HorsesAss.Org

With reports that the Obama Administration is considering backing down on the public option – a health care proposal that is supported by roughly 3/4 of the country – due to the way the debate is being portrayed in the media, I get the sense that we’ve witnessed what might be an even larger media failure than what happened in the run-up to the Iraq War. At least then, the public was in far more of a position to buy into the lies being put out by the special interest groups leading us into that mess. But what has happened over the past few weeks in the health care debate has transcended that. A narrow set of interests who profit very handsomely from our incredibly overpriced health care system have managed to derail a popular initiative put forth by a popular president. It’s another loud warning that the ability of Americans (and media personalities) to figure out when moneyed interests are lying to us is not keeping up with the myriad ways we’re all being lied to.

A big part of this distorted debate has focused on end-of-life issues. An innocuous provision in one of the health care bills was incorrectly characterized by former Alaska Governor and losing Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin as “death panels“. The issue itself was nothing more than a provision to allow for voluntary end-of-life counseling sessions to be covered. As I’ve pointed out previously, these end-of-life sessions have a well-known positive effect when people take advantage of them. In fact, those who discuss these issues openly and honestly with their doctors tend to outlive those who don’t. The idea that there’s anything to fear from something like this is so absurd that even Sarah Palin herself didn’t buy it back in 2008 when she endorsed end-of-life counseling as Governor of Alaska.

Instead, much of what happened after Palin dropped that turd into the health care debate punch bowl reminded me a lot of what happened last year during the I-1000 campaign, where opponents of the death with dignity initiative piled lies on top of bullshit on top of more lies in order to convince people that a law that was working very well just across the border in Oregon would somehow be a disaster here in Washington. One can easily see the parallel to the current health care debate, where we can look to countries like France – which has a world-class health care system that relies heavily on government involvement alongside private insurance – to see that moving towards more “socialized” medicine is not a slippery slope. And we rarely saw the media (either last year or right now) take a forceful approach to separating fact from fiction this way.

Fortunately, the I-1000 debate was only about a single contentious issue, and in the end, it didn’t really matter that Martin Sheen was telling whoppers in a commercial that aired every 10 seconds in October, or that the Seattle Times was giving editorial space to a crackpot conspiracy theorist who actually believes that Washington’s death with dignity law was specifically worded to allow people to kill their rich parents. It still passed with nearly 60 percent of the vote. I think that’s one thing to be optimistic about. I remember having a conversation with Will around this time last year (he was working on the I-1000 campaign) as he was freaking out about all the bullshit being shouted through media outlets who arguably should have had much better baloney detectors. I told him there’s no way it wasn’t going to pass, and I ended up being vindicated on that front.

The national health care debate right now is a complete buffet of every contentious issue that borders on health care. End-of-life care is just a small tibdit. Abortion, government regulation, illegal immigrants, and taxes are each separate elephants crammed trunk to tail into this room. And while the people whose paranoia far outweighs their ability to grasp complex issues continue to show up at town halls and scream their heads off, I still hold out some hope that enough Americans are taking the same thing away from the spectacle that I am, that we’re really not doing a good enough job in this country of treating the mentally ill – and that’s just another reason we need to improve our health care system. Sadly, we’ll still likely have to improve how we keep ourselves well-informed first.

They say you can tell a lot about a person by the friends they hang out with, and so when HA commenter I Got Nothin’ went trolling around Susan Hutchison’s Facebook page, he couldn’t help but notice her friend Orly Taitz.

And who is Orly Taitz? Only the crazy queen bee of the “birther” movement, a woman who accuses mainstream journalists of being Brownshirts, and who compares the Obama administration to Nazi Germany.

But don’t you worry, Hutchison’s friendship with Taitz doesn’t make her a Republican. After all, Hutchison is also Facebook friends with Joe Mallahan, so that makes her about as nonpartisan as they come, right?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMUaca8wP9w[/youtube]

Marc Emery is expected to be sentenced to a 5-year prison term right here in Seattle on Monday, September 21. Rallies are planned in his support in a number of U.S. and Canadian cities on Saturday, September 19th.

NPR has the story of how an Orange County retirement community set up their medical marijuana coop.

A Clallam County man who was a medical marijuana provider won a victory in the state Court of Appeals when they overturned his conviction and ordered a retrial.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy isn’t buying that the Mexican government is upholding human rights in their (our) war on drugs.

The Economix blog at the New York Times breaks down the rates of illicit drug use from state-to-state. Washington is in the top ten, but still lags behind Montana and Alaska.

