Here is Another Shocker...

It turns out that Ernest Hancock, who I mentioned earlier today in this post, has quite the colorful background. From Talking Points Memo (emphasis mine):

Ernest Hancock, the online radio host who staged an interview with an assault rifle-wielding cohort at the Obama event in Arizona yesterday -- and was himself armed with a 9 millimeter pistol -- was a vocal supporter and friend of right-wing anti-government militia members who were convicted of conspiracy and weapons charges in the 90s.

The federal government initially accused the Arizona Viper Militia of plotting to blow up federal buildings, which the twelve-member group cased on videotape.

[...]

Hancock, who in recent years designed the famous "Ron Paul rEVOLution" graphic, was an oft-quoted defender of the militia members. The tapes of the government buildings, he said at the time, were purely "educational."

"They don't have criminal records," another press account quoted Hancock, who knew all twelve militia members, as saying. "They just like their guns. And in Arizona, gosh darn it, that's normal."

and this is the same guy who posted a picture of Obama as a Nazi brown-shirt on the website for which he is a producer, along with footage of Nazis marching in Germany under the heading "We know what we are up against".

Here is Hancock today on CNN talking about all of this:

Woman Yells "Heil Hitler" at a Jewish Man at a Health Care Town Hall

I came across this video clip (h/t Amanda Terkel) that was shot in Las Vegas during a town hall meeting that was sponsored by radio station KDWN AM720. In this clip you can see an Israeli man being interviewed by local media in Las Vegas about his health care system in Israel. This man is describing how fantastic his government-run care has been over the course of his life when you can hear a woman yell out "Heil Hitler!".

The man is shocked and then confronts the woman. Here is the video:



There are several things that don't make sense regarding what point this woman is trying to make. First, if she is opposed to health care reform and is upset that this man is defending his country's government-run health care system, then why yell out a phrase that is so offensive in support of the leader of the Nazi's?

Secondly, when challenged, this woman states "you ought to be the most against Obama, you ought to be the most scared." Why does she state this? Does she believe that Obama is Hitler and will therefore target Jews (like the gentleman speaking)? If this is the case then why would she have yelled "Heil Hitler" at this man to provoke him?

Third, the gentleman in this clip states that he isn't talking about being "for Obama" or "against Obama", but wants to talk about health care. He then states that he had to go to the emergency room (apparently locally in Nevada), had to wait two hours, and then was billed $8,000 because he didn't have insurance. The woman then responds by making crying noises in order to mock this man.

One can only conclude that this woman not willing to have a rational discussion about this issue, but is one of the many who are so ill-informed that it is painful to watch them interact with anyone who tries to have an actual conversation about health care reform. In the mind of this woman and many like her, Obama = Hitler, health care reform is evil, and anyone who thinks otherwise should be mocked and shouted down. How can anyone hope to have a rational conversation when this happens? It seems even more ridiculous if I were to take out the hyperbole and emotion of the conversation:

Man: Our government-run system in Israel is great!

Woman: Heil Hitler!

Man: Why are you yelling Heil Hitler at a Jew? I am Jewish and you think it is appropriate to yell "Heil Hitler"?

Woman: You should be the most against Obama and the most scared!

Man: I am not talking about being "for" or "against" Obama, I am talking about health care. I recently had to go to a local emergency room and I don't have insurance. On top of waiting for 2 hours, guess how much they charged me? $8,000!

Woman: Boo-hoo you baby!


Is this really the level of discourse that we have been reduced to?

Assault Rifle Brought to Obama's Town Hall in Arizona

Yesterday, President Obama made a stop in Phoenix, Arizona for another town hall meeting on health care reform. On this leg of his cross-country travels, as has been the case on his previous stops, protestors showed up to the event carrying firearms. From Bloomberg:

Armed protesters asserting their right to bear arms, including a man with a rifle slung over his shoulder, gathered yesterday near a Phoenix convention hall where President Barack Obama spoke, a police spokesman said.

The protesters were taking advantage of an Arizona law that allows people to carry unconcealed guns, Phoenix Police Department spokesman Andy Hill said. Police made no arrests.

[...]

The incident marks the third occasion in a week when guns have been linked to an Obama event. On Aug. 11, police arrested a man for having a loaded, unlicensed gun in his car near a New Hampshire school where Obama later held a health-care forum, USA Today reported. In a separate incident, another man outside that event displayed a gun in a holster on his leg, the paper said.

One of the men who was carrying an assault rifle to the event, has now been featured in a YouTube video (h/t TPM) from the group "Freedom's Phoenix" and "4409".

