bipartisan measure, calling it “an attempt to save the president from making a significant mistake.”

Yeah, I know, it’s nonbinding.

Hagel was the only Republican to vote for the measure.

You think Dems are timid? Suddenly the Republicans are even wussier. They don’t like the war, they say, but a nonbinding resolution against it is going too far.

The ranking Republican on the committee, Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), urged committee members to oppose the resolution drafted by Biden and Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine). …

… In debate this morning, Lugar warned that passage would be “the legislative equivalent of a sound bite,” would allow Congress to wash its hands of responsibility for the war and would weaken America’s standing in the eyes of foreign observers.

“We don’t need a resolution to confirm that there is broad discomfort” with the war, Lugar said. “If Congress is going to provide constructive oversight, they must get involved in the weeds” of the policy.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) also opposed the resolution because, he said, it would not be binding on Bush and “will have absolutely zero affect on the administration.” But Corker said he was “not persuaded” the troop surge is “the right thing to do.”

Wusses, I say. They can’t even stand up to put the White House on notice that the Senate disagrees. Does Senator Lugar think the White House is going to invite him over to “get involved in the weeds”?

Health Care and Poison Pills

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Awhile back Harold Meyerson wrote a column called “Master of the Poison Pill” in which he outlined the Karl Rove method of taking an issue away from the opposition. For example, in 2002 the Dems were getting traction on their proposal for a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, which the White House opposed. When the Bushies decided to flip-flop and create the DHS, they inserted a union-busting poison pill into the bill. Dems balked, and the Bushies promptly claimed the DHS as their own invention, accusing Dems of being opposed to national security.

Sometimes it’s more than just a pill being used to poison a debate. Wingnuts still equate opposition to the war in Iraq with being “soft” on national security, even though Iraq ain’t doin’ a bleeping thing on behalf of national security except draining resources that could be put to better use elsewhere while causing more people to hate us. The Bushies tried to pull something like this with Bush’s Social Security “reform”; Dems were accused of being unwilling to “fix” Social Security because they didn’t back Bush’s plan. Fortunately the American people realized the “plan” was ridiculous.

I’m already seeing signs that the Right is going to use Bush’s utterly absurd health care proposals to claim that Democrats aren’t serious about health care reform. There are two columns in the Washington Post today that say Dems are poopyheads for not even listening to Bush’s “ideas.” One is by the already mentioned and cognitively challenged Ruth Marcus, whom Brad DeLong and Ezra Klein skewer a lot better than I did. The other is business columnist Steven Pearlstein:

… the most surprising and encouraging development is that a president who for six years has only nibbled around the edges of health-care issues has weighed in with some bold ideas to expand coverage, rein in costs and bring some fairness to the tax code. And get this: It actually involves raising taxes on the rich and lavishly insured and giving the money to the working poor and the uninsured.

Given that, you’d think Democrats would have welcomed a politically courageous proposal to put a cap on one of the biggest and most regressive features of the individual income-tax code. But instead, they’ve shifted reflexively into partisan attack mode, mischaracterizing the impacts of the proposal and shamelessly parroting the propaganda from the labor dinosaurs at the AFL-CIO.

“Dead on arrival,” declared Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), chairman of a key health subcommittee in the House, hinting at a dark conspiracy to kill off employer-sponsored health insurance.

In fact, Pete Stark’s web site proudly states:

I’ve introduced a Constitutional Amendment to establish a right to health care for of equal high quality for every American. If ratified, this would force Congress to make health care coverage available to all Americans. My preferred approach to universal coverage is to build on the success of the Medicare program, which provides universal health care for our nation’s seniors and people with disabilities.

Sounds to me as if Rep. Stark has already moved beyond the employer-based health insurance model, and that Steven Pearlstein is parroting propaganda from the policy dinosaurs at the Heritage Foundation.

