A couple of years ago, when a man at a town hall meeting in Simpsonville, S.C., railed at his Congressman to ”keep your government hands off my Medicare”, it was met with guffaws. But when Republicans go home for the summer recess, after attempts to manhandle Medicare by passage of Paul Ryan’s budget plan, that outcry won’t seem so misinformed anymore.
Under the Ryan plan, Medicare would arguably no longer be a government program. It would be reduced to no more than issuing an annual check to the health insurance industry as directed by each senior.
In a deft maneuver Majority Leader Harry Reid forced a Senate vote on the Ryan plan knowing it would fail. It did, by 57 to 40. But the tactic served to get 40 more Republican fingerprints on the bill in addition to those who had passed the plan in the Republican-controlled House. Thus armed, the Democrats can be expected to serve up a torrent of 2012 election ads with mug shots of those Republicans up for re-election who tried to take away Medicare.
We will also see an inundation of television ads from the health insurance companies and their trade associations in favor of Ryan’s plan because it would hand over the entirety of Medicare to them.
Republicans view the Ryan plan as a commendable attempt to rescue Medicare from certain impending bankruptcy, for which Democrats have no plan at all. Democrats view Ryan’s extreme restructuring as a surreptitious attempt to realize the Republican dream of abolishing government social programs.
The plan would not begin until 2022 and would be only for those now 55 years old and under; all above that age would continue under today’s Medicare. Seniors would shop for an insurance plan that best suits them. Medicare would then issue a subsidy payment to the insurer. The senior pays the rest.
And the rest would be considerable. Ryan’s budget indicates that the subsidy 11 years from now, in the face of insurance premiums presumably continuing their inexorable rise year after year, would only be $6,000. Others have said $8,000.
But actually all current seniors would be affected – and right now. The Ryan plan would immediately repeal Obama’s huge Affordable Care Act. That would re-open the “donut hole” in Medicare’s drug plan, whereby seniors will again have to pay 100% of their drug costs each year when total expense reaches $2840 and until Medicare resumes coverage at $4550.
As an indication of things to come, the day before the Senate vote, Democrat Kathy Hochul won a special election in New York’s 26th Congressional district, a district so solidly Republican (74% in the last election) that the Democratic Party ranks it as the 426th most impossible-to-win district with only 9 others in the country ranked more impossible still.
One commentator said 70% of Tea Party members don’t want to change Medicare.
Representative Ryan is undaunted. He says that Democrats “shamelessly distort and demagogue”. He says about seniors that “whenever I do town hall meetings. once they understand the facts, they want these solutions”. He exhorted his fellow Republicans when they head for home “not to go wobbly”.
Hardly noticed was that right after the Senate voted down the Ryan program, it banished Obama’s budget plan 97-0, demonstrating that it has finally dawned on Democrats as well that cuts must be made in the nation’s huge spending excesses.
A compelling argument working its way around the Internet says that President Obama’s late night rush to the television cameras that Sunday night threw away an enormous opportunity to do al Qaeda much greater damage. The unsigned message, purportedly by a retired Navy special operations officer, calls the ensuing open discussion of the mission by his administration a “massive security breach”.
The text is overlong for re-printing here and better summarized. Its key argument is, what if there had been no announcement at all for an indefinite period? How would al Qaeda cells around the world know that anything had happened? Nothing emanated from that house in Abbottabad except by courier. There was no Internet connection, no e-mail, no landlines, no cellphones. Al Qaeda operatives would be left to wonder about the absence of messages from the boss but only after time passed. Even then, they would have nothing but speculation to go on. Secrecy would have sown confusion and disrupted their activity.
Would they soon tell the world too much?
“If and when they did learn something definitive there would be a mass flurry of communication and our electronic surveillance apparatus would get some great information and leads”, says the anonymous writer.
Instead we compounded matters by blabbing about the “mother load” of intelligence material taken from the site, thus notifying al Qaeda members everywhere that the U.S. now knows everything that al Qaeda headquarters knew — their names, assignments and whereabouts. How many other al Qaeda lives might we have quickly terminated had bin Laden’s killing been kept under wraps? Not to mention (as the writer does) that crowing about the captured trove told al Qaeda that we had probably learned about their “financing, communications, continuity of operation plans, organizational structures, strength, recruiting, training and standard operating procedures”.
If we had not broadcast that we had captured that trove, how many al Qaeda terrorist plots might we have compromised by placing surveillance on the terrorists working up their plots?
