Doug-at-large

I remember the “It’s the Swinger! Polaroid Swinger!” commercial! 

http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/006464.html

Let me start by stating that I am a Hillary supporter (as if that wasn’t already obvious).

One of the things that irks me about Obama is his arrogant (in my opinion) assertion that if he wins, Hillary’s supporters will support him but if Hillary wins he can’t guarantee that his supporters will support her.

Not only does a claim like that strike a dangerous arrow at the heard of Democratic unity, there is no real evidence that his claim is true. In fact, there is now evidence to the contrary.

A CNN exit poll of Louisiana primary voters has come up with this interesting result. They questioned both Hillary and Obama supporters and asked if they would be satisfied if the other candidate won.

Among Hillary supporters, 67% said they would not be satisfied if the other candidate won and 23% said they would be satisfied.

Among Obama suppoers, 47% said they would not be satisfied if the other candidate won and 47% said they would be satisfied.

Those results are interesting, and are an empirical indication that Obama’s assertion is incorrect. It seems that in the end that Obama supporters would actually be more content with Hillary than Hillary supporters would be with Obama.

It’s just one more piece of the equation to consider…

doug

I was reading an online column by Larry Elder, a conservative columnist, who posed a question to Barack Obama which frankly surprised me. He asked:

“Sen. Obama, the church you attend, according to its Web site, pursues an Afrocentric agenda. Your church rejects, as part of their “Black Value System,” “middleclassness” as “classic methodology” of white “captors” to “control … subjugated” black “captives.” Your pastor, Jeremiah Wright, recently called the Nation of Islam’s Minister Louis Farrakhan — a man many consider anti-Semitic —a person of “integrity and honesty.” What would happen to a Republican candidate who attended a Caucasian-centric church, and who praised David Duke as a man of “integrity and honesty”?”

Not knowing what to make of this, or of which church he was speaking, I visited the Barack Obama web site, where in his “Meet the Obamas” profile at http://www.barackobama.com/learn/meet.php it says:

“Barack Obama continues to speak out on the issues that will define America in the 21st century. But above all his accomplishments and experiences, he is most proud and grateful for his family. His wife, Michelle, and his two daughters, Malia, 9, and Sasha, 6, live on Chicago’s South Side where they attend Trinity United Church of Christ.”  

The Trinity United Church of Christ web site is at http://www.tucc.org/home.htm.From their “About Us” page at http://www.tucc.org/about.htm it says: 

“We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian… Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain “true to our native land,” the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.”

I really don’t know what to make of this. But I find it as disturbing as if somebody were to belong to a white church. I thought, if nothing else, that Obama’s message was something that was supposed to cross the racial divide. Up until now I never thought anything else and despised those weird emails roaming around the Internet falsely claiming Obama was a Muslim and so on just to stir up religious hatred. My gripe with Obama has been about things like issues and experience, where I feel he falls short compared to Hillary Clinton, not about race or religion.
 But I find this Trinity United Church of Christ information disturbing. It seems like just the sort of racially divisive institution that I assumed, honestly assumed, that if nothing else, Obama would never tolerate or be a part of.
I am just really surprised… 
doug

On Wednesday on “The View,” former Sen. Obama supporter Whoopi Goldberg announced that she voted for Hillary. On Thursday, the video of Whoopi’s announcement was YouTube’s single most watched news and politics clip.

More than 200,000 people watched Whoopi explain that Hillary was the first candidate to propose taking tax breaks away from companies that ship jobs overseas.

You can watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFtRo3RHpq8

It’s nice seeing people making decisions based on actual issues!

doug

Republican “conservatives” are tearing themselves to shreds lately. Have you seen the reports? Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter saying they would rather vote for Hillary Clinton than John McCain. James Dobson saying he would rather sit out the election than support McCain.

What is going on?

Or maybe a better question is, what is a “conservative”?

