SOUTH COUNTY DEMOCRATIC CLUB
OPINION SECTION
OPINION PAGE - EDITORIAL PAGE
SEPTEMBER OPINIONS |
POSTED 9/14/09 Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED 9/14/09 Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED 9/14/09 Lyndon G. Furst:
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AUGUST 2009 OPINIONS |
POSTED 8/28/09 Republicans, Religion and the Triumph of UnreasonHow do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?
The election of Obama - a black man with an anti-conservative message - as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin. When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view - to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation - has swollen. Now it is all they can see. Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and - at the same time - that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain. These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence - here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper - can pierce this conviction.
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POSTED 8/28/09Don't Get Sick!
Now, these many years later, as I witness the health care reform "debate," my grandfather's words have returned to haunt me. He had been a pioneer farmer in Saskatchewan on the Canadian prairies. That's where Canada's universal health care system was conceived during the hard years of the depression and its aftermath.
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POSTED 8/23/09
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POSTED 8/22/09 Why I love Britain's socialized healthcare system
Aug. 22, 2009 | My eldest daughter had a rough first week. Born after 22 hours of hard labor, her pink skin proceeded to turn an alarming shade of yellow on the second day of her life. It was a bad case of jaundice. She would need to be placed in an incubator, whose ultraviolet light would hopefully clear up the condition. If not, a transfusion would be required. My exhausted wife and I watched in numb horror as our child was encased in the clear plastic box that was to become her crib for the next seven days. What we had hoped would be a straightforward delivery had turned into a nightmare. Because I am American, and those endless days and nights were spent in a maternity hospital in London, the week that followed has been very much on my mind as I listen to the recent attacks on the British National Health Service. It is a system that I found to be very different from the one currently being described as "evil" and "Orwellian" by politicians and commentators eager to use it as an example of the dark side of public medicine. |
POSTED 8/19/09 Howard Dean Calls Public Option Indispensable http://www.truthout.org/081709R?n |
POSTED 8/18/09 Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED 8/18/09 Obama Picks Fight with Left on Health Reform (From Common Dreams.Org) In backing away from its support for a public option in healthcare reform, the Obama administration is Liberal Democrats have insisted a public insurance option is necessary to ensure competition for private insurers. Just this week, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean predicted there could be Democratic primary challenges if a healthcare bill without a public option is approved by Congress. Dean also told liberal bloggers gathered last week at the "Netroots Nation" convention that the only piece of reform left in the House bill that is worth doing is the public option. The left wing of the Democratic Party already has been irritated by concessions its leaders have made on healthcare to centrists in the House and Senate. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) told CNN on Sunday it would be "very difficult" for her and other liberals to support legislation that does not include a public option. "The only way we can be sure that very low-income people and persons who work for companies that don't offer insurance have access to it, is through an option that would give the private insurance companies a little competition," she said. Johnson added that House liberals have already told Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that she should insist on White House support for a public option. Some liberals are already disappointed with positions President Barack Obama has taken since his election. THERE'S MORE - GO TO COMMONDREAMS.ORG
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POSTED 8/17/09 Who's Behind the Attacks on a Health Care Overhaul?
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POSTED 8/17/09 White House Appears Ready to Drop "Public Option"
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POSTED 8/17/09 Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED 8/9/09 Senator Carl Levin's
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POSTED 8/3/09 Lyndon G. Furst:
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Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama
was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital." 
As I learned when my newborn daughter was very sick, in U.K. hospitals, people take care of each other
picking a fight with the liberal wing of the Democratic party. 
JULY 2009 OPINIONS |
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POSTED 7/27/09 Senator Carl Levin's
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POSTED 7/26/09 Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED 7/19/09 Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED 7/12/09 Senator Carl Levin's
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POSTED 7/12/09 FOCUS | Report: Bush Surveillance Program Was Massive
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POSTED 7/10/09 Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED 7/6/09
Published on Friday, July 3, 2009 by The New York Times That '30s Showby Paul Krugman O.K., Thursday's jobs report settles it. We're going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that?
Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs - and as that grim employment report confirmed, it's continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we're about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole. And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren't the only bad news in Thursday's report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That's a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone? Wait - there's more bad news: the fiscal crisis of the states. Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further. So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3 ½ million jobs by late next year. That's much better than nothing, but it's not remotely enough. And there doesn't seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration's plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I. All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren't aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level. |
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POSTED 7/6/09 Published on Sunday, July 5, 2009 by ConsortiumNews.com Republicans, a Threat to the Republic?by Robert Parry
Like Palin, George W. Bush was a charismatic underachiever who hadn't accomplished much in life and showed little intellectual firepower but was nevertheless presented by the GOP as its candidate for one of the most powerful jobs on earth. However, unlike Palin who lost her vice presidential bid, Bush won the presidency for two terms - in two dubious elections - with disastrous consequences for the nation. Then, even amid the wreckage of the Bush administration's final days, the Republican Party enthusiastically nominated first-term Alaska Gov. Palin to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, which they hoped would be filled by 72-year-old cancer survivor John McCain. The Republican Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, was a glimpse into Crazy Town, with a national party gone giddy over the folksy Sarah Palin, who we were told could "field-dress a moose." The dominant chant of the convention - sometimes led by Palin herself - was "drill, baby, drill." On the campaign trail, Palin tossed out the reddest of red meat, accusing Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists" and whipping angry white crowds into anti-Obama shouts of "kill him" and "traitor." She seemed oblivious to the demagogic passions that she was unleashing - or she simply didn't care about the possible consequences. Palin finally unraveled with her simple-minded answers to simple questions during network TV interviews. In trying to burnish her foreign policy expertise she famously declared, "you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska." In elaborating on the point, she later said, "As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska." As Palin flamed out, her defenders claimed that the "liberal media" was picking on her. On one radio talk show, a caller complained to me that CBS News' anchor Katie Couric had asked Palin unfairly tough questions. I responded by noting that one of those "tough" questions was what newspapers Palin read, to which Palin couldn't manage a coherent answer. |
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POSTED 7/6/09 Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED 7/6/09 What the hell is going on with Republican politics lately?
One must assume there were very many Republican strategists greeting the Saturday dawn in painfully similar fashion. It would not come as a tremendous surprise if reports surface next week about a rain of frogs and plague of locusts striking Republican National Committee headquarters. I mean, seriously. This is getting entirely out of hand. The Republican Party, its adherents and its advocates have been running an astonishing gauntlet of shame, silliness and disgrace for four long years now. Randy "Duke" Cunningham went to jail for accepting $1.3 million in bribes, Bob Ney pleaded guilty to accepting bribes as well, Tom DeLay got indicted for money-laundering, Jack Abramoff lobbied half the GOP members of Congress into federal investigations, Mark Foley went sideways with Congressional pages while Dennis Hastert covered it up, Larry Craig tapped his foot in a bathroom stall and got busted for solicitation, and Ted Haggard, minister and leader of one of the largest evangelical churches in America and a pillar of the GOP base, was discovered enjoying meth parties with homosexual prostitutes in his spare time. This deluge of ignominy eventually resulted in a ravaging defeat at the polls for the GOP in the November 2006 midterm elections. There was, and remains, nothing particularly inspiring or exceptional about the Democratic Party which routed them and took back Congress that year - they were, and remain, a fairly bland and timid lot in the main - but the GOP was just so bad that the country abandoned them, thus beginning the long, slow crumbling of Karl Rove's dream of a permanent Republican majority. THERE'S MORE - GO TO Truthout.Com POSTED 7/6/09 |
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POSTED 7/5/09 Obama's Trip: A Mission to Reshape U.S. Image
And when in Rome? Obama will go to the Vatican to see Pope Benedict XVI for their first meeting. Obama's weeklong trip - he leaves Sunday night for Moscow - typifies the pace of his first-year agenda. Capitalizing on his popularity and his party's hold on power in Washington, Obama is moving quickly and broadly on foreign policy. That often means overturning George W. Bush's policies or mending relations that Obama contends went adrift under his Republican predecessor. Familiar foes may shadow Obama and his plans. Iran and North Korea are defiantly pursuing nuclear weapons programs despite international penalties. Iran has taken a hard and deadly line against postelection protesters, while North Korea fired seven ballistic missiles off its eastern coast on America's Independence Day. The North also has raised the prospect of a long-range missile launch, possibly toward Hawaii. The U.S. has positioned more missile defenses around the state. THERE'S MORE - GO TO Truthout.Com POSTED 7/5/09 |
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POSTED 7/1/09 Senator Carl Levin's
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POSTED 7/1/09 Lyndon G. Furst:
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Let's do the math.
