No Bebop

This past week’s elections were widely chewed over, nearly as much as 2008, when a president, most of Congress and thousands of state legislators and governors were up for election. This was mainly at the behest of the right-wing media, which is desperate to shake the loser image their side has over the past two federal elections, and they’ll take the election of two Republican governors on mostly likeability and local issues grounds to do their “U-S-A!!!!” dance. (Of course, they will argue the two special congressional elections that went for Democrats are meaningless, when they deign to mention them at all.)

The big buzz out of all the coverage, particularly the mainstream media, has been the significance of the independent voter. It’s a reasonable conclusion; in the gubernatorial elections, independents broke hard for the Republican candidates. Unfortunately, the resulting analysis of this situation has been half-baked at best, with pundits describing independent voters as some sort of cohesive political force whose turn to the GOP is some sort of harbinger for the real elections next year. This isn’t quite insane, but it is silly.

There is no such thing as a typical independent voter in the United States. Many of our cable news shouters, as well as our editorial page bloviators, are quick to conflate independent voters with centrists. There is no evidence to suggest this has any validity. Consider our two “independent” U.S. senators, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Sanders is an actual self-described socialist, while Lieberman caucuses with Democrats and votes with Republicans. See any continuity of belief systems there? (I’ll let others characterize the two men further.)

I’ve followed elections for longer than I care to admit, and here are a few things I’ve noticed about independent voters. It’s true that, in general, they have no great love for either the Democratic or Republican parties. Indeed, I tend to agree with that assessment. But for every independent voter, there’s a different reason why this is so — and few of those reasons have to do with political science.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people who describe themselves as independent voters actually aren’t anything of the kind. They have easy-to-characterize political beliefs, from wild-eyed liberalism to batshit Glenn Beck followers. The realities of following a particular party’s banner, however, don’t suit them for one reason or another, usually because maintaining a broad-based party requires compromises that either don’t interest them or actively repel them. (NY-23, anybody?) My own wife switched from Democrat to Independent after years of seeing her preferred candidates for federal office lose in the primary. She asked what was the point of having a primary vote if it didn’t mean anything. I don’t completely agree, but I do understand.

Of course, at this point I’m talking about independent voters who actually do have coherent political beliefs. I’d say the majority of independents are either frustrated Democrats or Republicans. There may even be a few independents who are actively centrist — people who still think both parties have important things to say. This notion, however, seems to have overwhelmed the punditry, despite the fact that it isn’t a true reflection of who independents are.

But a significant number of registered independents are simply independent of Beltway definitions of what constitutes a political world view. There are folks who would be solid Democrats in most of their beliefs, except they don’t like social minorities. There are liberals who prefer the Republican view of small government and military adventurism. There are folks who are fixated on a single issue, like abortion, war, immigration or gun control, who don’t want to compromise their vision and therefore have little use for politicians who will give ground on those pet beliefs. There are folks who register independent just to get out of voting in primaries in general. And there are independents who don’t even register to vote.

What pundits are clumsily recognizing this week is that independents are far more likely to be swing voters than are registered Democrats or Republicans. The deepening polarization of the electorate and the purification of party rosters has seen to that. So if independents are choosing Republicans in half of a very small number of closely watched off-year elections, where last year independents chose Democrats in hundreds of federal elections, it may be a trend, or at least a harbinger. But considering Virginia has chosen its governors from the opposite party of the president for at least 20 years, and that normally Democratic New Jersey simply hated Jon Corzine’s guts, I wouldn’t want to make any predictions based on such a small data set.

Indeed, NY-23 would be a far more significant result, assuming you ascribe much weight to Tuesday’s results, which I don’t. After all, a Democrat won that seat for the first time since before the Civil War. And this despite the attention of national Republicans who did everything possible to prosecute the election on national issues. You had Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck calling out the teabagger horde to smack down both a Democrat and a popular Republican candidate who was perceived to be too liberal. They did make a third party candidate look pretty good — but New York state has a Liberal and a Conservative party in addition to Dems and Republicans, and in most cases the Libs endorse the Dem and the Conservatives rubber-stamp the GOP. In this case they didn’t — and in doing so, the so-called “braintrust” of the teabaggers helped elect the Democrat. In the wake of the election, the teabag contingent professes its efforts a “success” and plan to widen their effforts. If I were a Democratic candidate, I’d be working to make sure teabaggers were doing exactly what they did in NY-23 to my opponent.

Notice how news coverage of health care reform no longer talks about “whether” there will be a public option, but “what kind?” How could that be? Only the loony left was interested in that, while the sober, bipartisan minds of the U.S. Congress were busy trying to strike deals for Republican votes with more “moderate” proposals.

Well, for starters, the “loony left” polled at anywhere from 55 to 80 percent when pollsters asked whether the health reform bill should contain a public option. And once the teabaggers shouted themselves out, the real majority of Americans began making themselves heard. And their concerns — losing their health care with their jobs, not being able to keep their health care unless they turned over their entire unemployment check to the insurance company, not being able to get the care they paid for over a lifetime once something actually became wrong with them — were far more real than the teabaggers’ unfocused complaints about violating the Tenth Amendment, creeping socialism, and the president’s birthplace. Not to mention their implied faith in the pirates that run the health insurance scam in the United States.

Funny story about the health insurers. A couple of weeks ago, they overplayed their hand by ginning up defective studies claiming that health care reform would raise everyone’s premiums. This kind of thing worked pretty well in 1993 (see bought-and-paid-for think-tank apparatchik Betsy McCaughey) but the faster news cycle — plus the fact that we’ve seen this game of three-card monte before — not only debunked the studies but allowed room for folks to question their motives at length. This made the studies radioactive to health reform opponents, and cleared the way for a more sober consideration of the public option.

This is not to say we’re going to get a good bill, however. Neither house of Congress appears to have a solid majority for the kind of balls-out public option that really will push the cost curve and bring the entire population under the coverage umbrella. Right now the discussion is over “triggers” and “opt-out.” One of these two useless fig leaves may be necessary to get a health reform bill through the Congress, unfortunately, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

“Triggers” means they’ll create a public option but hold it in abeyance until some future date when it becomes clear even to politicians with six figures’ worth of health care/health insurance/pharmaceutical money in their re-election accounts that the reform bill hasn’t made any headway. This is an exceedingly bad idea because tripping the trigger will require legislation, the story will be mostly ignored by the media because it won’t involve kids stowing away inside a weather balloon, and therefore will be easy for lobbyists to kick down the road further, with the help of still more campaign money. If there must be a trigger, here’s a good one: The public option kicks in when U.S. health care costs per capita reach double those of Canada, France, Japan, the U.K. and Germany.

Then there’s the “opt-out” proposal, under which they’ll pass a public option but states can opt out of it. This may actually be more insane than triggers; consider that if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had an “opt-out” provision, there’d still be whites-only lunch counters in Alabama and Mississippi, and possibly Texas as well. And since there still are a fair number of Republican governors in the U.S., hardly any of whom are profiles in courage when it comes to resisting the brain-damaged entreaties of the core Republican base voter, we can expect a significant number of states to opt out of health care reform. Which will do a number on any effort to bend the cost curve or get everybody insured. Not to mention it will guarantee a permanent campaign against further health care reform, as the retrogrades band together with the moneyed health interests to get all 50 states to opt out.