There seems to be four, largely inconsistent, very disperse ideologies that people variously call “conservative”:

(1) The government which governs best governs least group. These people are for lower taxes, less government regulation and generally support the idea of government staying as much out of people’s lives as possible. This group would also include those who think the job of the U.S. is to mind it’s own business and stay out of policing the world. Back at home they would have the government build roads and enforce contracts and that’s about it. They are the “libertarian” conservatives.

(2) The America-rules-the-world-through-projected-strength group. These people are for military buildups and strong military presence throughout the world, and even go so far as to impose the U.S. ideas of government and policy on other countries through military strength and adventurism. This group includes the “neocons” that George Bush aligned himself with.

(3) The social morality group. These people are basically far right, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who have never been really content with a separation of church and state and want to impose their ideas of religious morality on a secular society. This group tends to also be anti-science when they feel it contradicts their religious doctrines.

(4) The club for growth group. These people are basically supporters of big business and believers in trickle-down economics. They are of the “what’s good for General Motors is good for the USA” philosophy. They are often so extreme in their views that they will disbelieve in global warming because they are afraid that taking even moderate pro-environmental action would depress the GDP. To confuse things, this group often pretends they are in group (1), but they give themselves away by hypocritically supporting government largesse and overseas adventures when it supports big business.

The problem is that these four ideological groups are not necessarily mutually consistent. In fact they don’t really co-exist with each other well at all.

And sometimes they really confuse themselves with the strangest ideas, such as when the social morality group takes positions against environmental protection or social programs. As though Jesus would be against programs for the poor?

This year the strain is particularly showing as the conservative pundits are demanding 100% orthodoxy across all four ideologies in their candidate for president. But it strains credulity to imagine a thinking person actually holding all four ideologies at the same time.

doug

It might come down to the super delegates and the MI and FL delegations.

About the super delegates - Obama’s “warning” to them in unreasonable.

(1) He assumes that all Hillary’s supporters will support him but that his supporters won’t necessarily support Hillary. I say it definitely works both ways and mister “I’m a uniter, not a divider” (where have we heard that before?) should be giving a message of more unity in that regard.

(2) The super delegates are serving their intended purpose. Obama seems to imply they should fall in lockstep with the pledged delegates. In what way? Just in a way that favors him? Should Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and Deval Patrick all switch their super delegate vote to Hillary because she overwhelmingly won the Massachusetts primary? And what about the popular vote? Hillary won that on Super Tuesday overall. Shouldn’t the super delegates take that into account?

It’s probably best to leave the super delegates serving the purpose they were meant to - letting them vote their own independent consciences.

doug

From the Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-mcentee/clinton-or-obama-on-he_b_85144.html

by Gerald McEntee

Clinton or Obama — On Health Care the Difference is Big

There has been extensive coverage in the mainstream media and blogosphere about the health care proposals of Senators Clinton and Obama. This issue is important to me because I am a passionate advocate of health care for all and because the way the candidates deal with it points to a major reason I’m supporting Hillary Clinton for President: She’ll get results.

New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Paul Krugman closed his Monday column about the political and economic differences between the two Democratic candidate’s health care plans by explaining that, “If you combine the economic analysis with these political realities, here’s what I think it says: If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.”

Krugman makes a strong statement and it’s based on two points: the first is that Clinton’s plan provides universal coverage (through an individual mandate), and Obama’s plan does not cover everyone and does not include an individual mandate (except he does have one for children, which suggests he understands its usefulness). On this the experts agree — Obama’s plan leaves 15 million people uninsured while Clinton’s plan leaves no patients behind. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Outside experts agree that number is in the ballpark.” Obama has acknowledged this fact, saying that “Fifteen million sounds like a lot … I’ll have 97 percent covered.” The Washington Post notes that the “Obama plan could leave a third of those currently uninsured lacking coverage.”

Krugman’s second point is that Obama uses campaign rhetoric — straight from the pages of the right-wing, anti-government playbook — that demonizes mandates to the point where he would have a difficult time as president accepting a proposal that has one. The ideological intensity of Obama’s critique is a serious problem because an individual mandate is an effective mechanism for covering everyone. It’s far from the only way — but it is one way and it has lots of political support. If you’re trying to bring people together around a solution, ruling out something as big as this may well rule out your chance of success. In this way, says Krugman, “Mr. Obama’s campaigning on the health care issue has sabotaged his own prospects” of winning reform as president.

