The announcement today that the administration is scrapping a Bush administration program to create a ground-based missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland is eliciting predictable howls from neoconservatives.
You can understand why. A big missile defense system has been a hobby horse for conservatives going all the way back to the Nixon administration, despite constant signs that it would cost far too much, might not work, and would be exceptionally destabilizing if it became a true centerpiece of our national security strategy. But the particular system in question has become an even bigger obsession for conservatives who favor military confrontation with both Russia and Iran.
Here’s National Security Network’s assessment:

[N]ot only do the cancelled missile defense systems have significant technological shortfalls, but they would also fail to protect against Iranian missiles because of both their location and technological advances in Iranian missile technology. Furthermore, from a geopolitical perspective, the European missile defense was a disaster. It worsened relations with Russia without even providing a credible defense against their nuclear arsenal, further undercutting nonproliferation efforts. Because there is no strategic benefit to maintaining the program – either militarily or diplomatically – the Obama administration has wisely has decided to eliminate this program and to develop a more adaptable missile defense system that better protects Europe.

Indeed, much of the negative reaction from the Right isn’t about the actual national security implications of this as opposed to alternative (probably sea-based) missile defense systems, but just psycho-babble about the alleged pleasure the step would give to Russia and/or Iran.
Funny, isn’t it? Neocons who are outraged by any consideration of diplomatic concerns in the development of national security policy nonetheless think we should perpetually let nations like Russia control our actions. If Putin doesn’t like something, we absolutely have to do it, even if it makes no real sense.

One of the standard features of most debates about health care reform is the comparison of our system with that of other industrialized nations. Usually the evidence presented is anecdotal, but sometimes statistics having to do with mortality rates, expense etc. are trotted out. Rick Newman of U.S. News & World Report has an angle on international health care systems comparisons that merits some consideration, as he reports (flagged by TomPaine.com) on a health care consumer satisfaction study in six nations, including the U.S.:

The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions surveyed 14,000 people in six countries, asking them to grade their own healthcare system from A to F. The standardized results allow comparisons among all six countries…Here’s how all six countries fared. The survey data are from Deloitte. Also included are cost data from the OECD, to give a sense of who’s getting the most satisfaction per healthcare dollar:
Canada: Percent rating the healthcare system A or B: 46 percent; D or F: 15 percent; annual healthcare spending per person: $3,895
France: A or B: 63 percent; D or F: 12 percent; spending: $3,601
Germany: A or B: 18 percent; D or F: 44 percent; spending: $3,588
Switzerland: A or B: 66 percent; D or F: 14 percent; spending: $4,417
United Kingdom: A or B: 32 percent; D or F: 20 percent; spending: $2,992
United States: A or B: 22 percent; D or F: 38 percent; spending: $7,290

As Newman notes, Germany is the real shocker here. He doesn’t explain why. But, clearly the U.S. is the worst bargain of the lot when cost is factored in. So much for the “greatest health care system in the world” meme. As Newman concludes:

…Deloitte’s survey data show that socialized medicine in Canada and Britain is more popular than the quasi-capitalist healthcare system in America—which costs far more. Brits and Canadians may be more satisfied partly because they have a higher tolerance for government bureaucracy than Americans do. But the findings also undercut claims that the British and Canadian systems don’t work.

Newman doesn’t report on the reasons behind the satisfaction stats. But a couple of the reader comments responding to his article are instructive. Here’s Jim Atherley’s explanation:

I’m a Canadian currently living in the US. I’ve spent 22 years in Canada and 27 in the US, so I have plenty of experience with both systems. Having said that, I can assure you that the Canadian system is far superior. The US system is an expensive nightmare by comparison.
In the US, I have lower taxes but I’m forced to deal with outrageous monthly premiums, fear of being dropped at any time, fear of losing my coverage if I change jobs, fear that my wife won’t be covered because she had a benign tumor 10 years ago, etc. I also have to cough up “co-pays” for every office visit, must meet high deductibles (thousands of dollars out of pocket) before insurance even pays a penny, then have “lifetime maximum” limits on top of that – and the price just keeps going up every year. When it’s all said and done, my tax advantage here has vanished.
Meanwhile, in my 22 years in Canada, I never once paid a penny for medical care. I had gall bladder surgery, spent time in ER for a badly cut hand, spent a week in hospital with broken bones from a motorcycle crash, had many trips to the family doctor with sick children – and NEVER had to wait any unreasonable amount of time – and certainly never paid a bill. Prescriptions are also half the price in Canada.
When you phone the doctor here, the first question they ask is “what insurance do you have?” When you phone the doctor in Canada, the first question is “What seems to be the problem?” This whole debate about which system is better is a non-issue to anyone who’s actually lived under both systems. If I get laid off here (and lose my insurance), I can always go back to Canada – thanks God for that.

if the fear-mongers succeed in blocking health reform in the U.S., maybe the Canadians will have to build a long fence to keep Americans out.