We even blurted out to the al Qaeda underworld details of our operational methods as if there will be no further need for such missions. We told them to keep an eye out for strangers renting a house nearby. It maybe a safe house for observation. And then be ready to counter a force of 79 or so coming in on four helos. And they’d be fitted out with stealth technology.
But if we’d tried to keep bin Laden’s extermination a secret, wouldn’t the Pakistani military blow our cover? Not likely. Whether they did or did not know bin Laden was living next door, either way they would have said nothing publicly, bent on either hiding their complicity from the U.S. or their ineptitude at allowing an American raid not only to invade Pakistani airspace but the very town that was the home of their equivalent of West Point, surrounded by military retirees.
The writer shows evident hostility toward Obama, saying that the security breach was “only to enhance the poll numbers of a president”. That it did, and the media immediately focused on the 9-point (temporary) “bump” in Obama’s approval rating, as if that was what mattered. But the accusation is unfair when directed at the president. Revenge for our 3,000 dead on 9/11 was the reason for our lack of retraints, not politics. Obama had risked his presidency and won.
There is nothing new about our practice of revealing too much. (After all, the reason bin Laden used no electronic communication is that we just couldn’t keep quiet about our brilliant electronic surveillance). More savvy intelligence operations elsewhere think us foolish for our impulsive lack of strategy.
Democrats failed in their attempt to end the subsidy to the five biggest U.S. oil companies despite their just having posted over $35 billion in profits in the first quarter. The vote was 52 to 48 with 3 Democrats from energy-producing states joining a near solid phalanx of Republicans to strike down the bill, which would have ended a $21 billion handout across 10 years.
The vote ran directly counter to public wishes. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed 74% favored the end of oil company subsidies. But the public was no match for the $41 million paid to the campaign funds of the 48 Republican senators who voted to block the bill. They had no qualms about sticking us taxpayers with the $21 billion bill in return for that payoff.
The CEOs of the five companies had said in a Congressional hearing last week that they would be willing to give up their subsidies only if handouts to all industries were cancelled as well. If that meant those never-ending giveaways to cotton, sugar, big corporate farms and the latest addition, ethanol, were to be eliminated, we would be all for that. With the United States deep in trillions of debt, ongoing corporate welfare is a travesty.
But note the attitude. The CEOs would be “willing”. That tells us that Big Oil, so-called, views the subsidies as an entitlement — theirs to keep unless concessions are made elsewhere.
Of course, it was merely a cynical maneuver. There is no chance that the kept members of Congress would give up taxpayer handouts to their home state industries.
Republicans on the war path to cut spending forced a deal with the Obama administration to cut $38.5 billion from the current year budget, and the House voted approval of Paul Ryan’s plan to make deep budget cuts and entirely slash Medicare payouts. Yet, other than a two defections, Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine, all Senate Republicans voted to continue the giveaway of public money to keep those campaign contributions coming.
The question is, how can Republicans in Congress so blatantly violate their own campaign to reduce spending and at the same time succeed in selling the handout rationale to the party faithful? In particular, how could Tea Party members cave in for this duplicity? The sales pitch is that it will reduce the cost of $4.00 a gallon gasoline. Are there truly people who walk among us who believe that the $21 billion will pass through to the consumer?
You’d think that the killing of bin Laden, a success story for the Obama administration built upon an intelligence infrastructure laid down by the Bush administration, would offer a fine opportunity for bi-partisan healing. For a moment there was a flickering when President Obama, in his Sunday night showstopper, said, “Tonight let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11”. But it was not to be.
It did not help foster unity that, while giving repeated credit to the “heroic work of our military and our counter-terrorism professionals”, Obama gave not a word of credit to the Bush administration. That he then met with SEAL team 6 and spoke before servicemen returning from Afghanistan at at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, was part of a president’s job description. But it also did not help that, although saying on “60 Minutes” that he did not intend to “spike the football”, he had already done exactly that by going to Ground Zero in New York for a victory lap with New York City firefighters.
In seeming retaliation for Obama hogging the ball, out came the Bush troops en masse. Almost a dozen fanned out to the Sunday talk shows to claim some credit of their own. Andrew Card said that Obama had reason to be proud but showed it too much. (Pundits on the left immediately showed photos of Bush in a flight suit on the carrier Abraham Lincoln and the “Mission Accomplished” banner). Dick Cheney said it was “what we call ‘enhanced interrogation’” that was key. John Yoo credited “policies on interrogation and wiretapping”. Douglas Feith cited “rendition”. Condoleezza Rice said Bush “had to make some very, very hard calls that frankly helped to set this up”. Karl Rove credited “decisions made under Bush that made Sunday night possible”.
