Author: Swopa

An old friend and hero of this blog turned up on the CNN website today:

The story of how I became a national figure in the media is widely known, but few people know what I actually did for the CIA.

I was a covert operations officer specializing in nuclear counter proliferation — essentially, making sure the bad guys didn’t get the bomb. . . .

I resigned from the CIA in 2006 because it was no longer possible to do the covert work for which I was highly trained and which I loved. . . . But I did not lose my belief that the danger of nuclear terrorism was the most urgent threat we face. Nor did I lose my passion for working, albeit in a new way, to address that threat. I am working on this issue now as part of the international Global Zero movement, in which political, military and faith leaders, experts and activists strive for the worldwide elimination of all nuclear weapons.

As Wilson explains, the recent arms reduction initiative between the U.S. and Russia (which David Dayen has been covering here in recent days) is an important step toward preventing nuclear terror: “The only way to eliminate the danger that nuclear weapons will be used by countries in conflict, by accident or by terrorists is to lock down all nuclear materials and eliminate all nuclear weapons in all countries.”

In addition to her work with the Global Zero movement and for a nonprofit think tank in New Mexico, Wilson appears in “Countdown to Zero,” a film that will be released in theaters in July after premiering (to positive reviews) in January at the Sundance Film Festival.

Somewhere, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Karl Rove are probably gnashing their teeth that Valerie Wilson is continuing to work against their dream of a more militarized and antagonistic world.

April Fools’ Day can be a very dangerous holiday in some organizations.

For example, given the well-documented perversity of the Washington Post’s op-ed pages under Fred Hiatt, it’s probably no surprise that second-tier staffers blow off steam by grumbling and making sarcastic jokes in informal lunch-room conversations.

So, it happens that yesterday, a bunch of them were sitting around on a break at a table with that morning’s Wall Street Journal — lying open to Karl Rove’s opinion piece offering unsubtle GOP-friendly suggestions to the “tea party” movement (including not forming a third party).  The talk turned to how soon it would take Hiatt to ask the staff to gin up a me-too column from one of the WaPo’s ever-growing stable of former Bush administration mouthpieces.

Then, realizing it was April Fools’ Day, one of them said, “You know what would be funny?  If we wrote up our own piece and put it under the name of Dan Quayle.”

“Who’s Dan Quayle?” asked one of the younger staffers.

“The 1980s prototype for Sarah Palin,” another answered.  “Young, supposedly irresistible good looks, and dumber than the day is long.”

“Seriously?  How dumb was he?” asked the younger staffer.

“Bill Kristol was considered his ‘brain’.”

A long pause.  “Holy crap!  I guess you’re right.”

“Exactly!  So wouldn’t it be perfect to have a column with advice for the teabaggers from Dan Quayle — the patron saint and godfather they never knew they had?”

Unfortunately, just then Fred Hiatt walked in for a cup of coffee, overhearing the suggestion.  And he thought they were serious.

(Via Al Jazeera / Flickr.)

“You win some, you lose some. And then there’s that little-known third category…”
– Al Gore, on the 2000 U.S. presidential election

A couple of days ago, while awaiting the final results from Iraq’s parliamentary elections, Marc Lynch (a/k/a Abu Aardvark) wrote that the country “faces a double-edged test”:

If al-Maliki triumphs in a narrow election and assembles a coalition that largely reproduces the outgoing government, many Iraqis may feel that the election was a sham, and that democracy is not capable of producing true change. If al-Maliki loses, he may not surrender power without a fight…

Or, you know, both could happen.  From the New York Times this morning:

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s party lost the Iraqi election, but a day after the results were announced it became clear that he would fight to hold on to his post — even before the outcome was declared.

On Thursday, a day before the results were announced, he quietly persuaded the Iraqi supreme court to issue a ruling that potentially allows him to choose the new government instead of awarding that right to the winner of the election, the former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi.

