Here's why private insurance companies can't finance decent universal health care

Every wonder what is really wrong with America's health care lack-of-system? Here is the answer.

Insurance companies make money by not paying for claims.

So private companies will maximize profit by collection premiums and then avoiding paying claims as much as possible. The only appeals to this are to the company itself, to the state insurance regulators (which are staffed either by people from the insurance industry or people who are planning to later work for the insurance industry), or to the prohibitively expensive courts. The Republican Tort Reform efforts are all designed to cut off access to the courts by limiting the ability of tort lawyers to get paid for their efforts.

Christy Hardin Smith has a good article on this subject over at FireDogLake.

While it's not perfect, the solution is single payer national health care with the premiums paid by taxes on both employers and individuals and the crazy-quilt of varied coverages and their administration standardized.

Because there are so many insurance companies, each one can claim that refusal to pay valid claims by a different company is not something they do. The actions of each individual company is concealed in the many different companies all trying to offer different products. No government agency can get away with that. There would be a single system of appeals carefully covered by the media.

Stripping out the unnecessary administrative expenses out of the system would save 10% of the waste, fraud and abuse that characterizes the present lack-of-system. Eliminating the overpaid CEO's and dividends to owners would recover another 10%. Then eliminating the costs of salespeople would save another 10% or more.

We need single payer health care in this nation immediately.

See MichaleMoore.com.

Are the Iranians and Saudi's getting together?

Mark Lynch at Abu Aardvark reports on the recent friendly meetings between Iran's President Amedinejad and Saudi Arabia's King Saud. The American media is ignoring this. (It must not fit in with the White House talking points enforced by the major Press editors. Or their budgets won't stretch to sending real reporters to Saudi Arabia during the Haj.)

Even more significant than the friendly meetings, the meetings appear to be accompanied by general public approval in both the Sunni and the Shiite communities.

I wonder how Dick Cheney will try to spin this to justify his greatly desired war with Iran.

[ h/t to Emptywheel. ]

Screw up - get a $1 million retention bonus

Here is another typical example of the free market at work.

Last March the senior management of Circuit City decided that if they laid off their senior sales clerks who earned $14 - $15 an hour and had been there long enough for benefits, they could replace them with new hires who only earned $9 an hour. That's a savings of more than 1/3rd in salary. So they did it.

Without experienced clerks to help the customers determine what to buy, Circuit City's revenue dropped sharply. OK. Call up the laid off clerks and offer to hire them back. Of course, the story is that they offered to hire them back as new hires at $9 an hour. The response was as good as might be expected, and Circuit City is having a poor sales year now. As Ezra Klein says, "...things have not gone well for the bottom line. The company is now losing money and its share price is down more than 75 percent from its value earlier this year."

So of course, the geniuses who brought the company this far, the executive vice-presidents, will each get retention awards of $1 million. I guess that's pay for performance.

See how that works? Screw the employees and damage the company and get paid million dollar retention bonuses. Really, does circuit city want to retain those bozos? The Board of Directors who approved those retention bonuses are more interested in sharing the wealth with their fellow executives than they are in managing a successful business. When it goes under, they will all move on the equally lucrative Directorships.

My advice is to stay away from Circuit City and start a pool betting on what month they declare bankruptcy. The Board and the executives will, of course, blame the economy.

The bankruptcy judge can, of course, demand that the retention bonuses be repaid if the bankruptcy happens in the next couple of years. My bet is that the bankruptcy will occur next Summer at the latest (depending on how rapidly the Recession set in), and that the bankruptcy judge will not demand the repayment.

Why didn't the CIA give the tapes to the 9/11 Commission when asked? Coverup!

Marty Lederman at Balkinization discusses jut how badly the CIA and the Bush administration did NOT want the 9/11 Commission to get the torture tapes.

If the CIA had destroyed its interrogation tapes during the pendency of the 9/11 Commission investigation, that almost surely would have constituted felony violations of 18 U.S.C. 1512(c)(1). So they retained the tapes during that investigation. However, as the New York Times reports ..., the CIA very carefully avoided informing the 9/11 Commission of the existence of the interrogation tapes -- which would have been extremely valuable information for the Commission to use. "A C.I.A. spokesman said that the agency had been prepared to give the Sept. 11 commission the interrogation videotapes" . . . but the Commission never said the magic words!: The Commission repeatedly sought "documents," "reports" and "information" related to the interrogations from the CIA -- but "staff members never specifically asked for interrogation videos."

At one meeting, Lee Hamilton told George Tenet that "the C.I.A. should provide all relevant documents 'even if the commission had not specifically asked for them.'" How infelicitous of Representative Hamilton -- you see, a videotape isn't a "document"!

I urge you to read the entire report from Phil Zelikow,, and ask yourself whether the concerted effort by countless government officials, up to and including Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld and Steve Cambone, to assiduously avoid mentioning the videotapes to the 9/11 Commission -- in countless meetings and in response to numerous requests -- when obviously those videos would have been the motherlode of the evidence that the Commission was seeking, can possibly be justified. Zelikow wonders whether this didn't violate 18 U.S.C. 1001(a)(1) (prohibiting the knowing and willful concealment of "material facts" in an investigation by any "trick, scheme, or device"). Even if it did not, is there any scenario in which such stonewalling would not have constituted utter contempt for the Commission -- bad faith at a very high and sustained level?

Here's the really amazing bit, however: "Because it was thought the commission could ask about the tapes at some point, they were not destroyed while the commission was active," said a CIA spokesperson. In other words, they knew the tapes were relevant -- indeed, the most relevant evidence possible -- and that they would be required to produce them if only the Commission and its lawyers somewhere down the line used the word "tapes," or "recordings," or "evidence." But they failed to mention the tapes.

This is clearly criminal behavior by members of the Bush administration. There should be a rapid, broad investigation and criminal charges brough quickly.

You want to know that the conservatives will say to defend this criminal behavior? They will claim that bringing charges in court against the criminals who conducted this criminal behavior is criminalizing politics.

Then they will complain that illegal immigrants should be arrested and because they violate the law by their very presence in America, or a tourist who overstayed her visa by three weeks back in 1995 should be arrested in the New York Airport, carried out in chains, held overnight, then deported - again in chains - the next day back to Iceland.

