'Trumpcare' Is The Biggest Legislative Failure In A Hundred Years

Hi all,
This is from my (humble) site, newsasitshouldbe.com With a fair bit of research, I was able to come up with the pretty striking conclusion in the title. Hope you guys enjoy.

Only in rare periods in the last century or so (1913-1916, 1933-1936, 1964-1966, and 1981) have presidents been able to move transformational legislation through Congress. The system, arguably, is designed to make dramatic shifts in the status quo extremely hard to achieve. Over the years there have been spectacular collapses of major legislation, the most consequential, perhaps, being the failure of the Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in 1920. This begs the question: is the Trumpcare ‘repeal and replace’ effort of the last eight months the biggest legislative failure in a hundred years?

On the face of it, there is only really one other major contender; but before settling in for a showdown between the Clinton health care failure of the early nineties and the recent Trumpcare debacle, it would be intellectually rigorous, as well as fun, to examine modern political history, and take a walk down the boulevard of broken legislative dreams.

Unsurprisingly, the heaviest legislative defeats have revolved around health care. After intermittently successful periods of bipartisan legislation involving health and infrastructure during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, there came a push for health insurance reform in the early seventies. Democrats introduced the Health Security Act, a universal national health insurance program providing comprehensive benefits without any cost sharing. Around the same time, Nixon proposed the Comprehensive Health Insurance Act. In April, Democrats proposed a National Health Insurance Act, a bill to provide near-universal national health insurance with benefits identical to the expanded Nixon plan—but with mandatory participation by employers and employees through payroll taxes and with lower cost sharing. Both plans were criticized by labor, and consumer organizations, and neither gained traction. There was no reform to healthcare during Nixon’s administration; but, as a conservative, there had never been a particular ideological onus on him to deliver. It was a failure of competing plans, rather than a front and center, defining proposal from the President; and Nixon’s preoccupation (and defining successes) were always based in foreign affairs rather than domestic policy.

At the outset of the Carter administration there was wide support in the party, including from Carter, for single-payer health care. The odds of some kind of universal coverage passing were significant. Carter faced heavy pressure from unions, as well as liberals like Ted Kennedy, to introduce a national health insurance plan; but he kept delaying. Carter saw himself as fiscally conservative, and his health care focus was legislation to control hospital costs. Kennedy and the unions, willing to compromise on their calls for single-payer, submitted a new universal proposal in which private insurers would compete. But still Carter wasn’t convinced. He didn’t even want to endorse a single major bill, preferring a series of smaller ones. Kennedy and the unions refused to settle for something not offering universal coverage, and the effort died.

Also early on in Carter’s term, momentum grew for the Humphrey Hawkins Act, a proposal to guarantee a government job to anyone who wanted one so long as unemployment was above 3 percent. Carter endorsed the proposal in the campaign and it had strong backing from the civil rights and labor movements. For a brief period, the Humphrey-Hawkins act seemed certain to become law. Carter did not seize the opportunity. Instead, he severely damaged his relationship with congressional Democrats by devoting his energy to trying to eliminate water projects from the budget, legislation that didn’t stir much enthusiasm, threatened to take away much loved pork from his own allies, and ended in failure. Carter’s legislative failures were numerous; but there was no over-archingly terrible, drawn-out one; and, as dismal efforts that petered out, they at least had the virtue of being over-with relatively quickly.

In the wake of a struggle with Congress over the budget, George H. W. Bush was forced by the Democratic majority to raise taxes; as a result, many Republicans felt betrayed, given Bush had promised “no new taxes” in his campaign. Partly as a reprisal, Republican congressmen defeated a proposal by Bush which would have enacted spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the deficit. Under pressure, Bush accepted the Democrats’ demands for higher taxes and more spending, which alienated him from Republicans and eroded his popularity. Bush would later say that he wished he had never signed the bill. Although damaging, in terms of his own base, Bush was able to pivot, and the bipartisan effort didn’t seem too bad to the general public. It is also debatable whether the skirmish counts as ‘legislation’ in the sense of a defining ‘issue’ in the way Immigration, law and order, education or healthcare do.

The greatest legislative defeat during the George W. Bush administration would likely be the 2006 Immigration reform bill. The legislation proposed an increase in security along the southern border, an allowance for long-term illegal immigrants to gain legal status, and an increase in the number of guest workers over and above those already present in the U.S. through a “blue card” visa program. The bill was passed in May, 2006. The parallel House Bill would have dealt with immigration differently. Neither bill became law because the two Houses were not able to reach an agreement to go to conference. Whilst a substantial failure, the blame was widespread, as it was an across the aisle effort, and therefore a failure of compromise, and of bi-partisanship, or ‘of Washington’ rather than a distinct failure of the president, or of his administration. Furthermore, though the system was widely acknowledged to need reform, the fallback 1986 Immigration bill was one signed by a Republican president, with a bipartisan consensus, and was therefore a moderately acceptable default for the incumbent president, who, at the very least, didn’t suffer an outright personal defeat.

The same dynamic was in play during the subsequent big immigration legislative effort during the Obama administration. Entering into 2013, the conditions seemed right to achieve sweeping immigration reform. Prospects peaked when the Senate passed major overhaul legislation. But action stalled in the House of Representatives, where the bipartisan Senate bill was rejected in the GOP-led chamber. Again, it was principally the failure of a bi-partisan effort, rather than an administration driven, and defining initiative.

