Writing about the netroots' reaction to the Democrats throwing in the towel on the Iraq war supplemental, Hotline today writes

To the netroots' collective credit, they don't seem to buy the argument that political realities "forced" the Democratic leadership to drop withdrawal dates. Political realities are not like the laws of physics; they can be changed, and, indeed, are unequivocally useful today for Democrats, rather than Republicans.

Yesterday's New York Times gives us some insight into the Democratic strategy behind backing out of the Iraq redeployment timetable.

Democrats said they did not relish the prospect of leaving Washington for a Memorial Day break -- the second recess since the financing fight began -- and leaving themselves vulnerable to White House attacks that they were again on vacation while the troops were wanting. That criticism seemed more politically threatening to them than the anger Democrats knew they would draw from the left by bowing to Mr. Bush.

Here's a crazy idea. What if the Democrats said that they were going to pass a bill with a redeployment timeline, and that if they couldn't get it done before the Memorial day recess, then they would cancel the recess and stay in Washington to make sure that the people's work got done. Put the Republicans on the defense. Let them grumble about not having time off, and let them be the ones holding up the supplemental.

President Bush's numbers are in the toilet, and about 70 percent of Americans want the US out of Iraq.

For crying out loud, people, it's a no-brainer.

Did the DeLay campaign organize an attack on Nick Lampson's press conference today?

That's what I'm hearing from Fort Bend County.

BREAKING!  I will soon post photographs of a "demonstration" (read: violent disruption) of Nick Lampson's news conference this morning in Sugar Land.  Tom DeLay's campaign and a member of the State Republican Executive Committee called for volunteers to meet on the first floor of the parking garage and disrupt Lampson's press conference.

One elderly Democratic woman was slightly injured when she was assaulted by a DeLay protester.  The DeLay supporter first hit her in the face with a sign and then grabbed her hat and tried to pull it down over her eyes.  Think about this:  Your Congressman asked his supporters to go out and assault old women.  Okay, "wreck" them.

Update [2006-4-6 16:4:34 by sethco]: Juanita Jean has more on the DeLay camp's attack including photographs.  

Blowing airhorns while a candidate is trying to speak? (So much for free speech, eh?)  Intimidating parents holding their children?  Knocking around elderly women?  Talk about a complete and utter lack of class.  All politics aside, Tom DeLay and his supporters should be ashamed of themselves.  

Pathetic.

The conservative plan to colonize occupy liberate Iraq has caused many people to seriously re-think their positions.

William Buckley now says the Iraq invasion is a failure.  George Will has come to much the same conclusion.  Francis Fukuyama abandoned the Neocons.  Condi Rice says the government made thousands of errors in the Iraq project.  And on Sunday, former CENTCOM Commander General Anthony Zinni said Rumsfeld should resign.  

But, while some are coming to be critical of the invasion, others are sticking to their guns and coming up with eloquent well-reasoned arguments for the war.

Christopher Hitchens for example:

1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?

Yes: I was an advocate before the fact, not a supporter.

2. Have you changed your position?

Not in the least: I wish only that Saddam had not been able to rely upon Russian and French protection and the influence of oil-for-food racketeers and other political scum.

3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?

The United States and its allies should continue to stand for federal democracy, while making Iraq a killing-field for jihadists and fascists and a training ground for an army that will need to intervene again in other failed state/rogue state contexts.

Glenn Reynolds throws in his intellectual weight

1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?

Yes.

2. Have you changed your position?

No. Sanctions were failing and Saddam was a threat, making any other action in the region impossible.

3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?

Win.

And now Daniel Pipes explains the conservative mindset

Q: What is the biggest lesson you have learned from the Iraq war?

A: The ingratitude of the Iraqis for the extraordinary favor we gave them -- to release them from the bondage of Saddam Hussein's tyranny. They have rapidly interpreted it as something they did and that we were incidental to it. They've more or less written us out of the picture.

