Tea-Party Protesters Shout Slurs and Spit On Members of Congress

Like many others, I have written numerous entries about the tea-party movement and their rhetoric at various protests around the country. I wrote about how the Cincinnati Tea Party and 9/12 Project posted a letter comparing the actions of the Obama Administration to Hitler, I wrote about a local town hall forum where protesters shouted down and chased Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-OH), and this is what I wrote back in August:

...this type of anger is not rooted in, nor is it specifically about, health care reform. This is the same kind of rage that we saw during the campaign for President when the right-wing supporters of John McCain claimed that Obama was a terrorist, that his friends were terrorists, and that he was going to destroy America. This is the same kind of rage that we saw once Obama took office and tea parties were organized in opposition to the stimulus. This is the same kind of rage that we see from time to time when the issue of race is brought up either in the Henry Gates case, the nomination of a Latina to the Supreme Court, or the legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate. They claim that Obama is a racist, a foreign-born operative, and imply that he isn't really "one of us". This rage has now morphed into the opposition to health care reform, but it still has the same ugly undercurrent that is all too recognizable.

This ugly undercurrent reared its head once again yesterday with a tea-party protest in Washington.

As Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) walked past tea-partiers on the Hill, protesters shouted "kill the bill" and some also shouted "nigger" at the two members of Congress. This was not an isolated incident as it was also reported that when Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) was exiting a building earlier in the day, he was greeted with shouts and being called a "faggot" which prompted the crowd to erupt in laughter.

In a third disturbing incident, a staffer for Rep. James Clayburn (D-SC) reported that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MD) was spit on by a protester. Cleaver's office released this statement in response to the incident:

For many of the members of the CBC, like John Lewis and Emanuel Cleaver who worked in the civil rights movement, and for Mr. Frank who has struggled in the cause of equality, this is not the first time they have been spit on during turbulent times.

This afternoon, the Congressman was walking into the Capitol to vote, when one protester spat on him. The Congressman would like to thank the US Capitol Police officer who quickly escorted the others Members and him into the Capitol, and defused the tense situation with professionalism and care. After all the Members were safe, a full report was taken and the matter was handled by the US Capitol Police. The man who spat on the Congressman was arrested, but the Congressman has chosen not to press charges. He has left the matter with the Capitol Police.

This is not the first time the Congressman has been called the "n" word and certainly not the worst assault he has endured in his years fighting for equal rights for all Americans. That being said, he is disappointed that in the 21st century our national discourse has devolved to the point of name calling and spitting. He looks forward to taking a historic vote on health care reform legislation tomorrow, for the residents of the Fifth District of Missouri and for all Americans. He believes deeply that tomorrow's vote is, in fact, a vote for equality and to secure health care as a right for all. Our nation has a history of struggling each time we expand rights. Today's protests are no different, but the Congressman believes this is worth fighting for.

As the health care reform legislation is gearing up for a vote by the House of Representatives, it is clear that the ugly undercurrent, which was evident during the summer town hall meetings, has once again bubbled up to the surface. As Barney Frank told Talking Points Memo, the health care reform debate has indeed become a proxy for other underlying sentiments.


This piece is cross posted here.

Around the Horn: Reactions to Obama's Health Care Address

Opinions from around the blogosphere:

Jane Hamsher:

The President did a great job last night on selling the country on the need for health care reform. He made the moral case, and every metric indicates that people were overwhelmingly moved to support his plan. That's the good news for the White House.

The not so good news: the White House has been trying to get out from under the burden of supporting the public option for weeks. The trouble is, every time they try to do it, the President's numbers take a huge hit. And so last night he came out and indicated that a public plan would be a part of his reform package.

Nick Morgan of Public Words Inc.:

Last night, President Obama proved that he is still the master of rhetoric we saw during the campaign by delivering his first unambiguously excellent speech since those halcyon days on the stump.

[...]

One good speech rarely ends discussion and there is still much legislative work to be done. But the President accomplished as much as an address of this kind can, and his remarks deserve to be treated with the dignity and respect he showed all the other serious participants in the health care debate. It was an excellent speech.

Todd Gitlin at TPM:

He sounded like a winner. Like all great preachers, he started methodically and built to crescendos. The Republican responder, Charles Boustany of Louisiana, sounded like a whiner, crying, Deficit, deficit, and government-run, government-run, and built toward nothing. Obama charged the Republicans with specific lies. He made the obligatory gestures toward bipartisanship, including the unexpected shout-out to John McCain, who had campaigned in favor of mandatory catastrophic insurance--and I don't want to be cynical about those gestures, even though I think he's naive about the other party's intentions--but that's not where his stresses fell.