Also during the Obama Administration, twenty children and seven adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Momentum was behind gun-reform legislation. A law requiring background checks for all gun-show sales was favored by 92 percent of Americans and a law banning the sale and possession of high-capacity magazines was supported by 62 percent of Americans. A record-high 74 percent opposed a ban on handguns and 51 percent opposed banning assault weapons. The proposal that emerged, the Manchin-Toomey Amendment bill, was sponsored by Joe Manchin, a Democrat, and Republican Sen. Pat Toomey. It would have required background checks on most private party firearm sales. The bill was voted on and defeated by a vote of 54 – 46. It needed 60 votes to pass. Though a legislative failure, which President Obama remarked upon very emotionally, the degree of polarization meant the President, and the left, walked away with a sense of moral affrontery toward the opposition, and the process, that was matched, to a fair degree by the public. In addition, the President issued a long series of executive orders, mitigating against the sense of a comprehensive loss.

Deciding the greatest legislative failure in modern US history, then, really comes down to a two-horse race between the Trumpcare repeal and replace effort, and the collapse of the Clinton healthcare effort in the early nineties. Coming into office in the early nineties, Bill and Hillary Clinton were ambitious, wanting a far-reaching healthcare initiative. The problem was their perception of populist support. The economy was the big issue when Bill Clinton took office. After having spent the 1980s listening to Ronald Reagan say that government was the problem, America was skeptical toward sweeping programs. Furthermore, the Clinton’s healthcare plan was ever-changing throughout 1992 and into 1993. At various stages it was “managed competition” or ‘pay-for-play.’ There were also logistical problems with the legislation. According to Clinton, reflecting years later: “We had budgetary constrictions; we couldn’t raise taxes, we’d just raised taxes and cut spending to balance the budget, and therefore our only option was to have an employer mandate, and that put the small business lobby in with the health insurers, and that, plus the unified Republican opposition in the senate was enough to beat it.”

In November of 1993, the bill made its first official appearance. Over the next year, support for the bill waned. The Clintons could not persuade their own party to sign on to it. They were unwilling to compromise the integrity of their plan, and this made it hard to forge alliances within the party. Closed door meetings between the Clintons and Democratic congressional leaders were often uncompromising and tense. Neither side budged. In fact, Democratic leaders such as Senator George Mitchell and Congressman Dick Gephardt began to assemble their own bills, seeking to revamp health care as they saw fit. Opponents, both Democratic and Republican, attacked the employer mandate section requiring all employers to provide health insurance. Throughout the spring and summer of 1994, the Republicans drove home a message that the Health Security Act meant more “big government.” At the same time, lobbyists were running the now famous “Harry and Louise” ads, which featured a couple grappling with the complexities of the legislation. By late fall and just before the elections, the plan was dead. It would not even come before either house of Congress for a vote. The mid-term elections in 1994 were a disaster for the Democrats. They lost control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1950s. The Health Security Act played a huge part in the defeat.

Unlike the Trump administration, however, health care reform during the Clinton administration was not a singular proposition, dominating and holding up the legislative calendar. Months into his first term, Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which raised taxes and set the stage for future budget surpluses. He also signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, ensuring parents could take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a newborn or a sick relative without risking their job; the Earned Income Tax Credit was expanded; and in 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was signed: the largest crime bill in the history of the United States, providing for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs. Furthermore, whilst the damage was widespread when it came to the midterms, the professional reputations of senior Democrats were not tarnished to the extent senior republicans’ have been with the repeal-replace debacle. Mitch McConnell, in particular, has had his reputation as a Machiavellian tactician who always gets results severely discredited. Also, the Republicans, instead of a filibuster-proof majority, were aiming for only a bare-majority in the Senate, using their own conference, and couldn’t muster even that drastically reduced threshold. Finally, there was no ideological / existential defining urgency in the early months of the Clinton administration as there was with the recent Obamacare repeal and replace collapse. That effort had seven years of swelling angst and resentment and an imperative from the base behind it, as well as an insurgent new president’s need to trammel and surpass his predecessor, overturning his legacy in order to establish and project dominance. In the early nineties, the healthcare reform effort had no such dynamic. Back then, healthcare reform wasn’t so much a repudiation or overturning of the previous administration’s efforts, as an ideological pursuit in and of itself. In the present scenario, Trump has looked, with each failed iteration, to have lost, and his predecessor to have prevailed. Whilst it could be argued that the Clinton health care bill was the biggest legislative failure because of its expansive scope, and the notion it therefore had the most to lose, this is trumped, so to speak, by the fact it was abstracted by never making it out of committee and really having a decent shot; whilst Trumpcare, though somewhat smaller in scale (in what it would take away) came perilously close, multiple times, to becoming a reality.

When it came to health care, Trump displayed naiveté about the process, and how legislation would work. After famously declaring that ‘No one knew how complex healthcare could be,’ and having pledged to repeal and replace Obamacare almost immediately, Trump spent almost an entire year pushing Congress, but offered vague, often contradictory clues about what he wanted to see take Obamacare’s place. Initially he promised “insurance for everybody,” then he supported a House Republican bill that guaranteed nothing of the sort. He then held a Rose Garden celebration in May after the House passed a bill to repeal Obamacare, only to describe the same bill as “mean” “cold-hearted,” and “a son of a bitch” a month later in a meeting with Republican senators. His boasts about being a ‘dealmaker,’ a defining characteristic, were undermined. Many Republicans said that Trump knew little of the detail of policy in meetings, undercutting another core image as a savvy executive. A Senator who supported an early version left a meeting at the White House with a sense that the President did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan. Other reservations the public had about Trump, that he might be too volatile, or vindictive, were reinforced by the president’s threats to let Obama’s system explode on its own.