Obama had asked George W. Bush to join him at Ground Zero, but Bush declined. Perhaps the ex-president thought it unseemly self-congratulation on Obama’s part (with which we agree). Or perhaps the thinking was that Bush would seem to be tagging along, looking for credit. Better a TV blitz where his cohort could claim it for him.
Which was too bad. Given that the Ground Zero “celebration” did take place, would it not have been better to see both presidents side-by-side, each giving short mutually-congratulatory talks? That could have made the rest of the squabbling go away and restore, if only for moments, that “sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11”. Instead, even at this moment of signal triumph, we sunk into the same, corrosive animosity and bickering.
Barack Obama may have the power to unleash the weaponry of the United States outside the United States, but at home he is hamstrung by Congress. The most powerful person inside our borders that we have in mind is a fellow from whose strings dangles just about every Republican Senator and Representative. The one to whom all of them have signed a pledge. An ironclad pledge broken on penalty of his organization’s launching an assault in their home state or district come election time to starve them of funds and see to it that they will never serve in Congress again.
That would be Grover Norquist, who heads Americans for Tax Reform. His mission is and has been for decades (he was appointed to run that organization by George Bush Sr.) to make certain upon their taking office that no Republican Congressperson ever votes for a tax increase of any sort – not even diminishment of a tax deduction. Here is the pledge all are required to sign:
I, _________________, pledge to the taxpayers of the __________ district of the State of ____________ and to the American people that I will:
ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; and
TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates,
Signed __________________
Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn           Grover Norquist
That’s it. But thus does this unelected Harvard graduate that most Americans have never heard of, except perhaps for his famous desire to reduce government to a size so small that he could “drown it in the bathtub”, thus does he rule enough lawmakers in Washington to throttle any contemplation of taxes as one of the remedies to roll back the nation’s colossal debt. He has made tax increases so toxic that Democrats, too, have bought into taxes being loathsome, witness universal agreement on their part that only the top bracket should be increased.
Jaws dropped recently when a letter from Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to Norquist was made public. Coburn’s sin? As a member of the “Gang of Six”, he was trying to come up with solutions to reduce the national debt, one of which was to do away with the $5 billion annual giveaway to the ethanol industry through the tax code. Coburn had this to say:
Your organization is working to protect an ethanol subsidy the Heritage Foundation and others have called a tax earmark because it is a special interest giveaway targeted to a narrow group of recipients.
By opposing my amendment you are defending wasteful spending and a de facto tax increase on every American. Ethanol subsidies are a spending program wrongly placed in the tax code that increases the burden of government, keeps tax rates artificially high, and forces consumers to pay more for food and energy.
Rather than demanding that Senate conservatives violate their consciences and support distortions in the tax code that increase spending and maintain Washington’s power over taxpayer’s [sic] lives, your organization should assist our efforts…Continuing to issue blanket defenses of all tax expenditures is a profoundly misguided embrace of progressive, activist government and a strategy for tax complexity, tax deferment, excessive spending and unsustainable deficits.
That’s tellin’ him!
In reaction to this kerfuffle, a letter from Norquist appeared in the New York Times in which he said Coburn “has signed in writing a pledge to the voters of Oklahoma — not to me”. How disingenuous, to put it ever so politely. Did the voters of Oklahoma ask Coburn to sign the pledge?
But now, possibly as indication that Norquist has given other senators marching orders to bring pressure on him, Coburn has suddenly quit the Gang of Six. In an acrimonious session with the group, as if to regain the favor of the extreme right, he made outlandish demands that the group propose $130 billion in reductions to current Medicare recipients, a demand so outlandish that it was guaranteed to be rejected. Out he went. So much for Coburn as hero.
Which returns us to Norquist and the stranglehold he exerts by shutting off an avenue of public policy that must be considered if we are ever to reduce the nation’s Brobdingnagian debt. It is reprehensible that Republicans accede to this McCarthy-style loyalty oath. And President Obama is equally to blame for his irresponsible promise not to raise taxes on all but the top brackets. Why? Because he made that promise on the campaign trail, before knowing the state of the union in all its complexity, thus putting his winning the election before the security of the country.