From Freedom's Phoenix website:

We recognize that Freedom was taken from us the moment the ink was drying on the Constitution. Today's governmental structure is imploding under its own weight, and its death rattles aren’t going to be pretty. At Freedom’s Phoenix we observe, comment and try to stay out of the way. We know Freedom will rise from the ashes, and we want to make sure that everyone's Freedom is never signed away again by those who believe they have the power to do so.

Ernest Hancock is the mind behind the "Freedom's Phoenix" website and on Sunday posted the following picture under the caption: "r3VOLutionaries go Head Up with "The Man" Monday Morning here in Phoenix" "We know what we are up against":



Below this picture and the words "We know what we are up against" is this video:



Here is the YouTube video that was posted highlighting the man who brought the assault rifle:

Can House Democrats Force the Inclusion of a Public Option?

After yesterday when Kathleen Sebelius stated that the public option was not "essential" to passing health care legislation, the Obama Administration has now come out with the message that President Obama still "favors" a public plan. As I mentioned earlier, just because Obama favors this option doesn't necessarily mean that he would draw a line in the sand by vetoing legislation that didn't contain a public option. These are two very different things.

While my tone earlier today was one of frustrated inevitability, Jane Hamsher makes a valid point about the basic math of the situation. As she points out, there are not enough votes for a health care bill without a public option in the House:

There are 435 seats on the House. Of those, 257 are filled by Democrats and 178 by Republicans. Which means a majority is 218. The Republicans have vowed to vote against health care, period. The Democrats can pass health care on their own, but if they lose 40 of their own, they only have 217 votes.

There are 57 Democrats who signed the July 30 letter saying that they "simply cannot vote" for a bill that "at minimum" does not have a public plan (PDF). There are 7 more not listed on the letter who have pledged to vote against any bill that does not have a robust public plan. That makes 64 Democrats who won't vote for the "co-ops" that both Kathleen Sibelius and Robert Gibbs say the White House is "open" to.

Do the math: 257 - 64 = 193. They need 218 to pass the bill.

So thanks to the progressive members of the House who have pledged to vote against any health care bill that does not have a public plan. They represent 76% of Americans who want a public plan, and coming from heavily Democratic-leaning districts as they do, an even greater percentage of their own constituents.

UPDATE: Hamsher was on MSNBC this afternoon discussing health care:

Obama Administration Hints That the Public Option is Not Essential

In my post last night I mentioned the comments that were made by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. Sebelius stated that the public option was not "essential" to the passage of health care reform legislation which shows that the Obama Administration may be sending the signal that they would not be pushing for the presence of such an option in the final version of a bill.

While this morning's top story at The Huffington Post states that the White House is sending "mixed messages" on the issue of health care reform, I think that the indications are troubling. Sebelius has stated that the public plan is not "essential" to the passage of legislation, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs continues to say that the White House supports the public option, and health care reform spokesperson Linda Douglass also indicated that the President is supportive of the public option.

In this instance it is important to remember that while President Obama may offer his support for the public option, it doesn't necessarily mean that he would veto legislation that did not contain such a provision. The Administration is looking for a win on this issue and I think it is pretty clear that if a political win can be obtained through passing a bill that doesn't have the public option attached, then Obama will probably sign such a bill. We have seen this type of behavior from Obama throughout his political career and it is what led many to emphasize (pre-2008 election) that Obama is a centrist Democrat who is more willing to adapt to existing institutions than fundamentally fight to change them.

This is the very reason why I found Rachel Maddow's comments so on point yesterday during her appearance on Meet the Press. If Obama chooses to spend his political capital by signing a bill that does not fundamentally change the health care system and is a watered-down version that contains mild reforms, then it is almost certainly going to be a failure. It will be a failure for the millions of Americans who are in need of health care, it will be a failure for progressives who voted for Obama last November, and it will be a failure for true reform. On the flip side of this equation it would certainly be considered a victory for the health care lobbyists (who have been pushing for meaningless "reforms" from the very beginning), it would be considered a victory for Republicans, and it would be considered a victory for the type of behavior that we have seen from the Republican's right-wing base who have been showing up at these town hall meetings. The only thing that would have been accomplished is that the Obama Administration got a lot of very angry Conservatives riled up over moderate to conservative reforms to a system that is in need of a radical overhaul.