Brad Hicks at "The Infamous Brad":

To be honest, I had a hard time paying attention to anything President Obama said Wednesday night after he said this, let alone taking him seriously on the subject.

[...]

Contrary to what he claims, the reason that medical expenses in the US are skyrocketing is not inefficiency and waste. Nor, contrary to what the Republicans are claiming, is it malpractice insurance; this was solved at the state level two years ago, and malpractice insurance rates are down across the board. The main reason that health care costs have skyrocketed is honest-to-gods scarcity. And that scarcity is entirely artificial. And his approach does nothing to address the artificial scarcity of doctors, or the artificial scarcity of newly (wrongly) patented drugs. And the other reason why health care costs have skyrocketed is flagrantly corrupt profiteering in both the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Matt Welch at Reason Online:

It is telling that so many people who claim to be speaking on the side of Truth, Justice, and the American Way of Journalism have consistently focused their outrage-o-meters at individual townhall attendees, political broadcast entertainers, and the lesser lights of a lame (if resurgent-by-default) opposition party, while letting walk nearly fact-check-free the non-irrelevant occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If calling out lies and misrepresentations about a significant policy proposal is such pressing journalistic business—and it should be!—you'd think the watchdogs might start with the guy doing the proposing.

[...]

There was one line in the speech last night that pointed to an alternative, more promising future: "My guiding principle," Obama said, "is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition." Unfortunately, the president evinces zero understanding of how increased regulation can reduce consumer choice, even or especially when the government joins the competition. And even if he did see the connection, we'd have good reason to suspect that he wouldn't talk about it openly with the American people. That, ultimately, worries me more than a senior citizen who wants to keep the government out of Medicare.

Initial Reaction to President Obama's Health Care Address to Congress

President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress this evening in a nationally televised address on the topic of health care reform. I decided to tune into NBC's coverage of the address which was hosted by Brian Williams and featured commentary from Kelly O'Donnell, Host of Meet the Press David Gregory, and NBC political analyst Chuck Todd.

I tuned prior to the speech when Kelly O'Donnell was reporting that Sen. Olympia Snow (R-ME) has a direct line to the President and that she has encouraged him to drop the public option from his proposal from health care reform. Brian Williams followed up by putting the historical nature of Obama's spech into a weird context. Williams compared the historical moment to President Bush addressing a joint session of Congress after the attacks of September 11 and to President Johnson addressing Congress after the assassination of President Kennedy. While the issue of reforming health care is an important issue, putting President Obama's speech into this context seemed like a really odd comparison for Williams to make.

After Chuck Todd made some of his typical observations from inside the beltway about Obama needing to create "political space" for Democrats, Obama entered and gave a speech that packed more punch than I had anticipated. Prior to the speech, it was known that Obama was going to reveal some details on where he stands on health care reform, but Obama's tone (while measured during some moments) was at times stern and drew some interesting responses from the Congressmen in attendance.

The President started out with a statement that his Administration did not come to Washington to simply fix problems, but to "build a future". He launched into historical references where past Presidents that have attempted to reform health care and made note of Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) and his efforts at reforming health care by introducing the same reform bill at the beginning of each session of Congress.

Obama went on to outline the problem of America being the "only advanced Democracy" and "only wealthy nation" to force the hardship of lack of affordable health care on its citizens. Obama then spoke to advocates of a single-payer health care system and those who advocate for the elimination of employee provided health insurance. Obama lumped both groups into the same category and said that either of these plans would be too much of a radical shift for those who already have insurance plans. Obama said that it is his wish to build on the parts of the current system that work and to fix the parts that don't.

The President then outlined his plan which he stated would provide "security and stability" to those who already have insurance, provide insurance for those who currently don't, and slow the costs of health care for all involved. Obama outlined the basic tenants of his plan in which he stated that those who already have insurance and are happy with it, can keep it and that a new "Insurance Exchange" will be created over the next four years to provide incentives to insurance companies to compete in providing Americans with health insurance at lower costs.

Obama also spoke of providing tax credits to those who can still not afford insurance plans and Obama gave his support to a public option that would be available to compete with the insurance companies. Obama stressed that this public option, while important, should not be overblown by the left, the right, or the media because it is simply one portion of what is being proposed.