Last week folks in the Democratic party finally, much belatedly, got behind the best possible description of what health care reform needs to be: Medicare For Everyone, or Medicare Part E. Can you name somebody over 65 who doesn’t have health insurance? Of course not. So why stop there? One of the important points of health reform is to insure everyone. Then there’s the need to do away with all the silly administrative games: pre-existing conditions; “experimental” treatments; the subrogation game, in which multiple insurance companies play hot potato with people’s health bills; and the ever-popular recission, in which people’s entire policies get canceled the day they show up with a condition that’s expensive to treat.

Then there’s the need to make a dent in the phenomenon of medical bills bankrupting ordinary Americans — some 60 percent of all bankruptcies are primarily caused by mounting medical expenses. Check out Sen. Al Franken evicerating an industry flack who tried to claim that medical bankruptcies would go up if the U.S. passed health insurance reform:

Folks, I remain convinced that straight-up single-payer is what the U.S. needs to get to real health care and health insurance reform. Unfortunately, we’ve allowed too many interested profit centers to grow up in this country; instead of moving toward sustainable reform, we’ve actually been moving in the opposite direction for some 30 years now. Been to a hospital lately? It used to be that everybody in the hospital worked for the hospital, and while the doctors had private practices, they were beholden to the hospitals in terms of quality care and ability to make money treating patients. Today’s hospitals are like shopping malls — practically every department of the hospital is a separate private enterprise cost center and a separate medical practice. You can go to a hospital that’s “in the network” yet be treated by doctors who are outside the network. (That happened to me personally.) Even the emergency room doctors are an external practice. And who do you think pays for the byzantine reams of paperwork that are generated by dozens of cost centers under a single hospital’s roof?

Meanwhile, the hospitals tolerate this situation because if the doctors don’t like the hospital, they can withhold services and even go into competition with the local hospital to drive it out of business by cherry-picking all the profitable treatments and surgeries in their own shiny new outpatient centers. If the doctors aren’t rich enough to undertake such a thing themselves, there are any number of medical provider chains who would be happy to underwrite such a move.

The political conservative sees nothing wrong with any of this because it’s market-based private enterprise. Unfortunately, patients do not have any ability to harness the power of the market. You don’t shop for an emergency room or the best place to have an appendectomy; you get rushed into whatever facility will take you in a reasonable amount of time. This is why EVERY advanced democracy in the world has downplayed or regulated the amount of private enterprise in the health care system. The U.S. needs to get to that point, but it’s going to take years and years of political struggle to get within a country mile of where everybody else is.

The big story in media circles this past week — if you leave aside the “balloon boy” — was Anita Dunn of the White House communications shop committing the unpardonable sin of clearly explaining what function Fox News Channel serves in the world of reporting political news.

The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.

On what planet does anybody dispute this in the year 2009? The network has been in business for 13 years. It got a providential boost from coming along just as the Whitewater non-scandal morphed into all-Monica, all the time, and matured on its slavishly pro-Bush coverage of the 2000 election, particularly the Florida recount phase. (The so-called “liberal media” was mainly responsible for fluffing Bush while making up fake nonsense about Al Gore — Bob Somerby hosts the archive on that lowlight of journalistic history.)

And yet the defense of Fox News hasn’t been limited to its own air or even its media allies and wingnut bloggers. The mainstream media has been historically averse to calling Fox what it is, with everybody from the Washington Post to New York magazine painting this as “Obama’s war on Fox.” This is like saying that simply expressing the equation 2+2=4 is somehow a “war” on new math.

Apparently a lot of media types wet themselves when forced to consider the possibility that Fox News, as an institution, is a $4 billion in-kind contribution from News Corp. to the U.S. Republican party. They mewl that just because the period between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. isn’t hosted by Beck, Hannity or O’Reilly and is structured more like real news — and that folks like Shepard Smith and Major Garrett report things that aren’t by definition insane — that this somehow makes Fox “just like” CNN or MSNBC.

It does nothing of the kind. This is because Fox’s opinion personalities completely ignore anything the daytime news reports say if it doesn’t comport with their agendas. (One would argue that Beck ignores pretty much anything that doesn’t originate with the voices in his head, but I don’t have time to pursue that line of thought.) When a Fox reporter gives a report at 4 p.m. on a Monday explaining that the health reform proposals do NOT create “death panels,” but Beck, Hannity and O’Reilly continue to repeat the canard night after night for weeks on end, which of these two contradictory messages do you think will connect with Fox audiences? Just because you can show that Fox occasionally airs fact-based reports — and that some of their criticisms of Obama are reasonable — does not excuse the orchestrated opposition based entirely on ideology that arises from the totality of their news coverage and opinion programming. If Fox were merely an outlet for conservative news gathering it would be one thing, but as Anita Dunn expressed clearly this past Sunday,

Obviously, there are many commentators who have conservative, liberal, centrist, and everybody understands that. But I think what is fair to say about Fox and certainly the way we view it is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party.

Besides, the idea that Fox has a respectable news operation is itself a myth. Ex-Fox-employee Charlie Reina described the “news gathering” process at that network several years ago for Romanesko’s page at Poynter.org (it seems to only be available at Sourcewatch now):

The roots of Fox News Channel’s day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered. To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel’s daytime programming, The Memo is the bible. If, on any given day, you notice that the Fox anchors seem to be trying to drive a particular point home, you can bet The Memo is behind it. …

The sad truth is, such subtlety is often all it takes to send Fox’s newsroom personnel into action — or inaction, as the case may be. One day this past spring, just after the U.S. invaded Iraq, The Memo warned us that anti-war protesters would be ‘whining’ about U.S. bombs killing Iraqi civilians, and suggested they could tell that to the families of American soldiers dying there. Editing copy that morning, I was not surprised when an eager young producer killed a correspondent’s report on the day’s fighting — simply because it included a brief shot of children in an Iraqi hospital.

These are not isolated incidents at Fox News Channel, where virtually no one of authority in the newsroom makes a move unmeasured against management’s politics, actual or perceived. At the Fair and Balanced network, everyone knows management’s point of view, and, in case they’re not sure how to get it on air, The Memo is there to remind them.

Fox News relentlessly pushed the talking point that Obama was personally cratering the stock market from his inauguration until just a couple of months ago — about the time the market started rising again. When the Dow hit 10,000 the other day for the first time in about a year, how did Fox reconcile their previous stance with Obama apparently goosing the stock market 3,000 points from its low? Why, they began talking about the “Bush recovery.”

Sen. John Ensign is under a criminal investigation because he is believed to have bribed the husband of the woman he was having an affair with by getting him a good job with a lobbying group and giving that firm preferential access to his office. Is Fox giving him the full Lewinsky? Of course not, he’s a Republican. But I’ll bet you know who Kevin Jennings is, since he works for Obama, though most of what you know about him is false because Fox doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good smear.

No wonder self-identified Fox News viewers scored near the bottom in a Pew Research Center survey of how much people knew about current events. (The O’Reilly Factor actually made the top four, a bit of an outlier for the whole network, but then O’Reilly occasionally play-acts the part of an independent and actually hosts the occasional liberal guest who is capable of facing him down. Nevertheless, Daily Show/Colbert viewers tied with newspaper websites for best-informed viewers, well ahead of any of the cable news networks.)

So the idea that Anita Dunn hasn’t been watching this 13-year history, hasn’t been watching the unrelenting Fox hostility to every Democratic presidential candidate ever to declare since 1996, hasn’t noticed the preponderance of criticism to her boss reaching back to Super Tuesday 2008 (about the time it began to look like he might be nominated), is just too ridiculous to countenance. That actual professional journalists in the employ of Time, Washington Post, U.S. News/World Report, New York magazine, Mediaite.com and a number of other not-insane sources could credibly argue that the Obama administration should NOT be treating Fox News as a political adversary rather than as a news source shows that they’ve been out of school too long. How could so-called news people not notice that there is no criticism of Obama too unhinged to be promoted by Fox News?

