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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l9-eT9WzPY[/youtube]

Substantive policy aside, the two biggest highlights from President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform speech last night came within seconds of each other, and both involved the utterance of the “L” word. Of course, I’m talking about the word “lie.”

The first instance came from the President himself, in refuting one of the must absurdly false allegations being lobbed by opponents of reform, and his bluntness was welcome:

“Some of people’s concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost. The best example is the claim made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but by prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Now, such a charge would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple.”

By “prominent politicians” President Obama was likely referring to Sarah Palin amongst others, and by “lie” he was accusing them of making false statements with the deliberate intent to deceive. “Lie” is a strong word, and one that should not be bandied about lightly by a person of such stature as the President of the United States, but in this instance its usage was both apt and appropriate.

No doubt Palin is not the most informed politician ever to strut across the national stage, but when she repeats the same false statement over and over again, even after being repeatedly and thoroughly fact-checked, refuted and rebutted, it is more than fair to accuse her of lying.  And in a policy debate of such import as that in which we are now engaged, mere gainsaying is not sufficient; it was absolutely crucial for the President to blow up this particularly pernicious lie, and in no uncertain words.

The truth is, people lie. The ability to lie marks a recognizable milestone in every toddler’s cognitive development, and this talent to consciously deceive is one of the uniquely human traits that separates us from most of the rest of the animal kingdom. Indeed, if lying were not such a basic element of everday human interaction, its prohibition would not be the most frequently violated of the Ten Commandments.

And yet, despite the abstract cliche of “lying politicians,” you will almost never read the “L” word printed in the polite pages of our family newspapers. Oh, they’ll fact-check and refute the claims of politicians, they’ll highlight disputes, and even occasionally label statements as clearly false. But they’ll almost never imply intent by accusing a politician or public figure of spreading actual “lies.”

That’s what I found so refreshing… not that President Obama refuted the other side’s lies, but that he bluntly called them as such.

The second use of the word “lie” last night was not nearly as refreshing, but in a way, just as welcome, when Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) heckled the President by screaming “You lie!” from the floor of the chambers:

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

Of course, Wilson’s use of the “L” word couldn’t be more different than the President’s. The death panel allegations are demonstrably false, yet continue to be repeated by prominent politicians well after having been thoroughly disproved; these are indeed lies, plain and simple. But while Wilson might dispute President Obama’s assertion that his proposal would not insure illegal immigrants, “you lie” is not a refutation, and there is absolutely no evidence or consensus that Obama’s statement was false, let alone said with the intent to deceive.

I repeat, the word “lie” should not be bandied about lightly, and yet that’s exactly what Rep. Wilson did.

But of course the biggest difference between the President’s use of the “L” word and that of Rep. Wilson was the context, for the latter came from a US representative, heckling from the floor of the chambers, during a presidential address to a joint session of Congress… a violation of Congressional decorum the likes of which I have never before seen.

Whether Rep. Wilson felt free to interrupt the President because he is a black man, or merely a Democrat, I do not know. But I welcome his show of disrespect because it clearly illustrates the self-destructive naivete of attempting to work with congressional Republicans in an honestly bipartisan fashion, and expecting Republicans to honestly respond in kind. The current class of Republicans do not respect Democrats, do not respect President Obama and do not even respect the Office of the President when occupied by anyone other than their own… which means they do not respect the institution at all. Bipartisanship cannot be imposed unilaterally, and without at least the grudging respect of the party on the other side, would be an ultimately futile and self-defeating pursuit for anything more than rhetorical purposes.

Last night’s speech should be a turning point in the debate on healthcare reform, not just because the President clearly laid out the case for his proposals, but because Rep. Wilson clearly illustrated the petty, hateful and obstructionist nature of the Republican opposition.

No doubt there are many Republicans in Congress who find Rep. Wilson’s behavior dishonorable, but if they wish to avoid being painted with the same broad brush they must do more than merely criticize their colleague or even censure him. They must now prove themselves to be a loyal opposition, or else risk having their own call for bipartisanship demonstrably proven to be a lie.

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

[via Scott Morgan]

Still waiting for updates on the court cases happening this week in Washington.

Just got in, only heard snippets of President Barack Obama’s speech on health care. What I heard sounded good. Cesspool?

Yesterday marked the six month anniversary of our state’s Death With Dignity Act. Compassion & Choices of Washington, a group that works to make sure the law works for both patients and doctors, announced that 16 Washington residents have passed away since taking advantage of the new law, 11 of whom actually used the prescription to control the time and manner of their passing. None of these events are cause for celebration, but merely a recognition that the terminally ill in this state have more choices than the residents of 48 other states, and that’s something that we should be proud of here.