On another front, officials in charge of purging the government of former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party said Saturday that they still expected to disqualify 50 political candidates, many of them members of Mr. Allawi’s Iraqiya Party. That could strip Mr. Allawi of his narrow plurality, 91 parliamentary seats compared with 89 for Mr. Maliki’s State of Law party.

And if all that does not work, the prime minister still is clamoring for a recount. . . . Ultimately, the same Supreme Federal Court, which is nominally independent but has proved friendly to Mr. Maliki in the past, will decide the recount issue.

Yes, it’s always nice to have a friendly Supreme Court in your back pocket in case of a close election, isn’t it?

The relevance of the court’s decision is that under the Iraqi constitution, the electoral coalition with the largest number of seats in parliament gets the first chance to form a government, including choosing a prime minister.  But because although Allawi’s slate came in first in the voting, the court ruled that a coalition formed after the election would be eligible — meaning that Maliki’s party and the bloc of Shiite religious parties (who came in second and third, respectively) could unite and thereby “win” the right to stay in power.

As a result, a coalition like the one I predicted two weeks ago is still the most likely outcome: Maliki’s “State of Law” bloc (unfortunate acronym and all), his off-and-on Shiite allies (including those loyal to U.S. bogeyman-cleric Moqtada as-Sadr), and the largest Kurdish parties, creating a near-reunion of the 2005 government.

Why?  Because despite ordinary Iraqis’ unhappiness with the incumbent regime’s corruption and ineptitude, the high-level fault lines that brought about the Shiite-Kurdish alliance — in particular, the desire to remove any trace of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated Baath party from the government and especially the military — still exist.

In 2005, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani oversaw the creation of a nearly all-Shiite electoral slate in order to ensure that Iraq’s majority sect would control the country’s post-Saddam future.  Even if just enough voters in Iraq’s predominantly Shiite regions rejected that sectarian strategy (either by staying home or defecting to Allawi’s coalition) to tip this month’s election results, Sistani is not likely to accept such a swift unraveling of his master plan — and his will is unlikely to be defied by the politicians he brought to power, especially for the sake of a minority role in an Allawi-led regime.

Similarly, as Juan Cole notes this morning, an alliance between Allawi and the Kurdish factions is implausible because of the battles for influence between Kurds and the Sunni Arabs who make up Allawi’s political base in Kirkuk and other parts of northern Iraq.  As Cole concludes, “Allawi may therefore have a plurality that is incapable of growing into a majority.”

The primary impact of Prime Minister al-Maliki’s surprising (if narrow) second-place finish, if anything, is likely to be felt by Maliki himself.  Even if Team Shiite reunites as I’ve been predicting, Maliki’s rivals in the religious parties may demand his scalp as the price for patching up the assorted feuds of the last four years.  But that would put all of the factions in the troublesome position of having to agree on a successor, meaning even more wrangling before a government can be formed.

But then, given the congested and inconclusive results of the election, I suppose that would be fitting.

(Via Flickr.)

With all deference to D-Day’s whip count posts, I think Matt Yglesias has the underlying dynamic of the upcoming House vote on the healthcare reform bill right:

This is one of these situations where now that the vote has been called, the votes will be there to pass the thing. . . .

Now that the count is underway, you can’t change the bill. So there’s no point in holding out for changing. . . . You have a victory, or you have a humiliating defeat. And everyone’s in the same boat. At that point, the votes will materialize.

The New York Times made a similar point:

In the homestretch of the health care debate, one obvious question being asked across the capital is whether Speaker Nancy Pelosi will find 216 votes to pass the bill. For a group of particularly jittery Democrats, the better question may be this: Who will be allowed to slip away?

. . .as the week inches along, with momentum steadily building to a Sunday vote, the party leaders are . . . beginning to decide which politically endangered lawmakers will be given absolution to vote no.

. . . There are, of course, very few votes to spare. Yet there are some. And even most Republican leaders concede that the mystery is not so much whether Democrats will reach the magic number of 216, but rather whose names will be included as yes votes in the final count.