Pearlstein goes on to sing the praises of Bush’s proposal while accusing Dems of “class warfare.” He also says,

Almost every health economist agrees that the tax subsidy for employer-paid health insurance is not only unfair but that it also encourages people to buy too much insurance, consume too much health care and pay too much for both. Bush deserves praise for having the political courage to confront the issue.

Mr. Pearlstein, meet Paul Krugman.

Some nameless dweeb at Opinion Journal credits Bush for initiating a discussion on health care:

The U.S. has long needed a debate over health care and tax subsidies, and President Bush got ready to rumble last night with his proposal to make insurance more affordable for most Americans.

That was bad enough, but in the very next sentence the dweeb actually wrote “Americans have the most advanced health care in the world,” meaning the dweeb plans to rumble with his head firmly planted up his ass. That should be a sight. Although notice he wrote “most advanced” instead of “best,” and it’s possible he could make an argument for “most advanced.” Years of “market forces” have given us a system that is grand at delivering state-of-the-art, boutique health services to the wealthy, even as poor women lack basic prenatal care and emergency rooms close.

The dweeb puts forth more howlers, such as:

These new [private health insurance] products are also likely to be policies that put individuals directly in charge of more routine spending. That’s because removing the tax advantage would mean it will make less financial sense to “insure” for predictable expenses like several annual office visits.

In other words, he thinks insurers should not be covering preventative medicine, meaning people are less likely to indulge in those gold-plated, frivolous office visits to get their cholesterol monitored or their hearts checked or some such. Unfortunately, skimping on preventative care is a sure way to drive up costs overall.

That in turn could put pressure on health care providers to post–and actually compete on–prices. Such new price awareness might even generate pressure for states that overregulate their insurance markets (New York, Massachusetts) to ease their costly mandates

The “costly mandates” prevent insurers from refusing insurance to people who have pre-existing health problems. In states without these “costly mandates,” insurers can refuse to insure people with health problems. That reduces the insurers’ costs but doesn’t exactly solve the health care problem.

It’s true that additional subsidies might be needed for some people with chronic illnesses who might have a harder time finding private insurance in this kind of world. And we’d also like to see a more national insurance market, with companies able to sell policies over the Internet free of the worst state mandates.

You see the problem. While the dweeb casually acknowledges that a lot of people will need “additional subsidies,” he goes ahead and endorses the very policies that create the pool of people who need “additional subsidies.”

Insurance works by pooling risk. The premiums paid by people who don’t file claims help pay for the claims that are filed. It’s true that many kinds of insurers charge more for people who have higher risks, such as a teenage driver. But essentially what the private health insurance industry wants is to insure pools of healthy people and force those with chronic health problems onto the mercy of taxpayers. If taxpayers are going to be stuck paying for the high-risk pool anyway, one wonders why we need private insurers at all. One big national system that puts everyone into the same pool would be more cost-effective for taxpayers, obviously.

The dweeb concludes,

This status quo won’t hold, and the political race is going to be between those who want to move to a more genuine market and consumer-based health care, and those who want to move toward Canada, Europe and more government control. The Bush plan ought to jump start that debate.

Many nations have devised national health care plans in which people are free to choose their own doctors, make their own decisions, and keep their medical records private from the government. See Ezra Klein’s Health of Nations series for details on what works and what doesn’t. But what we have here is even worse than government control, because citizens still (although barely) have some say in what government does. Instead we have control by the private insurance industry, meaning people with no medical licenses right now are shuffling papers and deciding who gets treatment and who doesn’t.

See also: MaxSpeak, The Carpetbagger, Kevin Drum. Brad DeLong thinks the whole proposal is a bluff:

I believe it is overwhelmingly likely that this is, in fact, a bluff. And it is not clear to me why anybody should be in the business of welcoming things that are not “real solutions.”

We should certainly welcome real solutions. But otherwise it seems to me that we are still in the standard Bush administration game of Dingbut Kabuki. The administration has made no effort to convince us that this will do more good in terms of redistributing income and increasing access to health insurance than it will do harm in magnifying adverse selection problems.

