Farewell, Ted Grocoff. Former NFD Vice-Chair Passes On

Blessed is the Righteous Judge.

Theodore “Ted” Grocoff, 79, a long-time member and a forme vice-chair of the North Fulton Democrats,  died January 10, 2010. Ted worked in the camera industry, and later at the Consulate General of Israel as a driver for Consul General Arye Mekel. Ted is survived by his wife of 54 years, Phyllis Grocoff; daughters and sons-in-law, Susan and Daniel Alterman of Atlanta and Wendy and Jeffrey Rudd of Sarasota, FL; son and daughter-in-law, Matthew and Kelly Grocoff, of Ann Arbor, MI; grandchildren, Andrew “A.J.” Levine (who will be married to Dahlia Travis in May), Alexis Levine, Samantha Alterman, Jane Eleanor Grocoff, Danielle Rudd and Jayme Rudd; and sister-in-law, RoseAnn Center, of Wanaque, NJ. Please sign online guestbook at www.edressler.com. In lieu of flowers, please make donations to Israeli Defense Force, or the charity of your choice.

May the Grocoff family be comforted among all those who mourn.

A Death In The Family

Colleen Bailey Mabry, wife of Georgia Democratic party and labor leader Herb Mabry, passed away on December 28, 2009, at the age of 80.  Colleen was born on January 4, 1929 and grew up in Hartwell, GA. She graduated from Hart County High School as valedictorian of her class. After graduating from high school, she came to Atlanta to work for the telephone company. In addition to raising six children, Colleen continued to work at various bookkeeping positions and retired about 15 years ago as a manager in the finance department of Fulton County. At the age of 48 she decided to go back to school to obtain her college degree. She attended Georgia State University at night while still working a full-time job and graduated with a bachelor’s degree a few years later at age 53. Colleen was very involved in the Democratic Party of Georgia, and was an enthusiastic member of the “Peanut Brigade” supporting Jimmy Carter for President. She was an avid reader and she and her husband traveled quite extensively over the years. Colleen was a member of the First Baptist Church of Sandy Springs.

Slamming Stimulus Package But Happy To Take Its Money

Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor may be a GOP rising star, but he sure is a hypocrite.

How else to describe someone who is a leading critic of President Obama’s Recovery Act and yet also joins his congressional colleagues to urge Virginia’s Department of Transportation to apply for stimulus money for high-speed rail? If that isn’t two-faced, what is?

He’s also a demagogue: “Millions of jobs will be crushed by the administration’s policies.”

Say what? The stimulus may have been too small and overemphasized tax cuts, but it has helped states, including his own, with longer unemployment benefits, expanded food stamps, and subsidies for people who have lost jobs to extend their health insurance. It has also kept teachers in classrooms and cops on the streets, and gotten workers rehired.

Hours after Cantor recently delivered the GOP’s weekly radio address blasting the stimulus, Vice President Biden announced that $ 1.5 million of the bill’s money would go to the Richmond Police Department to retain officers. And $20 million is going to Chesterfield County – the suburbs of Richmond – to keep 275 teachers from being fired.

Virginia’s working men and women should remember that Cantor fought hard to cut a provision in the stimulus bill that was designed to help low-income workers.

As Obama marks his sixth month in office, his presidency will be judged by its laser-like focus on creating jobs, good jobs, and many of them. Double-digit unemployment is a ticking time bomb, and his economic team needs to work quickly to defuse it. But Cantor and his crew don’t care about creating jobs. They want to spin the debate about the economy so their party, which has absolutely nothing to offer working people, games the 2010 midterm elections.

It may be, as some argue, that the politics of getting a second stimulus through a Congress filled with GOP obstructionists and conservative Democrats is too tough at this time – especially with the battle for health-care reform in full gear. If that’s the case, what’s needed instead is a simple and comprehensive package that focuses on job creation.

In their article in the July 13 Nation, “Our Jobless Recovery,” Leo Hindery Jr. and Leo W. Gerard lay out a set of commonsense proposals for a job-led recovery.

