From The NY Times
By Paul Krugman

The whole world is in recession. But the United States is the only wealthy country in which the economic catastrophe will also be a health care catastrophe — in which millions of people will lose their health insurance along with their jobs, and therefore lose access to essential care.

Which raises a question: Why has the Obama administration been silent, at least so far, about one of President Obama’s key promises during last year’s campaign — the promise of guaranteed health care for all Americans?

Let’s talk about the magnitude of the looming health care disaster.

Just about all economic forecasts, including those of the Obama administration’s own economists, say that we’re in for a prolonged period of very high unemployment. And high unemployment means a sharp rise in the number of Americans without health insurance.

After the economy slumped at the beginning of this decade, five million people joined the ranks of the uninsured — and that was with the unemployment rate peaking at only 6.3 percent. This time the Obama administration says that even with its stimulus plan, unemployment will reach 8 percent, and that it will stay above 6 percent until 2012. Many independent forecasts are even more pessimistic.

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From After Downing Street
By David Swanson

While a Democratic polling firm has just found, as pollsters always do, dramatic public support for public health coverage, Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill appear divided, as they have always been, over whether to take a comprehensive approach to health care.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said on C-Span on Sunday that incrementalism would suit him better “than to go out and just bite something you can’t chew.” Clyburn said he opposes any comprehensive approach in 2009. Meanwhile House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) made a long speech about healthcare at a conference in D.C. on Thursday in which he said “I am committed to helping bring comprehensive reform to the floor of the 111th Congress.”

Now, on Capitol Hill, phrases like “comprehensive reform” and “universal healthcare” can mean almost anything, including proposals that would likely require comprehensive reform themselves by the time the ink was dry. But there is an opening right now for serious healthcare reform of the sort that has succeeded in almost every other wealthy country on earth: single payer. Here are three reasons why this is a moment in which single payer health coverage (private medicine paid for by the government, and the elimination of all health insurance companies) has become possible.

First, the partisan dynamics have changed in Congress. While some Republicans might vote for single payer, they wouldn’t need to. The Democratic leadership could persuade enough Democrats to vote Yes to pass it without a single Republican, if they chose to. In the House, where the Democrats seriously worsened an economic stimulus bill this week in order to win irrelevant Republican votes and then didn’t get a single one, they might be in the mood to wake up and begin behaving as the majority they are. In the Senate, there is the ever-present scourge of the filibuster, which allows senators representing 11 percent of the public to block legislation, but the Democrats could change the rule to rid our republic of that antidemocratic blight if they choose to. Read the rest of this entry »

From The Seattle Times
By Ellen Goodman

It must be the world’s longest-running game of ideological pingpong. In 1984, Ronald Reagan aimed an overhand smash at international organizations, pledging that America would no longer give family-planning money to any group that even counseled or referred women for abortions. Ping.

In 1993, Bill Clinton revoked this Global Gag Rule two days after he took office. Pong.

In 2001, George W. Bush signed the gag order back in place as his first order of business. Ping.

Then, in 2009, Barack Obama rescinded the order again. Pong, anyone?

Obama’s act was greeted with the familiar cheers and jeers of old rhetorical enemies, but I heard a different voice. In the quiet statement that accompanied his move, the new man in the White House described abortion as “a political wedge issue, the subject of a back-and-forth debate that has served only to divide us. I have no desire to continue this stale and fruitless debate.”

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From The Raw Story
By John Byrne

Four days before leaving office, and ten days before House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) subpoenaed him to testify, President Bush’s White House Counsel instructed Karl Rove not to appear before Congress or turn over any documents relating to his time at the White House.

The letter, on White House stationery, was addressed to Rove’s D.C. lawyer, Robert Luskin, and addressed questions of whether the former White House Deputy Chief of Staff was obligated to appear before Congress relating to the firing of nine US Attorneys.

“Please advise Mr. Rove (i) that the President continues to direct him not to provide information (whether in the form of testimony or documents) to the Congress in this matter… and not to appear before Congress in this matter,” then-White House Counsel Fred Fielding wrote.

The Jan. 16, 2009 letter was acquired by Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and printed online Thursday evening.

At its heart, Fielding’s letter reflects President George W. Bush’s decision to continue to argue that “[t]he President and his immediate advisors are absolutely immune from testimonial compulsion by a congressional committee,” even after leaving office, citing a 2007 memorandum the Justice Department prepared. Ironically, the memo was prepared by the very department that Congress is trying to garner information about.

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From Think Progress
By Ali

John Yoo, infamous author of the Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of torture on suspected terrorists, slams President Obama for banning torture in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, gravely warning that Obama “may have opened the door to further terrorist acts on U.S. soil.”

Throughout the article, Yoo insists that torture is America’s most effective weapon against terrorists and warns that without it, the U.S. will be incapable of intelligence-gathering:

Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists. Every prisoner will have the right to a lawyer (which they will surely demand), the right to remain silent, and the right to a speedy trial. […]

Relying on the civilian justice system not only robs us of the most effective intelligence tool to avert future attacks, it provides an opportunity for our enemies to obtain intelligence on us.

Considering the Bush administration repeatedly insisted its use of coercive techniques was “limited,” it would be a far stretch even for loyal Bushies to suggest that torture is not the one and only method to obtaining information. And as ThinkProgress has made clear again and again, numerous intelligence experts and real interrogators agree that, far from being “the most effective intelligence tool,” torture simply doesn’t work.

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From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Jay Bookman

The folks at Politico have a couple of intriguing stories posted.