As I learned this week at Netroots Nation, some leaders lead through mere words, while some lead by example. For Drinking Liberally’s Justin Krebs, it’s definitely the latter.

CBS News examines the similarities and differences among the five different health insurance reform drafts in Congress:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irwmdDMZVP0[/youtube]

Now examine this mini-debate between Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31-1SFncpIw&feature=player_profilepage[/youtube]

This is remarkable. First, Hatch refuses to take sides in the “Obama Death Panel” canard! Hatch then lets loose with a series of blatant lies (“government take-over”, “cut medicare”, “eight in ten of Americans really want their health insurance coverage and don’t want to lose it”, “nameless, faceless bureaucrats setting healthcare”, “single payer”, “government plan”).

Much of what Hatch is saying isn’t simply “alternative interpretations” of facts. They are fabrications that are so discordant with the actual provisions in the drafts that this can only be intentional deceit.

This is what Republicans are reduced to? Putting their senior statesmen on mainstream TV to tell barefaced lies to Americans? I mean, there is a deep tradition of politicians “spinning” facts to their cause. But discarding facts altogether? We tolerate unashamed lying from pundits and political operatives…but a U.S. Senator?

Or perhaps Republicans have become so enmeshed in their lies that they no longer recognize objective truth. This goes beyond deplorable; now it’s just pitiable.

There is no fundamental right to profit from selling private health insurance.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4jcdy4QZdQ[/youtube]

Jeffrey Feldman caught Rep. Jay Inslee in the hall yesterday at Netroots Nation, and I couldn’t help but eavesdrop as they talked about what we (that’s you and me) need to do to help pass real health care reform. Shorter Inslee: show up!

I’m on my way down to Hempfest right now. I will update this post as the day goes on.

[Read more…]

Thursday a federal court rejected a permit to build a 305 foot dock in an environmentally sensitive area on Maury Island, essentially halting Glacier Northwest’s controversial gravel and sand mine for years to come, and State Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark deserves a huge “thank you” for helping to realize a key campaign promise:

Last year, the company gave $50,000 to a political action committee that supported former Republican State Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland’s re-election bid. Sutherland lost, but signed a lease for the project days before leaving office. His successor, Democrat Peter Goldmark, who’s campaigned on a promise to try and stop the project, immediately announced plans to more thoroughly scrutinize the lease. In early July, he ordered the company to do no work until it could prove to him Puget Sound would see no harm. Earlier this week, the company responded with a 17-page letter — and a promise that it still planned to start work next week.

Now, the project is on indefinite hold, and a protest scheduled for Saturday on Maury Island instead will become a victory party.

I started writing this post while sitting in the audience of a health care forum with Gov. Howard Dean at Netroots Nation (just reasoned, rational discusion, FYI… no angry, disruptive teabaggers thus far), and was feeling a little nostalgic at this particular turn of events.

It was at last year’s Netroots Nation that I celebrated my biggest blogging accomplishment of the year, my success at forcing the Seattle Times and other media outlets to front-page then-incumbent State Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland’s embarrassing sexual harassment scandal… a scandal I broke.

As a blogger, I know that I have made a difference over the past few years, but this was one of the few times that I could really quantify it. Despite being snugly in the pocket of mining and timber interests, Sutherland was a personable guy and a self-proclaimed moderate who appeared to be well liked by members of the press, and up until this point in the election cycle the Lands Commissioner race and the challenge from Goldmark had received very little media attention.

All that changed after the scandal, as journalists and voters started paying closer attention to both the candidates and the issues, with Goldmark eventually squeaking out a one percentage point victory… close enough for me to almost confidently say that my coverage likely helped swing the election.

Of course, one of the main issues in that election was the Maury Island gravel mine, and it’s tremendously gratifying to see Goldmark living up to his campaign promise to block it. This past legislative session notwithstanding, elections do matter, and thus what we all do to influence elections matters too. Yes, it’s hard to quantify, and so much easier just to be cynical, and no individual should pat themselves too hard on the back for the outcome of any election, as it’s the voters in the end who deserve most of the credit for making the right choice. But for those of us who devote ourselves to such things, there’s nothing wrong with a little self-congratulation if that’s what keeps us going.

How long that alone can keep me going, I don’t know.  But I might as well enjoy the moment.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDp3sPN-5fE[/youtube]

(And there are some sixty other clips from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

A new batch of signature data for Referendum 71 has been released. The number of signatures examined is 58,493 which is 42.5% of the total signatures submitted. To date, 6,348 invalid signatures have been found, giving a raw rejection rate (uncorrected for duplicates) of 10.85%.