Claudia Rowe covered the milestone nicely for the PI, but as she points out, opponents of the new law still aren’t doing a very good job of dealing with reality:

But no number of physician-assisted deaths — however small it may be — is small enough for opponents of the law. Eileen Geller, a hospice nurse and spokeswoman for True Compassion Advocates, believes that merely discussing the issue implies that hastening death is a valid option for the sick and vulnerable.

“It’s not just the few who have used this, but all the other Washingtonians who are receiving the message that they should die prematurely and unnaturally,” Geller said. “I’ve received calls from people who are worried and wondering, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t receive treatment. Maybe I should give up.'”

I have a very simple suggestion for Geller. Tell these people the truth. Tell them that giving people choices is in no way forcing them into a particular choice. Tell them that the law is not meant in any way to encourage people to die prematurely and unnaturally. Tell them that the law is meant for people who have very strong feelings about being able to control the time and place of their passing.

What’s most frustrating about this is that the reason that Washingtonians are “receiving the message that they should die prematurely and unnaturally” is not because of the law, but because people like Eileen Geller spent much of last year misleading people into thinking that that’s what the law was meant to do. It’s as if we pass health care reform this year, and then next year Sarah Palin finds that people keep telling her they’re worried about imaginary “Death Panels” and blames that phenomenon on Obama.

It’s one thing to be – like Palin – dishonest for the sake of your political prospects and potential income streams. It’s another thing altogether to be dishonest out of pure paranoia. If there are large numbers of people in this state having sleepless nights about the Death With Dignity law, it’s not the fault of the law. It’s the fault of those like Geller who act as if they’ll break out into hives if they simply tell the truth about what this law does and doesn’t do.

Another family values conservative gets caught “hiking the Appalachian trail”…and without his boots (ick!):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n50ZiCFhIyg[/youtube]

As reported yesterday on Publicola, Susan Hutchison has substantially trailed Dow Constantine in the all important money race since the August primary. But Constantine supporters should not grow complacent, nor Hutchison fans too discouraged, because as I reported several weeks back, GOP stalwart John Stanton had been quietly promising to wage a million dollar “independent” expenditure campaign on Hutchison’s behalf.

Hutchison’s inability to keep up with her earlier fundraising pace stems mostly from the fact that the bulk of her money came in the form of double-max donations; she simply can’t legally tap much of her ultra-wealthy base a second time. But there’s no limit to how much one can give to “independent” expenditure campaigns, and that’s the beauty of Stanton’s alleged efforts.

We’ll have no idea how much Stanton and his Republican cohorts really raise until the money is spent, but considering what’s at stake in this race, especially for powerful developers seeking to crawl out from underneath our growth management statutes, a million dollars seems like a small price to pay.

At Crosscut, Bob Simmons eloquently points out a simple historical truth with a contemporary meaning: private enterprise failed to provide electrical service to much of rural America, and it took the REA under Franklin D. Roosevelt (and Truman) to get it done. And the right wingers of the day called FDR a communist and everything else under the sun.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, where we’re even more indebted to government action for the creation of cheap, reliable electrical power, you kind of wonder if the morons proclaiming that they “don’t need the government for anything except defense and law enforcement” are going to stop using their computers, microwaves and flat screens, or if many of them are even aware of the BPA. I suppose the magic market fairy just fires up the PS3 for them.

The ridiculous hysteria of August should cause sensible people to reflect on what the proper role of government is in a democracy that adheres to a well-regulated capitalist system. This is a legitimate area for debate.

The essential position of progressives, as I understand it, is that if you don’t have a referee in key sectors the cheaters will prosper. This has been proven countless times in our history, from the railroads and oil companies of yore to Enron and the housing bubble in our own time. From time to time government action has been required to preserve capitalism, not destroy it. Notice nobody wants to centrally plan production of toilet paper or iPods, we’re only talking about essential services, health care being rather essential at times to not being dead.

One can argue for or against regulation in a given sector, and how little or what type of regulation will work best, but the far right has simply decided to hurl whatever insults it can muster instead, and is being egged on by corporate America acting in lockstep with the GOP. These are the folks who supposedly hate class warfare, but ruthlessly wage it against the most vulnerable Americans in order to harvest vast profits from the sick, the working poor and anyone else that gets sucked into the monstrosity known as health insurance.

We’re still waiting on that GOP plan to fix health insurance, and my bet is they’ll never produce one. The GOP and the insurance industry are essentially one and the same thing, and just because there are also a lot of Democrats who display similar whorishness does not excuse any of it.

The health insurance companies have become the new Enrons, and they must be refereed. Obama must indeed welcome their hatred, just as FDR did, or nothing much will be accomplished.