So violations of really important laws should not be criminalized by bringing charges in court if the culprits are conservatives, but a tourist who overstayed her visa by three weeks 12 years ago gets treated like a terrorist.

How in God's name to Republicans live with themselves and sleep at night?

Presidential candidates on Executive Power

Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe, one of the nation's best political reporters, has just reported the results of a survey he conducted with the Presidential candidates on their approach on which of the "checks and balances they would respect, and whether they would reverse the Bush administration's legacy of expanded presidential powers." In other words, how much of the set of expanded Executive Powers that Bush and Cheney have claimed would any of the candidates retain, and what powers do they feel are inappropriate to the Executive in the American Constitutional democracy.

First, Who answered the survey?

Six Democrats and three Republicans provided answers to the Globe survey. Three GOP candidates did not respond to the survey: Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, and former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson.

The Giuliani campaign instead provided a general statement by its top legal adviser, former Bush administration solicitor general Ted Olson. He said that a president "must be free to defend the nation," but provided no specific details about what limits, if any, Giuliani believes he would have to obey as president - in national security or otherwise.

This tells us which candidates feel least responsible to the American people, and which candidates view the Presidency as a modern day monarchy - or in Huckabee's case, modern theocracy.

What are the candidates opinion of Bush's approach to Presidential Power?

Of the nine candidates who answered, Romney expressed the most positive view of Bush's approach to presidential power.

"The Bush administration has kept the American people safe since 9/11," Romney said. "The administration's strong view on executive power may well have contributed to that fact."

By contrast, the other two Republicans who responded - McCain and Paul - both expressed reservations about legal claims Bush has made. For example, both rejected the idea that a president, as commander-in-chief, has "inherent" power to wiretap Americans without warrants, regardless of federal statutes, as the administration has argued.

"I don't think the president has the right to disobey any law," said McCain, an Arizona senator.

Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor who studies executive power, said Romney's answers suggest that the former Massachusetts governor will probably embrace the Bush administration's legal theories on executive power.

"It's fair to say that the Democrats, Senator McCain, and Representative Paul are united in supporting a reinvigoration of checks and balances and the reassertion of a meaningful congressional role in national security affairs," said Shane.

I think this also disqualifies Romney as an American President under the Constitution. Romney, Giuliani, Huckabee and Thompson are all telling us the Constitution is a nice idea, but disposable if they decide they don't like it.

The candidates were asked whether they would be restricted by a law passed by Congress that restricted their power to deploy troops.

Among the Democrats, only former North Carolina senator John Edwards refused to say that he would be bound to obey a law limiting troop deployments, instead saying, "I do not envision this scenario arising when I am president."

Similarly, Romney talked generally about a president's need to both "respect" Congress's constitutional powers over war while also remaining "faithful to commander-in-chief powers," but he declined to say whether he believed he could disregard a law capping troop deployments. [Snip]

But the other two leading Democrats - Clinton, a New York senator, and Obama - were both more definitive. Along with Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, and Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Clinton and Obama endorsed a more restrained approach to executive power than Bush.

The Democrats said a president must obey laws and treaties that restrict surveillance and interrogation. They also said that the Constitution does not allow a president to hold US citizens without charges as "enemy combatants" - even though Bush has won court rulings upholding his right to indefinitely imprison citizens suspected of terrorist links.

Then the candidates were asked how they would use Signing Statements.

while all the Democrats condemned Bush's use of signing statements, Clinton, Edwards, and Obama each said that they would use them too - just less aggressively. Obama said the problem with Bush's signing statements is not the device itself, but rather that Bush has invoked legal theories that most constitutional scholars consider "dubious" when reserving his alleged right to bypass certain laws.

"No one doubts that it is appropriate to use signing statements to protect a president's constitutional prerogatives; unfortunately, the Bush administration has gone much further than that," Obama said.

By contrast, Biden, Dodd, and Richardson called for an end to signing statements altogether.

Among the Republicans, their stance was echoed by McCain and Paul, both of whom said they would never issue a signing statement. Romney, by contrast, praised signing statements as "an important presidential practice."

So except for Ron Paul and McCain, the Republicans all approve of how Bush as accumulated more power to the Presidency. That makes all the Republicans other than McCain and Ron Paul primarily anti-Democratic authoritarians. The Republicans consider the Executive Branch to be the supreme branch in the federal government. Combine that with a penchant for secrecy and a refusal to respond to questions from the public and the Republicans are the reactionary party of monarchism.

The Democrats are not as easy to characterize. They support reinvigorating the check and balances established by the Constitution, but are not yet ready to declare Congress as the supreme branch in the federal government. Edwards simply delayed announcing his opinion of the Presidential power to deploy troops contrary to Congressional law which is troubling.

It is interesting that McCain belongs to the camp in which Congress is viewed as a branch of federal government that is equal the Executive branch.

I don't put Ron Paul into either camp, since his Libertarian view is that neither Congress nor the Executive branch have more than minimal functions under his view of the Constitution. That is such an extremist, out-of-the-mainstream view that he cannot be compared to any other candidate.

CQ Politics has an earlier publication on the subject of Presidential powers.

the records and statements of the eight major candidates -- the three Democrats and five Republicans who have had double-digit support in the most recent national polls -- show that the 2008 presidential election is not likely to start a huge shift in the balance of power away from the White House.

That doesn't mean the top candidates would continue all of the Bush administration's practices, and most aren't likely to take the same kind of deliberately confrontational approach to Congress. Also, an upset victory could still go to one of the few candidates whose victory would represent a clear rejection of Bush's overall policies. But there is enough evidence of a preference for strong executive power in the backgrounds of most of the field to suggest that, more likely than not, there will be no U-turn under the next president.

---

The only real question is What the Hell is wrong with Charlie Savage asking such stupid questions? Voters don't care what the opinions of the candidates on the limitations of Executive power are! Voters want more reports like the one written by the Washington Post's Robin Ghivan last July in which she wrote the very unflattering description of Hillary Clinton's "cleavage on display." (See The Washington Post doesn't like or respect Democrats) Digby points out what the modern Press wizards all know about how Presidential campaigns should be covered.