Sometimes the voting behavior of certain members of “the world’s greatest deliberative body” is so far beneath contempt that it can be likened to a demented limbo dance, in which the bar is set so low that only the most reptilian of U.S. Senators dare try to slither under it. Sue Sturgis of Facing South may have found a new measure for such low-lifery in the U.S. Senate in her report “The 10 Senators who vetoed insurance protection for domestic violence survivors.” As Sturgis explains:

…Health insurance companies in a number of states and the District of Columbia are allowed by law to treat domestic violence as a pre-existing condition for which they can deny individual coverage…The story was met with outrage, but it gets even worse.
The blog of the Service Employees International Union, which is pressing for health insurance reform, reports that in 2006 a Senate committee considered an amendment to the Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act that would have required insurers to stop ignoring state laws that make it illegal for them to deny coverage to domestic violence survivors — and 10 Senators, all Republicans, voted against it. They were:
* Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)
* Richard Burr (R-N.C.)
* John Ensign (R-Nev.)
* Mike Enzi (R-Wy.)
* Bill Frist (R-Tenn.)
* Judd Gregg (R-N.H.)
* Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)
* Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.)
* Pat Roberts (R-Kan.)
* Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)

Yes, that’s right. These ten Republican Senators reportedly voted to protect the right of health insurers to deny coverage to women who have been beaten by their spouses. As Sturgis notes, Frist, a physician no less, is thankfully out of the picture. But the others are still railing away, doing what they can to stop the Democratic reform plan. If they think it’s OK for insurance companies to penalize battered women, it’s hard to imagine what kind of “reform” they would support.

If you’re puzzled about why everybody thinks Max Baucus’ new health care blueprint is a big step forward in the debate even though pretty much nobody likes it, it’s important to understand the dialectical nature of the process. For health care reform to happen in the Senate, it needs to get out of the Finance Committee, which even on the Democratic side, is not a terribly progressive group. It also represents the last chance to lure a couple of Republicans across the line, and although none have stepped up yet, the relatively positive reaction of health industry groups (in itself not the most wonderful thing) could make it a lot easier for that to ultimately occur.
Once the Baucus bill is out of committee, the Senate Democratic leadership will design a floor package composed of elements of the Finance and (more progressive) HELP Committee bills. That’s also the point at which Senate Democrats and the White House will make the fateful decision of whether to go for broke on a cloture vote (which requires 60 Senators), or move towards use of reconciliation, at least for the more controversial elements. And all along, Democrats will be acutely aware of the need for a health reform design that can produce a conference committee report able to survive close votes in both House and Senate. And that means, for example, that the Baucus bill’s exceptionally weak state-by-state co-op system will have to be eventually revised or the whole effort could go down thanks to opposition from House Democrats.
So Baucus’ bill represents just one piece of the puzzle. Ezra Kleiin has an excellent summary today of five steps that could make Baucus’ proposal significantly more acceptable to progressives; none really does much violence to the basic scheme.
There’s one wrinkle to the Baucus plan, however, that probably will have “legs”: its back-door attack on the tax deductibility of high-end employer sponsored plans via an “excise tax.” Modifying the deduction for employer-sponsored plans is one of those things that policy wonks from all sides of the ideological spectrum tend to favor, but it’s quite unpopular. Baucus’ approach might be doable because it’s indirect, and is phased in very slowly through a threshold that will be adjusted by a consumer price index, not a health care price index (which means more and more high-end plans will be exposed to it over time). And this last feature, most significantly, means that the overall Baucus plan is not only deficit-neutral, but actually begins reducing the federal budget deficit in the “out-years.” This makes it pretty attractive to the many people who worry that we simply can’t afford health care reform.
At present the main visible opposition to the “excise tax” idea is coming from the labor movement, which has many members who have negotiated very good health plans. But if only because the threshold for future exposure to the excise tax could be changed down the road, union leaders probably won’t make this a litmus test for final support.
In any event, the significance of the Baucus plan can’t really be captured by up-or-down (mostly down) assessments of its content. There are a lot of moving parts on health care reform, and this is just one of them, albeit the final basic piece to fall into place.

