Buck Naked Politics

Keeping Faith

by Bill Kavanagh: Today, with our spirit beaten down by two long wars, an economic collapse, and a seemingly paralyzed political process; we wait for the President’s speech on Afghanistan. We’ve become restless and fearful now, still waiting, but less hopeful for the big changes we thought would be coming after we threw off the chains of our former right wing leaders. Many of us are out of work; many are underwater in our homes.

Despite the trepidation we feel about the future, there are reasons to hope that yes, we can, in fact, make a better America and a better world for our children. The first one is remembering that we did elect someone because he inspired hope. Whether or not he lives up to our high expectations, Barack Obama is in the White House because he embraced hope and change. His campaign succeeded largely on the premise that this democratic experiment in the United States still had the potential to be reinvigorated by our participation in it. Across racial, age and economic boundaries, Americans responded to that premise, with the belief that yes, we could make a more progressive and vital America.

Energy Jobs for a Renewable Economic Future

posted by Bill: Check out what Stan Ovshinsky is doing in Detroit to create energy jobs for an American economic and environmental renewal. You won't hear about his work on the evening news, but Bob Herbert writes about him today in his column.

Revitalizing American Industry

posted by Bill: I highly recommend Bob Herbert's column today as he tours through downtown Detroit, or what's left of it, with an economist from the Motor City. It's time we all started thinking about how America is becoming less like the capital of the world and more like Detroit all the time.

Herbert's piece ends on this note:

"We need a revitalized industrial policy, including the creation of whole new industries, if American families are to prosper in the coming decades. If there is any sense of urgency about this in the hearts and minds of our corporate and government leaders, I’ve missed it."

More Jobs

posted by Bill: Hey, maybe I'm being too tough about the need for a jobs program, incentives, and more. Maybe people out of work just aren't looking hard enough.

According to McClatchy, Mickey D's is hiring...at Guantamamo Bay. All you need is some restaurant management experience, a valid passport, a willingness to relocate to Cuba (er, or the 45 square miles you'll be living and working in on the island nation), and a love of grease.

Link here for more application info...

(A hat tip to Allen McDuffee for this catch.)

Bill cross-posts at Bill's Big Diamond.

Job One

by Bill Kavanagh:  Healthcare reform, climate change legislation, education reform, even changes in war strategy will all fall short of creating a lasting political program if Americans don’t have jobs. We have a crippling level of under/unemployment, which many believe actually tops 20% today (higher than the 17+ percent reported by the feds), even while the government tells us the recession is now over. Still more Americans fear losing their jobs, or struggle with reduced pay and reduced expectations. This reality is the primary area the Obama Administration must grapple with— and soon.

Next month, the White House will convene a Jobs Summit, bringing together economists, academics, labor leaders, businesspeople, and non-profit groups to discuss putting Americans back to work. While the date of the summit has yet to be announced, a bigger unknown is whether the President will put the government’s money and energy squarely behind the effort; whether he realizes how basic creating jobs is to his success in dealing with every other problem he faces.

Historic Vote

posted by Bill: Finally, the historic vote came as healthcare reform passed in the House last night. Rep. Jim McGovern lauded Speaker Pelosi for "threading the needle" in pulling through a 220-215 margin for a truly significant change in American healthcare. Letting the abortion battle play out first seems to have been the necessary prelude to sorting out priorities in the Democratic Caucus and getting the votes needed in the "Yes" column.

As depressing as all our financial news is, this is a ray of sunshine in American political life. It's the first step towards truly important progress in an era when we seem too often to be merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

On to the Senate!

Public Option Reduces Deficit, Costs Less Than Blue Dog Bill: CBO

posted by Bill: New estimate by CBO brings public option bill in under Blue Dog proposal in budget impact and rates it as net deficit deduction over ten years. See CNN.

Healthcare Debate— A New Option for the Public Option

by Bill Kavanagh:  As you no doubt know already, the public option as an essential element of healthcare reform has been under sustained attack.  Not only did the town hall Astroturf commandos decry the public option as part of a “government takeover” of healthcare, but soon afterward, the insider oddsmakers in Washington declared the public option dead-on-arrival, even as a substantial majority of the House of Representatives supported it, along with most Americans polled on the subject.

Florida Sunshine in the Healthcare Debate

by Bill Kavanagh:  Two of my colleagues here at Buck Naked Politics are based in Florida, the home of the dimpled chad.  For a decade, we’ve all been cringing when we hear they have an election down there.  Will they elect another member of the Bush family, or someone like Kathleen Harris, unable to discern the difference between serving the Bushes and performing her responsibility to voters?  Perhaps they’d send us another a moral-majority type like Mark Foley, leading one (creepy) life for himself and espousing another very conservative set of rules for the rest of us?  Who would Floridians send to Washington next?

