Good healthcare policy makes good politics -- and vice versa

Forget Olympia Snowe; pass the right healthcare bill, and voters will reward you

David Sirota
salon.com
October 17, 2009


 I don’t get it.

I know that’s the simplistic refrain of every 10-year-old, but I’m 33 and I mean it: I just don’t get it.
Specifically, I don’t get why Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine -- or any Republican senator, for that matter -- is attracting so much attention.



In the last few months, Democratic senators eliminated the public option and substantially weakened their healthcare proposals in order to buy insurance industry acquiescence and, thus, Snowe’s vote. Now, based on the deafening media noise, all of American politics is focused on this unaccomplished backbencher and whether or not she will endorse the final bill. It is as if Republicans control Congress -- as if Snowe, not Barack Obama, won the biggest presidential landslide since Ronald Reagan.

This is bizarre for what should be obvious reasons.

First of all, Snowe's much-celebrated initial vote this week for an embarrassingly flaccid healthcare initiative wasn't necessary to pass the bill -- Democrats had enough votes to move the legislation out of the Senate Finance Committee without her approval. That's a mathematical fact, as is the fact that Democrats control the 60 votes to overcome a filibuster with or without Snowe; as is the fact that Democrats have the 51 votes to enact healthcare reform through a parliamentary procedure called reconciliation -- again, with or without Snowe.


So the notion that Snowe’s vote -- or any other GOP vote -- is inherently pivotal to healthcare reform is a fantasy created by the Beltway media and the Democratic congressional leadership. The former is desperately trying to manufacture headline-grabbing drama; the latter is looking for a Republican excuse to water down the bill and protect corporate interests -- all while absolving Democrats of legislative responsibility.


Second, the idea that Snowe’s support will result in the final legislation being called "bipartisan" -- and that such billing will politically protect Democrats -- is absurd. How do we know this? Because Democrats themselves taught us that via the Iraq war.


Recall that with solid Democratic and Republican backing, the 2002 Iraq resolution was far more "bipartisan" than any healthcare bill will ever be. Yet, Democrats turned right around and used the Iraq war to criticize Republicans -- and because the conflict was so wildly unpopular, Americans in 2006 and 2008 were willing to overlook the contradiction and vote for the only major party echoing any semblance of an antiwar message.
On healthcare, it will be the same in reverse: The GOP will invariably attempt to turn any bill into an electoral cudgel against Democrats -- regardless of how many Republicans end up voting for it
.
The lesson, then, is simple: If the Democrats’ hypocritical Iraq criticism worked only because the war was such a disaster, then the GOP’s inevitable healthcare attacks -- however hypocritical -- can be thwarted only by making healthcare reform the opposite of Iraq (that is, a major success). For Democrats, in other words, good healthcare policy is great politics, and bad policy is the worst politics.


Whether passed by one congressional vote or 50, real reform that improves the system (a bill with a public option, tough insurance regulation and universal coverage) will transform the Democratic Party into an election-winning force forever known as "the generous protector of middle-class interests," as GOP strategist William Kristol admits. Conversely, even if passed unanimously, bad legislation that makes the system worse (a bill empowering insurance companies, preventing a public option, and leaving millions uncovered) will make GOP criticism of Democrats extremely effective.


That's a truism, no matter if Snowe or any other Republicans add their support to a healthcare bill that doesn’t actually need it in the first place.


© 2009 Creators.com

Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco

Frank Rich
Columnist Op-Ed
The New York Times
October 10, 2009

THOSE of us who love F. Scott Fitzgerald must acknowledge that he did get one big thing wrong. There are second acts in American lives. (Just ask Marion Barry, or William Shatner.) The real question is whether everyone deserves a second act. Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great Afghanistan debate is the Beltway credence given to the ravings of the unrepentant blunderers who dug us into this hole in the first place.

Let’s be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 — when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq — bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued. Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess — even though thenumber of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to fewer than 100, according to the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones.


But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was “the central front in the war on terror” when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.


To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’sconstant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.


What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.


Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCaingave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.


He takes no responsibility for any of this. Asked by Katie Couric last week about our failures in Afghanistan, McCain spoke as if he were an innocent bystander: “I think the reason why we didn’t do a better job on Afghanistan is our attention — either rightly or wrongly — was on Iraq.” As Tonto says to the Lone Ranger, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”


Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page to assert that “we have no choice” but to go all-in on Afghanistan — rightly or wrongly, presumably — just as we had in Iraq. Why? “The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse,” they wrote. “The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again.”


