Hysteria du Jour

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Today’s hysteria is that Nancy Pelosi is planning to get health care out of the way through a process called “deem and pass,” which Republicans are now screaming is unconstitutional even though it wasn’t when they used to use it. For further explanation, see Steve Benen, “The IOKIYAR Rule, Procedural Edition,” and Ezra Klein, “The Arms Race of Rules.”

In brief, “deem and pass,” also called the “self-executing rule,” would allow the House to “deem” the Senate bill passed and then the House would vote only on the “fixes” to it. As Steve Benen explains, this used to be a rare procedures until 15 years ago, when the Newt Gingrich-led Republican majority in the House discovered it and began using it to pass all sorts of bills.

In 2005 the group Public Citizen challenged the constitutionality of deem and pass in federal court. At the time Nancy Pelosi, Louise Slaughter, and Henry Waxman filed amicus briefs supporting this move. And now that the majority shoe is on the other foot, Pelosi is resorting to the dreaded rule and Republicans dredged up Public Citizen’s old arguments against it.

According to some of them, the rule was “devised” by Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter — they’re calling it the “Slaughter House Rule” — because she is chair of the Rules Committee. But she didn’t “devise” it. It’s been around since before she was in Congress.

As Steve B. says, “It’s a familiar pattern — Republicans open doors, and then whine incessantly when Democrats walk through them.”

Weirdly, many of the wingnuts are screaming about the hypocrisy of Pelosi and Slaughter, but I’m not seeing much mention of Waxman. Gynophobia, much?

Anyway, a U.S. District Court ruled against Public Citizen and decided “deem and pass” is constitutional. And what I think is that once they’ve got health care done, both the House and the Senate should engage in a major rule overhaul.

I agree with Steve M. that the Right will not let go of this and will use it to tar Democrats as arrogant, anti-democratic weasels, and health care reform will be called illegitimate if it’s signed into law. There is a class of people who simply will not let go of a perceived grievance, and wingnuts are it.

I have met people who still insist that West Virginia is not a real state because it was carved out of the confederate Virginia during the Civil War and admitted to the Union while most Virginia menfolk were traipsing around with Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. And when I say they “insist,” I mean they are passionate about it.

But guess what? West Virginia is still a state. And the enormous majority of Americans consider anyone who thinks otherwise to be demented.

And while I’d rather they pass health care reform some other way, if that’s the only way they can do it, they should go ahead. Not to do so is letting the bullies win. I think most Americans will like the HCR bill once they come to understand what is actually in it.

About a Bill

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Bill the BillAccording to Jonathan Cohn, the House Budget Committee will convene this afternoon to hold a hearing and write reconciliation instructions so the HCR bill doesn’t need a 60-vote majority when it goes back to the Senate. Also, the House Rules Committee has to finalize amendments, and the House probably won’t act on the bill until it is sure the Senate will pass the amendments, and that won’t happen until Harry Reid presents the reconciliation package to his caucus.

When the House acts, there’s no certainty there will be enough votes in the Hous. Smart people are saying there will be, but that it will be close.

The House Budget Committee has posted a bill online that Ezra Klein says is the bill that will become the reconciliation bill.

The original reconciliation instructions require Democrats to use a bill written before 10/15/09, and this bill fits, well, the bill. What’ll happen next is that the legislation will head to the Rules Committee, who’ll erase what’s currently on the page and replace it with the real reconciliation package. It’s a bit like how painters will reuse a canvas they’ve already painted on, though they’re doing it to save money and the House and Senate do it because their rulebooks are confusing.

OK.

The White House is pushing for the health care effort to finish this week.

Furlong’s Off-the-Books Spy Operation

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The New York Times just posted a story about a Defense Department official running an off-the-books spy operation with private contractors. It’s late and my brain has shut down, but this seems significant.

“While no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up, it’s generally a bad idea to have freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond,” one American government official said. But it is still murky whether Mr. Furlong had approval from top commanders or whether he might have been running a rogue operation.

Merlin Olsen 1940-2010

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I just learned that former Los Angeles Rams defensive lineman Merlin Olsen died on March 11 of cancer. Those of you who don’t follow football might remember Olsen better as Jonathan Garvey on Little House on the Prairie. And those of us who couldn’t stand Little House on the Prairie might remember him best from FTD commercials. Still, he always seemed like a very decent man, and I’m surprised his death didn’t make more of a splash in the news.

HCR Good for America, Smart for Democrats

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In the Washington Post, Joel Benenson explains why polls showing opposition to health care reform are misleading and why passage of HCR is not a political risk for Democrats.

First, the split between approval and disapproval of the current health care reform bill is pretty close to even. The most recent poll at pollingreport.com, conducted March 2-8 by AP-GfK Roper, shows “approve” slightly ahead, 49 percent to 46 percent.

Further, Benenson says a couple of polls that asked follow-up questions found that a substantial minority — more than one-third in a recent Ipsos poll — of the “opposers” were against the bill because it doesn’t go far enough, not because it goes too far. It’s safe to say that the percentage of Americans who oppose the bill because they think it is too radically “liberal” is a minority. A large minority, but a minority nonetheless.