(This is the second part of a three-part TDS Strategy Memo. A PDF version of the entire memo is available here)
Democrats must face the unpleasant reality that that from now on any significant local or national political meeting anywhere in America is going to be attended by conservative activists who are mobilized and directed there through a pyramid of online social networks. At the apex of this pyramid is Freedomworks and directly below it is a second tier of a dozen other lobbying organizations.
Immediately after the April 15th Tea Parties it appeared that the local activists who had been mobilized might attempt to form permanent “bottom-up” grass-roots committees in communities across the country. Instead, the rather different framework that has emerged is a kind of permanent “on-call” cadre of activists across the country – individuals who are willing to download talking points and slogans from the online social networks and be directed to local meetings in their area or to national protests in Washington D.C.
The simple but unpleasant fact is that in every one of these local political town halls or other community meetings that is not contested, the conservative point of view will dominate. Therefore Democrats have no choice but to build their own version of this kind of online social organization — a “Democratic Activist Corps” or corps of “Democratic Minutemen” – dedicated activists with a similar “on-call” capability.
At first glance this would appear to be the responsibility of Organizing for America, but in fact, for two reasons, that organization is actually not well suited to manage this task.

First, Organizing for America cannot avoid following a very broad, “big tent” approach because of the huge, extremely heterogeneous group of people in its database. In order to avoid schisms and conflict among its members, it must stick to the most elementary and widely shared views. This is reflected in the rather bland slogans it recommends e.g. “Health Insurance Reform Now: Let’s Get It Done!”, “Stand up for Reform”, “Standing Together for Health Insurance Reform”
Second, because it is directly connected to the DNC and the Obama administration, OFA has to conduct itself in a way that does not reflect negatively on Obama. This makes it necessarily very cautious and highly averse to direct conflict and confrontation. This is reflected it its preference for organizing what are essentially non-confrontational “pep rallies” of its supporters rather than directing them to directly engage and challenge opponents of reform.

Given the huge, ten million member e-mail base of OFA, these choices are not necessarily wrong. OFA is metaphorically speaking a political oil tanker, only able to move and turn only very gradually and cautiously. But as a result of these two characteristics it is impractical to expect an organization like OFA to be able to successfully direct a Democratic counterpart to a fierce and combative organization like Freedomworks that has complete freedom of action. It is therefore preferable to organize a “Democratic Activist” or “Democratic Minutemen” network outside the formal structure of government or the DNC, just as Freedomworks and the other conservative online activist groups have done.
Although the issue agenda of such an organization will be the same as the official Democratic organizations, to be effective its ethos must more closely resemble that of a passionate social movement and its staff must be composed of people with the background and perspective of union or civil rights organizers – men and women with both the passion and the experience to tackle a bitter, well-financed and determined adversary.
Freedomworks has a 14 person Washington staff, six full-time field coordinators or state directors and an annual budget of 8 million dollars. Its economic model is based on obtaining contributions from the industries that derive benefits from its grass-roots organizing activities. To effectively compete with this, Democratic organizations like unions, environmental and other social issue groups, professional associations and similar pro-democratic forces will need to contribute substantial in-kind resources — of staff time, office space, supplies and technical support — to a Democratic Activist Corps of this kind. Even with significant in-kind support, however, a core of paid, full-time employees and a significant operating budget will still be needed.
The key demographic target for an “on call” activist network of this kind will be mid-sized, second and third tier cities and towns. The major American cities and urban areas already have more than sufficient pro-democratic organizations and social networks to mobilize activists when necessary for meetings, marches, demonstrations and so on. At the other end of the spectrum, modern conservatism is disproportionately concentrated in small towns, urban fringes and rural areas – so much so that in many cases any effective competition is simply impractical. It is in the mid-sized cities and towns across America where significant numbers of Democrats live but where there are relatively weak pro-Democratic organizations and institutions that an online social network of committed Democratic activists could make a substantial difference.
The April 15th tea party movement claimed that they held events in over 1,000 cities and towns and Nate Silver documented events in around six or eight hundred. Because of the more concentrated geographic distribution of the Democratic coalition this project can aim to achieve lower numerical targets. The project should, however, set clear timetables for creating “on-call” networks in first 50, then 100, and ultimately about 200 smaller U.S. cities and medium-sized towns. If possible, at least the first two and preferably all three of these goals should be achieved before the 2010 elections.
Also, by next spring, some of these Democratic minutemen will also need to receive a certain amount of training in non-violent methods because by that time it is virtually certain that there will be young right-wing “skinheads” and other quasi-military groups openly participating in anti-Obama demonstrations. The strategy of intimidation and physical aggression employed by such groups can best be defeated by disciplined non-violent tactics

On the advice of my physician, I do not watch or listen to Glenn Beck, preferring to follow his exploits via the serial bouts of hysteria he inspires in his fans. So it was news to me to learn that he spends a lot of time hawking the works of the late W. Cleon Skousen, an extremely sketchy right-wing character who lived on the far fringes of the conservative movement and of Mormonism.
In a fascinating piece on the subject in Salon today, Alexander Zaitchick explores Beck’s near-apostolic advocacy of Skousen’s work, which serves as a sort of intellectual framework for the highly paranoid worldview of the Tea Party movement that Beck has done so much to promote. In his very colorful career, which earned him a big fat “dangerous extremist” file with his former employers at the FBI, Skousen gained most notice in the early 60s as a fellow traveler and stout defender of the John Birch Society (after Birch founder Robert Welch had been read out of the conservative movement for contending that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist).
As Sarah Posner alertly reminds us at TAPPED, Beck’s not the only Skousen fan high in the ranks of contemporary conservatism. Mitt Romney has spoken of the old crank fondly as well, which led to a sort of warning from National Review’s Mark Hemingway back in 2007:

