Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Intellectual dishonesty

Max Baucus yesterday offered one of the more bizarre rationales for voting against including a public option — publicly administered health insurance plan — in healthcare reform:

Finance committee members rejected two amendments that would have created a public option. The votes were 15 to 8 and 13 to 10. Baucus, who has emerged as the central player in shaping the bill, was one of three Democrats who voted ‘no’ on both proposals. Baucus said he supports the principle of a public option as an alternative to private insurance. But he warned that including it could doom the bill to a Republican filibuster.

“No one has been able to show me how we can count up to 60 votes with a public option,” Baucus said. “I want a bill that can become law.”

So, to be clear: Baucus supports the public option but can’t vote for it unless everyone else does. So much for intellectual consistency.

The Baucus contradiction, of course, is one that most progressives have been criticizing (Rachel Maddow last night, in a comment laden with derision and snarky sarcasm, described the Baucus position as “leadership”).

Another intellectually suspect argument has been making the rounds, however, and it comes from the left, from the people seeking to get a public option into the bill. As anyone knows who has read this blog or my columns with the Packet Group or The Progressive Populist, I view the public option as a stop-gap but necessary measure. What I find disturbing is this argument, made last night by both Sen. Charles Schumer and Howard Dean on Maddow — and made by other progressives at other times regarding this bill: That Democrats should vote with the leadership on cloture and with their conscience on the bill.

MADDOW: You just heard my interview with Senator Schumer. And he said something that I haven‘t heard him articulate before, which is that Democratic leadership should be able to expect that even Democrats who are going to vote against health reform should vote for cloture, should vote to end the Republican filibuster, thereby making the threshold 51 votes instead of 60. What‘s your reaction?

DEAN: That‘s true. Core procedure in almost every legislature I have ever had anything to do with, including the national legislature, is, you can vote however you want on a bill, that‘s a conscience matter, but you owe it to your leadership who gives you your chairmanship and to vote with the leadership on procedural votes. And a filibuster is a procedural vote.

So, I would expect all of the people caucusing with the Democrats to allow a vote to go forward.

MADDOW: And.

DEAN: And so, you know, the chairman‘s argument is auspicious. You don‘t need 60 votes for a public option, you need 51 — under any circumstance, if the people who caucus with the Democratic Party and owe their chairs to the Democratic leadership are willing to do the right thing.

It’s a specious argument that unfortunately echoes the ones made by Republicans when Democrats threatened (they always threatened but rarely followed through) to filibuster hard-right judicial nominees. Let the nominee get an up-or-down vote.

That’s what Dean is arguing here, that whatever you believe you should allow a floor vote to occur. Sounds good in theory, but what if you know that allowing the floor vote will allow legislation you disagree with vehemently to pass. The cloture vote is the only power you have to stop the bill.

I’m not defending folks like Ben Nelson or Blanche Lincoln. Their stance on healthcare is indefensible. But they have a responsibility to use every tool they have in their arsenals to ensure that legislation they oppose does not become law.

The issue here is not that all good Democrats should fall in line. Rather, the issue is the filibuster itself and whether it really is anything more than an opportunity for a minority of senators to hold the rest of the Senate hostage.

I’ve written about this before (there was a point in time when I defended it, but shifted my view about four years ago$, when the Republicans threatened to jettison the filibuster to get their court nominees through. My reasoning was simple: It was an archaic technicality generally used to stop progress and thwart the democratic process. Rather than a simple majority of Senators (an unrepresentative body in and of itself), you potentially needed a supermajority of 60 — something that can be difficult when controversial legislation is on the table (think about the civil rights filibusters of the ’60s).

So, here we are, with a public healthcare option being incredibly popular (65 percent according to a recent CBS/NY Times poll) and offering the only real chance we’ll get to keep the health insurance companies honest, but failing to get through a committee because a handful of small-state Senators with power disproportionate to the size of their constituency are unwilling to get behind it.

All of this is possible because we continue to hang on to an archaic procedural “safeguard.”

Doggie diaries: The story of Rosie and Sophie Help, the dogs are winning!

I’m still shaking. Two-plus hours after the dogs went at each other, after Rosie grabbed onto Sophie near the ear and locked in, two-plus hours after Annie and I stupidly attempted to break them up by grabbing their collars — a horrifying couple of minutes — and I’m still shaking.