It’s also the case that a large number of opponents don’t know what’s in the bill, and when they are told about individual components of the bill, such as not permitting insurance companies to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, they tend to support those individual components.

Finally, the Big Truth is that while a majority of Americans don’t want “government-run health care,” the bleeping bill doesn’t establish any bleeping “government-run health care.” Except for Medicare and Medicaid, which already exist, everyone’s health care will still be insured by private insurance companies. Damn. But there’s no reason not to keep pushing for the public option in a separate bill.

Once HCR passes, for the overwhelming majority of Americans who already have insurance nothing is going to change. Their premiums won’t be suddenly jacked up, and they will have the same access to the same doctors in the same offices and hospitals.

I take it some of the tea baggers imagine doctors will be forced to work out of barbed-wire enclosed gulags, and that it will require a signed permission form from the Ministry of Rationed Health to see one. But when that doesn’t happen, and when tanks don’t appear in the streets and Grandma is not hauled off to the Soylent Green factory, a lot of the hysteria will fade away. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

I can even imagine the day when some of the same Republican gasbags who are fanning the hysteria flames to stop the bill from passing will take credit for it.

The biggest problem is that since many of the provisions won’t go into effect for two to four years, that will give the gasbags two to four more years to demagogue. We may have to fight to keep some or all of it from being repealed before it’s all even implemented.

But I agree with RJ Eskow — passing the bill is not just the right thing to do, but it will also help Dems politically. Pollsters and pundits who say otherwise are just pulling the old “briar patch” scam.

BTW — this week’s Big Liar Catapult the Propaganda Award is split between Jammie Wearing Fool and the Ace of Spades, who say it’s a lie that the HCR bill doesn’t fund abortions because “P. 2017 of HCR Bill Specifically Mentions Funding Abortions.” They don’t tell us what it says about abortion on page 2017, but it “specifically mentions” funding abortions. Therefore, Dems lie about the funding thing.

And I thought righties were claiming no one had read the bill. But there’s nothing about abortion on page 2017 of the Senate bill (HR 3590) that passed in December, which is supposed to represent the mostly final version. It doesn’t say anything about abortion on page 2017 of the now obsolete House bill (HR 3200) either.

Both bills specifically do mention abortion here and there, just not on page 2017. The Senate bill has a section that begins on page 2077 (did the Fool and the Ace get the number wrong?) that specifically mentions abortion, and it specifically says there will be no change in federal law regarding abortion. Timothy Noah explains why the Senate bill doesn’t fund abortions.

But I love the way the Fool and the Ace both “proved” Democrats lie about abortion funding in the bill by saying the bill “specifically mentions” abortion, never mind what “specifically” the bill actually says, and they can’t even get the page number right.

The Trouble With Textbooks

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By now you’ve probably heard that the Texas Board of Education has adopted standards for Texas public school textbooks that only a wingnut could love. Texas public school children will now be taught revisionist “history” and fundamentalist Christian propaganda in place of actual facts. They’ve even eliminated Thomas Jefferson. See also “Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change” in the New York Times and “Revisionaries” at Washington Monthly.

As Steve M. says, actual scholars were absent from the process. I doubt they were invited.

I will be interested to see how the textbook industry responds to this. Texas is the second-largest textbook market in the nation; Number One is California. In the past, we could probably have counted on the California adoption committee to nix the Texas revisions and demand a normal textbook. But I understand California public schools will not be buying new textbooks anytime soon.

Of the other 20 or so other states with textbook adoption policies, none have the market clout to countermand Texas, and most are in the South and Midwest anyway. The liberal northeast and Pacific coast states mostly allow local school boards to make textbook purchase decisions. Right now upper-level managers of U.S. textbook publishers no doubt are having long, intensive meetings and phone conferences trying to decide what to do about Texas.

For many years, textbook publishers have cranked out state-specific editions that meet individual adoption states’ guidelines, but the differences between state and national editions were mostly minor tweaks accommodated by black plate changes in the press run. Usually this meant that all editions had the same layout and illustrations, but where there had to be state-specific text, the black plate would be changed for the state print run, and the magenta, cyan, and yellow plates would stay in place. (See explanation of four-color process if this is confusing.) Years ago I did work on a social studies series in which the Texas and national editions had one chapter entirely different, but that was unusual.

However, since black plate changes are avoided as much as possible for the sake of economy, what Texas and California want in their textbooks influences everyone’s textbooks. Text is carefully written (by contracted development houses that work for all the publishers) to mince around anything that would piss off adoption committees, insuring that the text is thin, tasteless but non-controversial gruel. But the pictures are nice.

But this time the Texas revisions are so extensive I don’t see how the black plate change dodge alone would work. Publishers are likely to end up with books that are unsalable anywhere but in Texas and a few other, mostly rural, states. It is possible publishers will choose to publish Texas editions that are substantially different from national and other state editions. This will crank up the cost of individual textbooks even more than they are already, but the publishers may feel they don’t have a choice. I doubt anyone will choose to opt out of the Texas market.