Who is Cleon Skousen you might ask? In answering that question, it’s hard to even know where to begin. Skousen was by turns an FBI employee, the police chief of Salt Lake City, a Brigham Young University professor, consigliore to former secretary of agriculture and Mormon president Ezra Taft Benson and, well, all-around nutjob.
Of course he was also a prolific writer and likely brilliant, but Skousen is not an association a presidential candidate should loudly trumpet.

Thanks to Beck, one of Skousen’s books, The 5,000 Year Leap, has become a runaway bestseller, which suggests that a lot of Tea Party folk have read it and given it to friends and family. Next time someone tells you the Tea Party movement is composed of average Americans who are simply worried at the terrible things Barack Obama’s trying to do to their country, keep in mind they are being influenced by the works of someone who thought America was being plunged into socialist tyranny by the Eisenhower administration.

President Obama’s TV blitz amounts to a declaration of all-out media war against the GOP’s efforts to obstruct health care reform with lies and distortions. Katharine Q. Seelye reports in the New York Times on the President’s historic media initiative:

For the first time ever, a president is appearing on five talk shows on a single Sunday, in quick succession — on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Univision. (To be clear: He is taping them Friday night at the White House, not sprinting from set to set on Sunday)… Collectively, those five shows reach almost 12 million people, according to Nielsen…The president is leaving no channel unchurned in his quest to convince Congress to pass a health care overhaul.

Seelye points out that Obama’s blitz “raises the ante” and “suggests he knows he needs to do something dramatic to alter the course of debate.” The risk is that the President will expose himself to tricky “gotcha” questions, which are difficult to anticipate. In addition, Obama’s strongest messaging weapon is the speech, not the television interview, in which his skills are about average among leading Democrats. Still, time is short, and he has few alternatives to using as many major TV programs as he can to help educate voters and persuade undecided Senators and House reps.
Ads, with Obama in particular, provide an edge over interviews in that they can be edited and tweaked for maximum effect. The downside is that they are expensive, while interviews cost nothing but time. Hopefully, the DNC and health reform groups are re-packaging bits of his well-received health care address to congress into TV ads, which also depict the outrageous injustices practiced by health insurance companies. Not doing so would be the equivalent of the DNC’s failure to re-package Al Gore’s excellent acceptance address at the 2000 convention, which soon disappeared unused into the ether, while his campaign ran mediocre ads. We can be certain that the health insurance industry is now preparing an ad blitz of unprecedented scale. If Dems and their supporting organizations get buried by a tidal wave of insurance industry TV ads and respond weakly, we will have only ourselves to blame.
The optimistic scenario is that Obama handles the interviews exceptionally-well, which is certainly possible and Democrats and health reform groups run a great ad blitz that more than offsets the insurance industry effort. If these two challenges are met, it could help make the difference between victory and defeat on health care reform.
It’s probably too much to hope that a good YouTube health care reform video will go viral as did the “Yes We Can” clip, although there are some good ones available. Seelye also reports that a coalition group, Health Care for America now has budgeted $1.2 million to run an ad on nation-wide cable TV and Washington, D.C.-area television (It’s a pretty tough, but very short ad. see it here), as well as print ad in political publications. For those who like longer (about 11 minutes), tougher fare, in this video clip Keith Olbermann gets seriously medieval on specific members of congress who oppose/obstruct health reform while taking big money from the health insurance companies. Also, YouTube has dozens of video clips from Michael Moore’s “Sicko.”
The great advantage of videos and documentaries is that they can show the need for health care reform as opposed to just talking about it. The networks could do a tremendous public service that could save the lives of many simply by showing some of the better videos and documentaries about health care and the need for reform in the days ahead. It’s unlikely that network programming execs will ever have a better opportunity to do something great for their country and its people.

At the New Republic today, TDS Co-Editor William Galston draws attention to Obama administration projections that unemployment could well remain very high through the mid-term election cycle, and perhaps beyond it:

If OMB’s projections are correct, unemployment will average 9.8 percent during 2010 and will likely stand above 9 percent on the day of the mid-term election. After the health care debate ends, and whatever its outcome may be, the administration and congressional Democrats would be well advised to turn their attention back to the economy and ask themselves whether there is anything more to be done to jumpstart job creation.

Another stimulus package, anyone?