. . . On Wednesday, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio was the first Democrat to explain his No-to-Yes evolution. Mr. Kucinich represents a safe Democratic district, and party leaders made it clear that he was not eligible for a pardon.

I don’t think this is just Village conventional wisdom at work.   Arguably, what we’re seeing now is not genuine persuasion, or even genuine bribery, but rather the time-dishonored tradition of Congresspeople competing to have it both ways — nominally opposing the potentially perilous legislation while making sure that it passes. (Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts implied to Mother Jones today that he was one of the lucky winners, announcing his intended “no” vote while admitting that the bill will probably pass — and rather than support a threatened Republican repeal effort, he will work to improve the bill once it does become law.)

The actual process may not feel as glibly cynical as that to the participants, but it seems increasingly clear that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t have proceeded with the vote unless she knew that the logic of “if this goes down, we all go down” would scare up the necessary ayes, one way or another.  To schedule the vote in the first place, Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic powers that be almost certainly had assurances from more than 217 members that “I’ll vote yes if you absolutely need my vote,” even if many of them would rather not be needed.

I could be wrong, of course; maybe the Democrats are headed for another crash-and-burn experience like when Scott Brown took over Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in January.   But that election blindsided them, and the date couldn’t be changed once the danger became apparent.  In this case, President Obama, Pelosi and company scheduled the vote after weeks of behind-the-scenes deliberations… and I think we can all agree that bravery in the face of uncertainty isn’t exactly one of their distinguishing characteristics.

And I have to admit it: I’m in favor of passing the bill at this point.  I’m not smart enough to know who’s right about the policy merits — whether public opinion will swing in favor of it once it’s passed, as Obama has predicted, or whether the more ominous forecasts we’ve seen here will prove correct.

But I do know that the Democratic leadership has committed itself thoroughly enough to this effort, and spent enough time on it, that the political logic seems irrefutable — if the current legislation fails, there is zero chance that anything more progressive will emerge.  Instead, voters across the political spectrum will (with substantial justification) conclude that Democrats are inherently incapable of getting anything done, the 2010 elections will move the Congress substantially to the right (perhaps even into outright Republican control), and it will be another decade or more before anyone dares another attempt to tame the corporate health insurance dragon.

As painful as seeing this bill pass may be, I would submit that even responding to the need to fix an unpopular insurance reform law is a better bet for progressives than letting it fail, because at least there will be evidence that Congress can do something to address the problem.  Don’t underestimate the sheer helplessness that will be felt by left-leaning voters at all levels of political commitment (not just the diehards who follow this stuff closely) if the current effort crumbles into dust.

In saying that, of course, I’ve committed anyone who agrees with me to a different sort of helplessness.  Just about anyone reading this site almost undoubtedly wants a better bill, and here my “optimistic” argument is that we should want it to pass, no matter how bad we think it is, because its failure would be an even bigger (political) disaster.

For better or worse, by committing themselves to the legislation that’s on the table now — to return to Yglesias’ “same boat” analogy — Obama, Pelosi, and Harry Reid have forced us to go along for the ride.  I’m just busy hoping at this point that the iceberg some of us are seeing up ahead is just a mirage.  And if it isn’t, I hope we’re mentally rehearsing how to help man the lifeboats instead of settling for saying, “See!  I told you so!” as the ship goes down.

So the election results are trickling in slowly from the Iraqi parliamentary elections, and the coalition led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is expressing confidence that they will come away with the largest share of the votes — a confidence that may or may not be related to the gradually accumulating accusations of fraud in the ballot-counting process.

Although all of the blocs that made up the Iraqi national legislature have frayed somewhat since the last round of elections at the end of 2005, virtually all of the major players are expected to return when the dust settles this time… most likely including al-Maliki as the prime minister.