“We can either focus our economic recovery efforts on creating full employment for the 150 million workers who are not part of the top 0.2 percent and on rebuilding the country’s manufacturing base,” they wrote. “Or, as we have been doing for nearly three decades, we can concentrate on policies that mostly just benefit the incomes of the wealthiest 300,000.”

The economic spin battle under way – disconnected from the real economy and working Americans’ lives – is filled with demagogic and alarmist rhetoric about out-of-control government spending and federal debt.

But in the absence of consumer spending and with banks failing to lend – even while they report record profits and hand out huge bonuses – government is the last resort. It must spend in order to avert a deeper recession.

But Eric Cantor and his crew just don’t get it. Instead of laying out job-creation policies, they whine. And they whine.

The question is, why are we still listening to people who broke the back of the middle class, engineered the largest redistribution of wealth upward to the very rich, and now dare to attack fairly modest government-led efforts to help working families weather this economic crisis?

Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editor and publisher of The Nation magazine

Canada: They’re Not “Dying By The Millions.”

You should have heard them: Three middle-age couples sitting around a breakfast table, complaining about glitches in the Canadian health-care system.

This was in a charming (of course) bed & breakfast in Victoria, British Columbia, about three years ago. My wife and I had slept a little late (of course), but the proprietor had (of course) kept breakfast warm for us. And the conversation was just heating up.

The three couples were from Canada’s east coast and upper (there’s no other kind) Midwest. For a few minutes we listened in silence to their cataloging of irritations, until finally I asked, “Well, would you like to switch over to the system we have in the U.S.?

To a man and woman, they looked aghast. Their vocal responses, to the best of my recollection, went something like, “Good heavens, no!” “Certainly not!” “No, no, no, no, no! and (LOUD GUFFAW).

Because in Canada, everyone is covered. No one worries about how they’ll pay for medical care, no one is afraid to leave their job because they’ll lose coverage, no one is bankrupted by medical bills, no one has to choose between a prescription drug and putting food on the table. The Canadian government doesn’t mandate or guarantee health insurance; the Canadian government mandates and guarantees health care. Doctors receive payment from, but are not employed by, the state. No “government bureaucrat” determines what test or treatment a patient will receive; if a doctor orders it, the patient gets it. Period.

Ginned-up horror stories notwithstanding, the landscape to the north is not strewn with the bodies of dying Canadians abandoned by cold, socialized medicine. Canadians live longer than Americans (80.18 years  there, 78.95 here), and fewer Canadian babies die in their first year of life (5.08 per 1,000 there, 6.3 here).

Ah, but surely they’ve bankrupted themselves by covering every citizen, right? Well, certainly there are problems with the Canadian system; they’re constantly squabbling about it. But what do they pay? A whole lot less than we do. Per capita, it comes to $2,931 per year. We pay – one way or another – $5,274. That’s while leaving around 47 million Americans without any coverage whatsoever.

Yes, Canadians frequently have longer waiting periods for elective surgery, sometimes even for procedures that seem only marginally elective, like hip-joint replacement. But the ads featuring lies spewed out by Shona Holmes about her supposed Canadian medical nightmare are scare tactics at its most vile and desperate.

Vile and desperate because the insurance companies, which siphon off 20-25 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S., are unspeakably vile and increasingly desperate. They make their obscene profits, and compensate their morbidly-obese-cat executives by denying care, not by providing it. Now, with President Obama’s public option for health care threatening their herds of cash cows and flocks of golden geese, they’re pouring tens of millions into fresh, new falsehoods in a last-ditch attempt to shoo Americans away from a path already chosen, and quite contentedly taken, not only by Canada but by every other developed country in the world.

That’s chosen by  every other developed country in  the world. It’s not as if a lineup of evil dictators cruelly running Canada, England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, et al, imposed harsh and uncaring systems on their helpless and suffering people. What happened was, elected representatives fashioned means (they vary) of providing medical care to every citizen in every one of these states.

They’re democracies; elections are free, open, honest, and held regularly. Any country wishing to trash “socialized medicine” and just let the free market determine who gets what care, and for how much — e.g., the non-system in the United States of America – has had decades to do so. Not one of them has.