Some things had been achieved by the Republicans during the healthcare debate. The Senate approved a Trump appointee for the Supreme Court, and the House and Senate worked with Trump to roll back Obama-era regulations using the Congressional Review Act. But to an extraordinary degree, the struggle on healthcare came to dominate time and energy on The Hill. Almost unique was the succession of iterations, each taking up more time, and each ending in the same impasse, each receiving an embarrassing report, showing draconian consequences, from the Congressional Budget Office, and the same public spectacle of failure. Furthermore, the process became ever more desperate, with the third iteration being reduced to a mere vehicle in a complex, and in retrospect, pathetic maneuver; which resulted in a moment of now iconic drama, when Senator McCain gave a literal thumbs down, killing the effort. The pattern of calamity, followed by resurrection, and further calamity brought with it stress, recrimination, demoralization, empowerment of activist opposition who could claim victory after victory, and consolidate their networks and infrastructure; the ongoing effort squandered valuable floor time for other legislation, which was dependent to a large degree on the savings the healthcare bill’s cuts would have made… As if it couldn’t have gotten worse, the final spasm of reform effort compelled a popular late-night host, whose infant son had almost died, to launch a crusade on his show, alleging, in a PR disaster for the last legislative effort, that one of the co-sponsors of the bill had ‘lied to my face.’ In every sense, then, the repeal and replace Trumpcare effort is unquestionably the worst single legislative failure in a century. The astonishing thing, is that it is almost impossible to imagine a process worse than the one the Republicans went through.

The Trump administration’s major legislative initiative, health care reform, has stalled, potentially for good. Only belatedly has progress been made on tax reform. An infrastructure plan is nowhere to be seen. Even funding for Trump’s beloved border wall hasn’t passed yet. But at the very least, any legislation, moving forward, must be handled better than the healthcare debacle. Surely?

In New Film, Sadistic Clown From The Gutter Terrorizes Innocent Children

If only this fake news were real...

News As It Should Be has a cool way of showing how crappy a lot of the modern world is by doing satirical write-ups of how things would be in an ideal world - in this case a 'story' about how Forbes magazine is releasing its 'Misfortune 500' list, to showcase poverty. if only it were true...

http://newsasitshouldbe.com/2017/09/12/forbes-releases-misfortune-500-list/

Would President Hillary Clinton be the most powerful woman in history?

I think this is a really good question, with a lot of angles for debate, because of the historical relativism. Do you go for other contenders, such as Elizabeth the 1st, Catherine the Great or Wu Zetian of China? Do you go by absolute power; the power within a realm, or global power? Do you go by global reach, or power in the historical 'known' world? Is knowledge of the nuclear codes, and the role of commander in chief of a super-power's military trumped by the limitations of constitutional checks and balances? Power over the largest number of people in history, or the largest percentage?

I say she would be the most powerful woman in history, having earned it by merit, rather than circumstances of birth, and for the sheer scale of global power, relative to any other candidate in any other era. What do you think?
Here's the source article, for more context: http://sheppardpost.com/would-hillary-clinton-be-the-most-powerful-woman-in-history/

The jury is in on Tsarnaev, civil liberties and dumb conservatives

From the reading of Miranda rights, to the civil trial, to the 30 verdicts of guilt, the system worked perfectly fine in the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev - without the need for all of that hard-bitten right wing nonsense about suspending rights indefinitely, holding him as an 'enemy combatant' and suspending rights under the constitution. The 'flaky' left-wing commitment to civil liberties turned out to be shrewd and sensible from start to finish, and brought out the best in us...


Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been found guilty on all 30 counts for his role in the Boston Bombing, which killed three and wounded 183. In the next phase of the trial, the same jury – seven women and five men – will hear more witness testimony to help them decide whether Tsarnaev's crimes were so heinous he should be sentenced to death.
With the jury now in on the Tsarnaev trial, the jury is also in on a debate that flared up in the aftermath of Tsarnaev's apprehension.
Two years on, the system has functioned as it should, with constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties upheld from start to finish. Tsarnaev was charged and sentenced to face trial in a civilian court, without his rights being suspended, in a manner that would have undermined American values, and might even have undermined the ensuing prosecution.
In April of 2013, shortly after Tsarnaev's apprehension, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) took to cable news and talk radio to push his case that Tsarnaev should ultimately face a criminal trial, but should first be held as an enemy combatant. In an interview with conservative radio host Mike Gallagher, he protested against sending terrorists "this idea of if you can find an American to kill us they can have a legal safe haven."
“We need to find out: does he know anything about a future attack?’’ Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Graham also took to the Senate floor to argue that “the surviving suspect — due to the ties that these two have to radical Islamic thought and the ties to Chechnya, one of most radical countries in the world — that the president declare preliminarily that the evidence suggests that this man should be treated as an enemy combatant.”
Following the capture of Tsarnaev, officials cited a public safety exemption in declining to initially read Tsarnaev his Miranda rights. But that exemption only lasted for 48 hours. Graham suggested President Obama consider designating Tsarnaev a combatant while they interrogate him for up to roughly 30 days. Although he noted, in an interview with Candy Crawley, that Tsarnaev was not eligible for a military tribunal due to his American citizenship, he went on to say: “When the public safety exception expires, and it will here soon, this man in my view should be designated as a potential enemy combatant, and we should be allowed to question him for intelligence gathering purposes to find out about future attacks and terrorist organizations that may exist and he has knowledge of.”
Republican Rep. Peter King, endorsed that position on Fox News Sunday. He agreed that the suspect could be tried and convicted in federal court.
"He's going to be convicted," King said. "I'm not worried about a conviction. I want the intelligence."
Senior Democrats countered this dangerous proposition by saying the courts could handle the case against Tsarnaev.
“I don’t think we need enemy combatant (status) to get all of the info we need out of him,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on CNN. “I don’t think we need to cross the line.”
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) questioned whether the controversial status might present problems for the prosecution.
“To hold the suspect as an enemy combatant under these circumstances would be contrary to our laws and may even jeopardize our efforts to prosecute him for his crimes in a court".
Jay Carney, the White House press secretary at the time, stressed that the civilian system had been used to try, convict and incarcerate hundreds of terrorists since the 9/11 attacks, including the Times Square attempted bomber. "The system has repeatedly proved that it can successfully handle the threats we continue to face," he said.
Many on the right felt that the enemy combatant designation should have been used to enable a thorough interrogation of Tsarnaev, arguing that his lawyers would, when given the opportunity, tell their client to keep quiet. The argument therefore descended into terms of tough, shrewd, rule-bending realism vs dangerously guileless liberal compassion for human rights.
Leaving aside the dubious idea that an American citizen captured in the United States by law enforcement personnel should be held in long term military detention without charge or access to an attorney, a major flaw in Sen. Graham’s case was that the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) prohibited Tsarnaev’s designation as an enemy combatant, something that Sen. Graham should have known very well because he voted for the Authorization Act a year and a half prior to his remarks.
In Obama’s first few months as president, his administration retired the term "enemy combatant" used by the Bush administration to justify indefinite detention of terrorism suspects. But Obama retained the right to detain indefinitely those who provide "substantial support" to the Taliban, al-Qaeda or associated forces. There was, at the time, no evidence that Tsarnaev met those criteria. Moreover, while the Supreme Court has found that a U.S. citizen can be designated as an "enemy combatant," a citizen labeled as such has the right to challenge that designation at an impartial hearing.
Two years on, the system has functioned as it should, with constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties upheld throughout. Although there had been doubts that Tsarnaev could receive a fair trial in Boston, the case moved rapidly and without incident.
The conduct and conclusion of the Tsarnaev case endorses the idea that American courts are fully able to fairly try individuals accused of even the worst crimes, up to and including acts of terrorism. The case also affirms the idea that constitutional protections are so valuable and so fundamental to American justice that they can be extended even to the worst of criminals, up to and including terrorists such as Dzohkhar Tsarnaev.
FROM: http://sheppardpost.com/