This shameless argument assumes — perhaps correctly — that no one in this country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003 — and we did so at the Three Amigos’ urging. Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 — even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we’re being asked to pay for their mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country where Al Qaeda has largely vanished.


To make the case, the Amigos and their fellow travelers conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda much as they long conflated Saddam’s regime with Al Qaeda. But as Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post reported on Thursday, American intelligence officials now say that “there are few, if any, links between Taliban commanders in Afghanistan today and senior Al Qaeda members” — a far cry from the tight Taliban-bin Laden alliance of 2001.


The rhetorical sleights of hand in the hawks’ arguments don’t end there. If you listen carefully to McCain and his neocon echo chamber, you’ll notice certain tics. President Obama better make his decision by tomorrow, or Armageddon (if not mushroom clouds) will arrive. We must “win” in Afghanistan — but victory is left vaguely defined. That’s because we will never build a functioning state in a country where there has never been one. Nor can we score a victory against the world’s dispersed, stateless terrorists by getting bogged down in a hellish landscape that contains few of them.


Most tellingly, perhaps, those clamoring for an escalation in Afghanistan avoid mentioning the name of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, or the fraud-filled August election that conclusively delegitimized his government. To do so would require explaining why America should place its troops in alliance with a corrupt partner knee-deep in the narcotics trade. As long as Karzai and the election are airbrushed out of history, it can be disingenuously argued that nothing has changed on the ground since Obama’s inauguration and that he has no right to revise his earlier judgment that Afghanistan is a “war of necessity.”


Those demanding more combat troops for Afghanistan also avoid defining the real costs. The Congressional Research Service estimates that the war was running $2.6 billion a month in Pentagon expenses alone even before Obama added 20,000 troops this year. Surely fiscal conservatives like McCain and Graham who rant about deficits being “generational theft” have an obligation to explain what the added bill will be on an Afghanistan escalation and where the additional money will come from. But that would require them to use the dread words “sacrifice” and “higher taxes” when they want us to believe that this war, like Iraq, would be cost-free.


The real troop numbers are similarly elusive. Pre-emptively railing against the prospect of “half measures” by Obama, Lieberman asked MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell rhetorically last week whether it would be “real counterinsurgency” or “counterinsurgency light.” But the measure Lieberman endorses — Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s reported recommendation of 40,000 additional troops — is itself counterinsurgency light. In his definitive recent field manual on the subject, Gen. David Petraeus stipulates that real counterinsurgency requires 20 to 25 troops for each thousand residents. That comes out, conservatively, to 640,000 troops for Afghanistan (population, 32 million). Some 535,000 American troops couldn’t achieve a successful counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, which had half Afghanistan’s population and just over a quarter of its land area.


Lieberman suggested to Mitchell that we could train an enhanced, centralized Afghan army to fill any gaps. In how many decades? The existing Afghan “army” is small, illiterate, impoverished and as factionalized as the government. For his part, McCain likes to justify McChrystal’s number of 40,000 by imbuing it with the supposedly magical powers of the “surge” in Iraq. But it’s rewriting history to say that the “surge” brought “victory” to Iraq. What it did was stanch the catastrophic bleeding in an unnecessary war McCain had helped gin up. Lest anyone forget, we still don’t know who has “won” in Iraq.


Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is poorer, even larger and more populous, more fragmented and less historically susceptible to foreign intervention. Even if the countries were interchangeable, the wars are not. No one-size surge fits all. President Bush sent the additional troops to Iraq only after Sunni leaders in Anbar Province soured on Al Qaeda and reached out for American support. There is no equivalent “Anbar Awakening” in Afghanistan. Most Afghans “don’t feel threatened by the Taliban in their daily lives” and “aren’t asking for American protection,” reported Richard Engel of NBC News last week. After eight years of war, many see Americans as occupiers.


Americans, meanwhile, want to see the fine print after eight years of fiasco with little accounting. While McCain and company remain frozen where they were in 2001, many of their fellow citizens have learned from the Iraq tragedy. Polls persistently find that the country is skeptical about what should and can be accomplished in Afghanistan. They voted for Obama not least because they wanted a new post-9/11 vision of national security, and they will not again be so easily bullied by the blustering hawks’ doomsday scenarios. That gives our deliberating president both the time and the political space to get this long war’s second act right.


Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

And herein lies the problem with the private insurance model

Brilliant at Breakfast
brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com
Tuesday, October 06, 2009


The New York Times reports that the goals of coverage and affordability in health insurance may be mutually exclusive (in other news, sun expected to rise in east today):

As Democrats prepare to take up health care legislation on the floor of the Senate and the House, they are facing tough choices about two competing priorities. They want people to pay affordable prices for health insurance policies, but they want those policies to offer comprehensive health benefits.

These goals collide in the bills moving through Congress. The different versions of the legislation would all require insurance companies to provide coverage more generous than many policies sold in the individual market today. That is good for consumers, Democrats say.

But Republicans say the new requirements would mean added costs for some consumers and for the government, which would help pay premiums for millions of low- and middle-income people.

That tension between keeping costs low and improving coverage is just one of many challenges facing Congress and the Obama administration as they head toward the final stages of the effort to pass health care legislation.

Under the legislation, the government would not only require insurers to accept all applicants. It would also define the acceptable levels of coverage.

Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, said the federal government had to specify coverage levels because the benefits under many existing insurance policies were inadequate.

“We have more than 46 million people who are uninsured,” Mr. Bingaman said. “We also have a substantial number who are underinsured. Although they have coverage, it is so bad or so inadequate that if they really get sick, they find they cannot afford the health care they need.”

But the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, Jon Kyl of Arizona, said it was “an act of hubris” for Congress to prescribe the permissible coverage.

“For the life of me,” Mr. Kyl said, “I don’t see why Washington has to dictate what kind of insurance you get to buy. Why not let the consumer decide?”

Perhaps because more often than not, the policies the consumer buys are worth about as much for providing health care as the products sold by Ryan O'Neal's door-to-door bible salesman in Paper Moon, as Dawn Smith found out:



Is everyone who is denied payment of claims going to be able to get his or her story in front of people the way Dawn Smith has? Of course not. And that's what the insurance companies are relying on -- the millions of people who fight with these companies every day in order to get medical care that is supposed to be covered under their plans paid.

This is why when I hear talk of "coverage" in the context of health care reform I cringe. Because "coverage" is what's on paper. But absolutely nothing is being said on Capitol Hill about actually paying claims. And that's why I'm desperately afraid that what comes out of Congress is going to be far worse than what we have now. At least now those who cannot afford "market-based" insurance aren't paying up to $15,000/year for family coverage that covers very little. What Congress is talking about is forcing them to buy "coverage" -- and doing nothing to address the hoops that these companies make people jump through in order to actually get their care paid.

The answer, of course, is not to do nothing, or to stand on a street corner holding a picture of Barack Obama with a Hitler mustache. The answer is not "government-run health care." The answer is a single-payer plan in which everyone receives REAL coverage for health care, not promises from for-profit companies which they have no intention to fulfill.
Copyright 2009 brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com

The Rabbit Ragu Democrats

Frank Rich
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 4, 2009


IN the annals of American excess, there often arrives a moment when those with too much money, too much clout and too much hubris just can’t stop themselves from tempting the fates. They throw an over-the-top party in public, or parade their wealth and power before the press, and the next thing you know their world, and sometimes ours, has crashed.


In the go-go Reagan 1980s, the junk bond king Michael Milken bedazzled investors with lavish Predators’ Balls in Beverly Hills. Sure enough, he and Wall Street would end the decade in ruin. Back East, the financier Saul Steinberg celebrated his 50th birthday in 1989 with a $1 million party in the Hamptons. “Honey, if this moment were a stock, I’d short it,” he said when toasting his wife. He would soon suffer a stroke and see his company go bankrupt.

Steinberg sold his vast New York apartment to the private equity titan Stephen Schwarzman. In February 2007, Schwarzman marked his 60th birthday with a highly visible multimillion-dollar bacchanal in the Park Avenue Armory. Though Schwarzman hasn’t suffered much since — he is tied for 50th on the new Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans — his bash presaged the bust to come. He became, as James Stewart wrote in The New Yorker, “the designated villain of an era on Wall Street — an era of rapacious capitalists and heedless self-indulgence.”