Q: How will we know when the occupation or the invasion of Iraq was a success or a failure?

A: Oh, it was a success. We got rid of Saddam Hussein. Beyond that is icing.

That's right, he said icing.

Health care is something that affects everyone, and if we don't do something to make affordable health care available to Americans, we face the real possibility of both public health and economic disasters.  Our current way of dealing with health care is a mish-mash of stop-gap measures that are becoming less and less viable as time and technology advance.  For example, the current program for providing health care to the poorest Americans is to have them wait until their situation is critical, and then send them to an emergency room.  This is, quite possibly, the most expensive and lease efficient way of providing medical care to people.  So, what do we do?

Princeton economist Paul Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, have an article in the 23 March issue of The New York Review of Books titled The health care crisis and what to do about it in which they present a good introduction to this real problem facing Americans.  I highly recommend taking the time to read it.

They begin by looking at the current patchwork of health care programs, and why they're quickly falling apart.  Take, for example, what most Americans probably consider the "normal" way to get health care - employer provided health insurance.  As Krugman and Wells explain, this idea worked right after WWII, but today it makes little economic sense.

Health care costs at current levels override the incentives that have historically supported employer-based health insurance. Now that health costs loom so large, companies that provide generous benefits are in effect paying some of their workers much more than the going wage--or, more to the point, more than competitors pay similar workers. Inevitably, this creates pressure to reduce or eliminate health benefits. And companies that can't cut benefits enough to stay competitive--such as GM--find their very existence at risk.

Rising health costs have also ended the ability of employer-based insurance plans to avoid the problem of adverse selection. Anecdotal evidence suggests that workers who know they have health problems actively seek out jobs with companies that still offer generous benefits. On the other side, employers are starting to make hiring decisions based on likely health costs. For example, an internal Wal-Mart memo, reported by The New York Times in October, suggested adding tasks requiring physical exertion to jobs that don't really require it as a way to screen out individuals with potential health risks.

The conservative solution is to create disincentives for consuming health care by placing more of the financial burden on everyday Americans - something President Bush has proposed with his "health care savings accounts".  The thought is, if you have to pay for medical care yourself, you'll only go when you really need to.  This, of course, assumes that everyone is both a doctor and always making rational, efficient decisions.  Unfortunately, that's just not the case in the real world.

Yet another problem with consumer-directed care is that the evidence says that people don't, in fact, make wise decisions when paying for medical care out of pocket. A classic study by the Rand Corporation found that when people pay medical expenses themselves rather than relying on insurance, they do cut back on their consumption of health care--but that they cut back on valuable as well as questionable medical procedures, showing no ability to set sensible priorities.

What Krugman and Wells find is that the preponderance of the research shows that a public health program would be cheaper, more efficient, and higher quality than a system of private health insurance.  Expect this to be a long time coming, though.  Conservatives have been, for decades, publishing Chicken Little stories about how public health programs are evil.  Only, there's no reason to really think that - even from a pro-business, capitalist perspective.

Capitalism recognizes that certain public goods cannot be provided by the market - national security, police, and fire departments for example.   Why, then, are we so adverse to recognizing what's been obvious to the rest of the civilized world for a long time:  public health is a public good that cannot be efficiently provided for by the market.

A large part of the reason is, of course, the excellent job that the pharmaceutical and insurance lobbies have done in propagating misinformation. Krugman and Wells provide a good start in countering the industry propaganda, though, and explain that if we want to provide the best health care, most efficiently, and at the lowest cost - we need to put aside our ideological hang-ups and start looking at the facts. Public health care won't destroy our capitalist economy, and it might very well save it.

It looks like Congress is taking an accounting lesson from the Enron playbook.  The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that members of the House and Senate are contemplating some budgetary sleight of hand to mask problems in last year's tax cut reconciliation bill by generating short term revenue while causing increased long term deficits.