JUNE 2009 OPINIONS |
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POSTED 6/30/09 Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED6/22/09 Senator Carl Levin's
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Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED 6/22/09 Spreading the Wealth Around to the Insurance Industry and Friends (From Truthout.Com) This is the time when the excrement starts hitting the fan. The lobbyists are in The industry groups will also have their friends in the news media working overtime hyping any possible obstacle to health care reform. And they are filling the airwaves with scary ads, warning that people will never be able to see a doctor again if meaningful health care reform passes. Since there are trillions of dollars at stake, the effort is understandable. The basic story is simple. The insurance, pharmaceutical and medical supply industries, along with the hospitals and the American Medical Association, have rigged the deck so that they get rich at the public's expense. They have structured our health care system so that we pay more than twice as much per person as people in other wealthy countries, even though we get worse care by many measures. The bloat in the health care sector is projected to grow rapidly over the next decade as health care consumes an ever larger share of the economy. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reports that just the increase in health care spending share of the economy over the next decade will cost us $4.3 trillion. That is equal to a health care tax of $57,000 for an average family of four. Who benefits from the taxpayers generosity? CMS projects that $1.4 trillion, or $18,500 per family will go to the hospitals. Doctors and the pharmaceutical companies are each expected to score about $550 billion, costing families $7,300. And the insurance industry's share of GDP is projected to rise by $360 billion, or $4,800 for an average family. THERE'S MORE - GO TO TRUTHOUT.COM - POSTED 6/22/09 |
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POSTED 6/22/09 Moyers Interviews Robert Reich on "Who Runs Government" Robert Reich, welcome to the Journal. ROBERT REICH: Hi, Bill. BILL MOYERS: I wanted to talk to you because you do know how Washington works. TIME ROBERT REICH: Well, we're now just about in the real time of fight and conflict. Republicans and the healthcare lobbies, mostly big pharmaceuticals, their trade associations, also the big insurance companies, private insurance companies, they are bringing out the big guns, the lobbyists, the threats, the promises. They're swarming all over Capitol Hill. And the question is how hard the President's going to fight back? So far the style of the White House is to set objectives and to let Congress come up with the details. But I think the President's going to have to get involved in the details to a much greater extent because the lobbyists on the other side have so much to lose, they fear, and so much to gain, they expect, if they win. BILL MOYERS: But this President seems given more to finesse than fight. He seems to want- you know, he said in his speech yesterday, "Let's get everybody together." Has consensus become his primary aim? ROBERT REICH: Well, he wants a bill apparently that has some Republicans on it. He only needs 51 votes in the Senate to get healthcare through on a Reconciliation Bill. That's a big victory for the Senate Democrats that wanted him to be pushing hard but he seems to be indicating he wants some Republicans on that bill. The Republicans are not willing to budge. They don't want what's called a public option which essentially would be something like Medicare that gives people a lot of bargaining leverage to get lower drug prices and also puts some pressure on private insurers. That public option is going to be absolutely critical. That's where the fight is going to really be squared. |
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Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED6/21/09 Senator Carl Levin's
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POSTED 6/20/09 Super-Blue Dogsby Ed Kilgore, June 19, 2009 05:40 PM EST(From the Democratic Strategist) The reluctance of moderate Democrats in both Houses of Congress to support key elements of the Obama administration's agenda has unsurprisingly angered others in the progressive coalition. Among the angry, OpenLeft's estimable Chris Bowers has come up with a new strategy that's more immediate than his site's general argument for launching or threatening primary challengers to "centrist' Dems: molding the Progressive Caucus into a more aggressive faction that will withhold votes for unacceptable legislation, just like the Blue Dogs: Instead of 60 votes in the Senate, what progressives need is Democratic control of both branches of Congress, control