Honduran Coup Losing Backers

Posted by Bill:  For those who missed it, here’s a link to the latest news from Honduras, where in the name of their Constitution, the coup-installed President has suspended civil liberties and sent international negotiators home.  This, while troops are surrounding the Brazilian embassy, where the legally elected President is holed up, unable to speak through opposition media, which has been taken off the air.

 It seems even the business backers of the coup are having some second thoughts now…

 LA Times:

Roberto Micheletti, installed after a coup, says ousted President Manuel Zelaya's return necessitated a restrictive decree. Earlier, the government shut down two opposition broadcasters... 

Obama Kisses First Lady Following 9-21 Health Care Address to Joint Session of Congress

Another official White House photograph (and U.S. Government Work) from official White House photographer Pete Souza. 

Investigative Filmmakers Barred From China

posted by Bill:  Filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill were barred from visiting the Bejing Independent Film Festival this week.  The Chinese government denied the pair visas to travel to the festival, where they hoped to speak with audiences of their HBO documentary, “China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province.”  Their film follows the struggles of parents whose children were killed during the earthquake in the central Chinese province last May.  These children were among thousands who perished when approximately 7,000 substandard classrooms collapsed during the quake.

The scandal that erupted over the deaths of the children has sparked a controversy that continues to rage.  The term "tofu-dregs schoolhouses" has now become a derisive Chinese name for the shoddy and corruption-ridden construction process behind the structures that suffered mass casualties of schoolchildren during the disaster.  See today’s NY Times article and the film’s site for more information.

(Cross-posted at Bill’s Big Diamond.)

Facing the Post-Recession Future

by Bill Kavanagh:  Paul Krugman’s NYT column today on the federal deficit should be required reading.  We are still mired in a slow, high-unemployment recovery from the meltdown of 2008, but the world’s governments have helped prevent another Great Depression by spending on enormous rescue efforts.  However inequitable, those efforts are basically all that stood between the public and the precipice of total economic chaos as the financial system in the United States unraveled last year.

The Town Hall Crowd

I see no real need here for explanation. Watch:  (posted by Bill)

Public Option Flowchart

by Bill Kavanagh:  Nicholas Beaudrot at Donkeylicious has put together a flow chart, based on a visualization by Chris Hayes, that helps keep the basics of the public option in perspective for the 200+ million Americans whom it will not affect in the slightest.  Many of these people will be the same people who are shouting about it at Town Halls across the country.

 Here is Beaudrot’s chart:  

(Bill Kavanagh cross-posts at Bill's Big Diamond.)

Lives of Military Families

by Bill Kavanagh:  Over the years, I’ve written frequently about the war in Iraq and, less frequently, about the war in Afghanistan.  The role of our soldiers in these places is often on my mind.  As we sit, nearly eight years since the attacks on the US, it’s been awhile since the blog noted their situation.  Our military personnel are often sent back to war zones they’ve deployed to once or more already.  What’s also occurring is that back home, we all hear less and less about them, even as our soldiers’ lives become more and more synonymous with these endless wars.

Healthcare Reform Now

by Bill Kavanagh:  I’m a little tired of the stories about the righteous indignation of conservative America regarding healthcare reform and the “socialist takeover” of the country.  I can only conclude that these folks have been sleepwalking through the last year and have somehow been miraculously reanimated by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich as zombies for the health insurance industry.  The indignation thing ought to be the territory of the rest of us, who’ve been ripped off by conservative leaders and their corporate backers for years and left to fend for ourselves when we’re ill, uncovered, or changing jobs.

Heathcare— Astroturf 'Populist' Uncovered on CNN

By Bill Kavanagh:  Rick Scott, the former chairman of Columbia Hospital Corporation, a for-profit chain of hospitals, is the founder of an organization called “Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.”  CPR (oh so cute, eh?) is now funding protests like the ones we see at health care reform town hall meetings across the country—  at which Congresspeople are being shouted down, scuffles started, and people routinely intimidated by mobs of frightened birther/wingnuts.

Walter Cronkite

by Bill Kavanagh: The death of Walter Cronkite at 92 leaves Americans contemplating the changes in our media since his heyday as the preeminent television news anchor.  It is hard to imagine that we once looked to a network news broadcast as a digest of the nation’s daily experience, that one voice was ever regarded as, “the way it is.”  We have so many ways to get our news now, but none are so central to the American experience as the CBS Evening News was in Cronkite’s day.

Tapping Our Economic Potential

by Bill Kavanagh:  Sometimes it’s hard to say you were wrong.  That seems to be the case for President Barack Obama when it comes to fixing the economic meltdown.  Understandably, his Administration misjudged the size of the financial catastrophe during the depths of the freefall.  Then, he presumed that making a compromise deal with the conservatives in his own party and with the Right Wing in the Republican Party on a stimulus bill would unify them, be enough to put Americans back to work—and more importantly, to pull the American economy back from the brink of extinction this winter.  It seems he was only one-third right.