About Last Night

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Jonathan Alter is impressed. The speech was powerful, he says. It was tough minded. The speaker has a sense of narrative and drama. Yes, Jim Webb did a great job. Bush, not so much.

Something unprecedented happened tonight, beyond the doorkeeper announcing, “Madame Speaker.” For the first time ever, the response to the State of the Union Message overshadowed the president’s big speech. Virginia Sen. James Webb, in office only three weeks, managed to convey a muscular liberalism—with personal touches—that left President Bush’s ordinary address in the dust.

Alter actually speculated about a place for Webb on the 2008 ticket. Webb is said to be a bad campaigner, but I have to admit it’s a tempting idea.

Webb was given a speech to read by the Democratic leadership. He threw it out and wrote his own.

Good man.

Webb is seen as a moderate or even conservative Democrat, but this was a populist speech that quoted Andrew Jackson, founder of the Democratic Party and champion of the common man. The speech represented a return to the tough-minded liberalism of Scoop Jackson and Hubert Humphrey, but by quoting Republicans Teddy Roosevelt (on “improper corporate influence”) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (on ending the Korean War), he reinforced the argument that President Bush had taken the GOP away from its roots.

And I think Webb could help take the Democratic Party back to its liberal roots. It’s way past time to remind people that conservatism and liberalism are not defined by laundry lists of issues, like being for or against raising taxes or legal abortion. These words are defined by what you think government is for, and how you think a people and their government relate to each other. But that’ll have to be another post.

If you missed Webb’s speech, you can watch the video here or read the transcript here.

The consensus on the SOTU itself was that it was tepid and far from the barn-burner Bush needed to deliver to revive his presidency. For detailed analysis of the President’s “proposals,” see the Drum Major Institute.

At The Agonist, Sean-Paul Kelley brings up something I missed — that at one point Bush dropped the “ic” from “Democratic.”

Dropping the “ic” from the word “Democratic” may seem insignificant, but it was almost certainly a deliberate move by Bush, who has used the phrase “the Democrat Party” for months as a way of needling his opponents. … Such a little, little man. So unable to rise above his small mindedness.

See also Media Matters.

At Sisyphus Shrugged, Julia pounces on the proposal to double the current capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Meet David Koch. Mr. Koch is a Bush pioneer, a huge Republican donor, and a founder, funder and board member of the Cato Institute.

Mr. Koch has the contract to fill the SPR on a cost-plus basis. The price you pay for heating oil and at the pump would be based on competition between you and Mr. Koch for the available oil.

Think about it.

Steven Thomma writes at McClatchy Newspapers about Bush and “bipartisanship”:

George Bush tried to go home Tuesday night.

His goal was what he thought he left behind in Texas when he was a Republican governor with a Democratic legislature. But the mythical bipartisan place he tried to reach out to in his State of the Union address Tuesday was never like the one he romanticized in Texas. It’s not what he’s built in six years in Washington. And today it’s as elusive as Oz. …

… the chasm between the parties is wide and deep, the politics between them are poisonous and Bush bears much of the blame.

After reaching out to Democrats his first year, Bush governed after the 2001 terrorist attacks as the leader of a one-party state.

In Congress, his party locked Democrats out of negotiations, then hammered votes through without chance of input.

From the White House, Bush tacked “signing statements” onto bills he signed and used the threat of terrorism in three successive elections to attack Democrats as weak or, worse, aiding the enemy. Last fall he warned that if the Democrats won control of Congress, “terrorists win and America loses.”

That makes it hard for Democrats to take his olive branch Tuesday without looking for thorns.

Then Thomma mentions the real speech.

The Democrats signaled in response that they’re not in the mood for compromise either – on Iraq or at home. They want Bush to get U.S. troops out of Iraq and shift the government away from the wealthy and toward the poor.