We want color and spectacle, not boring policy discussions. Reporters are there just to tell us who they like, so that we can all elect the most likable candidate. Their policy opinions are boring, irrelevant, and totally incomprehensible to reporters and their editors anyway. They have Communications degrees, with majors in hairdos and makeup, not MBA's or Political Science degrees. Who are we mere Plebeian voters to question their professionalism and expertise?

Right?

---

Addendum 1 December 23, 9:14 AM CST
Back to the analysis of Charlie Savage's excellent article. Glenn Greenwald weighed in this morning, and here is part of what he said:

...by far the most extraordinary answers come from Mitt Romney. Romney's responses -- not to some of the questions but to every single one of them -- are beyond disturbing. The powers he claims the President possesses are definitively -- literally -- tyrannical, unrecognizable in the pre-2001 American system of government and, in some meaningful ways, even beyond what the Bush/Cheney cadre of authoritarian legal theorists have claimed.

After reviewing those responses, Marty Lederman concluded: "Romney? Let's put it this way: If you've liked Dick Cheney and David Addington, you're gonna love Mitt Romney." Anonymous Liberal similarly observed that his responses reveal that "Romney doesn't believe the president's power to be subject to any serious constraints." To say that the President's powers are not "subject to any serious constraints" -- which is exactly what Romney says -- is, of course, to posit the President as tyrant, not metaphorically or with hyperbole, but by definition.

Each of the questions posed by Savage is devoted to determining the extent of presidential power the candidate believes exists and where the limits are situated. On every issue, Romney either (a) explicitly says that the President has the right to act without limits of any kind or (b) provides blatantly nonresponsive answers strongly insinuating the same thing.

Just go and read what he wrote. It's extraordinary. Other than his cursory and quite creepy concession that U.S. citizens detained by the President are entitled to "at least some type of habeas corpus relief" -- whatever "some type" might mean (Question 5) -- Romney does not recognize a single limit on presidential power. Not one. [Snip]

In a Washington Post Op-Ed this morning, historian and George Washington biographer Joseph Ellis labels Dick Cheney's quest for limitless presidential power "historically myopic" and writes:

Your opinion on the current debate about how much power the executive branch should have will be significantly influenced if you read the debates about the subject in the Constitutional Convention and the states' ratifying conventions. For it will soon become clear that the most palpable fear that haunted all these debates was the specter of monarchy.

Although one would not have thought it possible, a Mitt Romney presidency, by his own description, would remove us still further from those core principles. Romney isn't running to be President, but to be King. Anyone who wants to dispute that ought to try to distinguish the fantasies of power Romney is envisioning from those the British King possessed in the mid-to-late 18th Century.

Apparently others agree with me that Romney sees no significant limitations on the unfettered arbitrary power of the American President. as in so many other things on which he has spoken during this campaign, Romney will say and do anything to become President King.

If Romney is elected President he intends to treat the job as being the Monarch of America with the Divine right to rule in an unfettered, no checks and balances, manner. All Hail King Romney the First!

Reid - 'Harmony' preferred to stopping Bush extremism

We recently watched Sen. Chris Dodd go toe-to-toe with the Majority Leader, Harry Reid, about stopping the passage of the FISA bill that contains full immunity for the telecoms that illegally supported Bush's attack on the privacy of American citizens. This illegal action was in February 2001, well before Bush even admitted that non-sate terrorists were a real threat to Americans.

Reid gave in to Chris Dodd's threat to filibuster the bill and pulled it, with the statement that he would bring it back in January. Reid's spokesman says that Reid will pass the bill in January - along with the immunity for the crooked telecoms. As Glenn Greenwald says, Reid thinks that Sen. Dodd was just grandstanding and that as soon as his Presidential bid dies in January, Dodd will stop disrupting the harmony of the Senate.

Here's Glenn's take on what Reid is doing:

In the Beltway world, anyone who aggressively objects to the Bush administration's extremism, and especially its lawbreaking, is always guilty of (at least) one of two sins: they are either fringe, unSerious, overly earnest losers, or -- as in the case with the accusations against Dodd here -- simply pretending to be bothered by such things in order to rouse the rabble and exploit them for cynical political gain. Anyone who disrupts Beltway harmony in order to hold the Bush administration accountable -- anyone who seems actually bothered by the rampant lawbreaking -- is thus easily dismissed as an annoying radical or a self-promoting fraud.

After all, it can't possibly be the case that Dodd actually believes in what he's doing and saying. He can't really care if telecoms are protected from the consequences of their years of deliberate, highly profitable lawbreaking. Clearly, Dodd's just doing all of this to prop up his flagging presidential campaign, just a cynical ploy for attention, not because he has any actual convictions that there is something wrong with granting such an extraordinary and corrupt gift to lawbreaking telecoms. No Serious person would ever actually get riled up about anything like that.

As much as the Bush administration's push for an authoritarian corporatized, globalized America made up of the wealthy and the poor with no effective middle class disgusts me (and violates the Constitution) the problem with the minority Republican Party is only one portion of the difficulty America faces.

The other part is that the Democratic leadership inside the beltway has gone native. "Harmony" is more important than the Constitution and the Rule of Law, and a lot more important than the needs of the average American for affordable and reliable health care.

When the Republicans get their ass whupped in November, the next problem to be resolved is for the Americans to retake the Democratic Party back from the out-of-touch beltway leadership. The idiots in Washington either need to go or get retrained, one or the other.

Mitt Romney hallucinates - purpose? to get what he wants - a trophy Presidency

Apparently in defense of the recent racist refusal of his Mormon religion to accept Blacks, Mitt Romney reports that he wasn't one of "those Mormon." He stated:

"I saw my father march with Martin Luther King."

Unfortunately, that never happened. The Boston Phoenix reports that although Romney stated that in his "Religion" speech in College Station, TX and again to Tim Russert, it just wasn't something that really happened. The Boston Phoenix reports an update to its earlier article: "A spokesperson for Mitt Romney now tells the Phoenix that George W. Romney and Martin Luther King Jr. marched together in June, 1963 -- although possibly not on the same day or in the same city."

Shades of the spin doctors explaining away what Bush said with the sanitized and vetted version of what his handlers wish he had said!

