City of Brass

All along, the Republicans have insisted that they are not merely obstructionists seeking to derail health care for purely political purposes ("It's Obama's Waterloo", etc), but rather that they have genuine ideas on reform to contribute, but have been excluded by Democrats from the process. The reform bill is an ultra-leftist socialist agenda in disguise, they argue, rammed through Congress by a partisan majority uninterested in compromise.

This is, of course, total nonsense. The Republicans have not offered any ideas of their own beyond the same formula of tort reform, tax cuts, and privatization. They waved pieces of paper during Obama's SOTU as props but they have not negotiated in good faith with the Democrats. The 60-seat majority meant that the Democrats were uniquely vulnerable, ironically, to the demands of their most conservative members like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, who essentially advanced Republican ideas during the process. The result is that the Senate bill is not even remotely a leftist bill but actually right of center, something that the Republicans themselves could have passed anytime during their own complete control of Congress during the Bush Administration's early years, were they inclined to govern. And yet, the progressive left and the liberal establishment are unified in declaring that even this is better than nothing and will make a meaningful difference in people's lives.

Throughout this entire process, its been the left which has been pragmatic and willing to compromise - even on major centerpiece reforms like the public option - just to get something done. Meanwhile the right has done everything it can to stop any reform dead in its tracks. There's real blood on their hands.

So, on Sunday the President invited Republicans to join him for a health care summit on Feb 25th, so that they can offer their ideas on reform with full transparency and the American people as witness. The media would attend and broadcast the summit so that everyone could see what was being discussed and what solutions were being proposed.

If the Republicans were serious about wanting a voice and input to reform, then they would leap at this chance. If they were serious about governing, they would leap seize the spotlight and bring their ideas to the table and make their case to the people, using the opportunity that the President has given them.

Naturally, their actual reaction is, as always, "No!"

The GOP is often referred to as the stupid party. Let's pray they aren't stupid enough to sit down with a President who has for six months dismissed them as having no ideas. Barack Obama says he wants a bipartisan approach to health care now. Well, there is bipartisan support for scrapping the current proposals and starting over.

Unless Barack Obama says they should scrap the present plans and start over, the GOP should not entertain his invitation to use a gaggle of Republicans to rehabilitate our socialist President.

The Republican leadership has even written a letter to Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, arguing that a precondition for talks is the total scrapping of all the legislative work that has been done so far and starting over. As they know full well, if the Democrats do not deliver something to show for their work all last year on reform, the public will punish them at the polls. They are counting on it.

And make no mistake - the Republicans have never had any kind of credible alternative policy proposal:

Republicans, working in the minority, are not as close to a unified proposal. The House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, put forward an alternate bill as a substitute for the Democrats' bill that was adopted on Nov. 7.

But Mr. Boehner and other House Republican leaders acknowledged that the proposal was purposely designed to be a scaled-back measure that did not try to extend health coverage to the vast majority of the nation's uninsured. While the Democrats' bills would extend coverage to more than 30 million people by 2019, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the House Republicans' bill would extend coverage to perhaps 3 million people, leaving about 52 million uninsured.

Other House Republicans, including Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and John Shadegg of Arizona, have proposed more comprehensive legislation aimed at insuring many more people. But those proposals have not been fully analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office.

In the Senate, Republican leaders made a calculated strategic decision not to put forward a comprehensive alternative to the Democrats' legislation. Trying to draft a single counterproposal inevitably would have embroiled Republicans in the same internal disagreements and disputes that divided Senate Democrats over health care ideas for much of the past year. Putting such a measure forward and then being unable to generate broad Republican support in a vote would have been embarrassing.

Instead, the Republicans went into the floor debate over the Democrats' bills armed with dozens of individual amendments that most if not all of their caucus supported, but that might have been totally unworkable or even contradictory if pulled together into a bill.

As a result, Republicans appeared unified in their opposition to the Democrats' proposal, even as Democrats fought fiercely among themselves to make various changes to their own legislation.

I for one hope that the GOP does not, in fact, attend the summit. It will reveal their obstructionism and lack of excuses with clarity, and hopefully be the final straw that spurs Democrats to action. There is indeed a way forward and in many ways it's easier now without the 60 seat majority than it was before.

In a sense, the Republicans are right. The health care issue as a whole is a trap. But it's one of their own devising - they are the ones who chose to obstruct rather than to govern, and they will have to answer for it.

This is great news for public health - esteemed medical journal The Lancet has formally retracted a contentious 1998 paper that asserted a link between vaccines and autism:

The Lancet medical journal formally retracted a paper Tuesday that caused a 12-year international battle over links between autism and the childhood vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella.