“If he does, we will join him,” said Sen. James Webb. D-Va., who gave his party’s formal response to Bush’s speech. “If he does not, we will be showing him the way.”

Webb’s da man.

The New York Times‘s editorial on the SOTU also points to Bush’s phony “bipartisanship.”

The White House spin ahead of George W. Bush’s seventh State of the Union address was that the president would make a bipartisan call to revive his domestic agenda with “bold and innovative concepts.” The problem with that was obvious last night — in six years, Mr. Bush has shown no interest in bipartisanship, and his domestic agenda was set years ago, with huge tax cuts for wealthy Americans and crippling debt for the country. …

… When Republicans controlled Congress and the White House, Mr. Bush’s only real interest was in making their majority permanent; consultation meant telling the Democrats what he had decided. …

…Now that the Democrats have taken Congress, Mr. Bush is acting as if he’d had the door to compromise open all along and the Democrats had refused to walk through it.

The Times editorial also explains Bush’s health care proposal succinctly:

Last night, Mr. Bush also acted as if he were really doing something to help the 47 million people in this country who don’t have health insurance. What he offered, by the White House’s own estimate, would take a few million off that scandalously high number and shift the burden to the states. Mr. Bush’s plan would put a new tax on Americans who were lucky enough to still have good health-care coverage through their employers. Some large portion of those are middle class and represented by the labor unions that Mr. Bush and the Republicans are dedicated to destroying.

At WaPo, Ruth Marcus accuses Dems of “knee-jerk opposition.”

Listening to Democratic reaction to Bush’s new health insurance proposal, you get the sense that if Bush picked a plank right out of the Democratic platform — if he introduced Hillarycare itself — and stuck it in his State of the Union address, Democrats would churn out press releases denouncing it.

She admits that the Dems’ antipathy to Bush is largely of Bush’s making, but she actually thinks that Bush’s “health care plan” is reasonable, which is proof she’s an idiot. Even Kevin Drum recognizes it’s a dumb plan.

You know a Bush SOTU has failed when the righties are downplaying SOTUs generally as non-events.

Again, for fact-checking and detailed analysis of the SOTU, see the Drum Major Institute. And here are links to more analyses:

Fred Kaplan, Slate: Bush still doesn’t understand the war

Gerard Baker, Times (UK): Analysis: Bush tries to be a uniter, not a divider

John Dickerson, Slate: Lame Duck Soup

Joshua Holland, AlterNet: Nixon would have been proud

Walter Shapiro, Salon: Two long years to go.

The Live SOTU Live Blog

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Here we go. The legislators are filing into the chamber. The Dick is wearing a purple tie. The speaker is in a mint green suit. I always notice colors.

Remember, if you want to read along, the text is here.

The First Lady is in cherry red. The chief justices are in black. The Secretary of State is in black. I believe that’s Elizabeth Dole in a magenta pants suit.

It’s 9:06 and no President yet.

It’s 9:08 and no President yet.

OK, there he is. Navy suit, light blue tie.

9:12 and they’re still applauding. Speaker Pelosi just said “Welcome Mr. President,” and she has gaveled the room quiet and introduced the president.

I have a high privilege and distinct honor of my own — as the first President to begin the State of the Union message with these words: Madam Speaker.

Big cheer, standing applause.

The Creature looks pleased with himself. He isn’t as scared as he was in the recent “surge” speech.

Some in this Chamber are new to the House and Senate — and I congratulate the Democratic majority.

Applause.

Congress has changed, but our responsibilities have not. Each of us is guided by our own convictions — and to these we must stay faithful. Yet we are all held to the same standards, and called to serve the same good purposes: To extend this Nation’s prosperity … to spend the people’s money wisely … to solve problems, not leave them to future generations … to guard America against all evil, and to keep faith with those we have sent forth to defend us.

He said that with a straight face.

Our citizens don’t much care which side of the aisle we sit on — as long as we are willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done.