Why is Charles Krauthammer taken so seriously, when he's been wrong about almost everything?

Charles Krauthammer can be seen most nights on Fox’s Special Report with Bret Bair. He qualifies as one of the most significant of the Obama administration’s opponents. Politico’s Ben Smith proclaimed the commentator to be “a coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the president” and a “central conservative voice” in the “Age of Obama.” New York Times mainstay David Brooks characterized him as “the most important conservative columnist right now.” In 2006, the Financial Times named Krauthammer the most influential commentator in America.

There is much to admire about the younger Charles Krauthammer. He was a Commonwealth scholar in politics at Balliol College Oxford, and later a graduate of Harvard Medical School. As a psychiatrist he discovered a variant of manic depression and co-authored an influential study on the epidemiology of mania. In the eighties, one of his articles in Time Magazine won him acclaim for introducing ‘The Reagan doctrine.’ His weekly column for the Washington Post won him the Pulitzer prize for commentary in 1987.

Unfortunately, the modern Charles Krauthammer is a markedly different proposition. The luminary of the contemporary conservative commentariat has a record of erroneous predictions and discredited analysis that stretches back to the turn of the millennium. When collated and assessed, the record is so egregious that it is hard to figure out why he is still held in such esteem.

When NATO, seeking to prevent another potential Balkan genocide, launched a bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999, Krauthammer argued that air strikes would be insufficient to force Milosevic out of Kosovo. Having denounced the move as mere wide-eyed liberal amateurism on the part of President Clinton, Krauthammer added a sarcastic note about Clinton playing golf in the midst of conflict (“The stresses of war, no doubt”). He seems to have changed his mind on the propriety of such stress-relief measures around 2002 or so.

Even after the Kosovo campaign proved successful, Krauthammer said that NATO involvement “would sever Kosovo from Serbian control and lead inevitably to an irredentist Kosovar state, unstable and unviable and forced to either join or take over pieces of neighboring countries.”

When an ethnic Albanian insurgency arose in Macedonia along its border with UN-administered Kosovo in 2001, he felt himself vindicated, announcing that “the Balkans are on the verge of another explosion,” making several references to Vietnam, and characterizing the continued presence of NATO forces in the region as a “quagmire.” The violence ended within the year, having claimed less than 80 lives. Kosovo has since joined both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Krauthammer was one of the leading boosters of the Iraq war. He argued in his February 1, 2002, Washington Post column that an invasion of Iraq would lead to the spread of democracy throughout the Middle East:

“Overthrowing neighboring radical regimes shows the fragility of dictatorship, challenges the mullahs’ mandate from heaven and thus encourages disaffected Iranians to rise. First, Afghanistan to the east. Next, Iraq to the west”.

As the Iraq war got into full swing, Krauthammer ridiculed a New York Times article proposing that coalition forces might have to contend with guerrilla fighters in Iraq. He initially hailed the Iraq conflict as “the Three Week War”; and was sarcastically dismissive when those guerrillas whose existence he had found so improbable actually materialized. When U.S. reconstruction efforts were revealed to be amateurish, Krauthammer concluded a 2003 column with the suggestion that if, “in a year or two we are able to leave behind a stable, friendly government, we will have succeeded. If not, we will have failed. And all the geniuses will be vindicated.”

As the war dragged on, Krauthammer began a process of dissembling about the motivations for the Iraq war: “Our objectives in Iraq were twofold and always simple: Depose Saddam Hussein and replace his murderous regime with a self-sustaining, democratic government,” he said, now leaving the central argument made by the president and by the secretary of state at the U.N. about weapons of mass destruction out of his assessment.

A review of Krauthammer’s columns from 2002-2003 shows that he argued consistently that the risk of Saddam acquiring WMD and passing them on to terrorists was the reason for going to war, not the need to create democracy.