The case in point is Obama’s recent direct mail piece (PDF), which is misleading about Clinton’s plan and his own. Ezra Klein of the American Prospect says that Obama is “fear-mongering” and “demagoguing universal health care.” For example, Obama fails to mention that Clinton’s plan guarantees coverage for all. And while he says that affordability is the key issue, he neglects to note that her affordability provisions are stronger and more specific than his. Obama also fails to note that his own plan has an individual mandate.

The nonpartisan factcheck.org has done a thorough analysis of Obama’s mail piece that you can read on their site. Krugman and others note that Obama’s mailer is also reminiscent of the infamous “Harry and Louise” ads that the insurance industry spent millions on to kill national health care reform in 1993.

Jonathan Cohn from the New Republic, commenting on Obama’s mail piece, explains that “a presidential candidate who believes in a reform has to avoid making statements that could undermine that reform down the road. And that’s precisely what Obama has done here. Even he has admitted, in some instances, that a mandate might be necessary in order to get everybody into a universal health care system. (And he already has one for kids.) But this mailer — with all of its unmistakable echoes of Harry and Louise — makes that task much harder.”

“In the end,” says Klein, Obama’s “plan is not universal, does not attempt to be, and is probably less generous in its affordability provisions than Clinton’s. And even so, I wouldn’t really care, as it’s still a pretty good plan, except that he’s decided to respond to the inadequacies of his own policy by fear-mongering against not only a better policy, but the type of policy he’s probably going to have to eventually adopt. It’s very, very short-sighted.”

The substantive difference between Clinton and Obama on health care is that Clinton will cover everyone and Obama will not. There’s no reason to hope that every man, woman and child in our country will be covered under Obama’s plan because that’s not what he intends to do. When it comes to health care, the difference is clear: Obama’s plan sets us back. Clinton’s plan moves us forward.

The bottom line conclusion: “If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.”

February 4, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Clinton, Obama, Insurance

By PAUL KRUGMAN
The principal policy division between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama involves health care. It’s a division that can seem technical and obscure — and I’ve read many assertions that only the most wonkish care about the fine print of their proposals.

But as I’ve tried to explain in previous columns, there really is a big difference between the candidates’ approaches. And new research, just released, confirms what I’ve been saying: the difference between the plans could well be the difference between achieving universal health coverage — a key progressive goal — and falling far short.

Specifically, new estimates say that a plan resembling Mrs. Clinton’s would cover almost twice as many of those now uninsured as a plan resembling Mr. Obama’s — at only slightly higher cost.

Let’s talk about how the plans compare.

Both plans require that private insurers offer policies to everyone, regardless of medical history. Both also allow people to buy into government-offered insurance instead.

And both plans seek to make insurance affordable to lower-income Americans. The Clinton plan is, however, more explicit about affordability, promising to limit insurance costs as a percentage of family income. And it also seems to include more funds for subsidies.

But the big difference is mandates: the Clinton plan requires that everyone have insurance; the Obama plan doesn’t.

Mr. Obama claims that people will buy insurance if it becomes affordable. Unfortunately, the evidence says otherwise.

After all, we already have programs that make health insurance free or very cheap to many low-income Americans, without requiring that they sign up. And many of those eligible fail, for whatever reason, to enroll.

An Obama-type plan would also face the problem of healthy people who decide to take their chances or don’t sign up until they develop medical problems, thereby raising premiums for everyone else. Mr. Obama, contradicting his earlier assertions that affordability is the only bar to coverage, is now talking about penalizing those who delay signing up — but it’s not clear how this would work.

So the Obama plan would leave more people uninsured than the Clinton plan. How big is the difference?

To answer this question you need to make a detailed analysis of health care decisions. That’s what Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T., one of America’s leading health care economists, does in a new paper.

Mr. Gruber finds that a plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year. An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion. Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700.