Obama moved on to address the misrepresentations that have circulated at many town hall meetings and by many members of Congress. Obama called the claims that the government would form "death panels" a "lie, plain and simple". He also said that no federal dollars would be used to fund abortions and that in no part of the bill does it say that illegal immigrants will be given health care. As Obama stated this last point, you could hear rumblings on the floor of the chamber and you could hear Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) shout out either "that's a lie" or "you lie" (I have seen both reported). I can't recall another moment where a member of Congress shouted out that the President was a liar during a joint session of Congress though I do find it a fitting representation of some of the behavior that some of the Republicans and some of the attendees of town hall meetings have engaged in during the month of August. I am sure that interviews with Rep. Wilson will be numerous tomorrow and I wonder how he will defend his outburst considering that the facts are not on his side.

Obama finished by quoting portions of a letter that the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) wrote back in May and Obama paid tribute to Kennedy's life-long work on the issue of health care reform. I thought this moment was fitting and it also allowed for Obama to cite the bipartisan work that Kennedy had engaged in with John McCain, Charles Grassley, and Orin Hatch while highlighting his own wish for bipartisan work on this bill. NBC's Political Analyst Chuck Todd seemed to miss this moment as in his post-speech analysis he stated that Obama had only mentioned two Republicans during his speech - President Bush and John McCain.

The Republican response, given by Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA), was short and can be summarized by Boustany's statement that he had hoped the President would announce that he would scrap the current reform plans and start all over again. He also stated that this reform was nothing more than a "government run" proposal. Super.

While I thought Obama's speech was a good one (while surprising in its tone at times), I am skeptical to learn more of the details of his plan. Certainly I agree that the system needs to be reformed and that health care costs are out of control, that is not in dispute. It is the details of how serious the President is about fighting for the public option and how much the Conservative Democrats will be able to control the debate that is in dispute. It is also worthy of note that the ridiculous claims that we have seen some Republicans advance, are probably not going away any time soon. It will be interesting to see if this continued approach will result in stalling the legislation or will be successful in convincing Republicans to vote against any type of legislative reform.

This battle still has a long way to go and I will be posting further analysis and observations about this debate as we continue to move forward.

Harnessing Progressive Outrage

Author and Journalist Dave Lindorff has an interesting piece that is posted over at Counter Punch regarding the debate over health care reform. The main point of his piece is that the right-wing protesters are not really the main story:

What they are conveniently forgetting is that these are not really "town meetings" at all, at least in the sense of the town meetings I grew up with, and started out covering as a young journalist in Connecticut--that is, meetings called and run democratically, with leaders elected from the floor, open to all residents of a community.

These "town meetings" are really nothing but propaganda sessions run by members of Congress who are trying to burnish their fraudulent credentials as public servants, and trying to perpetrate a huge fraud of a health care bill that purports to be a progressive "reform" of the US health care system, but that actually further entrenches the control of that system by the insurance industry, and to a lesser extent, the hospital and drug industry.

[...]

Any mention of a system that works--single payer--the system we already have in the form of Medicare for the elderly and disabled, and the system that has proved successful for almost four decades in Canada-- has been systematically blocked and censored out of the discussion. Every effort has been made to bury an excellent bill, HR 676, offered up by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), which would cover every American by simply expanding Medicare to cover everyone.

The only proper response at this point is obstruction, and the more militant and boisterous that obstruction, the better.

Instead of opposing the right-wing hecklers at these events, progressives should be making common cause with them. Instead of calling them fascists, we should be working to turn them, by showing them that the enemy is not the left; it is the corporations that own both Democrats and Republicans alike.

A couple of notes on this post that are worth mentioning. Lindorff is correct to observe that all the focus on the right-wing disruptions of the town hall meetings have lent a certain brand of sympathy from progressives to the Obama Administration and the currently proposed bills that are before Congress. With so much time needing to be spent correcting the ridiculous claims (euthanizing the elderly via "death panels", government control of which doctors that you can see, etc.) it takes away from the time that could be spent having a real conversation about options, like single-payer, that are not even being considered or discussed.