of the White House, and a progressive block of at least 13 Senators and 45 House members that will vote against Democratic legislation unless their demands are met. What we need is our own version of the Blue Dogs and Evan Bayh's "conservodem" Senate group that is large enough, and staunch enough, to be able to block Democratic legislation by joining with Republicans. The impact of such a group of Super-Blue Dogs, of course, totally depends on the credibility of its threats to vote with Republicans against Obama and leadership-sponsored legislation. Chris Bowers obviously thinks they should and would, but the administration's point of view on this dynamic will be crucial. Maybe they'd actually like a left-counterpart to the Blue Dogs,or maybe they think there are enough dogs-a-barking right now. (From the Democratic Strategist) |
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POSTED 6/16/09 The Rise of Single-Payer Health Care
A House committee held a hearing on single-payer health coverage on Wednesday, and a Senate committee included single payer in a hearing on Thursday. Many opponents of single payer, including President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, say it would be the ideal solution if it were possible. A single-payer or "Medicare for all" system that eliminates for-profit health insurance and simply pays for everyone's treatment by private doctors and hospitals of their choosing is also the only solution consistently favored by a majority of Americans in polls. The proposal, already in place in most of the world's wealthy nations, is raised at every health care town-hall forum that Congress members or President Obama speak at, including the one Obama held on Thursday in Green Bay, Wisconsin. THERE'S MORE - GO TO Truthout.Com POSTED 6/16/09 |
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POSTED 6/13/09 Senator Carl Levin's
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POSTED 6/13/09 Senators Who Opposed Tobacco Bill Received Top Dollar From Industry Washington - Among the 17 senators who voted against allowing the Food and Drug Administration to
regulate tobacco are some of the top recipients of campaign contributions from the tobacco industry, which has donated millions of dollars to lawmakers in the past several campaign cycles. Over the course of his nearly quarter-century Senate career, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who hails from the tobacco-rich state of Kentucky, has received $419,025 from the tobacco industry, more than any other member of Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that analyzes the influence of money on politics and policy. North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr, who led the opposition to the bill, is the second highest recipient and netted $359,100 from tobacco-related political action committees and individual contributions. His state is the nation's largest tobacco grower and is home to R.J. Reynolds, the nation's second largest tobacco manufacturing company, which contributed $196,850 to Burr's campaigns. |
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POSTED 6/1/09 FROM Robert Reich's Blog The Future of Manufacturing, GM, and American WorkersAs president of General Motors when Eisenhower tapped him to become secretary of defense in 1953, “Engine Charlie” Wilson voiced at his Senate confirmation hearing what was then the conventional view. When asked whether he could make a decision in the interest of the US that was adverse to the interest of GM, he said he could. Then he reassured them that such a conflict would never arise. “I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country.” Wilson was only slightly exaggerating. At the time, the fate of GM was inextricably linked to that of the nation. In 1953, GM was the world’s biggest manufacturer, the symbol of US economic might. It generated 3 per cent of US gross national product. GM’s expansion in the 1950s was credited with stalling a business slump. It was also America’s largest employer, with over 460,000 employees. Its blue-collar workers received (in today's dollars) $60 an hour that year in wages and benefits. |
overdrive, rounding up members of Congress just like the cowboys of the Old West would bring in the herd.
MAGAZINE called you one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. So take us inside for a moment or two into how you think this healthcare debate is playing out after the President's speech yesterday.
Health care reform plans are being drafted and passed around on both sides of Capitol Hill, but the plan with the greatest number of Congress members behind it was first introduced as a bill six years ago. With two new co-sponsors having just signed on, Congressman John Conyers's single-payer health care plan, HR 676, now has 80 Congress members supporting it. 