It’s in this context that you have to wonder what some of the Obama era’s most moneyed and White House-connected lobbyists were thinking as they preened before a Washington Post reporter recently for two lengthy articles. We’re not even nine months into the new administration, yet these swaggering, utterly un-self-aware influence peddlers seem determined to prove that nothing except the party affiliations has changed in the Beltway’s pay-for-play culture since Tom DeLay. If these lobbyists were stocks, I’d short them.

One of the articles focused on Heather Podesta — “The It Girl of a New Generation of Lobbyists” — who lobbies for health care players like Eli Lilly, HealthSouth and Cigna. Podesta is half of what The Post has called a “mega-lobbying” couple. Her husband, with his own separate (and larger) lobbying shop, is Tony Podesta, the brother of John Podesta, the Clinton White House chief of staff who ran the Obama transition. Back in November, Tony Podesta told The Times that only “very unsophisticated” clients would hire his firm because of his brother’s role in assembling the new administration. That encyclopedic andever-expanding list of “unsophisticated” clients includes Amgen and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity — and that’s just among the A’s. His business was up 57 percent from last year in the first six months of 2009. Heather Podesta’s was up 65 percent.

When we first meet Heather Podesta in The Post, she is being bussed on the cheek by Charles Rangel at his August birthday party at New York’s Tavern on the Green. In keeping with the usual pattern of blowback, it took only one day after the article appeared for The Times to report that Rangel, the ethically challenged chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was guilty of yet another lapse: He’d neglected to list at least $500,000 in assets on his 2007 Congressional disclosure form. As if that were not karmic retribution enough, Tavern on the Green filed for bankruptcy just days after that.

The second Post article, on the front page two weeks ago, described the scene, as well as the rabbit ragu, at Ristorante Tosca, the lobbyists’ hangout on F Street in downtown Washington. The Post did not mention that it is just four blocks away from the location ofthe now defunct Signatures, the restaurant whose owner, Jack Abramoff, was the go-to fixer of the DeLay “K Street project” before scandal brought him down.

The stars of Tosca’s “Power Section,” we learned, include the Podestas, Tom Daschle (“not technically a registered lobbyist” but, as The Post put it, “a ‘special policy adviser’ — wink wink”) and Steve Elmendorf (who “eats lunch out only at Tosca”). Elmendorf was chief of staff to the former Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt. A quick visit to opensecrets.org reveals that Elmendorf Strategies’ client list includes Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, among other players in the coming battle over financial regulation reform. Then again, as The Nation details in its current issue, Gephardt has also lobbied for Goldman, among many other corporate clients in opposition to the populist policies he once championed.

Barack Obama promised a change from this revolving-door, behind-closed-doors collaboration between special interests and government. He vowed to “do our business in the light of day” — with health care negotiations broadcast on C-Span — and to “restore the vital trust between people and their government.” He said, “I intend to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” That those lobbyists would so extravagantly flaunt their undiminished role shows just how little they believe that a new sheriff has arrived in Dodge.

In his scathing Wall Street Journal column on The Post articles last week, Thomas Frank crystallized the gap between Obama’s pledge and this reality. “There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists.” That’s no joke: It was donated by Tony and Heather Podesta.

Obama’s promise to make Americans trust the government again was not just another campaign bullet point; it’s the foundation of his brand of governance and essential to his success in office. At the first anniversary of the TARP bailout of the banks, we can see how far he has to go. Americans’ continued suspicion that Washington is in cahoots with powerful interests in joints like Tosca is contributing to their confusion and skepticism about what’s happening out of view in the battle over health care reform.

The public is not wrong. The administration’s legislative deals with the pharmaceutical companies were made in back rooms. Business Week reported in early August that the UnitedHealth Group and its fellow insurance giants had already quietly rounded up moderate Democrats in the House to block any public health care option that would compete with them for business. UnitedHealth’s hired Beltway gunslingers include both Elmendorf Strategies and Daschle, a public supporter of the public option who nonetheless does some of his “wink, wink” counseling for UnitedHealth. The company’s in-house lobbyist is a former chief of staff to Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader. Gephardtconsults there too.