First, there’s this:

“Politico has learned that tomorrow Americans United for Change, a liberal group, will begin airing radio ads in three states Obama won — Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada — with a tough question aimed at the GOP senators there: Will you side with Obama or Rush Limbaugh?

“Every Republican member of the House chose to take Rush Limbaugh’s advice,” says the narrator after playing the conservative talk radio giant’s declaration that he hopes Obama “fails.”

“Every Republican voted with Limbaugh — and against creating 4 million new American jobs. We can understand why a extreme partisan like Rush Limbaugh wants President Obama’s jobs program to fail — but the members of Congress elected to represent the citizens in their districts? That’s another matter. Now the Obama plan goes to the Senate, and the question is: Will our Senator”—here the ad is tailored by state to name George Voinovich in Ohio, Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, and John Ensign in Nevada—“side with Rush Limbaugh too?”

I think that’s pretty well played. I doubt it will have much impact, but it’s smart politics nonetheless. Casting it as a choice between Obama — with a 65 percent approval rating in the new Fox poll, and only 16 percent disapproval — and the controversial Limbaugh is a nice touch.

So is this, if it pans out:

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From McClatchy Washington Bureau
By Michael Doyle

A recent Drug Enforcement Administration raid on a South Lake Tahoe, Calif., medical marijuana dispensary showcases one of the legal conflicts inherited by the Obama administration.

The Jan. 22 raid near the California-Nevada border occurred two days after Obama took office and before the new president’s own Justice Department team was in place. The raid resembled many conducted during the Bush administration, but seemingly clashed with Obama’s campaign opposition to such tactics.

“I think the basic concept of using medical marijuana for the same purposes and with the same controls as other drugs prescribed by doctors (is) entirely appropriate,” Obama told Oregon’s Mail Tribune newspaper in March. “I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue.”

Now, citing the Tahoe episode, medical marijuana activists and civil libertarians are urging Obama to freeze future raids. Some hope, as well, that Obama will reverse a Bush administration decision and let additional legal marijuana production to take place.

At the very least, activists and law enforcement officials alike are awaiting clarification about what’s changed in the world of medical marijuana. This could take time.

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From The Nation
By John Nichols

Author Michael Pollan suggested last fall that the next president–as part of a broader move to encourage understanding of and support for sustainable agriculture–should appoint a White House Farmer.

“Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer,” wrote Pollan, the author of books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. “This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.”

The idea caught on, and the campaign to get President Obama to appoint a White House farmer has captured the imagination of tens of thousands of Americans–thanks in no small part to an election that is being held to select three finalists for the position. Their names will be submitted to Obama as part of the campaign to get him to embrace Pollin’s proposal.

The voting finishes at midnight Saturday, and several dozen contenders are making their pitches at the great White House Farmer website.

Pioneering chef and restaurateur Alice Waters is in the running.

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From The Washington Post
By Eugene Robinson

Watching the House Republicans vote unanimously against President Obama’s economic stimulus package, I thought of Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers and the potential consequences for those who fail to recognize that one political era has given way to the next.

You may recall that the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went on strike in August 1981, seeking better working conditions and more pay. Reagan had been in office just seven months, and the nation still wasn’t quite sure what to make of him. The controllers union had legitimate gripes and calculated that the new president would deal rather than risk a disruption of air travel. The union knew that strikes by government workers were illegal, strictly speaking, but it also knew that other organizations of federal employees had gotten away with similar walkouts in the past.

Reagan declared the strike a “peril to national safety” and gave the more than 13,000 air traffic controllers 48 hours to return to work. A few complied. When the deadline expired, Reagan fired the 11,345 controllers who had defied him. Two months later, the union was decertified. Years passed before any of the strikers were allowed to work as controllers again.

The point isn’t to revisit the merits of the strike or the wisdom of Reagan’s hard-line stance. The point is that the controllers’ union failed to realize that the dawn of the Reagan administration represented a rare fundamental shift in American politics. Under Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford or even Richard Nixon, the controllers might well have won their strike. Under Reagan, they had no chance — not only because of his stubborn resolve but also because American voters had given him a broad mandate for change.

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From TruthDig
By David Sirota

When they write their retrospectives about the era that ended with the 2008 election, economic historians will undoubtedly credit George W. Bush with almost single-handedly moving the country to embrace extremist conservatism. It’s a simple storyline: Cowboy president drives bewildered American herd over laissez-faire cliff. What such reductionism will ignore, though, is what we must remember now: Namely, that Congress also played a decisive role in the stampede.

As former House Republican leader Tom DeLay said, he and his colleagues deliberately started “every policy initiative from as far to the political right” as possible, so as to shift “the center farther to the right.” The formula emulated Franklin Roosevelt’s fabled admonishment to allies: “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”

With Bush, congressional Republicans knew they had an ideological comrade in the White House. But they also knew he was confined by the (minimally) moderating desire for re-election and the (even more minimally) moderating limits of his national office. So, to reach their goals, conservatives had to compel their presidential friend to do what they wanted—and compel him they did. When Bush’s tax cuts and deregulatory schemes hit the Capitol, Republicans inevitably expanded them to fully achieve the right’s objectives.

Of course, that triumph was the country’s loss, as Republican policies thrust the political center off a conservative precipice and America into an economic free fall. And as we plummet, we are desperately groping for a lifeline.

If we are lucky and we end up snagging one that saves us—a huge if—it will be one that is strong enough to snap the center back from the conservative brink. This super-durable bungee cord must have the force of law, meaning it will be woven by Democratic legislators now exerting as much pressure on President Obama’s left as congressional Republicans focused on President Bush’s right.

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