If you want to know why, well, take a chance and talk to a foreigner. Or, ask a Canadian, Brit, Norwegian, Icelander, Dane — anyone from any of the countries mentioned above — to define “pre-existing condition.” You’ll get a puzzled look. That should tell you pretty much all you need to know.

Then, define “pre-existing condition” for them. The look you’ll get in response to that will tell you all the rest you need to know.

It doesn’t have to be this way. With any luck — and a lot of work — it won’t be for much longer.

Arthur Salm is an SDNN columnist.

Why Fiscal Conservatives Should Love Medicare-for-All

Call me old fashioned, but a true conservative is someone who conserves, dislikes wasting money and is offended by endless corporate bailouts by hard-working taxpayers. A fiscal conservative like me. As a public health professional, I want to see health dollars used to keep people healthy through public health and wellness programs, as well as provide medical care when it’s needed.

We have a health care crisis in the United States. Nearly 50 million people do not have health insurance, and they are our family and neighbors.

There are 500,000 medical bankruptcies every year. Most of these half million families had health insurance; at least they thought they did because every month they paid for insurance. Millions of people have learned the hard way that for-profit sickness insurance does not prevent financial ruin during a health crisis.

One of the worst lies thrown around every time Congress debates health care is that the U.S. will end up with socialized medicine. Socialized medicine is when the government owns and operates health facilities as well as pays the salaries of the doctors, nurses and the rest of the healthcare work force.

Let me say as clearly as possible — President Obama and the Congress are not discussing, introducing or enacting socialized medicine.

Good old-fashioned U.S. socialized medicine

Today, the U.S. already has socialized medical systems serving more than 20 million people. The current U.S. socialized medicine systems are very popular. The largest in terms of numbers of people is the Military Health System. The largest in terms of numbers of facilities owned and operated is the Veterans Administration health system. Two additional smaller U.S. socialized medical systems are the Indian Health Service and the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Despite being socialized medicine, the VA is ranked the highest in a national survey of patient satisfaction by the University of Michigan. U.S. taxpayers own the 155 VA hospitals and 881 clinics; we employ 289,000 people working in the VA including 16,000 doctors and 42,000 nurses.

Even the bastion of capitalism, Fortune magazine, is impressed by VA health care, stating, “The seamless integration of science, information, and compassion is the dream of modern health care. Scenes like these are not fantasies, however, but daily realities at the Veterans Health Administration.” (Fortune, May 2006.)

Let me repeat, President Obama and the Congress are not discussing, introducing, or enacting socialized medicine. Unlike the socialized system military and veterans enjoy, most health care services are provided through a private delivery system. All reforms will build on the existing private delivery system.

2009 health reform debate

So now that we all agree that the President and Congress are not expanding socialized medicine in the U.S., what are they proposing? There are two basic options and neither creates a nationalized or socialized health care system.

Medicare for all: The first choice expands Medicare eligibility beyond its current limitation to elderly (over 65) and disabled individuals of any age. This is the most conservative, least-disruptive and cost-effective way to cover more people; it only takes a simple change to an existing, very popular program. Every time the Congressional Budget Office scores the cost of Medicare-for-all type programs, they pay for themselves through two key business principles, the power of bulk purchasing and administrative savings though the elimination of waste in the system.

Mandated insurance: The second choice forces taxpayers to buy for-profit insurance despite a wasteful administrative cost of $1 billion a day. Yes, a trillion dollars every two and a half years just for paperwork, not a penny of that for health care. As a fiscal conservative, I do not want to pay a secret corporate bailout so that greedy CEOs make bonuses based on how good they are at rationing care to sick people.

In this expansion of the current failed system, the U.S. spends more than twice as much per person than any other country and the excess cost does not result in better outcomes. The U.S. is about 37th in the world for life expectancy, infant mortality, and other indicators of health status.

We have to walk away from corporate rationing to create a seamless system with the highest quality services for the best price. The easiest way to hold down costs is to have the largest purchasing group possible to get bulk prices — this is the single-risk pool.

Especially in this economic downturn it is essential to help people get access to health care. Being creative now gives us the chance to create a brand-new system, an All-American plan.