4/19/02: “Saddam survived, rearmed, defeated the inspections regime and is now back in the business of building weapons of mass destruction…Time is running short. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. He is working on nuclear weapons. And he has every incentive to pass them on to terrorists who will use them against us. Given the nature of Hussein’s rule, destroying these weapons requires regime change.”

9/20/02: “The vice president, followed by the administration A Team and echoing the president, argues that we must remove from power an irrational dictator who has a history of aggression and mass murder, is driven by hatred of America and is developing weapons of mass destruction that could kill millions of Americans in a day. The Democrats respond with public skepticism, a raised eyebrow and the charge that the administration has yet to “make the case.” The threat of mass death on a scale never before seen residing in the hands of an unstable madman is intolerable – and must be preempted.”

In the wake of the invasion, Krauthammer’s tone began to change:

6/13/03: “The inability to find the weapons is indeed troubling, but only because it means that the weapons remain unaccounted for and might be in the wrong hands. The idea that our inability to thus far find the weapons proves that the threat was phony and hyped is simply false.”

Later, when the surge was proposed, Krauthammer came out against the idea, explaining in a 2007 column that it “will fail” due to the perfidy and incompetence of the Maliki government. He eventually deemed it a success and criticized those who predicted that it would be a failure. Krauthammer also claimed that President Bush was able to present Barack Obama with a war virtually won and that all Obama had to do was seal the deal.

Regarding Afghanistan, he would initially declare it “an astonishing success” and Karzai a “deeply respected democrat.” As the Afghanistan war dragged on into President Obama’s administration, Krauthammer was asked if the president would end up giving General McChrystal the troops he wanted, or would change the war strategy, Krauthammer replied, “I think he doesn’t and McChrystal resigns.”

In reality, Obama did, and McChrystal didn’t.

Krauthammer has been delivering exasperated, portentous remarks about Iran being right on the cusp of a bomb for more than half a decade now. In Oct 2009 he gravely stated: “Our objective is to stop the enrichment. Unless it stops, they’re [Iran] going to have a bomb and they’re going to have it soon…” Two months later, he warned: “2010 will be the year of Iran. Only three outcomes are possible. A: there’s going to be an Israeli strike; B: there’s going to be a revolution; or C: the Iranian regime will either acquire or come up to the threshold of becoming a nuclear power.” In May of 2010 he lamented “the total collapse of our nuclear policy with Iran.” In February of 2012, Bret Bair asked: “Will Israel strike Iran before the [2012 Presidential] election?” To which Krauthammer replied: “I think Israel will strike, because it cannot live under the threat of annihilation from Iran.”

None of these predictions were accurate, and in retrospect, the rhetoric is agitated and alarmist.

When it came to early predictions about the 2008 Presidential race, Krauthammer suggested that should Obama run, “he will not win.” In the meantime, he said, the White House would probably go to a Republican, “say, 9/11 veteran Rudy Giuliani.” Krauthammer also warned that the “reflexive anti-war sentiments” of the left “will prove disastrous for the Democrats in the long run – the long run beginning as early as November ‘08.”

In the long run, of course, the Democrats won. During Obama’s first term as president, Krauthammer, On the PBS show Inside Washington, predicted that the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act: “I think the way it works is in the short run it will be a devastating defeat for the president, because his singular achievement will be shown by the Court to be unconstitutional”.

In the lead up to the 2012 election, Krauthammer speculated, “The fact is I think Romney does win in November, and the reason is it’s a pretty static race now, but it’s not going to be static forever, and the dynamic is the economy is weakening…”

On the eve of the election he predicted: “Romney, very close. But he’ll win the popular by I think about half a point, Electoral College probably a very narrow margin.” And for good measure he said: “I have every confidence he’s going to win in Florida, in North Carolina and Virginia”.

After Obama handily won the election, with virtually the same electoral college margin as in ’08, Krauthammer complained darkly about the President asserting himself in the new term. “This is entirely about politics. It’s phase two of the 2012 campaign. The election returned him to office. The fiscal cliff negotiations are designed to break the Republican opposition and grant him political supremacy, something he thinks he earned with his landslide 2.8-point victory margin on Election Day.”

Krauthammer’s sneering reference to Obama’s “landslide” overlooks the fact it was a more substantial win than either of George W. Bush’s, and Krauthammer never insisted that Bush practice restraint because of his narrow wins. Instead, he remarked of George W. Bush’s re-election: “The endorsement was resounding. First, his Electoral College victory was solid. He won comfortably. Second, there was the popular vote…If you have already won the electoral vote, it is okay to talk about the popular vote as a kind of adjunct legitimizer. And a 3.5 million vote margin is a serious majority. Knowing he will never again run for office, he is going to attempt several large things, most notably reforming Social Security…”

Obama’s near-5-million-vote margin was cause for sneering, and a reason why he shouldn’t push for the things he said he wanted to do during the campaign. Whereas George W. Bush’s 3.5-million-vote margin was “a serious majority”, giving him license to do things he never mentioned during the campaign, like try to privatize Social Security.

When the I.R.S issue surfaced, Krauthammer declared: “This thing is going to go on, and it could be fatal.”

When The Affordable Care Act was struggling early on, it was Krauthammer’s view that the prospect of Obamacare self-destructing and setting American Liberalism back at least a decade, “is more than likely.” Five months later, enrollments surpassed expectations.

More recently, Krauthammer castigated the President over the Ukraine situation: ‘The E.U dithers while Obama slumbers’. Krauthammer advocated “a serious loan/aid package, say, replacing Moscow’s $15 billion”, and urgent delivery of weapons in case the Russians advanced into Ukraine “as far as Kiev”. While a messy conflict ebbs and flows in the eastern Donetsk region, economically and geopolitically Putin looks compromised and unable to advance the situation, something Obama alluded to at the State of the Union.