Romney wants the Republican religious right to accept him as one of them - racism and all - but he doesn't want the independent voters to consider him as personally racist. Like his stance on abortion - Romney will say whatever he thinks the immediate audience he is speaking to will buy, and he leaves it to his handlers to deal with his many, many inconsistencies. It has left most of us wondering what Romney stands for. Who is he really?

Actually that isn't that hard to answer. Romney is another rich man who wants to cap his career with the trophy of becoming President of the U.S. He believes that he deserves it, and he'll say or do anything that will get him that trophy.

He believes that really strongly. Nothing else. Just that he is rich and entitled. He'll say anything - believe anything - hallucinate anything - to get what he wants.

Bush's scandals - the list is over 60 feet long now

I'm amazed that anyone could compile this list, and I doubt that it is complete. Go look at Hugh's List here. This is going to be a source of numerous books on the Bush era. It would take an encyclopedia to cover all the entries, though.

I'll give Rudy Giuliani credit, though. He is the only Republican running for the Presidential nomination who could already make a dent on this list.

An authoritarian welcome to Bush's America

This is Bush's authoritarian America. Our government, under the Republicans, has gone mad.

Read this story: A young blonde Icelandic woman's recent experience visiting the US.

Who gained by humiliating this woman except some jackbooted Republican thugs who got to show that they were in command?

Recession in 2008 - more from Roubini

Nouriel Roubini is now reasonably certain that we can anticipate a recession in 2008. His two question s now are whether the recession will be a mild one ("soft landing) or a bad one (hard landing), and whether the American recession will be isolated to the U.S. only (decoupled from the global economy) or whether it will trigger a worldwide recession (recoupling.)

First Richard Berner of Morgan Stanley started to talk about a "mild" recession in 2008; then yesterday Bill Gross of Pimco also argued that the US is likely to experience a "mild" recession in 2008.

Then today Larry Summers spoke of the high risk of a recession in 2008 and the possible risk that such a recession would be more severe than just mild unless the monetary and fiscal policy response to the current economic slowdown is not more forceful.

Add to the list Alan Greenspan that now believes that the odds of a recession are now about 50%; and Marty Feldstein (professor at Harvard, former CEA Chairman and head of the prestigious NBER) who thinks that a 2008 recession is certainly likely. And add to the list Rosenberg of Merrill Lynch who has effectively made a recession call, as well as Jan Hatzius who is one step short of formally calling for a US recession in 2008.

Also, while the consensus had been arguing until now that the rest of the world would "decouple" from the US the consensus has also recently shifted towards the "recoupling" view. Both Goldman Sachs and now Morgan Stanley are now referring to the 2008 as the "year of recoupling". This is not surprising; the decoupling view was always predicated on the view that the US would experience a soft landing. Now that a hard landing is becoming the more likely scenarios analysts are considering that trade, currency, financial, confidence, common shocks and other channels of interdependence will lead to a significant slowdown of global growth following the expected US hard landing, i.e. "recoupling".

Thus, at this point the debate is less on whether the US will experience a soft landing or hard landing but rather on how hard the landing will be, i.e. whether the coming recession will be "mild" or "severe".

Roubini is the professional. I'm not. But I still suspect that the Federal Reserve Board under Bernanke is going to try to delay the recession, which will lead to greater inflation. But back to Roubini:

As Summers pointed out today how severe the downturn will be will depend on how sensible the macro policy response - monetary, fiscal and regulatory - will be. So far it is not clear that US policy makers and other G7 policy makers are fully aware of the significant downward risks to growth. There is still the view among them that this is a soft patch of growth and that growth closer to potential will resume in the second half of 2008. That view increasingly looks like wishful thinking.

The problem that I see is that 2008 will be both the year the recession starts and also the Presidential election year - one in which the Republican Party is going got take a drubbing by an increasingly populist Democratic Party.

Right now that populism seems to frighten Wall Street more than what they think is going to be a mild recession. If the fed, reacting to the concerns of Wall Street, remains more concerned about the political threat against Wall Street than they do the economic threat, then we will see both stagflation by the time of the election and an even harder landing for the recession after the election.

I suggest that anyone reading this consider my opinions on political actions separate from Nouriel Roubini's economic opinion, and give his greater weight.

How one Republican rigged elections for the RNC

Allen Raymond, the former GOP consultant of New Hampshire phone jamming fame, is not happy about his fellow Republicans blaming the phone jamming on him. So he has written a tell-all book entitled How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Law Breaker. Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker has an advance copy and has published a few things from the book.

Allen Raymond was sent to prison for 90 days because the telephone firm he owned accepted a job from the New Hampshire GOP's executive director was hired to jam the telephone number that the Democratic party was using to arrange rides for voters who wanted to vote for the Democratic candidate for Senate.

To set the scene: Raymond got a call in 2000* from two former colleagues in New Jersey who ran a consulting shop called Jamestown Associates. They were working for Dick Zimmer, who was running against Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), the incumbent, and they were pulling out all the stops.

They'd already succeeded in getting a Green Party candidate on the ballot to drain liberal votes from Holt (a favorite GOP trick). And they had already put Raymond's firm to work calling Green-oriented households and urging them to support the Green candidate.

But what came next was "even better":

[Tom Blakely from Jamestown Associates] called me up and asked, "How do you guys find voice talent?"

"Well, I've got a whole catalog of different voices on CDs. I've got 'single Northeastern female,' I've got 'Southern belle' -- what are you looking for?"

"We're targeting Democrats of Eastern European descent using a surname select and geopolitical filter."

"Oh," I said, quickly doing the polarizing-voter math in my head. "How about 'angry black man'?"

"Yeah, that sounds good. What's his voice sound like?"

So I cued up one particular actor's CD on my computer and put the phone to the speaker. The track I played was one in which the actor was deliberately playing up a street gang character.

After listening for a few seconds, Blakely said, "That's the guy!"

So we had the actor record a spot over the telephone saying, "I'm calling as a Democrat, asking you to vote for the Democratic nominee. We need your vote for Holt."

I'm not saying that all Eastern European whites are racists, but, no matter where or when an election is held, there is a always a cultural divide that you can rely on. The message was "I'm ghetto black calling you, racist Ukrainian guy, and scaring the crap out of you because you probably think that if you don't vote for the Democrat I'm going to come to your house and take care of some business."