As happened four years ago, you can expect the major Shiite religious parties to join forces with the dominant Kurdish groups to form a ruling coalition, shutting out all but a few token Sunnis as well as secular Shiite politicians like the former U.S.-installed interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi.  Although there was a much-ballyhooed split between Maliki and the other religious factions last summer, several savvy observers noted right away that a reunion was inevitable.

I wrote at the time that the strategy behind the frenemies-style breakup seemed to be to diffuse the public unhappiness with the Shiite-dominated government’s lack of results in delivering basic services:

… Maliki would pick up votes from those who didn’t want to elect a sectarian slate [again], while the Hakim-Sadr-et al. group could pose as running against the Maliki regime… even though (surprise!) everyone would wind up in effect reelecting Team Shiite, with Maliki on top.

For better or worse, judging from the early voting returns and the political jockeying that has already begun, this analysis from last August seems to have been on target.

The difference this time is something that may not bear fruit until the next parliamentary elections, whenever those might be.  By apparently unifying behind Allawi’s slate, the fragmented losers from the 2005 elections — Sunnis of all stripes, as well as secular Shiites — will in effect make him the clear, singular leader of the political opposition.

Given the rampant corruption and ineptitude of the current (and likely to be re-installed) Iraqi government, that could be a favorable spot to hold.  If the next few years aren’t much of an improvement over the last four, and voters choose not to be fooled again by a faux split among the religious Shiite parties, Allawi would be uniquely positioned to ride the wave of political resentment.   (What would happen then is something even I can’t begin to guess.)

Tags: Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki

(photo: trois tetes via Flickr.)

Sam Stein of the Huffington Post notes a key bit of under-the-radar commentary from inside the health insurance industry this week:

The market concentration for health insurance is so monopolized in some areas that insurance companies are willing to raise prices and lose customers in an effort to improve their bottom line, a leading insurance broker told Wall Street analysts on Wednesday.

In a conference call organized by Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research, Steve Lewis, a highly regarded broker at the world’s third largest insurance broker, Willis, painted a picture of the health insurance market in which employers seem likely to be priced out of coverage. . . .

Insurers are able to do this in part because the markets in which they operate have no adequate competition, suggests Lewis. . . . employers in many markets know “that they’re not going to be able to trade down pricing very significantly” (i.e. find cheaper coverage) and, as such, would likely only change plans or become self-insured if there was a “fairly significant” disruption in service.

. . . The remarks are as clear an indication as any that while the health insurance industry suffered greatly from the recession it remains remarkably well positioned to recoup those profits going forward — principally because companies can raise prices without worrying about the market hit it will take.

I’m sure this is a problem that will clear itself right up once the President and Congress pass a health care reform package that mandates everyone to buy insurance. . . .

(See the Huffington Post article by Stein for a full transcript of Lewis’ remarks.)

Tags: Goldman Sachs, Health care, health insurance industry, Sam Stein, Steve Lewis, Wall Street

(Via Flickr.)

So, I didn’t get a chance to watch yesterday’s healthcare reform talkfest, but it seems as though things went largely as expected: Republicans postured and gave excuses, the president pretended to listen, and today the White House is announcing its intentions to proceed as soon as next week with a plan that will likely garner only Democratic votes.

As David Dayen wrote just a little earlier this afternoon, “Those media members who actually paid attention to the substance of the arguments and not the ‘optics’ saw pretty plainly that Republicans aren’t interested in fixing the health care crisis.”

You and I already knew this, of course.  But then, as I noted (along with Jon Walker and just about every other sentient observer in the universe), that was the point of having the televised summit — to make clear to people on the lower rungs of the information ladder why a “bipartisan” approach to solving the healthcare problem is impossible.

Those of us watching from a closer distance just wish the Democrats were better at it, that’s all.  But some of the news tidbits surrounding the summit suggest they might be learning a little bit.  An article in Politico quoted Rep. Rob Andrews as identifying a crack in the GOP front that should be exploited:

“Look at the difference between Tom Coburn and Mitch McConnell,” Andrews said.