False conservatives will parrot the corporate line and continue to bail out the failed sickness insurance system. True fiscal conservatives who want to eliminate waste, hold down costs and improve outcomes will support Senate Bill 703 and House Bill 676. All the other bills transfer tax dollars first into needless paperwork and corporate profits and then dole out whatever is left for medical bills.

The choice is clear. We keep our doctors and hospitals in the current private delivery system but let one public insurance plan handle the paperwork and pay the bills.

——————————————————————————–

Carol Miller is a New Mexico public and rural health expert. She has public service in Washington, D.C., in both Republican and Democratic administrations, including the Clinton White House. In 1994 she was the health reform policy adviser for the National Rural Health Association and the New Mexico Secretary of Health. Miller, a former Commissioned Officer in the US Public Health Service, has used both the uniformed services and veterans health care systems.

Republicans: A Threat to the Republic?

Sarah Palin’s abrupt decision to resign as Alaska’s governor—and her rambling explanation—underscore again how the Republican Party over the past dozen years has put up candidates for top national offices who are unqualified or ill-suited for those sensitive positions.

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 took 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.
Shrill, baby, shrill

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.

By the end of Campaign 2008, most American voters had concluded that Palin was simply not ready for prime time. But she remained beloved by many rank-and-file Republicans and had staunch advocates among the GOP establishment, including leading neoconservative voice William Kristol.

In looking toward Campaign 2012, political commentators counted her among Republican top-tier presidential candidates. (So, too, were Sen. John Ensign of Nevada and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford before those moral-values champions admitted to extramarital affairs,)

Now the impetuous Palin has decided not even to complete her first term as governor, quitting with 18 months to go. In her stream-of-consciousness resignation statement—that veered from self-righteous to self-pitying—Palin seemed to suggest that she was quitting so she could avoid the lame-duck temptation to take junkets.

“I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks, travel around the state, to the Lower 48 (maybe), overseas on international trade – as so many politicians do,” Palin said Friday from her home in Wasilla, Alaska. “And then I thought—that’s what’s wrong—many just accept that lame-duck status, hit the road, draw the paycheck and ‘milk it.’

“I’m not putting Alaska through that—I promised efficiencies and effectiveness. That’s not how I am wired. I am not wired to operate under the same old ‘politics as usual.’ I promised that four years ago—and I meant it. It’s not what is best for Alaska. I am determined to take the right path for Alaska even though it is unconventional and not so comfortable.”

So instead of completing the job that the people of Alaska hired her to do—be their governor—Palin announced her decision to quit by the end of July. Amazingly, there’s still hope in some Republican circles that Palin will use her free time to mount a campaign for the White House in 2012. (Kristol said Palin may have been “crazy like a fox.”)

And given the GOP’s continued media clout and its sophisticated attack capabilities, it surely is not out of the question that the Republicans might regain the White House in the not-too-distant future with another high-risk candidate, possibly even Palin herself.
Democratic comparisons

While the Republicans send up light-weights like Bush and Palin, the Democrats generally select candidates with strong credentials in governance.

By comparison to Bush in 2000 and 2004 and Palin in 2008, the Democrats correspondingly put up Al Gore, John Kerry and Joe Biden. While those three men surely have their shortcomings, they all are highly qualified and deeply experienced individuals.

Even a Democratic newcomer like Barack Obama demonstrated a first-rate intellect and impressive organizational skills as a candidate.

Yet, the idea that the Democrats are the “responsible ones” and the Republicans are the “crazies” is disconcerting for someone like me who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in a Republican household with Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative on my nightstand.

Then, the Republicans were the party of Rotary Club businessmen who met payrolls, balanced budgets, led community charities and—while supporting necessary government investments in roads, schools and other public works—held a reasonable skepticism about Washington’s ability to solve all the nation’s problems.

Though there were imbalanced and dangerous GOP leaders then, too, like Sen. Joe McCarthy and Vice President Richard Nixon, the most powerful Republicans were generally solid characters like President Dwight Eisenhower and Sen. Everett Dirksen. Only over the past three decades has anti-intellectual anti-empiricism transformed the GOP into a modern-day know-nothing party that disdains facts and reason.