The paper, written by British doctor Andrew Wakefield, suggests that the combined shot might be linked to autism and bowel disease.

His assertion, now widely discredited, caused one of the biggest medical rows in a generation and led to a steep drop in vaccinations in the United States, Britain and other parts of Europe, prompting a rise in measles cases.

"It has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield . . . are incorrect," the British journal said in a statement.

(...) A disciplinary panel of Britain's General Medical Council, or GMC, ruled last week that Wakefield had presented his research in an "irresponsible and dishonest" way and shown a "callous disregard" for the suffering of the children he studied.

(...) Data released last February for England and Wales showed a 70 percent surge of measles cases from 2007 to 2008, mostly because of unvaccinated children.

This should be the final nail in the coffin for the vaccine-deniers who have literally caused thousands of deaths by scaring parents from vaccinating their children.

Related: Ars Technica has a really good discussion with more details if you are interested. The bottom line: vaccinate your kids.

Last week, President Obama attended the House Republican retreat in Baltimore by invitation to interact with the opposition caucus and try to seek some common ground. It's a remarkable event because he also directly answered questions from the Representatives. He gives an incredible defense of his genuine intentions for bipartisanship, scolds the Republicans for their extremist rhetoric, and defended the stimulus bill and the economic recovery of his Administration in a clear and compelling way.

I'm embedding the video below and you can read the full transcript at the White House blog. It's basically a vindication of his entire first year in office, despite the naysayers from left and right. President Obama will be attending a similar retreat for House Democrats later and I am certain he will face equally tough questions with equally firm responses.

Ah, it must be Groundhog Day. In the movie, Bill Murray wakes up every day to the same day, where everything happens over and over again. In real life, conservatives argue for bombing Iran as if the Iraq war or the Green revolution never happened. It's fitting that today is the day Daniel Pipes is arguing at National Review that it's time to "destroy Iran's nuclear weapon capacity" - for Obama's own sake, of course:

Fourth, if the U.S.limited its strike to taking out Iran's nuclear facilities and did not attempt any regime change, it would require few "boots on the ground" and entail relatively few casualties, making an attack more politically palatable.

Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush's meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama's feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene. It would sideline health care, prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, and make the netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon.

OMFG, WTF, and LOL. In essence, Pipes is saying, "Obama, please wag the dog. It will poll well. People will rally around the flag! Also, I hate you but follow my advice I promise it will help." He's utterly and completely delusional, to the extent that I literally question his sanity.

The conservative obsession with bombing Iran is hardly new - even John McCain joked about "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" instead of reprimanding a questioner who wanted to send an "air mail message to Tehran" during the 2008 campaign. And the love affair with aerial bombardment as foreign policy tool is simply insane. Personally, I've argued that the United States should disavow aerial bombardment as analogous to land mines, and while I doubt that Obama will heed my advice I am at least comforted that he sent more troops to Afghanistan. With more troops, there's less reliance on drone attacks.

It's astonishing just how wrong in every respect "bombing Iran" is - in its assumptions, in it's immorality, and it's actual, demonstrable harm to our own national self-interest. I wonder if Pipes really even believes what he is saying. He's just a concern troll, making a partisan political attack, whose concern is more about defeating Obama than doing what's best for our country.

(Let's review some of Daniel Pipes greatest hits: He called for the US to replace Saddam with a "strongman" because Iraqis can't handle democracy; was a one-man jihad against genuine moderate muslims like Tariq Ramadan; and bought into the "Obama is a muslim" smear.)

Daniel Larison - no admirer of liberalism or Obama or Democrats, mind you - has been running against the tide of late by arguing that the Republicans do not stand to gain as much in the mid term elections this year as conventional wisdom woud dictate. His analysis of Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts in particular and GOP prospects in general have been data-driven instead of media-narrative driven. And I don't fundamentally disagree with his latest argument that Republicans are scoring tactical victories but lack a cohesive strategy.

However, I think he underestimates the way in which our political-establishment-media-establishment feedback loop structurally favors short-term tactics. In a sense, exploiting every possible tactical victory possible is a valid strategy. This is a cynical thing to say, I suppose, but given the utterly ridiculous expectations of the public and Obama's reluctance to dictate strategy on the left (essentially surrending political leadership to the Senate), I don't really see any reason for optimism. And I'm not one who believes the public are fools, either - I strongly believe that the public is a rational actor, but GIGO.

The burden of action for strategy is not on the GOP, but the Democrats, and despite a clear path forward the Democratic leadership has yet actively commit to it. Obama's lack of specifics in the SOTU about how to move forward on health care in particular was a massively missed opportunity to motivate the base, which the GOP can passively exploit.

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