When Dunn says the Obama administration plans to engage Fox as an entrenched adversary rather than a news organization, it’s no different than a military field commander noting that the ragtag band of rebels he was sent to contain was actually a well-financed military regiment taking orders from a foreign government — and adjusting his tactics accordingly.

I will admit my initial reaction to Barack Obama becoming the latest Nobel peace laureate was in the neighborhood of “WTF?” The more vitriolic reaction is widely available across the servile right-wing media and blogs, so I won’t bother you with it. Instead, I will point you to Glenn Greenwald , whose skepticism is the best possible summary of liberal misgivings regarding the award. While you’re at Salon, however, read Joan Walsh’s defense of the award, paying particular attention to the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize has, in the past, been awarded to people whose efforts had yet to bear fruit. Aung San Suu Kyi, for example, remains under Burmese house arrest 18 years after receiving the award, no closer to her objective. Walsh adds several other examples.

Also note that the popular talking point about the deadline for nominations being Feb. 1 meaning that Nobel’s committee judged Obama on 11 days in office is completely, idiotically, false. The proclamation specifically refers to events, like the redirection of American foreign policy, that took place after Feb. 1. Ezra Klein makes good points about this redirection of emphasis to the multilateral approach, as well as Obama’s built-in advantages in this regard.

As for me, well, my basic stance is to side with those who think the award says more about the Nobel Committee than it does about Obama. But the awards ceremony gives him another chance to address the entire international community, and those speeches have not only been personal milestones for him but they also serve as an excellent advertisement for the best of what America stands for in the world.

So let America’s right wing side with the Taliban and Hamas against American interests. (In fairness, at least one Hamas guy praised the prize. Also note in that link the futile attempts of reasonable conservatives to head off the unhinged reactions to the prize.) In the grand tradition of fake wingnut outrages that are factually insupportable but are constantly repeated because the wingers think they’re pissing off liberals, I support anything that leaves the wingnutosphere seething and spewing impotent and pointless rage. UPDATE: Keeping in mind the core principle of wingnut dogma that Obama is a self-obsessed spotlight chaser, note that the White House website, one day after the award, carries nothing about it on its front page. FURTHER UPDATE: By far the stupidest op-ed on this topic was carried today (10/16) by the Washington Post: “An Unconstitutional Nobel” by Ronald D. Rotunda and J. Peter Pham. Yes, it’s unconstitutional for a sitting president to receive the Nobel Prize, say these two giants of wingnuttery, ignoring the two previous presidents who accepted one and a third who was awarded his after leaving office. Lest you mistake this for reasonable debate, Rotunda is a denizen of what passes for conservative intellectual circles these days — George Mason University, the Cato Institutute and Chapman University School of Law. The latter institution was compared by one of the op-ed’s online commenters to DeVry Technical School — probably because conservative radio talker Hugh Hewitt is a professor of constitutional law there and John Yoo, the Bush administration’s justifier of torture, is a visiting scholar. Rotunda is also a climate change denier, as depicted at ExxonSecrets.org. And Pham is a co-author of such articles as “Give War a Chance,” which basically vouchsafes the notion that the U.S. is and must always be at war with the Scary Brown People™ lest we vanish from the face of the earth. One would assume from his curriculum vitae that his interest in a prize for peace would be somewhat beneath his interest in, say, the footie scores in the back of the Daily Mail. Their complaint — that Obama is somehow accepting an “emolument” from a “foreign power” — somehow manages to overlook the fact that Obama is giving the cash portion of the prize to charity. Boneheads, but what do you expect when somebody wet-dreams the topic first and then slaps together copy to support it. I guess I should call up George Mason and demand my full professorship simply on the basis of being better able to conduct research on a topic that’s less than a week old than one of its sitting scholars.

Does anybody remember this? Soccer mom Meleanie Hain was briefly a wingnut cause celebre last September when she started carrying a pistol to her daughter’s soccer matches. The county sheriff in her central Pennsylvania community lifted her concealed-carry permit in the wake of the publicity, but a county judge overruled him and returned her permit.

In a question-and-answer session with The Patriot-News about the case, Hain said she carried a gun because she never knew when she might need it.

Her move was controversial, of course. People taking their kids to play in soccer leagues in what are supposed to be safe suburban enclaves are not thinking that they might need to grab their piece at any moment. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be taking their kids to play soccer. The whole idea of the retreat to the suburbs is in pursuit of elbow room, homogenous surroundings, “better” schools and, not necessarily in this order, safety — the kind that is achieved by not living in the big bad city, or what Atrios likes to call an “urban hellhole.” That’s his satirical reference to his South Philly neighborhood.

Naturally, the Second Amendment crowd was on this like flies to sherbet. Hain was a modern pioneer, a constitutional hero, and all the other compliments wingers like to pay to people who think their right to own and wield a surrogate penis supersedes their responsibility to act with common sense. And carrying a pistol to a child soccer game (Hain’s daughter, the family soccer player, is 5; the link takes you to a story where they’re pictured together, Mom lovingly displaying her Glock on her hip) falls way short of common sense, never mind common courtesy.

Ah, but this happened last year, Sal; your news reflexes getting a little rusty? Why no, actually, there was a development in this story yesterday.

Gun-carrying soccer mom Meleanie Hain, who died with her husband in an apparent murder-suicide, had been separated from her husband and was considering filing a protection-from-abuse order against him, her lawyer said today….

Some neighbors told the Lebanon Daily News they heard or saw the children — a 10-year-old boy and girls ages 2 and 6 — running from the house and screaming “Daddy shot Mommy!” shortly before the 911 emergency center was alerted at 6:20 p.m.

This is a flat-out tragedy. But it’s also a preventable tragedy, which is the real point of me picking this story to feature. The gun fetishists who are out to repeal every sensible instance of gun control (legalizing the packing of heat in taverns? Say hi, Arizona!) fetishized this woman and made her a minor celebrity despite — or more likely because of — a shaky grasp of the concepts behind self-defense and lack of knowledge about gun safety:

A gun in the home increases the risk of homicide of a household member by 3 times and the risk of suicide by 5 times compared to homes where no gun is present.

While handguns account for only one-third of all firearms owned in the United States, they account for more than two-thirds of all firearm-related deaths each year.

A gun in the home is 4 times more likely to be involved in an unintentional shooting, 7 times more likely to be used to commit a criminal assault or homicide, and 11 times more likely to be used to attempt or commit suicide than to be used in self-defense.

There’s more, particularly in regard to what happens when the children you’re supposedly protecting with firearms get their hands on them, but I believe my point is made.

This tragic story also underlines the irresponsibility of right-wing house organs who simply grab onto any factoid that promises to validate their worldview like some shiny object and trumpet it to the skies (Obama is indoctrinating our children into socialist ideas, anybody?) without giving it the slightest bit of analysis. When I heard about Hain for the first time last year, I immediately thought, “Just what in the HELL does this woman think she has to defend herself against?” Folks, when I see a common-as-clay soccer mom packing heat, I wonder what her home life must be like.

Yeah, click that last link. Domestic violence remains a scourge, and a combination of lax gun laws and a societal presumption that unlimited gun ownership is a birthright leads us to the parade of casualties recorded in the statistics I have provided here this evening.