Coburn offered a number of ideas that Democrats could incorporate into their bill, like preventing fraud in Medicare, while McConnell read poll numbers.

If, like some, you wondered why Obama, Pelosi, and other Democrats wasted time praising a generally reprehensible Republican like Coburn, it’s because he stepped into the trap — as long as the debate is about how to solve the problem, the progressive side (which actually cares about solving it) holds the advantage.  And when even one Republican joins the debate on those terms, the pretense of his colleagues is easier to expose.

A braver, more assertive Democratic party could easily push further in this rhetorical direction.  Rather than compromising almost instinctively every time the GOP spouts a faux-populist talking point, President Obama could state clearly that he’s completely open to Republican ideas for solving problems — but that doesn’t mean he has to give the time of day to flimsy excuses, made-up controversies, and the other distractions that make up the right’s preferred fodder for public discourse.

Who knows?  Maybe if Obama made the Republicans pay more of a price for engaging in such BS, they might be slightly less inclined to pursue it.

I mean, it’s not like, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way” is such a hard philosophy for even low-information voters to grasp.

Tags: Barack Obama, Blair House, Democrats, GOP, Health care, health care summit, Jon Walker, Mitch McConnell, Politico, Republicans, Rob Andrews, Tom Coburn, White House Summit

Stand back, ladies and gentlemen, it appears that the fight for… um, whatever… is starting.  Appearing at a photo op town-hall meeting with Sen. Harry Reid in Nevada today, President Obama “made a fervent pitch” for passing a healthcare reform bill — and for the so-called summit with Republican and Democratic members of Congress next week.

As Lindsay Beyerstein concisely pointed out out two weeks ago, a key reason for announcing the summit was to provide “a delaying tactic… while Congressional Democrats wheel and deal furiously behind the scenes,” giving Obama the appearance of taking the political initiative while Pelosi, Reid, et al. were busy trying to push the sausage of healthcare reform through the legislative meat grinder.

But it’s also an intentional PR trap in the wake of Obama’s successful recent Q&A with GOP House members. A New York Times article this morning sums up the strategy behind bringing a specific proposal before the summit:

“It will be a reconciliation bill,” one Democratic aide said. “If Republicans don’t come with any substantial offers, this is what we would do.”

And, of course, we all know how likely it is that the Republicans will screw things up by actually offering a substantial proposal.  They can’t help themselves, and Obama knows it:

The Republicans say they’ve got a better way of doing it. So I want them to put it on the table — (applause) — because as I told them … I’m not an unreasonable guy. (Laughter.) If you show me that you can do the things we just talked about — protect people from insurance problems, make sure that the costs are controlled, and people who don’t have health insurance are covered — and you can do it cheaper than me, then why wouldn’t I do that? I’ll just grab your idea and say, great, and take all the credit. I’d be happy to do it. (Applause.)

So show me what you got. But don’t let the American people go another year, another 10 years, another 20 years without health insurance reform in this country. (Applause.)

Whatever political flaws he’s shown in the past year — and we’re all too painfully familiar with them — Obama is good at making himself seem like the reasonable alternative to Republicans’ ideological rigidity.  So, it’s not a bad idea to set up a public reminder just before Congress takes action.

I mean, uhh… they are going to take action, right?  Right?

Personally, I think so.  The actual proposal may be rather timid at first glance, but even if that is unsatisfactory, there’s a rare opening for progressive public opinion to be heard to make it better.  In a bit of kabuki we’ve seen before, the White House is saying they’ll back a public option if Harry Reid thinks a majority of the Senate will support one, and Reid is suggesting that he’ll push for one if the Obama administration will back him up.

So, what’s needed now is a push from the rabble (as in, us) to call both bluffs at the same time.  If Harry Reid can read his poll numbers, he knows how much (or, to be more accurate, how little) rhetorical support for a vaporware public option does for his prospects of survival.  And a few months ago, Tom Harkin said there were 52 solid Democratic votes in the Senate for a public option.  Perhaps we should ask him now for those 52 names, and figure out how to push those that are wavering?