We’ve been experiencing technical difficulties this morning, which may result in scattered down periods throughout the day.  Please be patient.

In the comments from Sunday morning’s post, commenter Roger Rabbit posted a link to another tragic drug war story that I haven’t covered here. It comes out of Kansas, where in late 2007 a pain doctor named Stephen Schneider and his wife Linda (a nurse) were rung up on a 34-count indictment related to prescribing more pain medication than the DEA allows. As Harvey Silverglate explains, this is an all-too-common occurrence:

When pain doctors administer too much of a controlled substance, or do so knowing that they will be diverted to narcotic addicts, they are deemed no longer engaged in the legitimate practice of medicine. But the dividing line is far from clear and not subject to universal agreement even within the profession. Any patient in need of relief can, over time, develop a chemical dependence on a lawful drug–much like a diabetic becomes dependent on insulin. And, once a treatment regimen begins, many patients’ tolerance to the drug increases. Thus, to produce the same analgesic effect, doctors sometimes need to increase the prescribed amount, and that amount varies from person to person.

It is notoriously difficult even for trained physicians to distinguish an addict’s abuse from a patient’s dependence. Nonetheless, federal narcotics officers have increasingly terrorized physicians, wielding the criminal law and harsh prison terms to punish perceived violators. Since 2003, over 400 doctors have been criminally prosecuted by the federal government, according to the DEA. One result is that chronic pain patients in this country are routinely under-medicated.

One notorious case along these lines was the prosecution of Richard Paey, a wheelchair-bound attorney in Florida who was originally given a 25-year prison sentence for forging prescriptions (he was pardoned by Governor Crist in 2007). Prosecutors tried to paint him as a drug dealer, but could never prove that he sold any of the drugs he obtained. Ironically, in prison, he was finally given the amount of pain medication he’d been trying to obtain for himself all that time.

Another person affected by this crusade against pain doctors is Siobhan Reynolds, whose husband died after spending years trying to find a doctor willing to treat his pain. Reynolds founded the Pain Relief Network in 2003. She’s been heavily involved in trying to raise awareness of the prosecution of Dr. Schneider, and because of that she found herself a target of the Kansas prosecutors as well. Silverglate writes:

When Reynolds wrote op-eds in local newspapers and granted interviews to other media outlets, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tanya Treadway attempted to impose a gag order on her public advocacy. The district judge correctly denied this extraordinary request.

Undeterred, Treadway filed on March 27 a subpoena demanding a broad range of documents and records, obviously hoping to deter the peripatetic pain relief advocate, or even target her for a criminal trial of her own. Just what was Reynolds’ suspected criminal activity?

“Obstruction of justice” is the subpoena’s listed offense being investigated, but some of the requested records could, in no possible way, prove such a crime. The prosecutor has demanded copies of an ominous-sounding “movie,” which, in reality, is a PRN-produced documentary showing the plight of pain physicians. Also requested were records relating to a billboard Reynolds paid to have erected over a busy Wichita highway. It read: “Dr. Schneider never killed anyone.” Suddenly, a rather ordinary exercise in free speech and political activism became evidence of an obstruction of justice.

Last Friday, after Silverglate’s editorial was printed, the judge in the case fined Reynolds for refusing to turn over the documents. She plans to appeal the ruling.

A few weeks back, I posted about my skepticism of what’s been happening with the investigation of Michael Jackson’s death and the attempts to charge his doctor with manslaughter. Cases like the one in Kansas are what formed my initial reaction to that news. The circumstances of the Michael Jackson case are quite different and bizarrely unique, but they also boil down to a prosecutor deciding that a doctor has done something so improper that it’s not only bad medical practice, but is actually a criminal act. And as this case out of Kansas has shown, it’s often the prosecutors who are a greater threat to the general public.

Please join us tonight for some politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. The festivities take place at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at 8:00 pm.

And if you can’t make it tonight, please stay in school, work hard for your goals, and listen to your parents. (I hope nobody’s offended.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSNQpEbtlP4[/youtube]

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for 336 other chapters of Drinking Liberally for you to shoot for.

In scolding Kent teachers to get back to work, the always anti-union Seattle Times argues that “Defying court order teaches the wrong lesson.” Uh-huh. Really?

Putting aside the issues of this particular strike (I haven’t paid them much attention, and don’t plan to), teachers, like nearly all workers, have a moral right to strike, even if in Washington state they may not have that legal right, and standing up for one’s rights, even in defiance of the courts, is never the wrong lesson to teach our children, especially in a nation like ours with such a strong authoritarian streak to its national character… a character quickly revealed in the first couple comments in the Times’ comment thread:

davidfelder
anderson island, WA
Why should any Kent student EVER believe another thing his/her teacher tells them?  A teacher willing to disobey a lawful order is a teacher who has no right to expect his/her students to follow the teacher’s rules. A national disgrace.

onein81
moses lake, WA
great first message. mine it to fire every single one of them. take the union leadership and lock them away in jail. am i being to hard. no. back in 1981 Patco members and union leadership were hauled off to jail in handcuffs and chains. fire each and every single one of them.