I doubt this tragedy will ripple across the wingnutosphere the way the original story of “plucky soccer mom packs a Glock” did, because the predictable damage gives the lie to their cherished notions about Americans as armed cowboys administering rough “justice” to unnamed “evildoers.” The old bumpersticker line, “An armed society is a polite society,” is bullshit, for all the reasons I’ve listed in this post. An armed society is Baghdad, or Roaring 20s Chicago, or Compton, Calif., in the late 80s. Meleanie Hain was not Dale Evans — she was a woman who was acting out in service of her individuality, and if I could play armchair psychologist for a moment, I’d bet she was concealing what turned out to be a deadly secret even then. (At this writing, police aren’t saying which of the two was the shooter.) She needed sympathy, but it was for something other than being a Second Amendment champion. Now it’s her orphaned children that really need that sympathy.

UPDATE:  Police now reveal Mr. Hain shot Mrs. Hain while she was on a video chat with a friend. The friend got to witness the entire thing, which was not captured to a file and therefore will not turn up on Smoking Gun or YouTube. For posterity, I will note that while a county judge restored her concealed-carry permit, he also said this:

The judge who restored Meleanie Hain’s concealed-weapon permit last year questioned her judgment and said she had “scared the devil” out of other parents at the soccer field.

As did most sensible people, Your Honor.

What a great day in history. The Senate Finance Committee voted down two public option amendments to its version of the health care bill today. While Republicans’ wall-to-wall opposition was a factor, they’re as useless as tits on a bull in the Senate anyway, so let’s unload both barrels on the Democrats who can’t see the following:

1. An effective health care bill is a long-term political winner for the Democratic party. There may be some short-term pain, as most of the proposed changes have been put off until 2013, the start of the second Obama term for those who are counting. But when you consider that Medicare is one of the most popular government programs, it’s just ridiculous to assume that extending this program to everyone will somehow turn the skies brown and the waters black. Or that the health insurance companies have any constituency among voters — even the teabaggers get sick and have to battle against coverage-denied decisions.
2. No, the health insurers’ real constituency is among the congressmen and senators who are drawing up this plan. Indeed, the Senate Finance Committee bill created by Sen. Max Baucus and his now-discredited “Gang of Six” was essentially written by insurance company lobbyists. And as Think Progress noted, 47 of the amendments offered to the Baucus bill were right off the insurers’ shopping list as well, including one senator’s attempt to give insurance lobbyists an extra 72 hours to read any bill before it gets voted on. The fact that actual Americans want reform — and that with the teabagger eruptions behind us, public opinion is swinging back toward reform — is effectively irrelevant.
3. Of course, the squishier Democrats on the Finance Committee will swear on a stack of Bibles that they want reform, they just don’t think the public option is a big deal. Well, they’re wrong. It is a big deal. As I’ve pointed out before, there is no effective competition among private insurance plans in the country. Most regional markets are dominated by one or two firms. And  the business plans of all private insurance firms consists entirely of collecting as much in premiums as possible while paying out as little as possible in benefits. The second half of that equation leads to stunning injustices, from recission — essentially booting claimants off the roster when they get something really bad — to simply denying coverage to people even when their illnesses are explicitly covered in their policies. Between the skyrocketing prices of uncovered care and the ever-rising co-pays even for those with supposedly good policies, it’s not infrequent that something like this happens. Or this. (I made sure to show you the story about the Ohio girl because of who her congressman is.)
4. Another major point in favor of the public option is that, assuming the final bill doesn’t cripple it too badly, its very existence will serve to enforce the reforms that our health insurance system so badly needs. Private insurance companies don’t actually care about the public option as a competitor — they care about the fact that a properly implemented public option will demolish their existing business plans. It won’t deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. It won’t cherry-pick the young and healthy and reject the upper-middle-aged folks who tend to need more care. It won’t spend any of its time scheming to dodge paying sick people’s medical bills. And it certainly won’t commit the sin of recission.
5. However, there’s a flip side to all of these arguments. A weak or badly implemented public option would actually benefit private insurers in a number of ways. A public option, by pulling in all the folks who currently can’t get private health insurance, would actually make it easier for private insurers to cherry-pick healthier customers, the kind of folks who pay insurance premiums and don’t spend much time at the doctor’s office. There are two other wrinkles here as well. One is the coverage mandate, in which everybody has to carry a health plan or pay a penalty on their IRS returns. Health reform is intended to drive 46 million uninsured Americans into covered status, and the private insurers expect to get as many of them as possible — or at least the ones without pre-existing conditions. Because a lot of folks are running without health insurance because they can’t afford it, reform is expected to expand Medicaid and also pay outright subsidies to Americans to make sure they can afford coverage. Which brings us to the other wrinkle: Both of those developments serve as an indirect subsidy to private insurance companies worth multi-billions of dollars a year.
6. And without a strong public option, there’s nothing to prevent private health insurers from continuing the 8 percent a year policy rate increases, the variable pricing that is used to “encourage” high-cost customers to drop their policies, or for that matter simply canceling their policies. The insurance companies want a weak public option that they can essentially use as a dumping ground for their “untouchables.” A strong public option, by contrast, can enforce the elements of reform by example — and if all else fails, by offering a no-recission, no-preexisting-conditions, no-lifetime-limit, no-capricious-denial-of-coverage plan that private insurance customers can migrate to if their private plans don’t change their ways. A weak public option — or worse, none at all — will be nothing but a rerun of the bank bailout, with health insurers the big winners and Americans the losers.
7. And under that worst-case scenario, Democrats may just blow their leadership positions in Congress and the White House. The only thing worse than a protracted policy battle is one in which the change ends up being for the worst. The CBO has now scored the public option and found it saves money, torpedoing the arguments of conservative Democrats and Republicans that it would be more costly. Indeed, conservative Dems have agitated for additions to the reform bill that would actually raise its cost, so any Blue Dog arguments about not blowing up the deficit are just horseshit.
8. So, to sum up: Conservative arguments are for naught. The Republicans are simply playing dog-in-the-manger because they don’t want reform under any circumstances. And Blue Dog/conservative Democratic arguments have been incoherent at best and touched by health insurance company money at worst. (Not that Republicans aren’t also motivated by that same source of ready cash.) Health care costs are out of control and threaten to bankrupt us by making it impossible to fund Medicare and Medicaid. Those costs get passed to employers, who are the main source of health insurance for Americans, and those rising costs are preempting salary increases. Extracting the unnecessary administrative costs from the system and limiting the costs of excessive profit are absolutely necessary moves. Every other Western democracy delivers health care to its citizens for half or even less of what we spend per person. It’s time to get on the bus with the sensible countries.

Heard you missed me, well, I’m back. For the relative handful of you who know anything about me, my recent lack of posts is directly related to a positive development for a change — I’m now among the employed once again, now toiling anonymously in the deepest bowels of a great blue state bureaucracy. Funny thing about that — life among the apparatchiks isn’t a hell of a lot different than worklife at any private enterprise job site I’ve experienced, certainly no different than life at any large private sector employer. In short, Dilbert rules.

Being otherwise occupied with learning manuals full of arcane workplace and job-performance rules and regulations has kept me from sounding off on the latest infoporn that has set the right wing on an endless jag of self-gratification — the ACORN “sting.” So I’ll have to outsource you to Glenn Greenwald on that one, since he said everything I was planning to say and more. I’ll wait for you to come back. Joe Conason has more at Salon.