Here are some other voices that are beginning to weigh in on the reports that the Administration is not married to the public option:

Matt Taibbi:

Now, obviously (and this is will be explored in more detail in the forthcoming piece, which will be out this week), the public option was not a cure-all. In fact, the Democrats had in reality already managed to kill the public option by watering it down to the point of near-meaninglessness. But the notion that our president not only does not have any use anymore for a public option, but in fact “will be satisfied” if there is merely “choice and competition” in the market is, well, disgusting.

Paul Krugman:

If we were starting from scratch we probably wouldn’t have chosen this route. True “socialized medicine” would undoubtedly cost less, and a straightforward extension of Medicare-type coverage to all Americans would probably be cheaper than a Swiss-style system. That’s why I and others believe that a true public option competing with private insurers is extremely important: otherwise, rising costs could all too easily undermine the whole effort.

But a Swiss-style system of universal coverage would be a vast improvement on what we have now. And we already know that such systems work.

So we can do this. At this point, all that stands in the way of universal health care in America are the greed of the medical-industrial complex, the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine, and the gullibility of voters who believe those lies.

Papamoka:

What it all comes down to is yet one more politician that happens to be the President selling out the millions of people that fought so hard for him to get elected. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the only ones with workable plans for a public option for health care during the election and that is why it was basically a battle of the super stars of politics right down to the actual vote in the presidential primary. And a public health care option is why so many people worked to elect a Democratic party lead congress in both houses.

As a Democrat, and now somewhat progressive in thought person, I feel like I just got stabbed in the back. If President Obama wanted the full healthcare bill passed then he could have simply negotiated with his own political party to get the job done.

The Health Care Debate on "Meet the Press"

I decided to watch Meet the Press this morning because the panel of guests was quite intriguing. The full hour, save a tribute to Eunice Kennedy Shriver at the end, was devoted to discussing the issue of the health care with the following guests:

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD)
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK)
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX)
Host of MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel Maddow

The conversation ended up being pretty even-keel and brought up many of the same points that are often advanced in this debate. Host David Gregory tried to focus on the more "contentious" issues, like the anti-health care reform protests and the inclusion of a "public" option and there were some good exchanges between panel members which you will see in the video clip that I have posted below. One of the most important responses came from Rachel Maddow and is below (emphasis mine):

MR. GREGORY: Rachel, let me ask you this question. What will progressives, what will liberals, the president’s base accept as reform? Do the independent voters he’s courting out in Colorado and Montana need to be placated, a big part of his base, or not?

MS. MADDOW: I, I, I mean, I don’t, I don’t think liberals monolithically feel one thing about this. I think most liberals would probably prefer a single payer system, honestly. But ultimately, if the president decides that he’s going to go with a reform effort that doesn’t include a public option, what he will have done is spent a ton of political capital, riled up an incredibly angry right wing base who’s been told that this is a plot to kill grandma, grandma, and he will have achieved something that doesn’t change health care very much and that doesn’t save us very much money and won’t do very much for the American people. It’s not a very good thing to spend a lot of political capital on.

I certainly agree that most liberals would like to see a single payer system and I also think that Maddow's point about political capital is spot on. Her point is especially poignant considering today's report that the Obama Administration is not considering the public option as vital to the passage of health care legislation. If Obama decides to compromise with Republicans and with the health care industry in order to simply pass a bill to claim a legislative victory, what he will actually accomplish is revitalizing the right-wing Republican base while advancing watered-down reforms that would not create the change that our health care system needs.

Also worthy of mentioning was a comment by Maddow in the Meet the Press: Take Two webcast that you can find here. Gregory asks Maddow the following:

GREGORY: Do liberals think he (Obama) has lived up to his promise?

MADDOW: I don't think liberals thought he had much liberal promise. I mean, I think that he was a very good candidate and I think that he did get a lot of liberal support but I don't think that liberals believed that he wasn't...that he was anything other than a centrist. He's a centrist Democrat, and so I think that liberals knew...at least liberals that I know, knew that coming into it.

GREGORY: No different than Bill Clinton?

MADDOW: Not really no, I wouldn't say that. I mean the way that he said he would be different than Bill Clinton were matters of style not substance.

Maddow went on to say that during the campaign, when Obama was campaigning against the Clintonian legacy in Washington, he talked about how to be more effective. This difference doesn't differentiate what he would like to see done however and this is an important distinction to make. This is what many have been saying this entire time, Obama is not some staunch liberal politician who is reigning in a new era of socialism. Obama is a centrist Democrat and this is what makes the protests and labeling of Obama as a socialist even more amazing.

Here is a clip from Meet the Press:

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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.