Whatever the Times editors thought they were saying, surely they must have understood that this is the kind of sentiment their headline would inspire. And while no doubt Times publisher Frank Blethen would be cheered at the thought of union members being hauled away in handcuffs, America in fact has a proud history of civil disobedience… a history lesson conveniently ignored by those who would use the power of the state to trample the rights of others.

The headline in the Seattle Times sounds awfully hopeful, “Wash. lawmakers take next step toward ed reform.” So what exactly is that next step?

They haven’t found a single new dollar to pay for their ideas, but state lawmakers and education officials are pushing ahead with plans to start implementing education reform.

A new education reform committee recently held its first meeting. It is chaired by the superintendent of public instruction and counts among its members the speaker of the House and the chair of the Senate Education Committee, so the political will to move on is there.

No money to pay for their ideas, or any idea how to raise the money, but at least they started a new committee.  Can’t get much bolder than that.

But some of the faces around the table have sat at similar meetings, battling similar issues for years.

Oh. That’s not an encouraging sign.

First came the governor’s Washington Learns task force that published an ambitious plan to improve education in 2006. That report led to the state’s new Early Learning Department, but the Legislature could not find the money to implement most of the other ideas.

There’s that pesky money problem again.

Then came the reinvented State Board of Education, which moved ahead on some related ideas, including new high school math requirements and a proposal to require high school students to earn 24 credits instead of 19 to graduate.

Next, the Basic Education Finance Task Force, wrote a road map last summer for completely changing the way the state distributes its education dollars. The task force’s ambitious plans would cost an estimated $3 billion to $4 billion a year, on top of the $7 billion a year the state already spends on education.

And the money…?

The 2009 Legislature adopted some of the task force’s ideas and put a new group, the Quality Education Council, in charge of implementing the plan, but with a new twist. This time, the task force is also in charge of finding the money to pay for the changes.

Rep. Skip Priest, R-Federal Way, has sat around many education reform tables, including Washington Learns and the Basic Education Finance Task Force.

“I think it’s time we have a sense of urgency about this issue,” Priest said after the Quality Education Council held its first meeting at the end of August.

No shit, Sherlock.

Honestly, there is no substantive education reform without the money to pay for it, and all the committees and commissions in the world won’t change that. So in a state facing its deepest fiscal crisis perhaps ever, and a long term  structural revenue deficit as far as the eye can see, the real “next step” to education reform in Washington state is an honest debate about tax restructuring, and unless Republicans like Skip Priest are willing to push for that debate, they really aren’t approaching education reform with any sense of urgency at all.

I’m just sayin’.

In the spirit of this post at EffU, I’d like to see who can come up with the funniest set of hypocritical statements from a wingnut blogger when it comes to the “George Bush is our President and we should respect him and everyone should shut up” and “Barack Obama should not be telling our schoolchildren to work hard” brain malfunction.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofxVMlU97yA[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yUMQR_Bo7s[/youtube]

In Part II of my “Talkin’ with Teabaggers” adventure, I chat with an elderly gentleman protesting last Thursday’s pro-healthcare reform rally (you know, the one that never happened).  No snarky subtitles or silly inserts this time, just a few minutes of unedited conversation about healthcare, and why us whippersnappers don’t need or deserve it.

In what has become an ironic cliche that typifies the inanity of the current healthcare reform debate, this eighty-ish-year-old man may be opposed to government run health insurance, but he sure does love him some Medicare. When asked if he’s happy with Medicare he says “yes.” When asked if he’d want it taken away, he says “no.” When asked if the government has done an “okay job” running Medicare, he says “As far as I’m concerned, it’s been okay with us.”

In fact, his high degree of satisfaction with his government-run Medicare seems to form the basis for his opposition to any plan that might include a government-run public option for the rest of us. “Why mess it up for old people?” he asked me.

Good question. Perhaps we should give up on this “public option” thing and just allow everybody to buy into Medicare, regardless of age? I know he thinks young folks don’t need it (hell, he didn’t have health insurance until he was 40, so why should anybody else?) but if that’s true then they’d sure be cheap to insure. Meanwhile, they’d still be subsidizing his Medicare coverage through their payroll taxes, just like they’re doing now, so how could that possibly mess anything up for him?

Yeah, sure… under that scenario, Medicare would be the public option. But shhhh, don’t call it that, and we might get his support.