QOTD

Senator John Kerry, in a Senate hearing on the new START:

During the question-and-answer period, Sen. Jim DeMint, a first-term Republican from South Carolina, who's up for re-election this year, said he found it "frightening" that the Russians believe there's a relationship between offensive and defensive nuclear forces.

The committee's chairman, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., patiently noted, "There is a relationship." If offensive forces are cut and defensive forces go up, "you can obliterate one party's sense of deterrence." This, he said, is "common sense."

DeMint said, "But you're agreeing with me." Don't we want to expand our defenses so that we can obliterate Russia's offensive capability?

Kerry, a bit nonplussed, replied, "No."

Fiscal Conservatism for Thee

This article about "fiscally conservative" Republicans all butthurt because their own pet projects are being singled out for cuts is just too much. My personal fave is our very own Mitch McConnell whining about cuts to coal subsidies, with his spokesman claiming that "an end to subsidies is the equivalent of tax increases on the coal industry." Smell the free market freedomness!

Kentucky Proud

Ya know, I kind of respect Jim Bunning for just half-assing (at best) what little remains of his...ahem...illustrious U.S. Senate career. He obviously could not give two shits about his job at this point, and I can't say I really blame him. We don't like him and he doesn't like us. Let's just try to remember him for his no-hitters.

Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., was the only senator to miss the historic Christmas Eve vote on the health care overhaul bill.

"The senator had family commitments” and was at home in Kentucky, Bunning spokesman Mike Reynard said in e-mails.

The missed vote was one of 21 this month — nearly half of all Senate floor votes — that the retiring senator skipped.

At least we'll be getting a new senator before too long. They couldn't be much worse than Bunning, right? Right? Oh crap, what's that you say? One of the major candidates is named after Ayn Rand? Oh dear...

Prayer Can Backfire

Sorry for the video overload, but this it too good to ignore. Via Balloon Juice.

This may be the most awesomest moment in C-SPAN history. What you are about to watch is a tearful teabagger, noting that James Inhofe missed a health care reform vote sick, calling in to C-SPAN worried that his prayer group from Waycross, Georgia may have killed Inhofe by mistake after answering...[Senator] Coburn’s call to pray for someone [note from slim: read: "a Democrat"] to miss a vote the other day:

Track of the Day & Health Care Thoughts

Goes out to the Congressional GOP:



Seriously, it's pretty amazing when you consider the sheer amount of poo flung during this whole process that something approaching a half-way decent bill seems to be emerging from this process. Here is but a brief list of some of the crap that got us to this point:

• socialism!!!11!!11, err, um Communism!!!11! (to be fair, these tactics had already been trotted out during the presidential election), I mean fascism or maybe Nazism!!!!!1!
• summer '09: crazy wingnuts scream at members of Congress about tyranny
• the teabag movement (copyright Fox News 2009)
• protesters literally routinely comparing health care reform to Hitler's policies and making pictures of the President as Hitler
• Max Baucus' wanktastic finance committee machinations, and then Chuck Grassley turning on him
• Olympia Snowe's grandstanding
• "They're gunna take yur Medicare!!!1!" (even though we viciously opposed and probably continue to oppose Medicare)
• Sarah Palin's Twitter feed
• the Stupak Amendment
• big insurance backed ad campaign
• Senator Eeyore
• Ben Nelson's most recent hissyfit
• DEATH PANELS!!!!!!!

A veritable gauntlet of douchebaggery.

Who Will Be the Next Dumb Senator to Become Indignant Over Some Arbitrarily Selected Provision of the Health Care Bill?

So they buy off Ben Nelson (who, according to some sources, "poops through his mouth") with federal Medicaid help for Nebraska...I'm seriously thinking the Democratic leadership basically needs to take a "we don't negotiate with legislative hostage-takers" line going forward before every Blue Dog/Conservadem demands several pounds of flesh at every step in the legislative process.

Nothing Like Good Old-Fashioned Hypocrisy

Washington Post:

Senate Republicans failed early Friday in their bid to filibuster a massive Pentagon bill that funds the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an unusual move designed to delay President Obama's health-care legislation.

On a 63 to 33 vote, Democrats cleared a key hurdle that should allow them to approve the must-pass military spending bill Saturday and return to the health-care debate. After years of criticizing Democrats for not supporting the troops, just three Republicans supported the military funding...