Now then. Think hard. When have you ever seen the wingnuts wank over the daily abuses of any large corporation? The teabaggers rail against handouts to Wall Street, but they never get specific. No CEO ever gets his dirty laundry aired by Beck, Hannity or Limbaugh. And they certainly aren’t going to lock onto the bad behavior of large health insurance companies — the canceling of policies just as the policy holder actually gets a serious disease, the refusal of effective treatments because they cost more than fermented fruit poultices and leeches, the constantly escalating premiums and co-pays that have run triple the rate of inflation for more than a decade straight — because that would put them on the same side as the evil liberals.

Nor did you see any of the wingnuts launching tirades against Bob Nardelli or Rick Wagoner for making Chrysler and GM wards of the government. Nor did they go after John Snow, CEO of Cerberus Capital Management, which bought Chrysler from Daimler thinking they were going to pick it of its assets and flip it only to discover the firm was a money pit. Shouldn’t Snow be the subject of a Glenn Beck wanted poster for taking taxpayer money for Chrysler rather than spending its own considerable assets on the company? (Hint: Snow was treasury secretary in the just-past Bush administration.)

No, Obama was the monster for saving three million jobs. Corporate malefactors are just helpless stooges in thrall of the black witch doctor president’s evil eye. That’s why we pay CEOs 550 times the salary of a line worker — for their malleability and low resistance to outside influence. Glenn Greenwald gets more deeply into the cracked psychology of wingnut populists railing against poor people and organizations of limited influence — people with whom the wingnuts have far more common cause than they do corporations and CEOs.

There is one example of a right-wing media figure going after a major corporation — Bill O’Reilly, who regularly calls out General Electric. Of course, the reason for that has nothing to do with its real sins; the reason is that GE owns NBC, which owns MSNBC, which employs his hated enemy Keith Olbermann. And attacking GE is his passive-aggressive way of tweaking Olbermann without mentioning his name. Unless a wingnut has skin in the game, he’ll never say boo to a corporate crook.

Given all this, what does it say that a Democratically controlled Congress voted to strip ACORN of permission to receive federal funds based on nothing but a wingnut fantasia and the shrieking of Fox News? Only the usual; that congressional Democrats are either badly informed or just pussies. Nancy Pelosi should have never allowed this out of committee. In the shadow of the 9/12 teabaggery about runaway deficits, they rushed to pass a law cutting off funding to an organization that aids poor people, mainly with private money. Total amount of money ACORN has gotten from taxpayers in 15 years? $53 million. With an m. Not a t. Not a b. Three and a half million bucks a year. Republican House Leader John Boehner spends more than that on tanning booths.

Meanwhile, Republicans closely allied with the teabaggers are trying to get the F-22 fighter plane funded — a plane that in two decades has never flown a combat mission, and one that the defense secretary,  a Republican who worked for Bush and now for Obama, has said is completely unnecessary. Even John McCain agrees. But Obama had to threaten a veto to get $386 million for 12 more of these unnecessary planes out of the budget. Where’s the teabagger outrage over this attempt to waste taxpayer money? Directed at ACORN, of course.

Harold Meyerson says this is a crap Labor Day for actual laborers in today’s Washington Post, and he’s right, go read the whole thing.

He hits upon one issue that I don’t think is getting nearly enough recognition — the eroding position of older workers and new retirees. Once upon a time, older Americans worked until they couldn’t pick up a shovel anymore, then they fell back on whatever savings they might have had or the largesse of their children, such as it might have been. Those without children were shit out of luck unless some non-profit old folks home was willing to take them in.

Then along came Social Security, providing some subsistence income to those older folks and in some cases actually encouraging people to retire and open up jobs to younger workers. (Yes folks, Social Security isn’t just a pension and disability program, it’s also a jobs program.) As the economy bounced back from the depths of the 1930s to the heights of the 1950s and early 60s, the rate of elderly people in poverty went from twice that of working-age people to half their rate. At the same time, more and more older workers not only retired, but began retiring early. This was due not only to Social Security but to the defined-benefit pensions that were a feature of most jobs above that of discount store associate.

But in recent years, defined-benefit pensions began to give way to 401k’s, which are basically IRAs into which employers contribute — as long as workers sign up for them and kick in money of their own. Unlike defined-benefit pensions, which pay you from retirement to the grave, the 401k pays only until you exhaust it. The 401k used to be a bonus perk. In my last job I had a defined-benefit pension and a 401k, which used to be the custom. Then my company was bought out by a larger one and it eliminated the defined-benefit pension entirely and cut its contributions to the 401k. And at the height of the stock market crash, the company cut its already token 401k contributions in half yet again. That’s the current trend, by the way; a not-insignificant number of folks are having their employers’ 401k contributions cut or even eliminated entirely.

This bodes ill for a majority of workers’ futures, and I’m not even addressing the companies that went bankrupt and spent their workers’ 401k’s on golden parachutes for the insiders. (There are laws requiring the maintenance of pensions even by companies filing Chapter 7 liquidation plans, but 401k’s aren’t pensions.) But when you look at losses recorded in the 401k statements of the last quarter of ‘08 and the first quarter of ‘09, you would not be surprised to discover, as Meyerson did in his column, that a third of Americans in the second half of their 60s are staying on the job, compared to 4 percent of the denizens of that socialist hellhole called France.

But you can see the trend here. Post-65 workers staying on the job cuts down on the opportunities for younger workers and exacerbates high unemployment numbers. They’re staying on the job because even with Social Security and whatever savings and partial pensions they have, they don’t think they can maintain their lifestyles even after economizing. There are going to be a lot more Baby Boomers depending on Social Security for the vast majority of their support, which means that the number of folks retiring at 62 is going to drop sharply and a lot of folks are going to blow past 65 (soon to be 66) on to 70 in order to maximize that benefit.

The only thing mitigating that situation will be the continuing job loss trend in which more post-55 workers are put on the street involuntarily, and those 62 and older will be forced to apply for SS benefits when they can’t find a job in the current economy. But for the under-65 group, that doesn’t help them with health insurance. They can pay the subsidized COBRA rate for 18 months, but after that they go naked unless they can afford one of those individual AARP policies or are bad off enough to go on Medicaid. (Yet another reason for universal health care.)

Does this sound like a demographic that is going to be available to help jump-start the consumer economy? Not to me either. Keep in mind that the crappy economy is hammering state budgets, and the state level is where a lot of retiree benefits, from cut-rate mass transit tickets to prescription drug subsidies, get funded. Those benefits could be severely proscribed or eliminated if the economy doesn’t bounce back and people don’t start getting called back to work.

Given this situation, we’re looking at a continuing decline in the living standards of retirees even after the economy bounces back, whenever that may be. And given the power of the elderly vote, government is going to be called upon to do something about that. So when you hear your brand-name Beltway centrists bloviating about “doing something about Social Security and Medicare,” feel free to laugh out loud — these folks have no idea of the shitstorm that’s about to descend upon us even after the economy recovers.

Oh, lest anybody accuse me of overlooking anything, I’d like to point out one more thing that’s going to exacerbate this trend I just described. Something like 25 percent of current workers who are eligible for a 401k haven’t even signed up for them. Which means they’ve essentially given back to their employer whatever amount of money might have been contributed to their retirement otherwise. That is just rank individual cluelessness, of course. Nevertheless, I’ll bet some of you reading this might fall into this category — or at least know someone who does. Consider this a warning to rectify this situation at the earliest possible opportunity. Those of you who have changed jobs without checking on your pension/401k status — go track down those employers and find out where your money went, and get it back. (You may have to open an IRA somewhere when you do this to avoid having to pay back taxes on the money.) Unless you’re looking forward to supplementing your retirement diet with cat food.