Ronald Reagan, with his loose relationship with reality, was an early version of this new Republican, but George W. Bush and Sarah Palin have taken Reagan’s tendencies to new heights. Over the past eight years, Bush and his neocon advisers treated information as something to be twisted and falsified, all the better to mislead a gullible public.

For Republicans, dogma regularly overrode reason. The GOP response to the federal debt and the growing gap between America’s rich and the rest of us has been to advocate tax cuts and more tax cuts, to let the wealthy consolidate an equity imbalance not seen since the pre-Depression days of the 1920s.

In the face of the record deficits spurred by Reagan and Bush tax cuts, the party simultaneously embraced the neocon agenda of expanding America’s global empire and settling international problems through the costly option of military force.

Despite the resulting harm to the nation’s economic health and to the stretched-thin U.S. military, the Republicans have refused to rethink either their tax cuts or their overseas military commitments. Instead they have opted for a political strategy of attacking anyone and any proposal that seeks even a mildly different approach.

And the pattern of rejecting science and objective evidence continues. Recently, during a House debate about cap-and-trade legislation aimed at reducing global warming, GOP members cheered a claim that the science regarding this deepening environmental crisis was “a hoax.”
Scaring Democrats, and journalists

Perhaps, the Republicans’ greatest success has been in intimidating Democrats, many of whom are scared away from charting a different course out of fear that they will be targeted by the Right’s potent attack machine.

Even in the midst of a budget crisis, worsening unemployment and the harmful disparity between the rich and the rest, mainstream Democrats won’t broach the idea of restoring the top marginal tax rate of 50 percent, which prevailed during most of Reagan’s presidency, compared to the 35 percent now.

The best the Democrats can muster is to sit back and let some of Bush’s tax cuts expire next year, letting the figure rise a few percentage points but not nearly enough to address the nation’s looming budget crisis. (During the Eisenhower years, the marginal tax rate – the percentage that the richest Americans paid on the top end of their income—exceeded 90 percent.)

Sometimes, it seems Democrats would prefer to see Obama’s reform agenda fail—and the United States careen toward bankruptcy—than face the prospect of more GOP attack ads accusing them of “tax-and-spend.”

Another key factor in this political dysfunction is that journalists in the mainstream media have their own career fears about being accused of “liberal bias” if they challenge right-wing canards or investigate GOP crimes.

With a few exceptions—like MSNBC’s experimental evening lineup of liberal hosts—the U.S. news media continues to cower before the Right’s demonstrated ability to destroy journalists who get in the way.

The American Left has contributed to the crisis, too, by failing to invest much in building media outlets that will stand up to pressures from the Right, even as pro-Republican financiers were pouring billions of dollars into the construction of a vertically integrated right-wing media apparatus ranging from books, magazines and newspapers to talk radio, cable TV and the Internet.

This combination of factors has enabled the Republican Party to guide a large portion of the American population into a never-never-land of made-up facts and raging paranoia.

And, as Palin’s bizarre resignation statement made clear, the GOP was excited over possibly handing the reins of national power to someone who was clearly unstable and unfit for high office.

After eight years of George W. Bush and last year’s nomination of Palin, the question must now be asked: Has the Republican Party become a clear and present danger to the security of the United States and to the future of the American Republic?

By Robert Parry

How Georgia May Spend The Money Republicans Didn’t Want

Georgia is expected to get $5.9 billion for transportation, health care and other programs from the massive economic stimulus package now on President Obama’s desk.

The $787 billion package includes a $1.7 billion infusion for Medicaid, $1.2 billion for education and $1 billion to build and repair highways and bridges in Georgia, according to Federal Funds Information for States.

Georgia legislators, facing a $2.2 billion deficit, hope the money will help them stave off deeper budget cuts and furloughs. The money for health care, for instance, could prevent a 1.6 percent hospital fee to offset a widening Medicaid deficit.

Lawmakers have already decided to slow the 40-day legislative session in anticipation of the federal dollars. Both chambers agreed last week on a plan to disband in late March and return in June to consider any final budget changes.

State officials said Friday they might need time to determine how the stimulus affects their projections.