May 2009 OPINIONS |
Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED 5/27/09 Prison Reform - Article from Detroit Free Press: Michigan can safely reduce prison population with planning (From the Detroit Free Press) The difficulty in finding a solution to Michigan’s prison population problem is not from a lack of political will or a shortage of reform ideas. A range of high-profile groups, including Governor Granholm, Michigan Legislators, nonprofit organizations and business groups have proposed reforms. What is lacking is a common understanding of what caused Michigan’s prison population growth. Believe it or not, Michigan’s prison growth was not caused by crime rates, but by policy choices that increased the average prisoner length of stay. Consider Michigan’s prison system as a bathtub.The flow of water into the bathtub, new commitments to prison, has been relatively constant since 1989, but the flow out each year, has decreased. This decline in releases resulted in an increased average prisoner length of stay, now over a year longer than the national average. The driving force behind Michigan’s longer prison stays is the unique discretion afforded to the parole board. Specifically, the parole board decides at what point between the minimum and maximum sentence each prisoner is released. The catch is that, there is a wide range between the minimum and maximum sentence. For example, the average minimum sentence in 2007 was 4 years, while the average maximum was 14 years. This, along with a doubling of parole denials for violent and sex offenders, which now represent 68% of Michigan’s prison population, caused the increased length of stay. To reduce Michigan’s prison population the state must safely reduce the average length of stay by limiting parole board discretion. The Department of Corrections has already made sizeable progress with administrative changes resulting in a reduction of over 2,000 prisoners since 2006. However, history dictates that it only takes one high-profile crime committed by a parolee to reverse reform. Thus, a reduction strategy must be supported with specific statutory changes. Towards this end, I recommend the following steps: THERE'S MORE - GO TO THE DETROIT FREE PRESS POSTED 5/27/09 |
POSTED 5/24/09 Senator Carl Levin's
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Lyndon G. Furst:
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Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED 5/4/09 The Other 100 DaysBy: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Columnist
President Obama marked the 100th day of his term with a prime time press conference on Wednesday night, during which he highlighted a few key accomplishments while reminding the American people that he has quite a lot of crazy crap to deal with. A swine flu outbreak tickling the pandemic edge, an economy still hemorrhaging jobs and money, a ballooning deficit, bad banks, a new eruption of violence in Iraq, an ongoing war in Afghanistan, a looming war and a shaky government in Pakistan, and a bunch of very strange people waving tea bags and yelling about Lord only knows what, because they sure didn't. I got this, Obama seemed to be saying, but damn. The "100 Days" benchmark is a relic from the first trimester of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal reform push, and is for the most part a meaningless milestone used primarily by news media types to fill air time and column inches. Still, the Obama administration can lay claim to a series of important victories, with more still to come if he keeps the wind at his back. The poll numbers are universally positive, and the American people seem willing so far to be patient and give the process time to play out. For the Republican Party, however, the last 100 days have been something out of a Roger Corman flick: blood on the walls, body parts everywhere, lots of screaming and no plot to speak of. The last 30 months have brought a litany of disasters for the GOP - electoral wipeouts in '06 and '08, a poisoned party "brand," mass voter defections to the Democrats, the total repudiation of their whole ideological slate, and an ex-president about as popular as the mumps - culminating with a run of incidents since the inauguration so unutterably bad as to beggar likeness. Let's review. |
Lyndon G. Furst:
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Lyndon G. Furst:
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POSTED5/1/09 Fox News Continues to Hallucinate About a Socialist/Fascist Menace -- And It's Causing Real Damage By Timothy Karr, Huffington Post. Posted April 30, 2009. Fox news' insane rants about the impending onset of socialism/fascism has trickled into mainstream media. This is extremely dangerous.
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POSTED5/1/09 How the Far Right Handed Dems a 60-Vote Majority The reason Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter switched parties on Tuesday is rather obvious. Though Specter explained in a statement released today that it's due to the GOP's rightward shift ("I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans," he said), the more likely reason is that Specter's political career would end if he remained a Republican. Unlike Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords, who abandoned the GOP and caucused with the Democrats in 2001 in a principled decision, declining to run for reelection, Specter is simply reading the tea leaves. Most available polling indicates that the moderate Specter would be trounced in the 2010 Republican primary by a conservative challenger named Pat Toomey. |
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