Say, remember all that right-wing bloviating about the horrors of Canadian health care? How it sucks so bad that all the roads from Canada to the U.S. are clogged with sick Canadians desperate to see real doctors like we have in the U.S., even though they have to pay extra here?

Funny story about that at USA Today. Seems Americans in the Southwest aren’t just leaving the country to get better care in Mexico — they’re moving there permanently. By setting up a Mexican domicile, they qualify for the health plan run by Mexican Social Security. Premium: $250 a year. That’s no typo.

Yes, the facilities aren’t perfectly analogous to those here. The nursing is crappy — if you’re going into the hospital for a procedure, you might be asked to have a family member accompany you to perform bedpan and bath duties. Nevertheless, the USA Today reporter found folks were satisfied with what they got — particularly when the alternative for one couple profiled was no health care coverage at all until one of them qualified for Medicare.

I looked in vain for comment on this from the bloviators who thought Canadians coming to the U.S. for heath care meant the Canadian system sucked. Shouldn’t this demonstrated trend that Americans are going over the border to get health care they couldn’t get at home prove that the U.S. system sucks? Guess we’ll never know.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of Canadians who do come here for procedures are simply jumping the line in their home country for non-essential treatments. Given our price lists here, it goes without saying these are the more affluent among Canadian society. The Shona Holmes story — a Canadian woman who claimed she had to come to the Mayo Clinic and pay $97,000 for removal of a brain tumor — was partly false, hyped up by the astroturf group Americans For Prosperity Foundation. Essentially, Holmes jumped the line for surgery on a Rathke’s cleft cyst — a non-cancerous and non-life threatening condition. As Arnold Schwarzenegger said in “Kindergarten Cop,” it wasn’t a tumor. Had it actually been a brain tumor, Canada would have treated her with dispatch.

There is a non-trivial number of Canadians who come to the U.S. for health care because there’s no room for them in Canadian hospitals. What the opponents of reform fail to tell you is that they are sent here by Canadian Medicare, which pays for their procedures. The opponents of reform want you to believe that these people have been abandoned by their bureaucratic socialist government, when nothing of the kind is true. The hoards of people in border states who sneak into Canada for care, on the other hand, really are abandoned by the half-assed U.S. system. As are those who are giving up their safe American homes for Mexican domiciles simply because our health-care system treats them like cranky customers rather than as patients.

Couldn’t let this next story go by without a comment. Jack Bauer believes in universal health care.

Well, Kiefer Sutherland does anyway, and on this he’s joined by an association of Canadian churches. You will also note in the story that Kiefer comes by his views naturally — he’s the grandson of Tommy Douglas, the Baptist minister who brought Medicare For All to Canada. For his efforts, Douglas was declared by popular vote of Canadians in a 2004 Canadian Broadcasting Company poll to be “History’s Greatest Canadian.”  Note the top 10 list in that poll — Douglas, who never served as the country’s prime minister, outranked three former prime ministers including John Macdonald, Canada’s George Washington.

But back to Kiefer, or should we say Jack Bauer. When you consider the numerous ways that his hit show “24″ has been used to support neoconservative fever dreams — good grief, the Heritage Foundation approvingly used it as a hook for a seminar, complete with boner pill advocate Rush Limbaugh as moderator — it’s absolutely a hoot that Kiefer would stick a thumb in the right wing’s eye by coming out for the signature initiative of a liberal president. And since the right wing appears to be incapable of distinguishing between fact and fantasy, either regarding the issues raised in “24″ or those regarding our defective health care system, it seems to me they should be falling in line behind Jack Bauer’s opinion about the need for universal health care in the United States. (Yeah, I should live so long.)

By the way, if you read deeper into that Washington Post blog post I linked to at the top of this post, you discover there’s a spread of religious opinion as to the need for health care reform. The National Council of Churches just released a letter Aug. 14 in support of the idea. The National Association of Evangelicals is concerned about too much government influence in the health care sector — another bit of irony, as a fair sampling of evangelical Christians have tried to get the government to promote Christianity in law over other religions. And the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops used to be in favor of health care reform, but now they’re worried that health care policies will cover abortion and euthanasia and enable stem cell research. (The evangelicals’ group shares that concern as well.)

They’re all entitled to their opinions, but the specific objections of the bishops and the evangelicals tend to demonstrate why there’s a growing drift away from organized religion even in this, the most religiously observant country among the Western democracies. Decades of polls show that Catholics do not follow their church’s teaching on birth control and abortion, and recent polls show they don’t agree with a blanket proscription against stem cell research. The evangelicals, as well, host multitudes of opinions on all sorts of public issues — they’re not the doctrinal monolith they are painted as by the media.

On the topic of reforming the U.S. health care system, all supposed Christian organizations should be operating on the Christ-like premise that “whatsoever you do for the least of my children, you do for me,” which includes “rendering unto Caesar” the additional taxes that might be needed to bring about real reform. Once the benefits of timely and effective health care are made available to the 47 million without it and the 75 million or so more people who are underinsured — more than 60 percent of personal bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, and 75 percent of those bankrupted by sickness had health insurance — then they can quibble over abortion, euthanasia, stem cells and socialism.

Now that Ted Kennedy has been laid to rest, the jostling for position begins. Here’s what I think of the two major issues:

1. Right before he died, Kennedy wrote a letter asking Massachusetts state government to change the law so that the governor could appoint an interim senator until a special election could be held (Jan. 19, as it now turns out). The senator didn’t want his seat to remain cold for four months with health insurance reform on the agenda. Word is now that they’ll consider the idea sometime next week.

Critics call this a partisan move, and they’re absolutely right. Because four years ago the Mass. legislature changed the law to prevent the governor from having that very same appointment power should John Kerry’s seat open up after the 2004 presidential election. You’ll recall the governor at that time was Republican Mitt Romney, who would have certainly turned that seat over to a fellow party member. State residents were more likely to give the seat to another Democrat, so they rewrote the law accordingly.

As it happens, the change as proposed now is the best way to proceed. There’s no reason to leave a seat empty for months on end — maybe a year or more in the event of a close election, see Franken-Coleman — so the best option is an interim appointment followed by a timely special election. The worst option, of course, is to change the law every time the party of the governor changes. Perhaps once they change the law back they can also make it a constitutional amendment so that this sort of maneuvering is discouraged.

2. Victoria Reggie Kennedy apparently has better sense than Orrin Hatch, who has called for her to be appointed senator in her late husband’s stead. She apparently plans to demur if asked, if George Stephanopoulos is to be believed. Maybe we should give her Hatch’s seat. Meanwhile, I’m not particularly interested in former congressman Joe Kennedy II, son of Bobby, getting the interim appointment either, assuming the law is changed to allow it. I wouldn’t mind if he ran in the special election, but I’m absolutely bone tired of this world thinking that legacy appointments are appropriate or desirable. See Glenn Greenwald for a far better expression of outrage. I might have been able to match him had I mounted an original argument, but on this topic I defer to Elvis Costello: “I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.”

And yes, I note that Teddy himself was a legacy appointment. I’d say that after 47 years he retroactively earned the presumptive faith that was granted him in this instance, but that’s the trouble with legacy appointments — the justifications beyond clannishness take years to develop, and thus don’t often occur.