DISTRIBUTION

How the funds could be doled out, according to the preliminary review by Federal Funds Information for States:

- $1.7 billion for Georgia’s Medicaid program

- $1.2 billion in education dollars

- $1 billion to build and repair roads and bridges

- $333 million for special education programs

- $90 million for public housing

- $82 million for child care programs

- $33 million for homelessness prevention

- $20 million for the Head Start program

Does Limbaugh Want Cheese With That Whine?

How fortunate for Barack Obama that Rush Limbaugh, big radio personality and leader of the instinctual far right, has yet to retire to a sunny island with his bottles of pills. At a moment when Republicans on Capitol Hill feel they must pretend to negotiate with the popular new president over spending to revive the economy, he blurted out what they really feel.

Speaking on his daily broadcast and later on Fox News Channel about the president’s prospects, Mr. Limbaugh said forthrightly: “I hope he fails.”

With those words, he turned his ample silhouette into the rhetorical target of choice for Mr. Obama, who warned the Republican leadership that they “can’t listen to Rush Limbaugh” and expect to accomplish anything useful. Hoping to preserve the spirit of bipartisan goodwill that attended his inauguration, the president is offering politicians on the other side of the aisle a stark choice. They can work with him, or they can join the radio extremist who wants him to fail—and could not care less about the consequences for America.

As always, Mr. Limbaugh articulates his opposition to the stimulus plan in the ideological jargon favored by his party. Evidently he fears that if the United States spends more money on highways, railroads and modernizing our electrical grid, we will shortly come to resemble the old Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China or even Cuba. Improving schools and expanding health coverage is just more “socialism”—and why would any right-thinking Republican hope for that to succeed?

But while he flatters himself as a “thinker,” the sad fact is that Mr. Limbaugh often sounds as if he’s motivated more by resentment than philosophy. During an interview with his soul mate Sean Hannity on Fox, he revealed that in this time of national distress, he is obsessing over an old grudge.

“I disagree fervently with the people on our side of the aisle who have caved and who say, ‘Well, I hope [Obama] succeeds. We’ve got to give him a chance.’ Why? They didn’t give Bush a chance in 2000. Before he was inaugurated, the search-and-destroy mission had begun.”

In reality, the Democrats displayed little appetite for obstructing George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote but got his way on tax cuts in the summer of 2001. The Democratic Congressional leaders and the entire country rallied to the side of the president after 9/11—and the Democrats were rewarded with savage assaults on their patriotism in the following year’s midterm election.

Even now, Mr. Limbaugh remains deaf to the bipartisan appeals of the Obama White House, which has tried, perhaps too hard, to change the tone in Washington. “I never hear Democrats talking about walking across the aisle,” he complained to Mr. Hannity. “I never see any of them praise each other or brag about the fact that they do it. They brag about the Republicans that they destroy.”

What all this inane ranting proves is how remote Rush and his imitators are from the urgent concerns of the American public, including not only Democrats and independents but a growing number of Republicans, too.

According to current polling data, the Limbaugh line is potentially perilous for any politician outside a firmly right-leaning district.

As thousands of jobs disappear every week, as the security and aspirations of millions of families evaporate, most Americans hope fervently that the Obama stimulus plan will succeed. They hear nothing from the Republicans except demands for new tax breaks that will chiefly benefit the same privileged people who have made out so well during the past few decades—and who now take taxpayer money and spend millions on private jets and fancy office furniture.

When President Obama considers how much of his stimulus spending to apportion to tax cuts in a vain attempt to appease the opposition, he ought to remember how Mr. Limbaugh described the hidden attitude of Republican leaders. “I know what our [G.O.P.] strategy is. They’re hoping he fails, so that they can go back and say, ‘We wanted him to succeed. We gave it everything we got. We worked with him, but …’”

So perhaps the best course is not to worry too much about winning Republican votes in the Senate or about what they’re saying on talk radio, but to simply do what will work best for the country—and let the Limbaughs whine on, as they always do.

by Joe Conason

The Age Of Obama And The Rebirth Of US Liberalism

When in college, I flirted a bit with conservatism. I was mostly doing it to shock my father, and I quickly discovered that my heart really wasn’t in it. But it was a useful experience, because it spurred dear dad to initiate some conversations with me. In essence, what he impressed upon me was the need to see the world through eyes other than my own. Try to examine events from the perspectives of poor people or striking workers or what have you. If you emerge from this process a conservative, he suggested, that’s life. But at least understand that politics is a competition of interests, and that your self-interest as a relatively privileged young man may sometimes be outweighed by other interests.