The most effective path in terms of both politics and policy has been obvious for months now.  All they need is the courage to do it.  If Obama and the Democratic leaders in Congress play this right (for once), next week’s public dialogue might be a tool to provide that courage.

(Via Flickr.)

It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and apparently love is in the air in our nation’s capital.  Unfortunately, though, any smell you might notice isn’t the odor of fresh flowers wafting over the recently fallen snow — instead, it’s the hideous congealing of conventional wisdom among Beltway pundits.

Yes, friends, though you might have prayed David Broder was alone in confessing his May-December infatuation with Sarah Palin’s “pitch-perfect populism,” Politico this morning broke the bad news, admitting on behalf of all “mainstream political reporters” that — and I quote — “We love Palin.”

Sure, Politico’s Pool Boy Jim VandeHei and Jonathan Martin play a little coy, claiming Palin’s lure is that “she knows how to exploit our weakness to guarantee herself exposure far out of proportion to her actual influence in Republican politics,” that’s merely squirming after falling into the trap.  (Note: I tried to get a reading on my irony meter for Politico calling someone overhyped, but the needle hasn’t stopped spinning yet.)

Backing up Politico’s assertion are new columns by Marc Ambinder for CBS News and Joe Klein for Time making roughly the same argument — that although the writer sees through Palin’s calculated public persona, she’s got an uncanny sense of the pulse of mainstream (if conservative) Americans.

Curiously, this sort of respect rarely seems to be communicated on behalf of political figures who strike a chord with progressives — who instead are treated with derision as the Beltway pontificators strive to expose them as phonies (cf. Howard Dean).  But then again, maybe both phenomena are simply evidence of the same point:  Be very afraid when veterans of the Village punditocracy try to express their solidarity with “real Americans.”

Call it the Applebee’s salad bar fallacy.

David Dayen already wrote this morning about how Sen. Richard Shelby’s attempt to block 70 Obama administration nominees over a couple of earmarks “does amount to what you would call a ‘teachable moment’ about the dysfunctional Senate.”

In his initial reaction overnight, Josh Marshall went a bit further, noting that Shelby’s hostage-taking attempt showed “gallons more audacity than Obama ever could have hoped for”:

… I wonder if this story might not end up amounting to much more than the sum of its parts because it brings together three or four of the issues roiling American politics today in a bundle of smack-you-in-the-face arrogance that’s too much to ignore.

For Republicans and the Tea Party set you’ve got pork-barrel spending and earmarks… for Democrats, there’s the outrage at archaic Senate obstructionism.

Perhaps more important, it crystallizes the essential pettiness and hubris of the Republican in such a vivid way that even Democrats should be able to sell the image of GOP selfishness to a generally inattentive public.

It’s happened before, back in 1995 when Newt Gingrich led the newly Republican-controlled Congress in forcing a shutdown of the federal government, trying to force President Clinton to capitulate on budget issues.  Thanks to an inopportune remark by Gingrich about a personal snub he had received from Clinton, the White House successfully embarrassed the GOP into ending the standoff.

That Shelby would try such a stunt barely a couple of weeks after the Republicans snagged their coveted 41st Senate seat shows that his party hasn’t outgrown Gingrich’s penchant for overreach.   But, as D-Day also wrote today, President Obama and the Democratic leadership can’t let themselves be even less willing to stand up for their own interests than the famed triangulator, Clinton.

Perhaps Obama should make a high-profile visit to various GOP senators’ home states, asking locals if they’re as fond of Shelby’s earmarks as Massachusetts voters were of Ben Nelson’s “Cornhusker kickback.”  Or maybe there’s a better attention-getting maneuver.

But hell, they need to do something.  Don’t let this teachable moment pass.