That doesn’t look like a trivial difference to me. One plan achieves more or less universal coverage; the other, although it costs more than 80 percent as much, covers only about half of those currently uninsured.

As with any economic analysis, Mr. Gruber’s results are only as good as his model. But they’re consistent with the results of other analyses, such as a 2003 study, commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that compared health reform plans and found that mandates made a big difference both to success in covering the uninsured and to cost-effectiveness.

And that’s why many health care experts like Mr. Gruber strongly support mandates.

Now, some might argue that none of this matters, because the legislation presidents actually manage to get enacted often bears little resemblance to their campaign proposals. And there is, indeed, no guarantee that Mrs. Clinton would, if elected, be able to pass anything like her current health care plan.

But while it’s easy to see how the Clinton plan could end up being eviscerated, it’s hard to see how the hole in the Obama plan can be repaired. Why? Because Mr. Obama’s campaigning on the health care issue has sabotaged his own prospects.

You see, the Obama campaign has demonized the idea of mandates — most recently in a scare-tactics mailer sent to voters that bears a striking resemblance to the “Harry and Louise” ads run by the insurance lobby in 1993, ads that helped undermine our last chance at getting universal health care.

If Mr. Obama gets to the White House and tries to achieve universal coverage, he’ll find that it can’t be done without mandates — but if he tries to institute mandates, the enemies of reform will use his own words against him.

If you combine the economic analysis with these political realities, here’s what I think it says: If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.

Barack Obama has distorted his legislative record in Illinois, claiming he got a bill passed which did not pass.

He also repeatedly caved in to Exelon, the country’s largest nuclear plant operator and one of Obama’s largest sources of campaign money by repeatedly re-drafting proposed legislation that initially required all nuclear plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of all leaks. Eventually the bill got so watered down that that all it did was offer “guidance” for voluntary reporting.

And even though Obama claimed while campaigning in Iowa that he got his legislation passed, even the watered-down bill died without being passed.

As the investigative article reports:

—from the article—–

When residents in Illinois voiced outrage two years ago upon learning that the Exelon Corporation had not disclosed radioactive leaks at one of its nuclear plants, the state’s freshman senator, Barack Obama, took up their cause. Mr. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in December that it was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed.”

“I just did that last year,” he said, to murmurs of approval. A close look at the path his legislation took tells a very different story. While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks.

Those revisions propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But, contrary to Mr. Obama’s comments in Iowa, it ultimately died amid parliamentary wrangling in the full Senate.

Asked why Mr. Obama had cited it as an accomplishment while campaigning for president, the campaign noted that after the senator introduced his bill, nuclear plants started making such reports on a voluntary basis. The campaign did not directly address the question of why Mr. Obama had told Iowa voters that the legislation had passed.

Since 2003, executives and employees of Exelon, which is based in Illinois, have contributed at least $227,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns for the United States Senate and for president. Two top Exelon officials, Frank M. Clark, executive vice president, and John W. Rogers Jr., a director, are among his largest fund-raisers.

————————-

You can read the entire article in today’s New York Times at

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/us/politics/03exelon.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp

in the article “Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate”.

I certainly hope people considering Obama over Hillary Clinton give some consideration to what this investigation means. To me it shows that Obama (1) has distorted his record on the campaign trail; (2) has shown he can be used by rich lobbyists and campaign contributors to water-down legislation and (3) the media have generally given Obama a “pass” so far - and how risky is that as we are nominating a candidate for the presidency?

The whole affair is certainly nothing to brag about. It shows how essentially weak Obama really is and how little “change” we could reasonably expect from an Obama administration.

I hope the Obama “something new phenom” dies down and people really think about who we need to (1) win in November and then (2) really get changes we need after this disastrous Bush administration. And yes, I am talking about Hillary Clinton.

doug

As far as I’m concerned, Hillary could spend the rest of the campaign until Super Tuesday just talking about the differences between her health care plan and Obama’s. On that issue alone she would win.

She could also mention how close her plan and Edward’s plans are, and how Obama’s just isn’t universal - like a Democratic plan should be!

doug