Later, I understood that my father’s lesson was in fact a profound one of political philosophy, considered by thinkers from Rousseau to Mill to the American founding fathers, among others. At what point did one’s conception of a good society require a person to sublimate his own interests in support of a larger common interest? I was mulling all these matters during the age of Ronald Reagan’s ascendance, when they were decidedly unpopular. And I can see why. By 1980, many middle-class Americans had come to feel that liberal governance was demanding far too much sacrifice of them.

The part of the social compact that had broken down was this. Since the 1930s, Americans had been asked to pay higher taxes, submit to greater regulation and so on. But for three or four decades most felt it was worth the trade-off. These middle-class people (mostly white) were getting something out of it: an enviable standard of living, and a fundamentally stable society. By the 1970s, they were getting stagnant wages, high crime and myriad other maladies. At the same time, liberalism kept up the fight for rights for various aggrieved groups: a noble battle, but, shorn of its connection to any larger common interest, an uphill one.

It was easy for Reagan, Newt Gingrich and, eventually, the cretins on Fox News to caricature this. And this is the short version of the long story of US liberalism’s 40-year demise: from a creed that many Americans embraced because they saw that it served both their interests and a larger common good, to an ideology that many Americans rejected because it seemed to stand only for “regular” people paying ever higher taxes so that fornicators could have more rights and artists could insult America with taxpayer-funded grants.

Now we are in the age of Barack Obama. Now it’s conservatism that has broken down and contracted into a narrow ideology. And Obama’s project is nothing less than to revive this pre-1970s conception of liberalism as an ongoing civic project to which all contribute and from which all benefit. It was there in his inaugural speech when he spoke of “the price and the promise of citizenship”, and it’s present in his early proposals. The stimulus package that he began negotiating with congressional leaders last week is an audacious experiment along these lines. Let’s invest these billions together, he is saying, and in time the investments will bear fruit and benefit everyone.

The gamble is clear. The stimulus has to work. Whatever healthcare proposal he advances will have to be broadly seen as an improvement over what we have now. The energy proposals will entail new costs for businesses. There’s no avoiding that, and there’s no avoiding that some of those costs will be passed on to ratepayers. But if they produce good jobs, green jobs, a more modern policy in which most Americans see that slightly higher rates are worth it in terms of producing both a stronger economy and a healthier planet, they’ll be broadly endorsed.

The same is true in terms of foreign policy. For 28 years, the American right has said: America first. The appeal to average citizens was clear, especially when set against liberal arguments of the 60s and 70s that America should restrain its hegemonic urges. But in the last eight years people have seen that “America first” doesn’t always leave America in first place. Obama’s calls for a new multilateralism and a new relationship to the Muslim world will take a long time to show themselves and will be highly contentious here. But if they make us stronger and the world safer, most Americans will come to see the wisdom of sacrificing some power upfront.

The remarkable thing is that according to the polls, large majorities understand all this. We’re not a nation of amateur political philosophers debating Locke down at the bowling alley. What we are is a practical people, and after the wreckage left by Bush, the above seems practical. And if it works, Obama will make us a liberal country again, in which a mostly forgotten tradition of shared sacrifice for the common good will be reasserted. Dad would have been 84 if he’d lived to see Obama take the oath of office last week. He’d have been moved to tears at the sight – and as I learned from him all those years ago, he’d have understood precisely what the new president was up to.

Michael Tomasky is editor of Guardian America

President Obama: “Don’t Listen To Rush Limbaugh!”

President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration.

“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.

One White House official confirmed the comment but said he was simply trying to make a larger point about bipartisan efforts.

“There are big things that unify Republicans and Democrats,” the official said. “We shouldn’t let partisan politics derail what are very important things that need to get done.”