Lindorff also has a valid point that what is actually being advanced as a truly progressive reform of the health care system, is actually turning out to be a giant compromise between those who wish to reform the system and the lobbyists of the health care industry. Yesterday, The Huffington Post got their hands on a White House memo that outlines a compromise that was reached between the Obama Administration and the pharmaceutical lobby. Bloomberg is also reporting that there are six lobbyists for each member of Congress that are working to shape the terms on which health care will be reformed. These lobbyists have one thing on their side that constituents of members of Congress don't...large sums of money which too often translate into the power to influence critical decisions that we are told are in the public interest.

The issue I take with Lindorff, is his prescription for progressives to advance their calls for a single-payer system. His advice is two-fold; first, to disrupt these town hall meetings by being both "militant" and "boisterous". Second, to join the protesters on the right by finding common cause with them and trying to "turn" them by focusing their anger on corporate interests.

Lindorff's first point, that progressives should adopt the very tactics that they have been denouncing all this time, would simply be counterproductive. What good would being "militant" and "boisterous" be considering we have seen first-hand how ridiculous and anti-democratic this has been when displayed by the protesters on the right over the last few weeks? One of the very criticisms of the right has been that their tactics of disruption have resulted in the suppression of views from progressives who also may oppose the health care reforms. What good would be brought to the views of progressives if they also engaged in the shout-down tactics? I would argue that little to no good would be served by adopting these tactics.

Lindorff's second point is that progressives should be finding common cause with the right and should work to "turn them" by showing them that the common enemy are the corporate interests. While this may seem like moving a mountain, it could be a worthy long-term goal. This is not a good strategy for this current issue nor would much success come from even beginning to attempt to "turn" people who currently believe that moderate reforms to the system will result in the United States turning into Nazi Germany. Call me crazy, but I can't imagine the following scenario:

Conservative: "Down with Government control of health care decisions! We are turning into Nazi Germany! Obama is a socialist! You are going to kill my elderly parents!"

Progressive: "But what is being proposed isn't a government takeover of the health care system."

Conservative: "Really?"

Progressive: "Nope, but let me tell you why you should support a true government-run system and how the corporate interests are screwing us both."

Conservative: "Okay, I will listen calmly to your viewpoint, consider all the merits of each system, and then be open to changing my mind."

Please excuse my oversimplification in this example, but "turning" conservatives in order to unite with them to fight for a common cause is not a feasible strategy in my mind, especially in the short-term and especially when discussing health care reform given the current political climate.

Should progressives be angered and outraged at the insistence by Congress that the single-payer option be kept off the table? Most certainly.

Should tough questions be asked at these town hall meetings about this topic? Definitely.

Should progressives continue to fight for a health care system that would cover all Americans while not sacrificing the quality of care? Absolutely.

Should this be done by adopting the same disruptive tactics at town hall meetings and joining with Conservatives to attempt an approach as a "united front"? I don't think this is a good idea.

There are other ways with which to affect change and to use activism in order get Congress to take the option of "Medicare for all" seriously. Before all this outrage began, Jane Hamsher was (and still is) doing a commendable job at organizing and I think that progress can be achieved with both grassroots and coordinated efforts from progressive organizations. These voices are (unfortunately) being drowned out by all the screaming and all of the misinformation that is trying to be corrected. While it may seem like an easy step to sympathize with the Administration in lieu of all crazy rhetoric being spewed from the right, progressives should not sacrifice their own voices. We can do better in this debate over health care reform and in order to get health care widely recognized as a human right and in order to get every person covered, we must do better.

Panetta's Reaction to Finding Out About Cheney's Secret Program

Rachel Maddow had a good point last night regarding the revelation that former Vice President Dick Cheney apparently ordered that his "secret assassination program" be kept from Congress.

If this was a program that was designed to secretly use the CIA to go around the world in an attempt to target, capture, or kill terrorists - then explains the reaction of CIA Director Leon Panetta? After all, the United States has a long history of targeting "terrorists" around the world with the goal of "capturing" or "killing" them, so it seems a little odd that Panetta acted the way that he did once he found out about this program. Panetta ordered that the program be stopped on the very day that he found out about it and he also went to Congress to disclose that this program had been hidden from them. Something tells me that we haven't learned all that there is to know about the nature of Cheney's secret program. Rachel Maddow explains:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

TIME magazine floats another possible idea:

CIA officials tell TIME there's another, somewhat less dramatic, possibility: a plan to conduct domestic surveillance. Spying on Americans is outside the CIA's purview and would be highly controversial — good enough reason for Cheney to want it kept under wraps.

but then the article quotes officials who claim that Panetta wasn't informed because the program wasn't "operational" and so it was "no big deal". If this program was "no big deal" and was a program designed to do what is essentially done every day in the so-called "War on Terror", then it makes no sense that Panetta would have such a severe reaction when finding out about this program. More details are almost certainly yet to be revealed.