Translation: Play ball with me, or else.

Here are his three domestic priorities.

First, we must balance the Federal budget.

Snowball’s chance in hell.

We can do so without raising taxes.

Seems to me aplause only comes from one side of the hall. Dems are sitting on their hands.

We set a goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009 — and met that goal 3 years ahead of schedule.

He did that by off-budget spending and by inflating the deficit projections.

The second thing he wants to do is get rid of earmarks, which everyone wants to do until it’s their earmarks.

With enough good sense and good will, you and I can fix Medicare and Medicaid — and save Social Security.

Yeah, by keeping your mitts off of ’em.

Now he’s calling for expanding on the “success” of No Child Left Behind.

A future of hope and opportunity requires that all our citizens have affordable and available health care.

Big applause.

I discussed the health insurance part of the speech in the last post., but here it is again:

When it comes to health care, government has an obligation to care for the elderly, the disabled, and poor children. We will meet those responsibilities. For all other Americans, private health insurance is the best way to meet their needs. But many Americans cannot afford a health insurance policy.

Tonight, I propose two new initiatives to help more Americans afford their own insurance. First, I propose a standard tax deduction for health insurance that will be like the standard tax deduction for dependents. Families with health insurance will pay no income or payroll taxes on $15,000 of their income. Single Americans with health insurance will pay no income or payroll taxes on $7,500 of their income. With this reform, more than 100 million men, women, and children who are now covered by employer-provided insurance will benefit from lower tax bills.

At the same time, this reform will level the playing field for those who do not get health insurance through their job. For Americans who now purchase health insurance on their own, my proposal would mean a substantial tax savings — $4,500 for a family of four making $60,000 a year. And for the millions of other Americans who have no health insurance at all, this deduction would help put a basic private health insurance plan within their reach. Changing the tax code is a vital and necessary step to making health care affordable for more Americans.

My second proposal is to help the States that are coming up with innovative ways to cover the uninsured. States that make basic private health insurance available to all their citizens should receive Federal funds to help them provide this coverage to the poor and the sick. I have asked the Secretary of Health and Human Services to work with Congress to take existing Federal funds and use them to create “Affordable Choices” grants. These grants would give our Nation’s Governors more money and more flexibility to get private health insurance to those most in need.

There are many other ways that Congress can help. We need to expand Health Savings Accounts … help small businesses through Association Health Plans … reduce costs and medical errors with better information technology … encourage price transparency … and protect good doctors from junk lawsuits by passing medical liability reform. And in all we do, we must remember that the best health care decisions are made not by government and insurance companies, but by patients and their doctors.

I don’t have time to take this section apart properly, but it just plain doesn’t provide anything for people with below-average incomes, and it doesn’t help people with average incomes much, either. The “patients and their doctors” line got a big ovation, but the fact is that as long as private insurance companies are involved, private insurance companies get the last word.

Here comes the immigration part of the speech.

We should establish a legal and orderly path for foreign workers to enter our country to work on a temporary basis. As a result, they won’t have to try to sneak in — and that will leave border agents free to chase down drug smugglers, and criminals, and terrorists. We will enforce our immigration laws at the worksite, and give employers the tools to verify the legal status of their workers — so there is no excuse left for violating the law. We need to uphold the great tradition of the melting pot that welcomes and assimilates new arrivals. And we need to resolve the status of the illegal immigrants who are already in our country — without animosity and without amnesty.

He’s also doubling the size of the border patrol.

OK, here’s the annual “we are too dependent on foreign oil” section of the speech. No switch grass this year, though.

The parts of the speech about energy conservation sound familiar; I’m wondering who has made these promises in the past.

To reach this goal, we must increase the supply of alternative fuels, by setting a mandatory Fuels Standard to require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017 — this is nearly 5 times the current target. At the same time, we need to reform and modernize fuel economy standards for cars the way we did for light trucks — and conserve up to 8.5 billion more gallons of gasoline by 2017.

