After the election, the "welfare" treatment of Obama's tax policies was echoed by similar conservative rhetoric about proposals to help homebuyers getting hammered by the mortgage and real estate collapse. Most famously, CNBC financial reporter Rick Santelli became a right-wing folk hero for a rant about the injustice of being asked to help the "losers" who took out mortgages they should have known they couldn't pay. This was at about the same time as Republican members of Congress began handing out copies of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," with its prophecy of a dystopic society in which socialist "looters" and Christian "altruists" had brought the United States to its knees, and some conservative agitators began urging "productive" Americans to emulate Rand's plutocratic heroes by "going Galt" and refusing to contribute to the welfare state. The "tea party" movement that ramped up in opposition to Obama's economic stimulus proposals was heavily freighted with this sort of revolt-of-the-producers attitude.

Unsurprisingly, the new "welfare queen wedge" esposed by GOP chairman Steel has been very evident in the opposition to healthcare reform, even before Michael Steele made it clear that "socialism" for "the greatest generation" was worth defending so long as it wasn't extended to the currently uninsured.

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Opponents suggest that a “government takeover” of health care will be a milestone on the road to “socialized medicine,” and when he hears those terms, Wendell Potter cringes. He’s embarrassed that opponents are using a playbook that he helped devise.

“Over the years I helped craft this messaging and deliver it,” he noted.

Mr. Potter was an executive in the health insurance industry for nearly 20 years before his conscience got the better of him. He served as head of corporate communications for Humana and then for Cigna.

He flew in corporate jets to industry meetings to plan how to block health reform, he says. He rode in limousines to confabs to concoct messaging to scare the public about reform. But in his heart, he began to have doubts as the business model for insurance evolved in recent years from spreading risk to dumping the risky.

Then in 2007 Mr. Potter attended a premiere of “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s excoriating film about the American health care system. Mr. Potter was taking notes so that he could prepare a propaganda counterblast — but he found himself agreeing with a great deal of the film.

A month later, Mr. Potter was back home in Tennessee, visiting his parents, and dropped in on a three-day charity program at a county fairgrounds to provide medical care for patients who could not afford doctors. Long lines of people were waiting in the rain, and patients were being examined and treated in public in stalls intended for livestock.

“It was a life-changing event to witness that,” he remembered. Increasingly, he found himself despising himself for helping block health reforms. “It sounds hokey, but I would look in the mirror and think, how did I get into this?”

Mr. Potter loved his office, his executive salary, his bonus, his stock options. “How can I walk away from a job that pays me so well?” he wondered. But at the age of 56, he announced his retirement and left Cigna last year.

This year, he went public with his concerns, testifying before a Senate committee investigating the insurance industry.

“I knew that once I did that my life would be different,” he said. “I wouldn’t be getting any more calls from recruiters for the health industry. It was the scariest thing I have done in my life. But it was the right thing to do.”

Mr. Potter says he liked his colleagues and bosses in the insurance industry, and respected them. They are not evil. But he adds that they are removed from the consequences of their decisions, as he was, and are obsessed with sustaining the company’s stock price — which means paying fewer medical bills.

One way to do that is to deny requests for expensive procedures. A second is “rescission” — seizing upon a technicality to cancel the policy of someone who has been paying premiums and finally gets cancer or some other expensive disease. A Congressional investigation into rescission found that three insurers, including Blue Cross of California, used this technique to cancel more than 20,000 policies over five years, saving the companies $300 million in claims.

As The Los Angeles Times has reported, insurers encourage this approach through performance evaluations. One Blue Cross employee earned a perfect evaluation score after dropping thousands of policyholders who faced nearly $10 million in medical expenses.

Mr. Potter notes that a third tactic is for insurers to raise premiums for a small business astronomically after an employee is found to have an illness that will be very expensive to treat. That forces the business to drop coverage for all its employees or go elsewhere.

All this is monstrous, and it negates the entire point of insurance, which is to spread risk.

The insurers are open to one kind of reform — universal coverage through mandates and subsidies, so as to give them more customers and more profits. But they don’t want the reforms that will most help patients, such as a public insurance option, enforced competition and tighter regulation.

Mr. Potter argues that much tougher regulation is essential. He also believes that a robust public option is an essential part of any health reform, to compete with for-profit insurers and keep them honest.

As a nation, we’re at a turning point. Universal health coverage has been proposed for nearly a century in the United States. It was in an early draft of Social Security.

Yet each time, it has been defeated in part by fear-mongering industry lobbyists. That may happen this time as well — unless the Obama administration and Congress defeat these manipulative special interests. What’s un-American isn’t a greater government role in health care but an existing system in which Americans without insurance get health care, if at all, in livestock pens.