The calls were extremely highly targeted, household by household, no message ever left on an answering machine. We wanted the message heard only by people whose reaction would be "I'm not voting for Holt because he uses scary black men to call my house."

We made calls to Democratic union households supporting Zimmer, taped by actors putting on thick Spanish accents, figuring union workers were the voters who felt most threatened by immigration. The objective was to get them to throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. We were just forcing those people to make a decision that was true to who they really were. If you want to question someone's character, look to the people who stayed home because of those calls.

Remember -- they were Democrats; they were supposed to be the tolerant ones.

Zimmer lost the election by 481 votes and the Green Party candidate picked up 2 percent in the polls.

This is Republican ethics.

Consider this along with the techniques of voter suppression they have practiced:

• Caging: What Bob Woodward doesn't know (or care) about Voter Suppression
  
• Another great moment in voter suppression
  
• Florida Republicans working hard to suppress minority voter registrations
  
• Vote Suppression is the issue
  
• "Caging" - an explanation of the term
  
• Where is the REAL voter fraud?
  
• More on the New Hampshire phone-jamming incident
  
• More evidence that the 2004 election was hacked for Bush

Who are the conservatives? Just ask them.

Sara has written the definitive explanation of who the Conservatives are:

Oprah Winfrey once said that the best advice she ever got in her life was from Maya Angelou, who said: "When people tell you who they are -- believe them."

I've gotten good mileage from this advice over the years. Being raised fundie, you spend a lot of your life being told to believe someone else's preposterous interpretation of events over your own lying eyes. Growing up this way really twists your reality lenses; and those of us who come out of it as adults spend a lot of time and energy learning to see and interpret the world clearly again. Angelou's quote is one of the mantras that gave me permission to trust my own observations of what people were saying and doing, knock off the false hopes and wishful thinking, accept this information as literal truth, and rely on it as an accurate indicator about how they were likely to behave in the future. It's knowledge that was acquired late, but has since kept me out of an amazing amount of trouble.

It struck me recently that, too often, we've been very slow to believe conservatives, even when they told us in no uncertain terms who they were. Some things were easy to acknowledge, even in the early years: they're the party of business, they don't care much about the middle and lower class, they believe in hierarchy and aristocracy and low taxes. Others came later: it took us a while to really admit to ourselves that they were pandering to racists, that they were perfectly willing to throw the middle class overboard, and that they didn't really care whether or not a rising tide lifted all boats. The hardest realizations have been the most recent ones: that these people are openly willing to destroy the Constitution, the country, and the planet in the name of privilege and profit; that they have absolutely no concept of the common good, and that the most horrible accusations they level at us should always be taken as an open admission of what they're intending to do themselves.

My parents raised me to always think the best of other people, so my view of conservatives was skewed until Bush took office as President. Now I understand. Sara's right.

I had really wanted to support Obama for President, but his statements make me think that his eyes are not yet open to the utterly selfish destructiveness of the American conservatives. It's clear that neither Edwards nor Clinton harbor any such illusions. Unfortunately, I don't think that Harry Reid understands who he is facing either.

2008 is not going to be pretty politically, but I still expect a strong election for the Democrats. Then the conservatives will take the gloves off and make the Bill Clinton years look like a pleasant tea party.

The homebuilding industry is in real trouble

From Calculated Risk:

The public builder BKs are coming. I'm not saying Horton will go BK [bankrupt], but more of the public builders probably will (like Levitt & Sons). There is simply too much capacity in the industry, plus too much debt, too much inventory, and poor demographics for housing in general. The next few years will be very difficult for the homebuilders, and I suspect 2008 will make 2007 look like a good year.

Greenspan kept the U.S. economy afloat during the Bush administration by lowering interest rates and encouraging both mortgage lending and the taking our of second mortgages to pay off credit card debt.

Consumer demand has been 70% of total demand and demand determines the level of the economy. Since real wages have not increased since 2000, the only source for increased consumer demand has been debt (credit card and then second mortgages or total refinancing to get access to the increased value from housing price increase during the housing bubble) or more work - moonlighting or overtime, or more work by the spouse - to fund consumer spending.

Now the housing bubble has collapse followed by the mortgage market, and as a reaction the credit markets which had expanded by borrowing on the supposedly secure home mortgages has also collapsed. The impact on the homebuilding industry is only just beginning.

Atrios points out that the unemployment rate is inching up. The CNBC report he links to also points out that inflation is creeping up. the New York Times also points out that Federal Reserve is pumping money into the economy by letting banks borrow directly from the fed - that indicates that the banks can't get the money they need to keep operating from the markets, so they are going hat-in-hand to the fed. That money being pumped into the economy, together with increased prices for imports (especially oil) as the dollar drops is going to cause more inflation.

The fed is trying to keep the inevitable 2008 recession from being a serious one, but what they are really doing is kicking the can down the road so that the coming Democratic President is in office before they let the full force of the Recession hit. Like Greenspan did in Bush's first term, the fed will keep interest rates as low as possible during the Republican administration, then turn around and deal with the inflation they are currently causing by sharply increasing interest rates in 2009.

This is not a conspiracy theory. Look at what Greenspan did - lowered interest rates through the 2004 Presidential election and released the mortgage brokers to issue junk mortgages to people who couldn't pay them back. Then, immediately after Bush was sworn in the second time he started increasing the interest rates sharply, killing the housing bubble he had created. The timing makes it clear that it was all about manipulating the economy to ensure Bush's reelection.

Bernanke is kicking the can of recession down the line until after the November 2008 election to protect as many Republicans as possible. Then, the Federal Reserve will have to deal with the inflation the only way possible - make the Recession even worse by increasing the interest rates.

The Wall Street Republicans got us into this mess to keep Bush in office. They will do everything they can to prevent the Democrats from being able to deal with the problems.

Count on it. Watch the the fed let inflation grow in 2008 along with a mild recession, then watch the fed crack down in early 2009 and end the inflation with increased interest rates that cause a hard recession. The Wall Street Republicans wouldn't have it any other way.