On the Hugh Hewitt show, after explaining his professional aversion to diagnosing someone from afar, Krauthammer then promptly did so, labeling Obama ‘a narcissist.’ His castigation of the president became a little histrionic: “Count the number of times he uses the word I in any speech, and compare that to any other president. Remember when he announced the killing of bin Laden? That speech I believe had 29 references to I – on my command, I ordered, as commander-in-chief, I was then told, I this. You’d think he’d pulled the trigger out there in Abbottabad. You know, this is a guy, you look at every one of his speeches, even the way he introduces high officials – I’d like to introduce my secretary of State. He once referred to ‘my intelligence community’. And in one speech, I no longer remember it, ‘my military’. For God’s sake, he talks like the emperor, Napoleon…” This was the assessment that prompted Stephen Colbert to describe Krauthammer as “a bit of a dick.”

Charles Krauthammer has a terrible history of erroneous predictions and assessments, stretching back to the turn of the millennium. Nevertheless, many perceive him to be preternaturally authoritative, and give a lot of credence to his insights. As Nate Silver has said: “The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital ‘A,’ don’t correlate very well with who’s actually good at making predictions.”
FROM: http://sheppardpost.com/

If Hillary doesn't run, is Biden the default? (I hope so)

Hillary Clinton isn’t going to retire to life as a Chappequa grandma; she is all but certain to run for president. If Joe Biden is putting any serious thought to 2016, there is no point in him positioning himself as a progressive alternative to Clinton in the primaries. His best chance is to loiter as an heir apparent, ready to launch a campaign if health issues or some other, unforeseen circumstance compels Clinton to bow out. At that point, it is highly likely Biden would be able to dispatch Martin O’Malley or Brian Schweitzer, or Jim Webb, or Bernie Sanders, or any of the other peripheral figures who might decide to contest the primaries. There would be an inevitable grass-roots campaign to get Elizabeth Warren to run, but she has consistently ruled it out. In any case, many of her most ardent and influential supporters have reservations about the feasibility of such a campaign, and would prefer her to remain in the Senate.

“If Hillary comes out tomorrow and says, ‘I’m not running,’…I still think she shouldn’t run,” said one New York-based financial supporter of Warren. “She has so many holes in her resume.”

Added another California-based donor: “Two years ago she was a college professor, for goodness sakes. She has one issue and she is a great advocate for that one issue. She doesn’t have the breadth of experience necessary to be president.”

If Hillary drops out, with a significant health issue entirely plausible, Biden becomes, if not the automatic substitute, then certainly the fall-back for the 2016 Democratic nomination until a substitute is decided upon.

The arguments about his viability as a presidential contender are deeply familiar. His authenticity and commendable face-to-face campaigning abilities are let down by his notorious ill-discipline and tendency to go off track. His age is an issue.

Officially, there’s no maximum age for presidential candidates. The point at which someone is considered too old isn’t clearly defined.

The oldest presidential candidate thus far was Ronald Reagan, who was 73-and-a-half years old when he ran as the incumbent in 1984. The oldest non-incumbent to win a nomination was Bob Dole, who turned 73 a few weeks before the 1996 Republican convention. He’s followed closely by John McCain, who turned 72 a few days before the GOP nominated him in ’08.

Bob Dole is the most interesting comparison. Biden, who will turn 74 two weeks after the 2016 election, will be 73 during the campaign, only eight months older than Dole was in 1996.

One person can be nominated by his party and run for president, but another person’s candidacy is tacitly ruled out, because he is eight months older? Put like that, such a margin seems arbitrary and artificial.

Biden’s gaffes reinforce the age issue for him, because they are synonymous with the lapses of attention and fading mental acuity of advancing years.

Mitigating against this is the notion that Biden’s lapses, whilst exasperating, are almost invariably inconsequential. They never reveal Machiavellian cynicism, or hypocrisy, or scathing contempt for opponents or figures in the media, or backstabbing, or a schism between on-stage and off-stage personas.

The ‘Joe Bombs’ as they are called, are what I would term soft gaffes – Biden’s ‘Big fucking deal’ getting caught on mic was crass, but amounted to little more than an old-school politician ginning up his boss who was about to make remarks about the ACA. Telling the wheelchair-bound Chuck Graham to stand up was similarly clumsy, but inconsequential. A more important distinction to make is between dated, politically incorrect analogies and language, and Biden’s durably authentic character. Biden calls someone ‘The wisest man in the Orient’, and calls lenders of bad loans to people serving in the military ‘Shylocks,’ and whilst clumsy, no one would contend that, the latter for instance, was a genuinely anti-Semitic Freudian slip, a revelation of a subliminal ethnic and cultural contempt. Outdated racial terminology? – Yes. The merest hint of genuine bigotry in the remarks? – No. Similarly, when Biden spoke at the Democratic Women’s Leadership Forum, and clumsily and thoughtlessly praised the legislative involvement of former Sen. Bob Packwood, who resigned in 1995 after accusations of sexual harassment and assault, no one would actually suggest that Biden, the driving force behind the Violence Against Women Act, actually condones Bob Packwood’s misogyny.

The reason these little episodes get so much media traction is partly because there is a degree of humor about them – the pathos and irony of a sincere person guilelessly frustrating those he is sincerely trying to help.

One emphatic riposte to criticism of Biden’s discipline is his key role in the debates, during two presidential campaigns. Against Sarah Palin he performed suitably, with discipline and without any gaffes. He had good control of his material, had the presence of mind to avoid being seen as overbearing towards his female opponent, and won the debate handily. Against Paul Ryan four years later, he was once again disciplined, and righted the ship at a difficult time for the re-election campaign, after the president’s weak first debate performance. With nation-wide attention, during prime-time, when it counts, Joe Biden delivers.