The invalid signatures include 5,502 that were not found in the voting rolls, 345 duplicates, and 501 that did not match the signature on file. There are also 30 “pending” signatures at various states of processing for a missing or illegible signature cards. I don’t count these among the invalid signatures.

With 345 duplicate signatures found so far, we can anticipate a final duplication rate of about 1.69%.

The V₂ estimator projects the number of valid signatures to be 121,648 giving an excess of 1,071 signatures over the 120,577 needed for the referendum to qualify for the ballot. The projected (duplicate-corrected) rejection rate is 11.65%.

A Monte Carlo analysis consisting of 10,000 simulated samples give a 95% confidence interval for valid signatures of from 121,175 to 122,415, well above the magic number. Here is the distribution of valid signatures:

There are a few “losses” in red on the left, but the overwhelming majority of outcomes in green have the referendum qualifying. In fact, the referendum failed to make the ballot in only 11 of the 10,000 simulations.

With the results to date, it is pretty clear that, come fall, we will be voting to accept or reject the “Everything but Marriage” law.

Seems that the people of the United Kingdom actually kind of like their health care system, and don’t take too kindly to the infamous lies being spread on Fox Noise. From BBC:

Labour has stepped up its criticism of Daniel Hannan, who waded into the debate over Barack Obama’s health bill.

They claim his view – that the NHS is outdated, unfair and should be scrapped – is shared by many Conservatives.

But David Cameron said Mr Hannan’s view was “eccentric” and accused Labour of making a meal of the row, stressing that the NHS was his top priority.

Mr Hannan has made a series of appearances on American television in recent weeks, describing the NHS as “60 year mistake” and saying that he “wouldn’t wish it on anyone”.

And the right wing lies are pretty obvious and infuriating to Britons:

Kate Spall, who appeared in a US free market group’s TV commercial opposing Mr Obama’s health bill, said her views were misrepresented.

She told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One: ” “Absolutely I was deceived yes because when I then found out the link to the website and it was a huge political machine I was horrified because it was the polar opposite of what I believe in. I absolutely believe in universal health care.”

If you click through to the BBC story you may notice a nice little graphic they have that shows, in percentage of GDP, health care expenditures by country. The US is at 16%, while the UK is at 8.4%. The graphic also includes the rather damning information “45.7 million people have no health insurance.” So we manage to spend twice as much and still leave a tremendous portion of the population vulnerable.

This is what the righties have been reduced to: they’re willing to tell infamous lies about and insult one of our staunchest allies in the world in order to block health care reform. Guess that “special relationship” only applies when Republicans are in the White House.

Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, WA-05, has condemned the crazy disruptors:

“I certainly don’t condone violence, I don’t condone calling President Obama Hitler and painting swastikas on signs at town halls,” continued McMorris Rodgers, vice chairwoman of the GOP conference.

McMorris Rodgers is the first member of the House Republican leadership to decry the Nazi comparisons. It follows a week of attacks by the House Democrats’ campaign arm on House Republican leaders, who Democrats say should speak out against Rush Limbaugh’s remarks comparing Democrats to Nazis in the healthcare debate.

As Think Progress noted, she didn’t mention Limbaugh by name, so it’s not clear whether the big fat idiot will require an apology.

So good on McMorris Rodgers anyhow.

President Bill Clinton delivered the opening keynote address in the Keystone State last night at Netroots Nation. It wasn’t as much a rousing barn burner as it was a frank come-to-Jesus, a bit defensive about his own record on hot button issues like health care reform and gays in the military, but absolutely blunt in telling the audience that we need to provide more support to President Obama than we did to Clinton if we expect real change.

If there’s a break in my day, perhaps I’ll post some audio and video clips. Perhaps.

Today is an absolutely jam packed agenda, starting with a health care reform town hall with Gov. Howard Dean, followed by the much anticipated Pennsylvania US Senate race face-off between Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak, and newly-Democratic incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter, who’s gotta be given credit for stepping into the lion’s den.

Then I’ll be going to the state blogger caucus where I plan to bitch loudly about the dearth of panels aimed at state bloggers (by far the largest contingent of attendees), before heading off to an energy policy forum featuring Washington state’s own Denis Hayes and Rep. Jay Inslee.

After that… I dunno… maybe a nap?