Capitolism

ExplainThis.org and The Breakdown

By Christopher Hayes

By now you've likely noticed the barrage of banner ads here at TheNation.com for my weekly podcast, The Breakdown. We've been doing it every Friday for two months now, sometimes with co-stars (Marcy Wheeler this week; Ryan Grim of HuffPo last month) and sometimes just me and my extremely dedicated intern Lauren. I started The Breakdown because I wanted to get into podcasting, but also because I thought there was a real hunger for explanatory journalism among Nation readers.

I wanted to put in a plug, then, for our new partner on "The Breakdown," ExplainThis.org. Started by Professor and Media expert Jay Rosen at NYU, ExplainThis.org bills itself as "a user-driven assignment desk for journalists doing explanatory work." Basically, it's a new model of how readers and citizens can get their tough questions answered by experts and journalists. They've been cool enough to create a separate page for The Breakdown. Go to ExplainThis.org/TheBreakdown, ask your politics or policy question, and the wheels start turning: questions are reviewed, sorted and ranked by the community of ExplainThis.org readers; then the most relevant and popular get answered.

What this means for The Breakdown is that there are three ways you can suggest the question I'll tackle each week:

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March 1, 2010

Health Care Moving in the Right Direction

By Christopher Hayes

For the first time since the Massachusetts debacle, I'm cautiously optimistic about the fate of health care reform. Here's why: In the wake of Scott Brown's election, what was most dispiriting was the total leadership vacuum and chaotic, every-man-for-himself atmosphere among congressional Democrats. There didn't seem to be any hard consensus on what to do next. Some said: break it up into smaller pieces, radically pare down the bill, go back and find Republican support (ha!) or let the thing die. Every one of these options would actually spell the death of health care reform, and one of the most stunning legislative failures in recent memory. To even consider such a move seemed insane, and yet those of us paid to observe Congress have spent the last two weeks watching, with mouth agape, as congressional Democrats slowly raised a loaded gun to their collective mouths and volubly considered pulling the trigger.

But sanity has, tentatively, provisionally prevailed. After spending much of yesterday talking to folks on capitol hill, it's clear there is increasingly consensus on a path forward: As I explained last night on Rachel Maddow, it involves a few steps, but is relatively straightforward. The House has to come up with a list of changes to the Senate bill that will get them to 218 votes (and will also pass muster with the procedural constraints of "reconciliation". For more on that you can listen to last week's episode of The Breakdown.) They then send those changes to the Senate leadership, which can pass them through reconciliation, a process that requires a simple majority. Once that process has moved forward or (better!) is completed, the House can then pass in quick succession the Senate bill, and the amended fix.

Now that's it, clear reconciliation is the only real option forward, we're suddenly operating in this bizarre alien universe where majority rules. So when I read Ben Nelson this morning expressing his discomfort with reconciliation I took great satisfaction in the fact that his opinion on the matter was more or less meaningless. It was always the razor thin 60 vote majority in the Senate that produced the agonizingly slow process of death by a thousand cuts. But that is, in the world of reconciliation, no longer operative.

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January 27, 2010

Freeze, Like a Deer in Headlights

By Christopher Hayes

There's lots of progressive backlash in the blogosphere to the announcement that the president is going to call for a multi-year freeze on "non-security discretionary spending," in the State of the Union.

The anger is totally justified, but I'll let others handle the policy of this. (Short version: it's criminally stupid).

But let me talk about the politics. I'm sure that in the short term it polls well. Most voters don't have a great grasp of what makes up the federal budget and the fact that about two-thirds of what the government does is security and social insurance for the elderly. Thanks to decades of right-wing attacks on Big Government, many people think that most of what the government spends money on are things like food stamps and foreign aid.

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January 26, 2010

A Practical Peace Advocate on Obama's Nobel Speech

By Christopher Hayes

The Obama speech was about what I expected: on the one hand/on the other hand, I reject false choices, needle-threading "pragmatism." I have to say I find this rhetorical approach increasingly wearying. There always seems to be the implication, hidden between the lines, that only the author of the speech truly understands how complicated the world is. During the race speech, that was appropriate and affecting: there are few people who've experienced race in as much of its full complexity as Barack Obama. But I don't think the same thing holds for war and peace.

The main thrust of the speech was that in a fallen, difficult world, sometimes war is necessary to secure peace. If we want peace, we have to be hard-headed and clear-eyed. Since Obama was positioning himself as a practical advocate of peace, I was curious to hear what David Cortright thought about it.

Cortright is the Director of Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame has been advocating peace since he was in the Army in Vietnam and organized his comrades against the war. He went on to write "Soldiers in Revolt" about that experience and then was a lead organizer in the nuclear freeze movement. In the 1990s he and his colleague George Lopez wrote often and influentially about non-violent alternatives to war and their support for sanctions in Iraq earned them withering criticism from Nation reader who saw the sanctions as a moral abomination. (I wrote about the sanctions here)

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December 10, 2009

More Deficit Idiocy: Politico Edition

By Christopher Hayes

The discussion about deficits and debt in Washington is so colossally stupid and disingenuous that even engaging it makes me despair. But today's Politico so expertly packages together every conceivable Beltway Establishment inanity about "spending" and "deficits" into one glib little piece of analysis that I can't help myself. (Well, I could help myself but was bullied over Twitter into writing about it here.)