Needs lots of fact checking.

I ask Congress to double the current capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Wouldn’t that raise the price of gas and oil?

As President, I have a duty to nominate qualified men and women to vacancies on the Federal bench. And the United States Senate has a duty as well — to give those nominees a fair hearing, and a prompt up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.

Of course, that responsibility only applies when there’s a Republican in the White House.

We know with certainty that the horrors of that September morning were just a glimpse of what the terrorists intend for us — unless we stop them.

Since 9/11, has he ever made it through a speech about anything without mentioning 9/11?

Yet one question has surely been settled — that to win the war on terror we must take the fight to the enemy.

And if we don’t do that, we pick on other people and make new enemies!

The evil that inspired and rejoiced in 9/11 is still at work in the world. And so long as that is the case, America is still a Nation at war.

Translation: As long as Bush and his war industry buddies have anything to say about it, America is still a Nation at War.

By killing and terrorizing Americans, they want to force our country to retreat from the world and abandon the cause of liberty.

Must … not … throw … lamp … at… television.

In the 6th year since our Nation was attacked, I wish I could report to you that the dangers have ended. They have not. And so it remains the policy of this Government to use every lawful and proper tool of intelligence, diplomacy, law enforcement, and military action to do our duty, to find these enemies, and to protect the American people.

Translation: bullshit bullshit bullshit

To prevail, we must remove the conditions that inspire blind hatred, and drove 19 men to get onto airplanes and come to kill us.

I thought they hated us for our freedom.

In 2005, the world watched as the citizens of Lebanon raised the banner of the Cedar Revolution … drove out the Syrian occupiers … and chose new leaders in free elections.

And in 2006 we saw Israel bomb the hell out of Lebanon and put Hezbollah back in the saddle.

Now he’s explaining how awful it all is in Iraq and how those extremists are doing unacceptable things. He’s gone off script a bit, I think.

Ladies and gentlemen: On this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle. So let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory.

“Victory” being a bugaboo in Bush’s head. Essentially he’s going through the “surge” part of the speech here. Many people not applauding.

We did not drive al Qaeda out of their safe haven in Afghanistan only to let them set up a new safe haven in a free Iraq.

Why did you let al Qaeda escape Afghanistan, Dipstick?

If you can’t stand the lies and bullshit, click here for a preview of Senator Jim Webb’s rebuttal. (Yay!)

Now they’re applauding the troops. (applaud)

Tonight I ask the Congress to authorize an increase in the size of our active Army and Marine Corps by 92,000 in the next 5 years. A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them. And it would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.

Volunteer civilian reserve corps? Let me guess — it’ll save Halliburton from having to pay people.

He wants to save the people of Dafur, which got a big standing ovation. Nobody is against the people of Dafur.

He wants to fight HIV/Aids and malaria in Africa, which is fine. But no mention of New Orleans.

Now he’s acknowledging people in the gallery. Dikembe Mutombo is sitting next to Lara Bush. Julie Aigner-Clark (Baby Einstein company), Wesley Autrey (saved a man from being killed by a subway in Harlem – big applause), Tommy Rieman (Silver Star in Iraq) are the other recognees.

We’re into the last four paragraphs, and before too long Bush will be telling us that the State of the Union is strong. I’m way more interested in what Senator Webb is going to say.

Ugh– smug Bush grin. He believes this shit.

Well, it’s over but for the clapping. Dems look less than wildly enthusiastic.

Olbermann: Not a particularly bad speech. Not a particularly good speech.

Hey, is Joe Lieberman there? Bush didn’t seek out Holy Joe to smooch him.

Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews and Tom Brokaw are discussing references to Hezbollah and wondering why he is equating the with al Qaeda. That isn’t new, though is it? All Muslim militants are the same in Bush World.

Here we go — JIM WEBB!!

Remember New Orleans!! And now that Dems are here, maybe we’ll do something about energy.