The Mortgage Crisis is conservative ideology insanity greed played out to the end

The Savings and Loan crisis was a direct result of deregulating the Savings and Loan industry. The collapse of Enron (and Enron's rape of the California energy industry and energy consumers) can be traced directly back to the rewriting of SEC regulations by Wendy Graham (wife of Sen. Phil Graham) that excluded the operations of Enron from SEC regulation. These deregulations of financial industries were both triumphs of the conservative philosophy that government regulation handcuffed the productivity of the economy. The identical ideological flaw led to the Great Depression and Herbert Hoover's refusal to take any actions to clean up after it and to regulate the ability of banks to create money.

Now Bill Sher explains that the failure is the mortgage crisis, once again caused by failure to regulate a financial industry.

Greenspan received several direct warnings about the looming crisis, but did nothing to regulate irresponsible corporations:

Edward M. Gramlich, a Federal Reserve governor who died in September, warned nearly seven years ago that a fast-growing new breed of lenders was luring many people into risky mortgages they could not afford.

But when Mr. Gramlich privately urged Fed examiners to investigate mortgage lenders affiliated with national banks, he was rebuffed by Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman.

....

And leaders of a housing advocacy group in California, meeting with Mr. Greenspan in 2004, warned that deception was increasing and unscrupulous practices were spreading.

John C. Gamboa and Robert L. Gnaizda of the Greenlining Institute implored Mr. Greenspan to use his bully pulpit and press for a voluntary code of conduct.

“He never gave us a good reason, but he didn’t want to do it,” Mr. Gnaizda said last week. “He just wasn’t interested.”

...

An examination of regulatory decisions shows that the Federal Reserve and other agencies waited until it was too late before trying to tame the industry’s excesses. Both the Fed and the Bush administration placed a higher priority on promoting “financial innovation” and what President Bush has called the “ownership society.”

...

Mr. Greenspan and other Fed officials repeatedly dismissed warnings about a speculative bubble in housing prices. In December 2004, the New York Fed issued a report bluntly declaring that “no bubble exists.” Mr. Greenspan predicted several times — incorrectly, it turned out — that housing declines would be local but almost certainly not nationwide.

The Fed was hardly alone in not pressing to clean up the mortgage industry. When states like Georgia and North Carolina started to pass tougher laws against abusive lending practices, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency successfully prohibited them from investigating local subsidiaries of nationally chartered banks.

Virtually every federal bank regulator was loathe to impose speed limits on a booming industry.

It was not always this way. As John Atlas and Peter Dreier explain in The American Prospect this week, our government once practiced regulation. And it was good.

There was a time, not too long ago, when Washington did regulate banks. The Depression triggered the creation of government bank regulations and agencies ... After World War II, until the late 1970s, the system work[ed]. The savings-and-loan industry was highly regulated by the federal government, with a mission to take people's deposits and then provide loans for the sole purpose of helping people buy homes to live in. Washington insured those loans through the FDIC, provided mortgage discounts through FHA and the Veterans Administration, created a secondary mortgage market to guarantee a steady flow of capital, and required S&Ls to make predictable 30-year fixed loans. The result was a steady increase in homeownership and few foreclosures.

Those glory days became a distant memory once Ronald Reagan brought the conservative movement to town:

...by the early 1980s, the lending industry used its political clout to push back against government regulation. In 1980, Congress ... eliminated interest-rate caps and made sub-prime lending more feasible for lenders. The S&Ls balked at constraints on their ability to compete with conventional banks engaged in commercial lending. They got Congress -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- to change the rules, allowing S&Ls to begin a decade-long orgy of real estate speculation, mismanagement, and fraud...

...The deregulation of banking led to merger mania, with banks and S&Ls gobbling each other up and making loans to finance shopping malls, golf courses, office buildings, and condo projects that had no financial logic other than a quick-buck profit. When the dust settled in the late 1980s, hundreds of S&Ls and banks had gone under, billions of dollars of commercial loans were useless, and the federal government was left to bail out the depositors whose money the speculators had put at risk.

The stable neighborhood S&L soon became a thing of the past. Banks, insurance companies, credit card firms and other money-lenders were now part of a giant "financial services" industry, while Washington walked away from its responsibility to protect consumers with rules, regulations, and enforcement. Meanwhile, starting with Reagan, the federal government slashed funding for low-income housing, and allowed the FHA, once a key player helping working-class families purchase a home, to drift into irrelevancy.

Into this vacuum stepped banks, mortgage lenders, and scam artists, looking for ways to make big profits from consumers desperate for the American Dream of homeownership. They invented new "loan products" that put borrowers at risk. Thus was born the sub-prime market.

Bill also refers to recent articles that explain the problems of the mortgage crisis:

• Alan Greenspan on the mortgage crisis: "I didn't do it!" in Salon.com and
• Fed Shrugged as Subprime Crisis Spread in the New York Times.

The problem is that the conservatives object to government restrictions, yet without those restrictions, the very industries the conservatives work in collapse every so often. Major efforts that had to be implemented to bring America out of the Great Depression include creating the Securities and Exchange Commission, regulating the ability of banks to make loans without having the assets to survive if those loans go into default, and regulations that require that the financial statements of public companies receive independent audits.

The failure of Enron was, in part, the failure of the accounting industry to conduct truly independent audits. The failures of Enron, Worldcom, Tyco International and Peregrine Systems among others required the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The dangers of accounting firms that were paid by major companies to both audit the company's financial statements and also provide consulting services were reported for years before any of the above companies went bankrupt. Not only were the above companies destroyed by deregulation, so was Arthur Anderson, one of the accounting industry's "Big Five firms until it's collapse as a result of the Enron debacle.

These are just a few samples of the damage done to the economy by conservative greed. And the conservatives are proud of their actions, as Rick Perlstein documented:

Federal regulators once held a press conference in 2003. To symbolize their commitment to cutting red tape for bankers, they held up gardening shears. The head of Bush's Office of Thrift Supervision, James Gilleran, did them one better. He brought a chainsaw.

As I indicated in the title to this article, the conservative greed of which they are so proud is also a from of insanity (attributed both to Benjamin Franklin and to Albert Einstein) "insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

The Mortgage Crisis is just the next example of the insanity of accepting the conservative idiocy of deregulation of so many forms of business in which the seller makes a larger profit by shaving on the quality of the product - auditing, banking and financial reporting are just some examples.