But here's the big thing about "mainstream" journalism and what Ambinder calls "information asymmetry." Upton Sinclair said it best: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Furthermore, the safest place during a stampede is the middle of the herd. Establishment journalists with mortgages, car payments and children in private schools saw what happened to the Dixie Chicks. Why couldn't it happen to them? (The job I got fired from that month wasn't paying my bills.) The United States had been attacked. Feelings ran high, especially in New York and Washington.

What did it matter if we killed the wrong Arabs, so long as Arabs were being killed? In Thomas Friedman's immortal words, "We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth."

Under oath to a Senate committee, Condi Rice told a barefaced whopper about the Aug. 6, 2001, CIA terrorism briefing that Bush blew off. Media insiders pretended not to notice. Bush made a slapstick skit of searching under his Oval Office desk for Iraqi WMDs. The press laughed on cue. He claimed that Saddam Hussein forced him to invade Iraq by expelling U.N. arms inspectors. (In reality, Bush made them leave.) Pundits praised his charm.

Long under siege for "liberal bias," media careerists now find themselves confronted with people they see as passionate amateurs. True, fearless scrappers like my friend Joe Conason have always been around, and somebody like Paul Krugman -- a world-class economist who doesn't care what, say, MSNBC's Chris Matthews thinks of him -- can be very annoying.

But what's really driving these jokers up the wall is economic and intellectual competition from the Internet: people with first-class minds and a passion for truth that some of them can barely remember.

© 2009 Gene Lyons. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association

Thomas Paine v. the Right's torture defenders

GOP Congressman Peter King -- the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee -- had this rancid outburst today in Politico regarding Eric Holder's decision to investigate whether laws were broken by the Bush administration's torture:

"It’s bullshit. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on. [It's' a] declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense. . . . When Holder was talking about being 'shocked' [before the report's release], I thought they were going to have cutting guys' fingers off or something -- or that they actually used the power drill. . . "

Pressed on whether interrogators had actually broken the law, King said he didn't think the Geneva Convention "applies to terrorists."

Never mind that the Supreme Court in Hamdan ruled exactly the opposite: that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to all detainees, including accused Terrorists. Never mind that the War Crimes Act makes it a felony to inflict "prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from . . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering. . . ." and that these acts are therefore criminal whether or not King likes them.

Never mind that scores of people have died -- not merely been threatened with death -- in American custody as a result of "interrogation tactics." Never mind that Ronald Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture which compels the U.S. to prosecute anyone authorizing torture; that the Treaty proclaims that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever . . . may be invoked as a justification of torture"; and that Reagan himself said the Treaty "will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today." And most of all, never mind that King has no idea whether these people are actually "terrorists" because the people we tortured were never given trials, never proven to have done anything wrong, and in many cases were -- as federal courts have repeatedly found and as the CIA IG Report itself recognized -- completely innocent.

My email inbox and comment section are filled with King-like accusatory sentiments that to oppose Torture is to defend Terrorists, because Terrorists deserve to be tortured, and that to oppose their abuse is to be treasonous because it's terrible to care if Terrorists are abused, etc. etc. In his "1795 essay", which he entitled Dissertations on First Principles of Government, Thomas Paine wrote this as his last paragraph:

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Can that be any clearer? Of course, Paine also wrote in Common Sense that "so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king" and "in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other." And in his Dissertations, he also wrote:

The executive is not invested with the power of deliberating whether it shall act or not; it has no discretionary authority in the case; for it can act no other thing than what the laws decree, and it is obliged to act conformably thereto. . . .

For anyone who believes in the basic principles of the founding, the fact that these acts of torture are illegal -- felonies -- ought to end the discussion about whether they were justified.

Few things are more repellent than watching the contemporary Right in America invoke the principles of the Founders -- in general -- to justify their warped and lawless authoritarianism. But nothing is more repulsive than watching them pretend that Thomas Paine -- of all people -- has anything to do with them (Glenn Beck actually wrote his most recent book based on the explicit pretense that he is the modern day Paine). Any casual reading of Paine makes clear that, today, he would be so far on what is deemed the "left" side of the spectrum that you'd be unable to find him. Paine is nothing but what Joe Klein refers to as a "crazy civil liberties absolutist" and what Rush Limbaugh similarly calls "far, fringe, lunatic kooks, far left radical lunatic fringe."

The Right today argues that condemning torture is wrong because the people who were tortured were just Terrorists -- barely human -- and they deserve no defense, not even the force of law. Thomas Paine argued as a first principle that those devoted to liberty "must guard even his enemy from oppression." Could the contrast be any more stark?

-- Glenn Greenwald

What do right-wingers and Republicans have against our Constitution and the laws on which this country is founded?