When one looks at the health of our economy, it’s almost as if we are living in two different countries. Some say that things have never been better. The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared. When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it’s nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day.

Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time lows as a percentage of national wealth, even though the productivity of American workers is the highest in the world. Medical costs have skyrocketed. College tuition rates are off the charts. Our manufacturing base is being dismantled and sent overseas. Good American jobs are being sent along with them.

In short, the middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table. Our workers know this, through painful experience. Our white-collar professionals are beginning to understand it, as their jobs start disappearing also. And they expect, rightly, that in this age of globalization, their government has a duty to insist that their concerns be dealt with fairly in the international marketplace.

This is a good, honest, no-bullshit speech.

With respect to foreign policy, this country has patiently endured a mismanaged war for nearly four years. Many, including myself, warned even before the war began that it was unnecessary, that it would take our energy and attention away from the larger war against terrorism, and that invading and occupying Iraq would leave us strategically vulnerable in the most violent and turbulent corner of the world.

Well, you can read the speech here. This is a much better rebuttal than the Dems have presented after past SOTUs.

Chris Matthews: Jim Webb is a liberal conservative. [I meant to explain to Matthews that Webb is a liberal, not a conservative.]

Well, that was the speech. Go ahead and discuss. I’ll post a round-up of reaction tomorrow.

SOTU Live Blog

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Live blogging will begin at 9 pm. If you can’t stand the suspense, you can get a sneak preview of part of the speech at Raw Story. The excerpts don’t include much about health care, which may mean nothing, or it may mean there will be less about health care in the speech than originally leaked. Bush has a history of faking people out with pre-SOTU leaks that don’t, in fact, make it into the SOTU.

“Bipartisanship” promises to be the overriding theme of the speech. “Bipartisanship” means, of course, that the Dems should do what Bush tells them.

Courtesy Bob Geiger:

Update: Here’s the full text.

Update update: Here’s the part of the speech about health care:

Tonight, I propose two new initiatives to help more Americans afford their own insurance. First, I propose a standard tax deduction for health insurance that will be like the standard tax deduction for dependents. Families with health insurance will pay no income or payroll taxes on $15,000 of their income. Single Americans with health insurance will pay no income or payroll taxes on $7,500 of their income. With this reform, more than 100 million men, women, and children who are now covered by employer-provided insurance will benefit from lower tax bills.

At the same time, this reform will level the playing field for those who do not get health insurance through their job. For Americans who now purchase health insurance on their own, my proposal would mean a substantial tax savings — $4,500 for a family of four making $60,000 a year. And for the millions of other Americans who have no health insurance at all, this deduction would help put a basic private health insurance plan within their reach. Changing the tax code is a vital and necessary step to making health care affordable for more Americans.

I don’t see how this is going to help families living on less than $60,000 a year. Even $4,500 isn’t going to cover much of the insurance cost for a family of four.

My second proposal is to help the States that are coming up with innovative ways to cover the uninsured. States that make basic private health insurance available to all their citizens should receive Federal funds to help them provide this coverage to the poor and the sick. I have asked the Secretary of Health and Human Services to work with Congress to take existing Federal funds and use them to create “Affordable Choices” grants. These grants would give our Nation’s Governors more money and more flexibility to get private health insurance to those most in need.

Nothing about taking money away from Medicare, but who knows how they propose to pay for this without raising taxes.

There are many other ways that Congress can help. We need to expand Health Savings Accounts … help small businesses through Association Health Plans … reduce costs and medical errors with better information technology … encourage price transparency … and protect good doctors from junk lawsuits by passing medical liability reform. And in all we do, we must remember that the best health care decisions are made not by government and insurance companies, but by patients and their doctors.

Translation: Government will see to it that health care decisions will be made by insurance companies, as they are now.