But it’s not as if the Republicans now have the public’s back. DeLay may be reduced these days to violating public taste rather than the public trust on “Dancing With the Stars,” but back on Capitol Hill, his successors keep the K Street faith. In their campaign to kill the public option, G.O.P. leaders often cite data from the Lewin Group, a research company, which has projected that 88 million Americans might quit their private insurance plans if given a government alternative. (The Congressional Budget Office puts the figure at the far less earthshaking 10 to 11 million.) Lewin, which repeatedly insists it’s still a nonpartisan outfit, was actually bought by a subsidiary of UnitedHealth in 2007. The Huffington Post reported in August that John Boehner and Eric Cantor — who use Lewin’s findings to scare voters about a “government takeover” of health care — are big recipients of UnitedHealth campaign cash.

Next up will be the overhaul of financial regulations. With job seekers now outnumbering job openings 6 to 1 in America, many still wonder why most of the big-dog culprits who helped speed the national meltdown — from lying and gambling bankers to shyster subprime mortgage packagers to executives at delinquent ratings agencies — have not shared their pain. In his speech marking the anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ failure, Obama chastised Wall Street for having taken irresponsible risks. But of course it is already back doing exactly that.

Meanwhile, we’re hearing of behind-the-scenes Congressional softening of perhaps the most promising component of the White House’s modest financial regulatory package, a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Real-estate brokerages are being exempted from its purview, and banks will not be required to offer “plain vanilla” mortgages. As in health care, the question of what the White House will really fight for in financial reform remains open. While the ostentatious daily predators’ ball at Ristorante Tosca is a bad omen, we don’t know yet whether that omen is for the lobbyists, or the Obama administration, or both.

This is history that the president still has the power to write. It will be written in the bills he will or won’t sign into law. We can only hope that he learned an important lesson from his stunning failure to secure Olympic gold for his political home of Chicago last week. If the Olympic committee has the audacity to stand up to a lobbyist as powerful as the president of the United States, then surely the president of the United States can stand up to the powerful interests angling to defeat his promise of reform.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

The Real Story Behind the “Rogue” in Sarah Palin’s New Book.

AK Mudflats
The Mubflats
September 28, 2009

“Going Rogue,” is the title of Sarah Palin’s soon-to-be released memoir. It’s cute, it’s catchy and it will sell some books. The 400-page tome will hit the shelves on November 17th, with a massive first printing of 1.5 million copies.  And each one of those book jackets is another jab at two of the many casualties of the Palin administration in Alaska.

Politico reports that the phrase has its roots in an Oct. 20 story by Slate’s John Dickerson, with the lead: “Has Sarah Palin “gone rogue”?”

But those of us who live in Alaska, and who have been following this story from the beginning know the real root of that phrase, and will understand the ugly irony of Palin’s title.

During the ethics investigation of Sarah Palin now known as “Troopergate,” that phrase became seared into the collective consciousness of Alaskans.  Palin’s spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton used that word referring not to Palin, but to the former Commissioner of Public Safety Walt Monegan.  Palin had pressured Monegan to fire her ex-brother in law Trooper Mike Wooten whose nasty divorce from Palin’s sister had left bitter feelings.  Monegan refused to fire him, and was subsequently dismissed by the governor, leaving the Department of Public Safety without leadership, and leaving many Alaskans with a bad taste in their mouths.

In a stinging press conference, Stapleton said that Monegan, a particularly well-liked and respected public servant, former police chief and ex-Marine had displayed “egregious rogue behavior.”  Stapleton, who had been a respected news anchor before her association with Palin, suffered withering criticism from Alaskans on both sides of the political spectrum.  Alaska is a small town. Monegan was no “rogue,” everyone knew it, and the use of the term disgraced her.

What had Monegan done, according to the governor, that earned him this brand?  He had planned a trip to Washington D.C. to seek funding to help combat sexual assault in a state that leads the nation in that category.  Rogue, indeed.

In September of 2008, Alaskans for Truth held a rally in downtown Anchorage.  More than 1500 Alaskans showed up to protest the administration’s handling of “Troopergate,” the insinuation of the McCain campaign’s attorneys into Alaska’s Department of Law,  and the outrageous behavior of Meg Stapleton, then Attorney General Talis Colberg, and Palin herself.  One of the speakers at the rally was Betty Monegan, the mother of Walt Monegan, who carried a sign referencing the outrageous accusations made by the Palin administration.

But Monegan was not the only one to stand accused of being a “rogue.”  Mike Wooten, the infamous ex-brother-in-law was called a “rogue trooper” and Palin said he was a danger to her family and to the public.  She made it clear that in no uncertain terms that being a “rogue” was not a good thing.   These accusations were soundly refuted by Steven Branchflower, an independent investigator hired by the bipartisan Legislative Council to investigate Troopergate.