Most importantly, his legislative involvement during the administration reveals him to be a disciplined and vital figure.

In December 2010, Biden’s advocacy within the White House for a middle ground, followed by his direct negotiations with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, were instrumental in producing the administration’s compromise tax package that revolved around a temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts. Biden then took the lead in trying to sell the agreement to a reluctant Democratic caucus in Congress. In March 2011, Obama detailed Biden to lead negotiations between both houses of Congress and the White House in resolving federal spending levels for the rest of the year and avoid a government shutdown. By May 2011, a “Biden panel” with six congressional members was trying to reach a bipartisan deal on raising the U.S. debt ceiling as part of an overall deficit reduction plan. The U.S. debt ceiling crisis developed over the next couple of months, but it was again Biden’s relationship with McConnell that proved to be a key factor in breaking the deadlock and finally bringing about a bipartisan deal to resolve the debt ceiling crisis, in the form of the Budget Control Act of 2011. Biden had spent the most time bargaining with Congress on the debt question of anyone in the administration, and one Republican staffer said, “Biden’s the only guy with real negotiating authority, and McConnell knows that his word is good. He was key to the deal.”

Dick Cheney is the most influential modern vice-president in terms of geo-politics and national security; but Biden’s negotiating and framing of significant legislation marks him as the most influential modern vice president in terms of the domestic, fiscal agenda. In an age of hyper-partisan gridlock, he has managed, through experience, connections and trustworthiness, to get significant things done. Isn’t that, ultimately, what people want from a president? Wouldn’t that be an attractive proposition in 2016, after the current legislative malaise and mood of distrust? To put it another way, the legislative deals he helped negotiate are a big fucking deal.

If he can tell that story, and establish that narrative, the public might start to tolerate the worst of his his ill-disciplined rhetoric, and be willing to give the old-school, hand-grasping, mouth-running, stick-up-for-the-working-stiff V.P a decent chance. FROM: http://sheppardpost.com/

Millennials are kind of boring

I've always thought that the modern generation, born after 1980 or so, are kind of boring as a generation; and now the jury is in: http://sheppardpost.com/millennials-are-kind-of-boring/

Modern film is a hell of referential reboots

Watching the sci-fi-action film Pacific Rim, which features giant robots punching huge lizards in the face, something made my head spin, and it wasn’t just the special effects, or the fact I couldn’t decide whether I was watching the most awesome dumb movie ever made, or the dumbest awesome movie ever made.

Watching Pacific Rim was like watching Transformers crossed with Godzilla, crossed with Ultra-man crossed with Power Rangers crossed with Hugh Jackman’s Robot boxing movie, crossed with Robocop.

The confounding thing was that most of those referenced film and media franchises have gone through multiple reboots of their own. We are now in an age of reboots with multiple references to multi-referential reboots; a vertiginous age of homage and ever-increasing installments of rehashed source material.

Of the material referenced in Pacific Rim, Robocop was recently brought back to the screen, thirty years after the eighties classic, whilst the Transformers franchise, which this year has produced Transformers: Age of Extinction, the first in a new trilogy of films, succeeding the last trilogy of films, was based off the eighties Transformers cartoon series; and Power Rangers has had two theatrical films, which were developed from the twenty television seasons of seventeen different themed series, stretching back to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in the early nineties.

The Tom Cruise sci-fi fantasy film Oblivion, described by its director (who helmed the reboot of Tron), as an homage to classic seventies films like Logan’s Run, was, aside from those references, a mixture of Blade Runner, Inception and The Matrix with a generous amount of Total Recall thrown in. Again, the references themselves have also been revived. Total Recall received a recent reboot, which took out all the corny charm of the old Total Recall, and replaced it with references to, well, The Matrix and Inception.

Ender’s Game was like watching Harry Potter crossed with Star Wars, crossed with Starship Troopers. The Star Wars reference was strengthened by the casting of Harrison Ford, who had recently reprised his role in the latest reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise, and who is rumoured to be appearing in the latest three-film reboot of the Star Wars franchise, which will follow the three earlier reboot films, which were prequels to the three original films.

There is also, of course, the seemingly endless films based off Marvel superhero comics. Since 2008, there has been Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, Marvel’s The Avengers, Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Marvel also unleashed The Fantastic Four, and its sequel Rise of the Silver Surfer. A reboot of the Fantastic Four franchise is scheduled to be released in 2015. In the next few years, there may be releases such as: Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America 3 and, depressingly enough, Ant-Man.

Multiplexes have also been showing X-Men films since the turn of the millennium. X-men, X2: X-men United, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men: First Class, The Wolverine, and X-Men: Days of Future Past. In the coming years there will be: X-Men: Apocalypse and a sequel to The Wolverine.

The 2013 film Man of Steel was a long, and loud reboot / sequel to the 2006 Superman film, which followed on from the nineties television series, Lois and Clark, which followed on from the Superman film franchise of the eighties.

The recent Star Trek reboot, and its sequel, had to go pre-five-year-mission in order to find a chronological niche on the franchise timeline that hadn’t been occupied. The new films are set prior to the Next Generation films of the mid-nineties, the Next Generation T.V series and the original-cast films in the eighties and early nineties, which followed on from the original T.V series of the sixties.

The Amazing Spider Man 2 came out this year as a sequel to the 2012 film The Amazing Spider Man. That film was a reboot of the 2002-2007 three film Spider Man franchise, which for a time was intended to be extended to Spider Man 4 and Spider Man 5.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is this year’s sequel to the 2011 film Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which began 20th Century Fox’s reboot of the original Planet of the Apes series. It is the eighth film in the franchise, stretching back to the sixties. Prometheus was a prequel / homage to Alien, and its three sequels. The Hobbit films are prequels to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie this year is a continuation / reboot of the previous Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, which followed on from the nineties cartoon.