The proposal would induce taxpayers to move savings from traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs, which would generate additional revenues in the short run, but would reduce revenues and increase deficits after 2015.  This maneuver is an effort to circumvent the Senate rule prohibiting budget reconciliation from increasing long-term deficits by including tax cuts or entitlement spending increases that are not offset in years beyond the budget window. It would undermine respect for, and the effectiveness of, budget procedures intended to promote long-term fiscal responsibility.

Not only is this bad economic policy, pushing the country further into debt, it appears to be in violation of a Senate rule prohibiting long term deficit increases.

That Senate rule prohibits use of reconciliation legislation to increase the deficit in any year outside of the period to which the reconciliation process applies, which is from fiscal year 2006 through fiscal year 2010 for the pending tax-cut reconciliation measure.

Of course, under Republican leadership, if you preside over a three month, $1.8 Trillion debt increase you get a promotion.

Bad news on the economic front.  Yesterday, Jonathan Singer at MyDD wrote about the sharp rise in personal bankruptcies.  Singer cites an AP article that says

Bankruptcy petitions filed in federal courts totaled 2,039,214 in 2005, up from 1,563,145 in 2004, according to data released Friday by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

The problem is not one of wealth creation, says Singer, noting that Forbes reported  a 14% rise in the number of American billionaires.

At the same time, states are reporting the weakest revenue growth in two years.  Though the growth is down, it's there.  But pay attention to how the revenue is coming in - there's an interesting disparity.

While corporate taxes continued their double-digit increases, growth in both sales and personal income taxes dipped to their lowest levels in more than two years, the March 16 report said.

Wealth is being created, sure, but it is also being consolidated in the hands of a select few.  As I previously noted, this should come as no surprise.  The corporatist economics of the GOP are centered on wealth creation and consolidation, as opposed to creating opportunities for ownership distributed throughout the general population.

Singer says that

"...it would greatly behoove Democratic candidates not to forget and forsake talking about economic equality in America, even if George W. Bush and the GOP believe that there is no economic problem in this country today.

I think he's right, but I think it's important that Democrats, liberals, progressives - whomever, don't just say "there's an economic problem" without proposing a sound alternative to GOP "trickle-down" economics.  Just saying, "there's an economic problem" allows conservatives the opportunity to counter with their voodoo economics plans.  What progressive should be saying is, "there's an economic problem in this country today, and it's Republican economics - we have a better plan."

A proper plan to tackle personal bankruptcy isn't what the Republicans want - tighter restrictions on who can file.  Sure, personal responsibility is part it, but most Americans try to be responsible about their finances.  Nobody says, "I'm going to take on a lot of debt and then make things worse by filing bankruptcy." And as much as Republicans like to talk about personal responsibility, they're silent when it comes to the real problem - corporate responsibility.  

Republicans want to make it harder to file bankruptcy, but they also want to make it easier for you to go bankrupt.  The regulations governing predatory lending are so lax as to make them nearly non-existent.  The elephant in the room of the American economy is that banks and corporations are happy to give you credit with interest rates to dig a giant hole and penalties to bury you.  It's a shell game corporations play so that you'll use the credit and they can pad their bottom line come end of quarter.  This makes shareholders happy, which makes stock prices go up.

In the end, though, the result is that only the tiniest fraction of the population has economic opportunities, and the rest of us are just knocking each other over trying to get to the starting line.

Progressive economics begins with corporate responsibility, and it continues with smart investment in creating opportunities for ownership across the population.  This is a plan that will win, not because it sounds good - but because it works.

In a previous post I mentioned that Bush, when signing the bill re-authorizing the Patriot Act, issued a so-called "signing statement" to the effect that he will ignore the oversight requirements.  Today, The Boston Globe has more on the story.

Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it ''a piece of legislation that's vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people." But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a ''signing statement," an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.

In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would ''impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."

It struck me at the time that this was a blatant overreach by the President, and I did not see how it could stand up to Constitutional scrutiny.  Apparently, I'm not the only one who thought so.