“I conclude that such claims of fear were not bona fide and were offered to provide cover for the Palins’ real motivation: to get Trooper Wooten fired for personal family reasons,” Branchflower wrote.

The Branchflower report states Todd Palin used his wife’s office and its resources to press for Wooten’s removal, and the governor “failed to act” to stop it. But because Todd Palin is not a state employee, the report makes no finding regarding his conduct.

The bipartisan Legislative Council, which commissioned the investigation after Monegan was fired, unanimously adopted the 263-page public report…

The Branchflower Report was to find Governor Palin guilty of abusing her power as governor under the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act. Attorney General Talis Colberg would ultimately resign his position, and Todd Palin and several administration officials would be found guilty of contempt of the Legislature for ignoring subpoenas.

Trooper Mike Wooten ended up with a desk job because Palin’s accusations that he was a “rogue” and a danger to the public had brought about threats that made it impossible for him to work out in the open as a trooper, despite the findings of the Branchflower Report.

Walt Monegan was denied a request for a due process hearing before the governor-appointed Alaska Personnel Board to address reputational harm because of the insults he endured from an administration who chose to call him a “rogue.”  That’s the same board to which Palin filed a complaint against herself, and was subsequently cleared of wrongdoing.

And now Sarah Palin apparently hopes to make the term “rogue” impish and endearing, and hopes it will help her sell a lot of books.  But that term is no such thing to many Alaskans. It wasn’t “cute” when it was used as a finely sharpened tool in the Palin toolbox, used to malign the characters of those who stood in the way of her power scramble to become the Vice President of the United States.

She may have fooled her ghost writer, and the folks at Harper-Collins, and she may fool many of those in the Lower 48 who will wait on line for their copy of “Going Rogue,”  but she will not fool Alaskans.

Copyright 2009 The Mudflats

Once again, Americans are smarter than the media

 

Joan Walsh
salon.com
September 23, 2009

A slumping President Obama, battered in the polls and facing charges he's "overexposed" in the media, will get the blame if he doesn't pass healthcare reform this year. Or so goes an increasingly negative media narrative in the wake of a tough month for the new president.

But the most recent NBC/WSJ poll released Tuesday turns almost all of those assumptions on their head. Only a third of those polled said Obama is "overexposed" in the media -- 63 percent said his exposure was either just right or too little. Thirty-seven percent said congressional Republicans would be to blame if Obama's healthcare reform drive fails; only 10 percent would blame Obama. Almost 80 percent of Americans said they like the president personally, and his job approval has held steady over the last rocky month, at 51 percent.

Far from hurting the president or his agenda, this week's media blitz seems to have improved his numbers on healthcare, specifically. Last month, only 41 percent of Americans approved of the way he was handling the issue, while 47 percent disapproved; now it's 45 percent-46 percent. In particular, Obama has rallied Democrats behind his plan: Last month 62 percent  of Democrats backed Obama's plan; now 69 percent  do.

It's not all good news for Obama and those who support robust health insurance reform, including a public option. MSNBC's Ed Schultz pointed to a vexing paradox: While an impressive 73 percent of those polled say it's extremely important that the plan have a public option (only 23 percent say it's unimportant), 48 percent oppose the public option, while 46 percent support it. Go figure.

There's similar confusion about Obama's stimulus plan: 45 percent said it was a bad idea, with 34 percent supporting it, and yet on balance -- 46 percent to 43 percent -- they believe the recession would have been worse without it.

And a combination of confusion and dissent over Afghanistan seems to be pulling down Obama's approval rating on foreign policy issues: It's dropped from 57 percent to 50 percent since July.

Clearly the president still has a slog ahead of him as the competing versions of healthcare reform plans -- all crafted by Democrats, by the way -- make their way through Congress. But it's also clear that the Obama administration's best political asset is Obama, and the White House should continue to tune out Beltway doubters.

Meanwhile, though, the best news about healthcare reform came from Will Ferrell and MoveOn today: The left has a sense of humor, and this video spoofing the insurance industry's syrupy "We're on your side" ad campaign made me laugh out loud. (Jon Hamm's harried, sexy health insurance exec could make me turn against the public option.) Great work, MoveOn!

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.