The fight, probably just the fourth since we have them (though four is four too many), made us realize that we need to bring the trainer back, that their willfulness, their jumping on guests as they come in, is just not acceptible. We need help.

So we’re bringing back our trainer, Pat, who knows her stuff. The problem has been us — we just haven’t followed through with the hard work.

If that doesn’t work, we’re going to have to call in Victoria Stillwell or Cesar Milan (he’s going to be at Barnes and Noble next week) for an emergency session.

It is quite depressing to find that, after owning dogs for 25 years, these two have us where they want us and not where we need to be.

The long, silly season

The Connecticut U.S. Senate race has started early — really early.

Sen. Chris Dodd, a longtime Democratic incumbent who holds the seat once held by his father, is under attack (with some cause) and facing a serious challenge.

This probably explains the TV ad I’ve seen several times over the last couple of days. It is from Linda McMahon, former CEO of the WWE — the wrestling empire. She’s not the frontrunner — not even in the top four, acccording to all the major campaign sites and most polls — but she’s already opening her wallet.

And that means that Connecticut voters — and those of us as far away as the northern half of New Jersey who share a television market — are in for a long, drawn out campaign season.

The public knows better than the pols: Reform health care now

There is no doubt that the American healthcare system needs to be changed.

The problem is that the public — the people who the reforms are supposed to help — doesn’t seem to understand how the amorphous change that has been placed on the table will fix things.

A mix of over-the-top and unhinged opposition from the far right and the GOP (are they the same thing at this point), a hands-off approach on the part of the president (until recently) and an overly technical and ridiculously complicated plan that may or may not include the one thing the public does understand (the public option) has created a level of confusion that is going to be difficult to overcome.

Consider this information from the poll released today by The New York Times:

Majorities of respondents said that they were confused about the health care argument and that Mr. Obama had not a good job in explaining what he was trying to accomplish.

“The Obama administration seems to have a plan, but I’m not understanding the exact details,” Paul Corkery, 59, a Democrat from Somerset, N.J., said in a follow-up interview.

However, and this is key, he continues to work in an environment in which the public is more likely to believe what he has to say than his opposition.

By a margin of 52 percent to 27 percent, Americans said Mr. Obama has better ideas about overhauling health care than Republicans. And the percentage of Americans who approve of how Mr. Obama has handled health care has gone from 40 percent in August to 47 percent now, about equal to where it was earlier in the year.

On one of the most contentious issues in the health care debate — whether to establish a government-run health insurance plan as an alternative to private insurers — nearly two-thirds of the country continues to favor the proposal, which is backed by Mr. Obama but has drawn intense fire from most Republicans and some moderate Democrats. The poll suggested that Mr. Obama’s big effort to deal with concerns about the health care plan has enjoyed, at best, mixed success. In the poll, 55 percent of Americans said Mr. Obama has not clearly explained his plans for changing the health care system, and 69 percent said they thought the health care reforms under consideration in Congress was confusing.

What does all of this mean? First, the numbers make it clear that the public wants a change in the healthcare system and trust the president more than they trust the GOP. And, perhaps more importantly, the public is smarter than the politicians. It is the public, after all, that views the dance happening in Washington over health care as unnecessarily uncomplicated.

The public understands the benefits of a public option — that competition from a government run program would keep the healthcare companies honest — and that forcing people to carry insurance without giving them someplace to go aside from the insurance companies is nothing more than a huge government giveaway.

The danger right now is that the current parameters of the argument are focusing on the wrong things — the deficit, for instance. We should be talking about what a lack of health insurance means for us and our neighbors, how it leaves too many vulnerable to illness and the economy, and how that vulnerability is bad for society as a whole. We should be focusing on how the system fails us every day and offering a clear plan to address it.

We should be talking about a single-payer system, which would remove profit from the system (health care companies boost profits by denying care) and place all of us on an equal plane. I know that is not going to happen at this moment in history, so we need to push hard for a public option and use the public option to prove to our neighbors and friends that a public plan is better for all of us.

Hammer time

Um….

I don’t think America needed to see Tom DeLay shake his booty on national television. (I’m sitting with my wife, who watches the show religiously.)

Couldn’t we have just let this guy fade into the sunset, to be remembered as a corrupt partisan who helped drive the conservative movement off a cliff?

A 16 for that dance? Are the judges hoping that DeLay will get his Congressional pals to name an airport after them? Or maybe some federal money for a TV dancing school?

Just too bizarre for words.