Slaying the Jabberdick

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From Think Progress:

Under oath, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff Scooter Libby told a grand jury that he first learned that Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent from conversations with the media. In fact, he first learned that information from Vice President Cheney himself. …

– “Vice President Cheney himself directed Scooter Libby to essentially go around protocol and deal with the press and handle press himself…to try to beat back the criticism of administration critic Joe Wilson.”

– Cheney personally “wrote out for Scooter Libby what Libby should say in a conversation with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper.”

– “Scooter Libby destroyed a note from Vice President Cheney about their conversations and about how Vice President Cheney wanted the Wilson matter handled.”

Digby:

Norah O’Donnell is asking Andy Card and Leon Panetta if the president is going to have to ask Dick Cheney to resign as a result of what’s being alleged at the Libby Trial. (They both punted.)

And just think — Dick the Dick is supposed to show up and sit next to Nancy Pelosi at the SOTU tonight. Wheeee!

Tonight’s the Night!

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Be sure to drop by tonight for blow-by-blow live blogging of the State of the Union address. You are welcome to watch the SOTU along with me and add your commentary to the comments. Or, you can blow off the SOTU and add your commentary to the comments, anyway. I don’t know that it matters. You know the boy ain’t gonna say shit. I only plan to watch so I can see Nancy Pelosi looming in the background.

However, there are some things we can watch for, like whether the creature can pull off looking confident, or if he says something that hasn’t already been leaked. Advance word is that the creature plans to focus on domestic policy; stuff that isn’t so much, you know, Iraq.

The President is expected to announce a major health care initiative, which I discussed earlier this week, here and here. Today we have the exciting news that The Dumbest Health Care Plan Ever!â„¢ has gotten even dumber. Christopher Lee and Lori Montgomery write for the Washington Post,

The best solutions to the problem of nearly 47 million Americans lacking health insurance are to be found in states across the country, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said Monday.

President Bush will propose in his State of the Union address tonight, Leavitt said, that the federal government redirect some money from programs such as Medicaid and Medicare into a new grant program to help states devise and implement plans ensuring access to affordable health insurance.

Leavitt, who did not specify a funding amount, said the new Affordable Choices Initiative would help fuel efforts already underway in states such as Massachusetts and California to guarantee access to basic health coverage for everyone.

“The aspiration for all Americans to have access to a basic insurance policy at an affordable price is a widely held sentiment,” Leavitt said. “There will be two diverging philosophies on how to solve this problem. One will be to have the federal government ensure everybody, and the other will be, ‘Let the states lead.’ “

The Massachusetts Plan hit some rocks recently when somebody figured out that the “affordable” insurance the plan promised would cost $380 on average per month for an individual, and “up to $580 per month for a 56-year-old.” The catch is that insurance is mandated, so poor, uninsured folks in Massachusetts are expected to scrape this money together somehow or be in violation of law

But from a wingnut perspective, the Affordable Choices Initiative would not only slice a few pennies off the cost of health insurance, it would gut Medicare and Medicaid in the bargain! Win/win!

WaPo’s Lee and Montgomery continue,

Meanwhile, another Bush health care proposal drew a chilly reception from some Democrats. Bush will urge the creation of new tax breaks for the purchase of health insurance, especially by those who do not get coverage through work. Bush advisers acknowledged Monday that the plan initially would cost the federal government millions of dollars in lost revenue, but said that would be offset by more revenue in later years and the plan would pay for itself within the first decade.

And you know that whenever a Bushie says a plan will “pay for itself” — we’ll be robbed.

[Update: Ezra has more details on The Dumbest Health Care Plan Ever!â„¢]

Here are some links to keep you busy as we anticipate the big event:

Bush To Face Skeptical Congress

Diminishing clout presents challenges for Bush

From Hero to Goat

How chilly a reception in the House chamber?

Nearly two-thirds in U.S. have given up on Iraq

Saving Their Seats, and Maybe the Country

Stale of the Union

State of Indifference

State of the Union: Irate

[Update:] Trying to Change the Subject