One final thought, though. Poorly done regulation can be very destructive to an industry, so that has to be considered also. Properly done regulation can actually make an industry grow. As it is, the life insurance industry would be much smaller than it is if the states did not guarantee through regulation that insurance companies had sufficient financial assets to pay off when required, that life insurance contracts are written so that customers can understand them, that the contracts are sufficiently standardized so that consumers can compare the differences between the offerings of different companies, and that insurance companies do not simply take a customer's money during his or her life and then refuse to pay off upon the death of the insured. Without the standardization and financial assurance provided by government regulation, there would be a lot less life insurance sold.

America's growing plutocracy

America is becoming a nation in which wealth dominates the government and in which the financial rewards from the economy are monopolized by wealth instead of ability and accomplishment. The term for that is "plutocracy." The ideal of America has always been a society that was a "meritocracy" in which ability and accomplishment dominate government and the rewards from the economy flow to those who are most productive. We are losing that ideal.

What is the difference? In a meritocracy society rewards those who demonstrate personal abilities that increase economic and social productivity and who are useful to others. In a meritocracy the government is run by individuals who have demonstrated personal achievements. In a plutocracy, society rewards the holders of great wealth rather than those who have personally accomplished things of note.

The key government policies in a plutocracy are those that protect great wealth and the ability to keep it in the family. In a meritocracy the key government policies are those that grow greater wealth for society, and instead of allowing it to remain concentrated in a few pockets already dominated by inherited wealth, they spread it to those who contribute most to building society and to increase economic productivity.

But don't people with great wealth get rewarded for their achievements? No, generally they are rewarded for their personal networks and ability to raise funds needed to build organizations (productive or not) which they will then dominate because of their networks among the wealthy. I offer as an example George W. Bush, who has never in his life achieved anything, but because of his family and its wealth he was handed a series of jobs at the top of oil companies, then handed a professional baseball team, and finally was handed the Governorship of Texas followed by the Presidency of the United States. At no time has he ever achieved, let alone exceeded, expectations. There is one exception. He was placed in government by those who have great wealth, generally inherited, and his job has been to appoint government officials who act to protects and augment families with great wealth.

Just my opinion? Go look at the chart that Kevin Drum has posted and read his explanation. The top line on his chart - the one that shows the income flowing to the top 1% of America families - shows clearly that America is rewarding wealth, not ability or productivity.

Protecting and rewarding wealth is the central purpose of the conservative movement, even when it makes American society less productive.

Why fight when it is so purposless your leader commits suicide?

From Editor & Publisher we get the story of 2nd Platoon, Charlie 1-26 when they hit the wall in Iraq and simply can no longer perform the mission.

Iraq is a war without any purpose for Americans. Here is a sample of stories.

• IRAQ: US Army 'stretched to breaking point'
• A failure in generalship
• How the US Army's being worn down in Iraq
• Study: Army Stretched to Breaking Point
• America suffers an epidemic of suicides among traumatised army veterans

From the article above titled "A Failure of Generalship" we get this description of war

Armies do not fight wars; nations fight wars. War is not a mili¬tary activity conducted by soldiers, but rather a social activity that involves entire nations. Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that passion, probability and policy each play their role in war. Any understanding of war that ignores one of these elements is fundamentally flawed.

The passion of the people is necessary to endure the sacrifices inherent in war. Regardless of the system of government, the people supply the blood and treasure required to prose¬cute war. The statesman must stir these passions to a level commensurate with the popular sacrifices required. When the ends of policy are small, the statesman can prosecute a conflict without asking the public for great sacrifice. Global conflicts such as World War II require the full mobilization of entire societies to provide the men and materiel necessary for the successful prosecution of war. The greatest error the statesman can make is to commit his nation to a great conflict without mobilizing popular passions to a level commensurate with the stakes of the conflict.

The problem with the occupation of Iraq is that Bush and his minions never offered a real reason to fight the war they started in Iraq. The Bush people had to be dragged into Afghanistan after 9/11 and there was, and remains, popular support for the war in Afghanistan. But Iraq?

America lost the war in Vietnam because the nation was not involved in it. Vietnam had no meaning to most of the American nation. The occupation of Iraq is even worse. Every so-called reason America was given to invade Iraq fell apart as soon as it was looked at closely. It is a tribute to the professionalism of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps that they have gone to Iraq and done what was demanded of them with inadequate equipment, incompetent White House leadership, increased tours, and no valid reason to fight there except professionalism. The Reserves and National Guard have substituted for a draft because of the utter incompetence of the Bush administration.

Five years is enough. Bring them home. Bring them ALL home. Quit making American soldiers die in the misbegotten Republican Party's War.

They've done enough, ten times over and more. It's time to quit.

Break up of the alliance of Repub econo/cold-warriors and Repub evangelicals?

Eric Kleefield over at TPM Election Central writes about how the polls of Republicans in the primary states consistently show a sharp drop for Rudy Giuliani coupled with a rapid increase for Mike Huckabee. When we look at the utter horror the Republican pundits are displaying at the growth of Huckabeemania, then it seems likely to me that we are seeing signs that the traditional econo/Cold-Warrior Republicans and the evangelical Republicans are each going to go their own, separate, way in November 2008.

The Republican Party since Reagan has been an uneasy alliance between the econo-Repubs (which includes the foreign policy Repubs - mostly left over Cold Warriors) and the Evangelists, with the Evangelists generally getting federal judges and a lot of lip service from the party, while the econo/cold-warriors have gotten most of the economic and foreign policy power. This has worked as long as the Republican alliance had a reasonable chance to win the Presidency - that meant both sides got enough from the alliance to be willing to put up with the idiocies of the other side. As long as the followers felt that a Republican win was possible for the Repub alliance, they stuck together.

With the Republican primaries starting in three weeks, the rank-and-file Republicans are taking a serious look at the Republican prospects for 2008. No one thinks that the Republicans can win the Presidency, and the possibility of that Presidential power has been the glue that held the alliance together. So the evangelical followers are looking for someone - a purist - who can represent what they believe. Under the old rules Rudy or Romney, representing the econo/cold-warrior branch, could talk Southern religious racism and the Evangelical leaders could convince their follower that since they have no strong candidate of their own in the fight, the econo/cold-warrior candidate offered the evangelicals their best shot at national influence. But that becomes a much harder sell if the Republican candidate has no reasonable chance to win the Presidency. Why should the evangelical rank-and-file vote for and work for a loser who doesn't even represent the religious values that have motivated them to work in politics in the first place?