They are the principals on which we were founded and live by, not some pie in the sky, feel good convictions to be used only when it's convenient. Real patriots understand that the Law is King in America. We are not a country of monarchs and flesh and blood King's but of the suprimacy of the Law! That is what separates us from the rest of the governments of the world. People like "w", Cheney and all their pathetic sychophants still don't understand what the Constitution is all about. It is why we are the greatest nation on earth. If they don't want to support that they need to leave and start their own country somewhere else. They are not patriots. They are lawless frauds who have no basis or pricipal on which to stand. The U.S. Constitution is our King!

It’s so interesting to watch and listen to right-wing extremists at Town Hall meetings and those writing conspiracy theory op-eds with ridiculous references to Nazi’s these days. I noticed a crippled lady with a life threatening disease struggle to stand up talking about how she had been consistently denied insurance coverage by her private insurance company countless times and had exhausted her life savings. So many people that are fortunate enough to even have private insurance have also been dropped because of their condition and most can’t get private insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The tragedy of this story is that while the women struggles to stand with her crutches and tell her story another loud mouth tea bagger nut-case behind her a few rows back screams, her face distorted and ugly in it's anger, ignorance and selfishness, "I shouldn’t have to pay for your health care!" And these are normal, patriotic, "concerned" citizens?”



Tell me our present system is not a sick health care policy. It is what those who are against Obama’s plan want to continue. Doing nothing is not an option. These right-wing protesters are the ones lying, abusing disabled people, hanging people in effigy, destroying property, and making death threats while ignoring essential medical needs of fellow citizens. These are the kinds of people Republicans are counting on to destroy Obama’s health care plans by lying to them and provoking them with fear mongering about death panels and forced euthanasia. Our present Medicare system doesn’t require that and the proposed system doesn’t either. Purposely lying about the proposed health care insurance system is sick and so is our political discourse today.

What is it about today’s Republicans that cause them to give up on reasoned debate and instead just distort and lie concerning the issues? The issues should be debated on merit, not lies. Case in point is the Health Care Bill presently in Congress. The ignorance and histrionics surrounding this issue is typical of right-wing talk show methods. It is a fact that Rush, FOX news and the like control and lead conservative Republican thought in this country. No right-thinking Republican elected official will dare contradict anything said by right-wing media sources for fear of national humiliation on the airwaves. How many Republican politicians have gone on Rush’s program and apologized on bended knees for having the audacity to disagree with his views? It’s a sad day in American politics when an unelected drug-addicted blow-hard talk show host runs one of our two major political parties but that is the case in today’s essentially all-white rural fundamentalist Southern regional Republican Party cult.

Republicans are in such disarray and have no constructive ideas on how to resolve the myriad of problems they created over the last eight years that their only recourse is to just try to destroy and obstruct any effort put forth by our President to resolve them. The ignorance by which they do this is astounding. The Democrats should stop trying to compromise with them and just create their own program. It is futile to try and work with a group that is dead set against any health care plan. One comment from a recent Republican critic said, “keep your government hands off my Medicare” as though he had no idea that Medicare was a government program. That ignorant view is much like driving cross country to protest the highway system. The heath care insurance and pharmaceutical industry are so desperate to derail the health care program they have resorted to the same scare tactics and lies they used in 92 and the 60’s against Medicare and Medicaid programs. It’s interesting to note that the administrative costs of private insurance companies are 20% while the administrative cost for Medicare is only 3%. Now, you tell me which one is more efficient and cost effective.

Not to be outdone by the health insurance industry, politicians like Sara Palin and other simple-minded Republicans have hysterically claimed that the government will force death panels and make euthanasia mandatory for the elderly and disabled. That is the most blatant lie perpetrated so far but the conspiracy theorists on the right fall for this kind of tactic every time. When you can’t win the debate on the facts just lie, demagogue and scare people that don’t know any better. They continuously do this on issues like abortion and the Presidents birth certificate. Anti-abortion extremists act as though abortion wasn’t even around until 1973, ignoring the fact that countless women were maimed and died from back-alley botched abortions for decades prior to 1973. That is why it was legalized in the first place. Another lie perpetrated by the right is that the government funds abortions. This is a blatant lie but it doesn’t keep right-wing zealot nutcases from repeating it ad infinitum. Are these the kind of people you want dictating to you and your doctor if you can use birth control pills or not? On the one hand they are against abortion for any and all reasons and on the other they rail against welfare mothers who live off the government by having child after child irresponsibly. They cater to illogical reactionaries and paranoid NRA types.

These right-wing Republican domestic terrorists incite violence in unstable people and that is why so many doctors and leaders from their ideological enemy’s lists are threatened and killed with guns or anthrax. For a political party that still insists Saddam was involved in 911 and that he had weapons of mass destruction what else do you expect? Until right-wingers address the issues honestly and stop all the lying and scare tactics they don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Otherwise they should be called what they are. Dare I say it? Ignorant and dishonest.