Add to all this monotony the eight Harry Potter films, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the Twilight saga, The James Bond series, The Batman reboots, and the Hunger Games. This, then, is the repetitive, multi-referential, risk-averse, increasingly-rehashed state of Sci-fi and Fantasy film.

Things aren’t nearly as bad in the drama genre, though it’s sort-of fun to imagine what the studios could come up with, if they thought audiences would go along with it, and there was revenue to be generated: Noah 2: New Flood Rising…Thirteen Years a Slave…Lincoln: Resurrection.
FROM: http://sheppardpost.com/

Is New Zealand Ready For A Gay Prime Minister?

New Zealand’s recent election saw the right-wing National government of John Key returned for a third term with a huge majority. The leadership of the opposition Labour party is currently being contested, with the two likeliest contenders being the former deputy leader, Grant Robertson, and the incumbent, David Cunliffe. Robertson seemed relaxed about David Cunliffe’s supporters raising the issue of him being gay.

“I’ll be judged, I’m sure, on my ability to reflect Labour values,” he said earlier this week.

Just how receptive would the New Zealand public be to the idea of a gay prime minister?

Perhaps a more important, initial consideration is Labour’s base. The fears are that, an openly-gay parliamentary leader might fail to connect with the indigenous Maoridom and with socially conservative, church-going Pasifika voters, and add to the disconnect the party is already experiencing with provincial working class voters. The West Coast, one of the few remaining Labour provincial redoubts, is a good example of this. In 2011 the local M.P, Damien O’Connor, described the list MP selection process as being run by “self-serving unionists and a gaggle of gays.”

In many of these demographics, however, especially the latter provincial category, it’s hard to get a proper fix. The breakdown of a 2012 Colmar Brunton poll on same sex marriage showed, somewhat predictably, that 70% of people aged under 55 were in favour of allowing same sex couples to marry, whilst those who identify with a religion were split evenly on the issue. Interestingly though, rural and small town respondents were in favour by 59% to 33% – just slightly less than the overall average of 63% to 31%.

Perhaps the best example of this unpredictable provincial dynamic is Georgina Beyer, who, at the 1999 general election, won the typically right-leaning electorate of Wairarapa, and became the world’s first transsexual MP. As further evidence of New Zealand’s mercurial progressive attitude, it is interesting to note that Beyer, reiterating her support for the Civil Union Bill in 2004, stated that she did not believe that gay marriage would be legal in New Zealand for at least 20 years. (It was legalised two years ago).

When looking at Maoridom, Meka Whaitiri makes for an interesting case study. She was the successful Labour candidate in the by-election held in the Maori electorate of Ikaroa-Rāwhiti in 2013, following the death of Parekura Horomia. An openly lesbian candidate prevailing in a Maori electorate would seem to diminish the narrative that much of Maoridom, a core labour constituency, would be averse to a gay Labour party leader. But again, sociological assumptions in New Zealand are vexing, and it might well be that the same Maori voters who ticked the box for a lesbian Maori woman in a specific cultural and regional context may be completely averse to voting for a gay, Pakeha professional Wellington politician in a national election.

The peculiar dichotomy, between New Zealand’s staunch, laconic character, and it’s socially liberal tendencies, goes almost as far back as the nation’s founding. Settled largely by Victorians, New Zealand seemed destined to be conservative, insular, and parochial in nature, until it saw the emergence, in the late nineteenth century, of the kind of social problems associated with the ‘Old World’. Vocal minorities of secularists, non-conformists, suffragists, teetotalers and rationalists flourished, and New Zealand soon earned a reputation as a ‘Freethinkers’ paradise,’ and ‘The social laboratory of the world’. The nation became the first in the world to grant women the vote, and devised innovations in labour laws and indigenous affairs.

While the Marriage Reform Bill has taken its place as part of that liberal legacy, many issues around orientation and gender remain. The LGBT success stories, outside the comfort zone of the Labour base, have tended to be lesbian, and this is an important distinction, because at the heart of much homophobia is a kind of misogyny. Lesbianism is somewhat acceptable to the homophobe, who is more squeamish about what they suppose to be the mainstay of the masculine variety. To such homophobes and misogynists, in a sexual sense (as well as other senses) the most degrading thing that can happen to a man is to be treated like a woman. By contrast, lesbianism is unthreatening, negligible, almost a kind of blankness. It is this nasty distinction that could, hypothetically, pose problems for Labour: There are a large number of voters willing to tick the box for an electorate candidate who happened to be a lesbian – but who, in the prime minister stakes, would be adamantly opposed to voting for a ‘homo’.

Grant Robertson’s prospects, were he to secure the leadership, would depend to a great degree on how the party itself evolves. Against the backdrop of National’s ascendant neo-liberal tropes of individual responsibility and society as a meritocracy, Labour’s political-correctness, man-bans and quotas seem staid and stultifying. Last year, Labour’s Council proposed that the Party’s constitution be amended so that the Moderating Committee would arrive at a list which “fairly represents tangata whenua, gender, ethnic groups, people with disabilities, sexual orientations, age and youth.” At the time, however, gay representation already surpassed the quota. Labour had four gay M.Ps out of 34, about 12% of the caucus.

If the public perceived Robertson to be a product or a beneficiary of that culture and those types of processes, they would likely see Labour as having failed to adapt and evolve, to be still beset by special interests and political correctness. If, however, Labour goes through a process of rejuvenation and emerges as appealingly mainstream, than voters might be more open-minded about Robertson, seeing his orientation merely as an aspect of his identity, rather than analogous, in any significant way, to the identity of his party.
FROM: http://sheppardpost.com/