Neither Rudy nor Romney can deliver a Presidency, and Rudy has come to look worse and worse on a daily basis. Romney still isn't viewed as a Christian by a lot of evangelicals, and for a lot of them that is a deal-breaker. Enter Huckabee, a Southern governor who speaks true evangelical as a native language and who has truly awesome political skills.

With nothing to tie the the evangelical followers to the econo/cold-warrior candidates who have severe religious and moral baggage, the evangelical followers are leaving the Repub alliance and moving towards Huckabee. I think that's is what we see in these statistics, with Rudy collapsing, Romney dropping and Huckabee doing a rocket imitation going up.

Does this present an opening for McCain? Maybe with the econo/cold-warriors, but the evangelicals didn't like him in 2000 and the feeling was mutual. The enmity is not something that McCain can paper over by sweet-talking the evangelical leaders, particularly since the econo/cold-warriors are at best luke-warm about him and he has shown no indication that he can win in November. With Huckabee in the race, the evangelical followers are not going to switch to McCain.

I think we are watching the evangelistic Republicans as they decide they have nothing to win by voting for the econo/cold-warrior candidates. If Huckabee gets the nomination (unlikely) the econo/cold-warriors will sit at home in November. If Romney (or, much less likely, McCain) gets the nomination, the evangelicals will sit at home or run a third party in November. If that happens then the Republican alliance will have broken apart by November 2008. The leadership will try to keep the party unified, but without any hope of winning the Presidency, the leadership has nothing to offer their followers.

Then, just for fun, consider Ron Paul. Dr. Paul is running for the Republican Presidential nomination because it allows him to present his Libertarian philosophy on a national scale. When he ran for President as a Libertarian in 1988 no one ever heard of him. His effort this year has made him a household word. But neither the econo/cold-warriors nor the evangelicals are going to vote for Dr. Paul. Dr. Paul is the greatest hope that the Libertarians have ever had. Ron Paul is going to run as a third party candidate. That will split out the Libertarian Republicans from the econo/cold-warriors.

So we are looking at the strong likelihood that the national Republican Party is headed for a major crackup in November.

That makes the likelihood of a strong win for the Democratic candidate for President very likely. He or she is going to have coattails, too. Add the Presidential coattails to the drag Republicans will face from the now inevitable recession and from the continued fighting in Iraq, and it looks like the Democrats can be expected to win big next November.

Would I expect a Democratic win as big as in 1964? I wouldn't bet on that his far ahead of the election, but if nothing breaks favorably towards the Republicans by late Summer 2008, then I wouldn't want to bet on much Republican success next November. I do think, even now, that the Democratic nomination for President will decide who our next President will be.

2008 is going to be an interesting year.

Tony Snow - a recruit to fight against the (mythical) war against God

His battle against cancer isn't big enough to occupy Tony Snow's time and efforts. He also wants to remake himself as a conservative Christian warrior fighting "‘The Second War In This Country’ ... ‘The War On God’". Apparently Bill O'Reilly has enlisted Snow to fight against the mythical Secular - Progressives.

How long until Tony branches out to join the resistance against the secular - progressive "War on Christmas" and the "War on Easter?"

I guess that Snow has seen how much money Bill O'Reilly has made pushing these mythical culture wars and Snow wants a piece of the action. Why not? It's practical, makes tons of money, keeps them both in the eye of the public (I have no doubt that the applause of the audience is more important than the money) and as wars go, these skirmishes against a mythical enemy are one Hell of a lot safer than actually going to Iraq or Afghanistan with the troops who are fighting real wars.

This is what Bush calls the finest health care system in the world

Bush and the Republicans are lying about America's health care system again. Bush Claims ‘We Have Fabulous Health Care’ Compared To ‘Other Systems Around The World’

In 2002, the U.S. spent more on health care per person than other industrial countries like Britain, Canada, France, and Germany. But unlike those countries, which have universal health care systems, there are roughly 47 million Americans who lack health coverage.

In 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) did a comparative assessment of the health systems of 191 countries. The WHO found that in terms of the five measured performance indicators, the U.S. ranked 37th:

The U. S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance, the report finds. The United Kingdom, which spends just six percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on health services, ranks 18th . Several small countries — San Marino, Andorra, Malta and Singapore are rated close behind second- placed Italy.

Go look at Michale Moore's Latest Sicko News.

I wonder if anyone has even dared tell Bush that the UN has rated the American health care system as 37th in the world, right behind number 36 (Costa Rica) and just ahead of number 38 (Slovenia) and number 39 (Cuba.) Somehow I doubt it.

Like everything else the Republicans think America does so well, it is only really good for the very wealthy who are not kept from accessing it by lack of funds.

Bush lied about when he knew Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program.

From Think Progress:

President Bush has said he first learned that there was new intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program “in August” when DNI Mike McConnell told him “we have some new information.” The White House later revealed that Bush was told at that time that Iran’s nuclear weapons program “may be suspended.” Gareth Porter of IPS News writes that “it now appears” that “Bush likely knew about that intelligence as early as February or March 2007,” months before the White House has conceded. December 17, 2007 7:28 pm |

Was there any doubt?

This goes beyond misunderstanding or spin. Bush simply lied because he has been pushing for war with Iran well after he learned that the nuclear weapons program that was allegedly the reason for the war he wanted had been stopped.

So why does Bush really want to start a war with Iran? Does he actually have an objective rational reason, or is he simply an psychotic war-lover?

After the election in November, America needs a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" that has subpoena power and the power to offer immunity from prosecution to those who admit their criminal behavior as part of the Bush administration and tell their stories fully in public.

It's going to take something like that to begin to rebuild the truest Americans have lost in government officials. The refusal to take such a step after Nixon resigned or after Reagan's administration got caught in the Iran-Contra mess has simply allowed the criminals to do it again in the Bush administration.