I also think that someday big, behemoth textbook series will become as extinct as dinosaurs, and instead teachers will rely more on electronic content and on-demand printed literature, small print runs printed with newer digital technology instead of the big honking CMYK web presses. We’re not quite there yet, though.

Stuff to Read

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Via Ezra Klein, the Republican argument against Democrats passing health care reform.

Paul Krugman has a good column on the lies people have come to believe about HCR. The biggest lie is that HCR would be too expensive, when in fact it would save money, especially compared to doing nothing at all.

Example, from Krugman:

The second myth is that the proposed reform does nothing to control costs. To support this claim, critics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.

Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.

Kevin Drum: “Yes, the Health Care Bill Really Does Pay for Itself.”

Anything else worth reading today?

I’m So Confused

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About every half hour there’s more news from Congress about what’s going on with health care reform. Recent developments:

Harry Reid sent a letter scorching letter to Mitch McConnell. Do read.

Alex Koppelman wonders if the Dems will get the votes.

The Senate parliamentarian may have just thrown Dems a curve ball. President Obama must sign the health reform bill into law before Congress can go ahead with reconciliation.

Ezra Klein explains that the biggest barrier to getting HRC done is the “corrosive mistrust” between the House and the Senate.

Iraq = Fail 2

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I’ve written in the past about how the wingnut political cosmos is something like old Greek mythology (see, for example, “Why Sarah Palin Is a Goddess.”) In rightie mythology, many presidents — Republican ones, anyway — are gods with the power of bending mortals to their will with simple words and the occasional lightning bolt.

For example, in rightie myth, President Ronald Reagan went to Berlin in 1987 and called on the Soviets to “tear down this wall.” And then, in 1989, the wall came down. And if you listen to righties, you’d believe it came down entirely because of the godlike will of Reagan, who wasn’t even President in 1989. In the Real World, there were, um, lots of other things going on that caused the Berlin Wall to be dismantled. Brave people all over eastern Europe were rising up against Soviet dominance. And at long last the once-mighty Soviet Union was too depleted by its own blunders to maintain control.

So the Berlin Wall came down, as it surely would have done anyway, even if Saint Ronald of Blessed Memory had never made the speech. But saying that out loud is blasphemy in Wingnut World.

Lately some of the losers who were gung-ho to invade Iraq in 2003 are crawling out of the woodwork to declare victory (see, for example, “Iraq=Fail“). As I have written before, these declarations never take into account (1) the original, stated objectives of the invasion were never met; (2) the U.S. considerably weakened itself militarily and economically, possibly permanently. And, as of the most recent count, 4,382 American soldiers have been killed during their tours in Iraq.

Now we’ve got Jeff Jacoby, in a column headlined “Mission Accomplished, Indeed,” arguing that George W. Bush is responsible for “the transformation of Iraq from a hellish tyranny into a functioning democracy.” And then later he wrote, “Where Saddam once ruled a ghastly ‘republic of fear,’ Iraqis live today in democratic freedom and relative peace, dispelling daily the canard that democracy and Arab culture cannot co-exist.”

OK, so in the recent elections about 100 bombs went off, killing 38 people. I would say Jacoby’s standardas of “relative peace” are pretty low.

I also liked this part:

“Iraqis are not afraid of bombs anymore,’’ a middle-aged voter named Maliq Bedawi told a New York Times reporter as they stood amid the rubble of a Baghdad apartment building destroyed by a Katyusha rocket.

See, back in the days of Saddam Hussein’s hellish tyranny Iraqis were afraid of bombs because they were so rare. But according to some figures, by 2007 about 78,000 Iraqis had been killed by coalition airstrikes. I suppose you have to get numb after awhile. And thanks to the invasion and occupation, Iraq became a lightning rod for terrorist hotheads.

Further, I can’t tell from here whether Iraq is truly a “functioning democracy” or not. Voting by itself does not a “functioning democracy” make. The real test of a “functioning democracy” is whether the people of a nation are really governing themselves through elected representation, or whether the elected officials are mostly serving their own ends and just going through the motions of representing the people. One could ask the same question of the U.S., of course.

But if Iraq truly does become a functioning democracy, the primary credit has to go to Iraqis. If they can dig themselves out of what was done to their country and make something positive come of it, this would be a monumental accomplishment. I also think there were many ways the U.S. and the rest of the world could have hurried Saddam out and helped Iraq become democratic that would have been much less costly and violent.

Yes, there were some things the U.S. occupation did long after the invasion that were helpful to Iraqis, but this was not accomplishing our “mission.” This was cleaning up after our mess.

But in Wingnut World, if Iraq becomes a functioning democracy, it will be because the well-protected George W. Bush bravely sat in front of a camera and declared the U.S. would invade Iraq. The simple brown people of Iraq are now enjoying the benefits of Bush’s godlike beneficence.