We say this not because we necessarily want taxes to rise, but because it is the responsibility of all elected officials not to make ironclad pledges before the fact, before knowing what the nation may face. And the country now faces enormous challenges and huge debts to foreign countries that could bankrupt us.
Your representatives in Congress must keep all options open and certainly owe no fealty to Grover Norquist. Let your Congressman know that his or her cowardice is disgraceful, that they owe their loyalty to you, not some an absolutist martinet on K Street.
Rumsfeld is then followed (at 2:28m) by a former senior military interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander who conducted or supervised over 1300 interrogations in Iraq. He, too, asks why, if Rumsfeld is implying that waterboarding led to bin Laden, why didn’t we find him long ago? Alexander confirms the disconnect between the time of waterboarding KSM and when we learned from him only the nickname of the courier.
But what is most riveting is Alexander’s answer to the question of why, if Rumsfeld says waterboarding and other “enhanced techniques” were so valuable, why did we stop? Better to hear that answer first hand at the 4:25m mark.
A host of actual interrogators has since come forward to refute the likes of Rumsfeld and John Yoo, the latter the author of the tortured legal opinion that gave the go-ahead to torture. One of them even said he believed we could have gotten more information by not torturing — that torture hardened prisoners against cooperating.
John McCain came out again against torture in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post. To the claim that waterboarding led to bin Laden, he said “That is false”.
Isn’t that case closed? Instead we have another example of disunity in the country that is feeding a civil war of words — a faction desperately trying to make themselves right with no hesitation of constructing lies to do so. Could they have come up with anything more grotesque to give credit to the Bush administration than America’s descent into torture?
<|234||SEALs made it happen but so did the President>
As President Obama said, in announcing the raid that took down the head of al Qaeda, “Tonight we are once again reminded that Americans can do whatever we set our mind to…We can do these things because of who we are”.
It was the incredibly brave Navy’s SEALs and presumed CIA operatives who risked their lives and conducted the raid, but citizens of all political persuasions should show their appreciation of the American president as well.
Watching and waiting in the White House Situation Room (Obama at left).
In a town hall style meeting during the 2008 campaign, a woman asked if we would go after bin Laden across borders, provocatively mentioning Cambodia, which we secretly entered during the Vietnam War. Candidate Obama made the non-diplomatically-correct pledge that:
“If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them [sic]
out, then I think that we have to act, and we will take them out”.
He did just that. While twice giving “thanks to the countless counter-terrorism professionals who have worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome” and “to the men who carried out this operation for they exemplify the professionalism, patriotism and unparalleled courage of those who serve our country”, the President also said this:
Finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbotabad Pakistan.
What are we getting at? That as Commander in Chief he authorized the raid, he gave the order. Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan (a Bush holdover) said Obama’s green light was “the most gutsy call of any president in memory”.
Why?
First, Obama turned aside the alternatives of bombing the compound or using Predator missiles as leaving results in doubt and too likely to cause collateral damage, instead opting for the far more risky commando assault. Second, no one had ever seen bin Laden in that compound. So there was the chance of risking the lives of our military for nothing. “There wasn’t a meeting where someone didn’t mention ‘Black Hawk Down'”, said one adviser, referring to the loss in Mogadishu, Somalia, of 19 commandos in a 1993 helicopter assault. Third, the debate rages about whether the Pakistani military were complicit, looking the other way as four helicopters penetrated 35 miles into their airspace, but if they were not notified, as the President said, the higher risk was that the mission could have been intercepted by the Pakistani air force with possibly heavy loss of life. And finally, reports say that all except CIA Director Leon Panetta counseled that the mission was too risky, which tells us that this was Obama going it pretty much alone.
So, apart from the anguish of possibly sending men to their death (see photo), what makes it so gutsy is that the President was going all in, doubling down with his own presidency. “Victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan”, John F. Kennedy said. No matter what might have caused this mission to go wrong, the orphan in defeat would have been Barack Obama.
As proof, all one need remember is the ridicule that befell Jimmy Carter when the mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran ended in fiasco. In this far more polarized country of today, Obama would have been vilified by our armchair heroes and the chattering commentariat all the way to the election.
A couple of years ago, when a man at a town hall meeting in Simpsonville, S.C., railed at his Congressman to ”keep your government hands off my Medicare”, it was met with guffaws. But when Republicans go home for the summer recess, after attempts to manhandle Medicare by passage of Paul Ryan’s budget plan, that outcry won’t seem so misinformed anymore. 