The House Releases Their Health Care Plan

Yesterday the House of Representatives released the text of the America's Affordable Health Choices Act. Analysts are already pouring over the details and offering their insights.

Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic:

The three House committees writing health care legislation have just released the full text of their bill. And my immediate, admittedly tentative reaction is strongly positive. Once fully implemented, this reform plan will accomplish most of the goals on my mental checklist:

- Generous subisidies, available to people making up to 400 percent of the poverty line
- Expansion of Medicaid to cover people making less than 133 percent of the poverty line
- Guarantees of solid benefits for everybody, with limits on out-of-pocket spending
- Strong regulation of insurers, including requirements that insurers provide insurance to people with pre-existing conditions without higher rates
- An individual mandate, so that everybody (or what passes for everybody in these discussions) gets into the system and assumes some financial responsibility
- A public plan, one that appears to be strong, although I'll reserve judgment on that until I hear from the experts
- Choice of public and private plan, at first just for individuals and small businesses, but later for larger businesses and--possibly--eventually for everybody
Efforts at payment reform, if not necessarily as strong as they could be
- Investment in primary care and prevention, which is not sexy but potentially important for general health .

Matt Yglesias:

The House of Representatives is now prepared to unveil their health reform legislation with markup taking place tomorrow and Thursday. It’s a good bill (more on that later) but it’s worth also giving a tip of the cap in the direction of the House process. The chairs and members of the three relevant committees did a great mitzvah by putting egos aside, forming a unified “tri-committee” bill writing process, largely shutting up about their internal negotiations, and getting down to the job of writing a bill that fits the parameters Americans voted for in November. I appreciate that the Senate has its own idiotic self-imposed supermajority requirement to deal with, but it would be nice to see the same discipline and seriousness of purpose from Senators at the committee stage.

Paul Krugman:

OK, so the CBO score for the 3-committee House health care plan is in: $1 trillion over the next decade for 97 percent coverage of legal residents.

That’s a bargain: the catastrophe of being ill without insurance, the fear of losing insurance, all ended — for much less than the Bush administration’s useless $1.35 trillion first tax cut, quickly followed by another $350 billion.

And that’s just the budget cost, which the House proposes covering partly with savings elsewhere, partly with higher taxes on very high incomes. As Jon Cohn points out, the overall effect of expanded coverage will probably be lower health care costs for America as a whole.

There is now absolutely no excuse for Congress to balk at doing the right thing.

Ezra Klein:

The Process Is the Message: Three separate committees -- Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Education and Labor -- have come together on one bill. This is an incredible achievement. If you read histories of the 1994 health-care reform fight, all of them have a substantial section on the committee crack-up: One passed a version of single-payer, another a variant of Bill Clinton's reform, another went further to the right. There was no unity.

There is unity now. And if it holds -- if the House of Representatives manages to pass this plan with a substantial majority of enthusiastic Democrats -- that significantly strengthens the House's hand in its eventual negotiations with the more fractious Senate. That's a big "if." But so too would have been the idea that three separate committees could cooperate on a bill of this size.

Pretty positive reaction on this House bill thus far. While the bill may not be the single-payer option that most Americans want to see, it looks like this bill is a fairly decent consolation prize. Now we will have to wait and see what the Senate brings to the table and I am trying to not be pessimistic, but something tells me that the bill they put forward isn't going to sit as well as the House version.

Cheney's Secret Assassination Program

A lot has been revealed recently about, what appears to be, a secret assassination program that was headed by former Vice President Cheney. Last week, details began to quickly emerge about this program and that Cheney allegedly ordered that it be hidden from members of Congress. Rachel Maddow gives a good summary of how events have unfolded:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

So it looks like Dick Cheney was running a secret assassination ring. This sounds oddly familiar, almost like someone said something about this earlier this year:

At a “Great Conversations” event (MP3) at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

[...]

At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

Replied Hersh:

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

"I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

"But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

For one, it looks like Seymour Hersh has been proven correct. As we continue to hear stories of wiretapping, torture, and assassination squads one must ask what it is going to take to launch some kind of investigation into criminal activity on at least one of these topics.