There’s nothing substantive I can add to the lengthy list of tributes to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy today, and since you can read all of them you want at every news site out there, I won’t bother linking to them. Two things:

1. Kennedy is a perfect example of the fact that even the best among us have feet of clay. People in general tend to deify the recently deceased, except for those who don’t like him or her, and then they go spelunking through the public record looking for anything embarrassing they can use against that person. So yeah, Chappaquiddick, drinking, womanizing, and don’t forget he cheated on a Spanish test once at Harvard. But his history as a hard-working senator who genuinely tried to make the lives of ordinary people better through legislation, and did so by converting his conservative opponents to his viewpoint, pretty much outweighs all of that. Kennedy had no reason to be a champion of the working class, given his silver-spoon upbringing and his never having to wonder where his next paycheck was coming from. But he was. He recognized that it was his life and background that was the outlier in American life, and that his good fortune was built on the backs of millions of only moderate, or lesser, means. Some folks regarded him as a class traitor for these very reasons, he knew it, and he didn’t give a shit — he knew what was right and what was wrong, and he recognized that he had done a lot of things in his life that were wrong. And he moved forward from there to find his way back to the right side of the street.

2. One of Ted’s signature causes throughout his career was universal health care. He introduced a bill on that topic in 1969 and pressed forward incrementally on that front at every opportunity. A smart person, let’s say an Ivy League-educated president who got his current job in part because of Ted’s endorsement in the primaries, would grab onto Ted’s HELP committee version of health care reform, demand it be renamed the Sen. Edward M. Kennedy Memorial Bill For Universal Health Insurance Coverage In America, and ramrod it through both houses of Congress. Of course, it would be co-sponsored by such notorious bipartisan fakers as Sen. Charles Grassley and Ted’s good friend Sen. Orrin Hatch, and with such support it should fly through Congress on a voice vote. Does this sound opportunistic? Sorry, politics throughout history has been influenced by emotion. The immediate metaphor is when Lyndon Johnson pushed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts through Congress using the memory of our dear departed president and Ted’s brother John F. Kennedy. And I shouldn’t have to remind anybody that civil rights for black Americans was just as controversial in 1964 as health care reform is today — and that one side depended upon fear, prejudice, dishonesty and general resistance to change in 1964 just as one side is doing now.

There’s a lot of debate over whether Cash For Clunkers was a success, but it’s pretty clear that, given a free chunk of money to put toward a new car, folks are going to come out of the woodwork and claim it. So sales were goosed, some clunkers were taken off the road and replaced with more efficient rides, and those of us not too spooked by trashed 401k’s and 10 percent unemployment to take on a five- or six-year loan are riding high in the neighborhood.

Complaints? A few, starting with the folks who think this was a waste of money adding to our towering deficit. But these are the same folks who think a five-year federal spending freeze was a really cool idea in the midst of a deep recession, so we can ignore them. Then there are the folks, like me, who have always bought sensible and economical vehicles, so our clunkers didn’t qualify us for $4,500 in mad money. One such complainer was my wife, and though I can’t say I blame her, well, we’re not in the market for a new car anytime soon anyway. And then there were those who felt that the program was too liberal — that only serious fuel-savers should have been eligible for the discounts. As it was, folks who had old beat-up full-sized pickups and SUVs could get money just for buying slightly more economical versions of what they already had. So I would have ruled out any full-sized pickup and any truck-based SUV like Explorer, Tahoe and so on.

Dealers were complaining that the cash hasn’t been flowing quickly enough from the feds to the dealers, prompting some to drop out early and parent companies to tap their reserves to loan dealers money to cover them until the fed cash arrives. The other complaint is that the program, as it required trade-ins to be rendered undriveable in advance of their visit to the crusher. Car buffs were afraid — and were proven right in some instances — that interesting future classics would be destroyed. The folks at Jalopnik and Autoblog documented such potential aesthetic losses as a Maserati Biturbo and GMC’s Syclone and Typhoon performance trucks meeting the end of their roads. That is regrettable — but the fact that they couldn’t find anybody to pony up the $3,500 or $4,500 in exchange for these future classics is itself at least a partial answer to that complaint.

Balancing the aesthetic losses were the gains in getting such guzzlers as the Ford Explorer — the no. 1 trade-in under the clunker program — off the road a lot sooner. There’s certainly no shortage of those on the roads and won’t be for many years. Most news accounts say that the Ford Focus and Toyota Corolla were the most-bought vehicles under the program, but uber-auto-site Edwards.com looked more closely at the numbers and discovered that the most popular purchase was actually the Ford Escape, the car-based compact SUV available with a 4 or V6 as well as a hybrid version. This is because the feds counted versions of vehicles, and the cars were counted as single versions while the combinations of engine and front-drive versus all-wheel drive for the Escape added up to six varieties.

The combination of the Explorer and Escape as counterparts in this politico-commercial dance rang a bell in the old brain pan, so I did a little research. Back when the Explorer first hit the streets as an early 1991 model, it replaced the Bronco II, which was considered a compact SUV. The Explorer was a little larger in the 2-door model and a good bit larger as a 4-door. And the current model, 4-door only, is about 6 inches longer than the original 4-door. Today we consider the Explorer and its competitors, like the Trailblazer, 4Runner and Pathfinder, mid-sized SUVs, surpassed in size only by the Expedition and Tahoe. In 2000 the Escape arrived to take over the compact segment for Ford, with strong competition from Toyota’s RAV4 and Honda’s CR-V. So check this out:

Notice that the Escape and 2-door Explorer are nearly identical in dimensions. The Escape has historically had better gas mileage because the Explorer was in its early years offered only with a V6, and eventually a V8 as well, while the Escape had the choice of a 4 or a smaller, more efficient V6 than the Explorer’s.

This sort of mission creep is pretty common in the car industry. The original 1973 Honda Civic was a few inches shorter than today’s Mini Cooper, the second-smallest car offered in the US after the Smart fortwo. The introduction of sedan and wagon variants pushed its size up, but by 1992 the Civic was the same size the Accord was when it was first introduced. The Accord, meanwhile, pole-vaulted from compact to midsize over a similar span of time. Toyota has demonstrated little fondness for nameplates over history, with the exception of the Corolla and Camry, so in its evolution it has continued to offfer subcompacts and compacts while adding midsize and large cars and trucks to its mix.

Essentially, car companies have a tendency to migrate popular small cars upmarket, which gets them more customers at higher profit points but also leads to them becoming less efficient. Then they replace those cars with new models with new names — the Honda Fit, for example, is about the size the Civic was in 1992. New names, however, come without the brand equity, so when small cars like the Festiva, Aspire, LeMans, Sephia, Excel and many others strike out in the marketplace, we hear the usual excuse that Americans “don’t like” small cars.

Well, there are a lot of big cars and trucks Americans have proven to “not like” over time as well. Do a search of any of those small car names in the last paragraph and you’ll discover that people who still remember them giggle about them, except for a few true believers who have made project cars out of them. Anybody remember the LTD, Caprice, Electra, Newport, so on and so forth? Big cars that hardly anybody noticed when they ceased production.

People want good cars that make them feel good. Mini Coopers remain popular even at a premium price. Plenty of people buy Corollas, Civics, Focuses (Focii?). The Mazda 3 is so well liked that folks consider it in preference to VWs and even the BMW 3-series. Good cars are what will bring GM and Chrysler back from the brink, put Ford back in the black, and start making a dent in this 10 percent unemployment rate. For some time now, the best cars have been judged not just on styling and creature comforts but also efficiency — better mileage and lower emissions. Even the new Camaro brags of its 29 mpg highway rating for its base V6, though taking all of its 304 hp out for an exercise run will push that number down a good bit. Nevertheless, the best mass-market cars are going to be higher-mileage models from now on, and it’s time to stop fretting about whether cars are “too little” to survive wrecks — folks, when the roads are as clogged with 18-wheelers as they are now, even a Chevy Suburban is “too little.” So grow the hell up and buy only as much car as you really need.