If the filibuster on the $626 billion defense bill had succeeded, Democrats would have had to scramble to find a way to fund the military operations, because a stopgap funding measure for the Pentagon will expire at midnight Friday. Such an effort to come up with another stopgap defense bill might have disrupted the very tight timeline on health care.

Looks it's perfectly fine to oppose funding the wars on principled grounds. See the section of the article on Russ Feingold for a good example of how this should be done. It's also perfectly fine to oppose the bill due to earmarks, which John McCain is quoted about in the article.

However, it's not fine to oppose the funding because you just want to delay the health care bill. And excuse us if we don't consider your opposition to the bill rooted in good faith when you just spent the last several years screaming about how anyone who voted against a war funding bill was a) with the terrorists and b) against the troops.

Madman Theory and Health Reform

This post at LGM made me think about how madman theory, or the theory of rational irrationalism, might be relevant to understanding the current negotiations over health care reform in the Senate.

When Thomas Schelling won the Nobel Prize for Economics, the Swedes said this:

Against the backdrop of the nuclear arms race in the late 1950s, Thomas Schelling’s book The Strategy of Conflict [1960] set forth his vision of game theory as a unifying framework for the social sciences. Schelling showed that a party can strengthen its position by overtly worsening its own options, that the capability to retaliate can be more useful than the ability to resist an attack, and that uncertain retaliation is more credible and more efficient than certain retaliation. These insights have proven to be of great relevance for conflict resolution and efforts to avoid war. . .

Tyler Cowen puts it in layman's terms:

Ever see Dr. Strangelove? [Schelling] developed the idea that deterrence is never fully credible (why retaliate once you are wiped out?). The best deterrent might involve pre-commitment [e.g., the Doomsday Machine], some element of randomness [e.g., ambiguity about one’s deterrent strategy], or a partly crazy leader [e.g., a madman such as General Ripper]. I recall Tom telling me he was briefly an advisor to Kubrick.

Here's where health care comes in. Progressive legislators would like to see "optimally" progressive legislation passed, but they, at the same time, actually care about the uninsured, insurance company abuses, and people losing their insurance when they lose their jobs. Since Lieberman doesn't really give a damn about any of these factors and is really only concerned with extracting concessions from those darn liberals that were mean to him in '06, his bargaining position is strengthened to a significant extent. As Lemieux puts it:

The dilemma facing progressives on health care is simply that the indifference in the face of suffering that the Joe Liebermans of the world have greatly increases their negotiating leverage. His threats to blow up health care reform are simply going to be more credible than those of people who actually care about whether people have access to health insurance.

Since progressive members actually want something to pass because of their real concerns about actual outcomes, they are much less likely than Lieberman to simply blow up the whole process in return for a public option or a Medicare buy-in.

War Bonds & Dumb Senators

To piggyback off of Frosty's post, the recent debate over financing the war in Afghanistan has provided a good window into the complete vapidity of the median member of the United States Senate. The war tax proposal was introduced by Rep. David Obey last month. Obey basically made the argument that we should engage in the same sort of cost-benefit analyses for war that we engage in for domestic policies (cost control, deficit neutrality, etc.). Reasonable people may agree or disagree about the merits of the proposal (I think Frosty makes a pretty good case against it), but it's probably a debate worth having.

Then, enter one Conservadem Ben Nelson:

In lieu of a “war tax” to pay for a troop increase in Afghanistan, Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson (NE) is proposing war bonds.

“We didn’t have a war tax in the second World War,” Nelson said, and instead the government sold Americans bonds. “People invested in their country, in that fashion [and] made a lot of sense back then. I don’t know why it might not make sense today, certainly in lieu of jumping to tax.”

There are a couple things wrong with this. One, we actually did have higher taxes during WW2. Second...well, I'll let Wonkette take it from here:

...this is superfluous, because we already have such bonds: they are called United States Treasury Bonds, which we use to finance any sort of deficit spending! For how many years, as a child, did Ben Nelson drink paint-thinner on a daily basis?...Issuing, say, $30 billion in new “war bonds” means taking on $30 billion in new debt, plus interest. If Ben Nelson wants to be Fiscally Serious, then he should either (a) add a surtax to accumulate $30 billion in new revenue or (b) offset $30 billion in the Defense Department budget, at the expense of other things. That’s probably like four F-35s, seriously. Seriously.

Ben Nelson poops through his mouth.

Well said.

Over at TNR, Jon Chait advances a similar thesis regarding Senator Joe "Eeyore" Lieberman's recent asshattery on health care.