There's one big maddening conceptual error at the heart of this piece (whether committed in good faith or bad I can't say) which is to confuse relatively substantial pieces of domestic legislation with a spending "binge." See, a government, like any organization, institution, or firm has expenditures and revenues. Miraculously, it can increase its expenditures, without increasing its deficit, if it also increases its revenues. This is called "deficit neutral" and it's what the current health care bill, in all its incarnations, is. It is what the cap and trade bill will also be. Now consider this paragraph.

For starters, the White House has not dropped plans for an aggressive global warming bill early next year that will be loaded with new spending on green technology and jobs – that would be paid for with tax increases. Democratic lobbyist Steve Elmendorf says the White House focus on deficit reduction could easily kill the cap-and-trade effort. "I think this means cap-and-trade has to go to the backburner," he said.

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November 13, 2009

The Public Option Lives! Big Victory for Progressives

By Christopher Hayes

Harry Reid just announced that he'll include a public option (with a provision that allows individual states to opt out of it) in the version of the health care bill he brings to the floor of the senate. This is a huge (though still partial) victory for progressives. Over the weekend there was a flurry of reporting over whether Reid would include the opt-out provision, or the "trigger" provision favored by Olympia Snowe, which would not create a public option unless and until some time in the future when health insurance costs had not diminished. The fact of the matter is, as David Sirota wrote here, the trigger is simply a way to kill the public option. Had Reid included it in the floor bill, progressives would have had to muster 60 votes to pass an amendment to strip the trigger out and replace it with the opt-out language. There's no way they would have been able to do that.

But with the opt-out public option included in the unamended floor-bill, opponents of the public option will now have to get 60 votes to pass their own amendment killing it, and they don't have those votes either. This means that the opt-out public option will almost certainly be in the final bill that comes up for a vote in the full senate. That's huge, since the house will also have a public option (an even stronger one, without the opt-out provision).

Reid is essentially calling the bluff of recalcitrant senators like Nelson, Lincoln and Landrieu, because the only way they can defeat the public option now is to join a Republican filibuster, something that I think Reid is gambling they won't do.

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October 26, 2009

Rural Health Care, the Public Option and the Opt Out Compromise

By Christopher Hayes

The latest health care legislative compromise being floated is one in which states would be allowed to opt out of offering a public option. Chris Bowers lists the problems with the proposal here. Ezra's more sanguine.

I suppose if someone put a gun to my head and the options were no public option or an opt-out compromise, I'd opt for the latter. (I should point out we're not at the gun-at-the-head stage yet). But it's also important to point out just how perverse the results of this compromise would be.

Red, rural states would almost all probably opt out and yet it's rural America that needs the public option the most. As the Center for Community Change points out in a new report [PDF] people who live in rural areas are a) more likely to be underinsured, because fewer people receive insurance from their employers and b) live in markets where there is essentially no competition. In Alabama one health insurance company has 90% market share, in South Dakota, it's two companies. It's under these circumstances where the public option is most needed. In fact, I was talking about this issue with a health care wonk (who works for the government and so can't go on record) and she went so far as to put it this way:

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October 8, 2009

Wade Rathke Speaks Out

By Christopher Hayes

This comes from Nation DC intern Eric Naing:

Just a few weeks ago, a book talk by ACORN founder Wade Rathke wouldn't have drawn much press attention, but the organization's recent notoriety as a conservative boogeyman has thrust Rathke back in the spotlight.

At an event on Tuesday to promote his book Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families, Rathke drew the attention of major media outlets ranging from The Washington Post to National Review. Notably, a reporter from biggovernment.com, the Web site that brought us the infamous pimp and prostitute videos, was there with a cameraman to get another bite at the proverbial, um, ACORN.

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September 30, 2009

Rohrabacher to Iraqis: Be More Grateful!

By Christopher Hayes

This dispatch comes from brand new crack DC intern Eric Naing:

The House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight met today to discuss issues of sovereignty and stability in Iraq ranging from the country's longstanding financial obligation to neighboring Kuwait to its even longer-standing issues with the Kurdish people. But Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) seemed mostly interested in berating the Iraqis for their lack of gratitude

At the hearing, Saleh al Mutlaq and former Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, both members of Iraq's Council of Representatives, spoke about Iraq's future and the importance of the country's upcoming elections.

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September 17, 2009

Does Joe Wilson Believe the President Was Actually Lying?

By Christopher Hayes

First of all: I'm back! Somewhere in the Bible it decrees that blogs must be left fallow in August, which explains my absence.

Like everyone else I watched the speech last night. (Quick review: deft explanation of the policy, a few unnecessary political concessions, extremely aggravating lefty-bashing, and genuinely fantastic inspirational finish). And like everyone else I've been following the Joe Wilson "You Lie!" flap.

Now here's what I think is most fascinating about the incident: It's pretty clear to me that Wilson's outburst wasn't calculated grandstanding but a genuine moment of rage and frustration. Just look at the photo. That's a genuinely pissed off dude.

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September 10, 2009