With the end of the congressional recess coming closer, the health reform debate is getting louder and more frantic. I’ve condemned the fear-mongers, the teabaggers and Republican leaders and pundits for trying to preempt the debate by shouting down the proposal and setting loose a series of whackdoodle lies about the various bills under consideration (see the latest smackdown of congenital health reform liar Betsy McCaughey by Jon Stewart), but I’ve also criticized the useless “Blue Dog” Democrats for adopting some of the worst Republican talking points about health insurance reform. Their recalcitrance, usually billed as principled concern about spiraling deficits, is actually nothing of the sort; when asked for input on the legislation, they proposed more funding for rural hospitals, which actually increased the eventual cost of reform.

So who can actually blame the Republicans for making popcorn and firing potshots from the peanut gallery? RNC Chairman Michael Steele has been saying hey, the Democrats have the votes, why don’t they just ramrod it through? Fair question, since that’s what Democrats are also asking. Of course, Steele is operating from a defective premise — that the Democrats somehow know that their vision of a reformed health care system is somehow toxic and that voters will punish them once the deed is done.

Recent polls showing a softening of Obama’s approval numbers and growing opposition to health insurance reform are fueling Republican hopes that they will benefit from torpedoing reform efforts. Unfortunately for them, the numbers aren’t nearly as favorable as some media outlets would have you believe. Obama’s still at 57 percent approval, with 49 percent favorable on how he’s handling health reform efforts. The polls do show some decline in support for aspects of reform, but those questions are based on aspects of reform that haven’t been formalized yet, what with there being four different bills in Congress. So it’s fair to say that the teabaggers and other liars have managed to accent the uncertainty among independents and especially elderly voters.

But the bottom line is that Obama’s struggles, and those of the health insurance reform initiative, have not in any way translated into gains for Republicans. Just 21 percent of Americans say Republicans will make the right decisions for the country’s future. And when you see how Republican officeholders and pundits are conducting themselves in this debate, it’s clear that only the walled-off ecosystem of Fox News viewers and talk radio listeners think that things are going swimmingly.

With some experts, like Charlie Cook and Nate Silver, predicting that Republicans will gain seats in the 2010 election, the conventional wisdom is hardening around the idea that Democrats are in big trouble. While I don’t doubt the formidable number-crunching skills of those two, the fact remains that we’re 15 months out from that election and six months out from the primaries. In other words, the vast majority of voters aren’t even thinking about 2010, and there’s plenty of time yet to pass health care reform. Of course, that’s overlooking the national media’s likely construction of a failure meme that they’ll peddle for every day past Oct. 31 that there’s no health reform bill. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of time for action, and in the meantime the effects of the stimulus will become more pronounced. So there’s just as much chance of the 2010 elections being a wash. Indeed, Republicans might even lose a couple more Senate seats before this is all over, especially if health insurance reform passes. So I’d put 2010 calculations out of my mind when analyzing the path of reform.

As for the will-they or won’t-they of the public option for health insurance, remember that multiple polls show three-quarters of Americans support the public option. Only the recalcitrance of the Senate Finance Committee — along with the rock-solid opposition of the health insurance industries and their apparatchicks among the Republicans and at least some of the Blue Dogs — has made this proposal in any way controversial. As anyone who has looked at the health insurance situation knows, there is no competition in private health insurance. Because of state franchising laws, the dozens of private health insurers don’t actually compete against each other coast-to-coast — instead, particular large insurers monopolize regional markets, which is the opposite of competition. A nationwide public insurance plan, one that does away with pre-existing conditions and recissions (cancellation of policies at the exact moment that a policy holder is diagnosed with an expensive illness), and will also have the low administrative costs of Medicare and the VA (2 percent vs. 20-30 percent for private insurance companies), will change the health insurance marketplace practically overnight. (Although the reform bills on offer postpone their effective date until 2013.) Regional co-ops, the fig leaf of the Senate Finance Committee, will simply be crushed by the current batch of regional monopolists.

There are some who think that simply making it illegal for private insurers to cancel policies for anything other than non-payment or fraud, and doing away with the pre-existing conditions dodge, will be enough. But as anyone who saw the near-dismantlement of the Food and Drug Administration’s enforcement apparatus during the Bush administration knows, regulations without an enforcement mechanism are useless. A public option, with its lower administrative costs, its ability to negotiate fees and drug prices, and its customer-centered mission, will provide a far more effective enforcement vehicle than any government bureaucracy. It’s called real competition. Conservatives whine that a government-built entity would be unfair competition, but I say the current regime, with its built-in monopoly structure, is what’s truly unfair. Don’t ask me — ask Natalie Sarkisyan. Oh, wait, you can’t.

The teabagger outbreak, of course, has spooked a few congressmen, like Sen. Charles Grassley, who thinks this is somehow a sign that the people are on his party’s side, despite the easily available polling information. So even if you’ve got a progressive House member representing you, it would be well worth your time to put in a call or write a letter, rather than an e-mail, a tweet or a blog post, letting him or her know that we need to reform the health insurance industry and that the public option is the middle course between single-payer and doing nothing.

Let’s take a few minutes away from the birther/deather brigade to note this Washington Post story, “Cheney Uncloaks His Frustration With Bush.” Apparently our clinically insane former vice president isn’t satisfied with having been the shadow president for most of the previous administration and he’s going to tell tales out of school about Bush, the man who made his disastrous reign possible.

This is hysterical coming from Mr. Impenetrable,  the guy who wouldn’t even let the federal directory list the names and phone numbers of the people who worked in his office. The guy who railed at folks like Scott McClellan and Paul O’Neill for revealing “secrets” about the wildly non-transparent Bush administration.

“If he goes out and writes a memoir that spills beans about what took place behind closed doors, that would be out of character,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as White House spokesman during Bush’s first term.

Bet your ass it would.

Yet that appears to be precisely Cheney’s intent. Robert Barnett, who negotiated Cheney’s book contract, passed word to potential publishers that the memoir would be packed with news, and Cheney himself has said, without explanation, that “the statute of limitations has expired” on many of his secrets.

“The statute of limitations.” Priceless. The man whose black and white worldview wasted a trillion dollars of American wealth, the lives of 4,000 American soldiers and upwards of a million Iraqis, the majority of whom were not combatants but merely innocent bystanders in a stupid and pointless war, is going to air his dirty laundry under the premise of what is commonly known as a technicality.

Of course, we already know most of his dirty laundry already — that on foreign policy especially he ruled in lieu of Bush, that he deliberately turned Scooter Libby loose on Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, that he thought he could work Bush into giving Libby a presidential pardon even after the judge’s sentencing report stated Libby showed no remorse for his crime, and so on and so on.

What we’re going to get between hardcovers from Cheney is how pissed off he was when Bush refused Libby a pardon, how annoyed he was when Bush realized Cheney had been playing him throughout the first term and began seeking counsel from more non-insane sources, and so on. This will be an endless source of amusement once it hits the light of day. Cheney may think he’s embarked on an epic defense of his misrule, but what’s going to happen is that it’s simply going to remind everybody that Cheney made a serious run at changing “Dr. Strangelove” from fiction to nonfiction.