Many rank-and-file cops see the requirement -- a result of the department's consent decree -- as an insult. It could erode the strength of the units.

The LAPD is struggling to fill vacancies in gang units as a financial disclosure rule meant to fight corruption has been received by many rank-and-file cops as an insult -- and a deal-breaker when it comes to working the tough gangland assignments.

Right when you thought (hoped) this whole thing was over, something comes along that, as the Jerky Boys would say, puts a whole different paint job on things. I was back in Maine for Christmas (and of course, holding my breath for an apology and retraction from Demi Moore and her legal team), just hanging out with my Mom and her cat - and in came a cameraphone tip from halfway 'round the world. [Thanks, Joe!]

The January 2010 issue of W Korea just hit the newsstands (with the ironic subtitle "Women in Full"). Unsurprisingly, they decided to use the excellent Mert & Marcus shot of Demi Moore. But very surprisingly, they installed a new hip on Demi. So: even W's sister publication thought the image looked weird enough to fix.

This raises a few serious questions for Martin Singer, his client, and W: did W's Korean team add in a fake hip because they just kinda thought it looked awkward? (Y'know, like I did, before you attacked, discredited, and threatened to sue me?) Or did they merely reveal a hip that was already there, but that Singer, et alia litigiously denied had been accidentally obliterated?

If it's the former: are Singer, Moore et alia now going to pursue legal action against W Korea? By retouching the image's supposedly "genuine representation" of her "absolutely not retouched" hip, did W Korea imply the same things Singer claims I did (but which, of course, I didn't)?

If it's the latter: who was aware of this? If Mr. Singer and Ms. Moore were aware, this raises some rather serious legal questions. Regardless of it being the dumbest argument ever, some very serious core principles are in play.

Anyway, to my eyes, the W Korea image looks great - it's a beautiful cover, and anatomically correct! If I'd seen this image in W's December advance, I never would have said a thing - except, perhaps, "nice work!" (And, had I not been threatened with a lawsuit, I surely would never have noticed the deformed thumb.)

My attempts to secure comment from the W Korea editorial team were unsuccessful.

[Crossposted from my photography blog.]

President Barack Obama has worked hard to forge a solid political alliance with Michael Bloomberg. He courted the New York City mayor during the presidential campaign, sought out his views on topics from gun control and education, and offered only the most tepid of endorsements for Bill Thompson, Bloomberg's last challenger, even though he was the endorsed candidate of Obama's own party.

On Sunday, however, Bloomberg threw a wrinkle into the relationship when he leveled a rather sharp critique at the health care legislation Obama is poised to sign into law.

"You know, if you really want to object to something in this bill, number one, I have asked congressperson after congressperson. Not one can explain to me what's in the bill, even in the House version. Certainly not in the other version," Bloomberg said during an appearance on "Meet the Press." "And so for them to vote on a bill that they don't understand whatsoever, really, you got to question how-- what kind of government we have. Number two, when they talk about bending the curve as -- the governor said, bending the curve is a flimflam euphemism for increasing costs, but we're going to say we'll do it at slightly lower rate than we would have otherwise."

"They are not talking about reducing costs," he added. "They're talking about changing the first derivate, slowing the growth down. And when you look at where the cost savings are going to be, well, they're going to cut something out of Medicare and Medicaid. Now anybody that runs for office will tell you, you don't do that. I mean, the bottom line is it's so politically explosive, it really would be a first time in the history of the world that they ever cut anything [from those programs]."

Bloomberg did credit Obama himself for being willing to tackle some of the tough aspects of health care reform, telling host David Gregory that his quibbles were with Congress. But his comments, nevertheless, represent a departure of sorts from the pro-reform camp. Bloomberg had been hailed by the White House as a prominent non-Democrat supporter of getting legislation passed. In recent days, however, both he and New York Governor David Patterson have raised concerns that the bill would be blow a hole in the state's budget and force the closure of 100 or so health clinics.

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More on Michael Bloomberg

Directors who were supposedly minding the store as disaster struck at companies like Countrywide Financial, Washington Mutual or Fannie Mae have not all been banished from other boardrooms. In many cases, directors just seem to skate away from company woes that occurred on their watch.

To some investors, this is an example of the refusal of those involved in the debacle to accept responsibility for it....

More on Financial Crisis

WASHINGTON — Call it the Terrible Teens.

The decade ahead could be a brutal one for America's unemployed – and for people with jobs hoping for pay raises.

At best, it could take until the middle of the decade for the nation to generate enough jobs to drive down the unemployment rate to a normal 5 or 6 percent and keep it there. At worst, that won't happen until much later – perhaps not until the next decade.

The deepest and most enduring recession since the 1930s has battered America's work force.

The unemployed number 15.4 million. The jobless rate is 10 percent. More than 7 million jobs have vanished. People out of work at least six months number a record 5.9 million. And household income, adjusted for inflation, has shrunk in the past decade.

Most economists say it could take at least until 2015 for the unemployment rate to drop down to a historically more normal 5.5 percent. And with the job market likely to stay weak, some also foresee another decade of wage stagnation.

Even though the economy will likely keep growing, the pace is expected to be plodding. That will make employers reluctant to hire. Further contributing to high unemployment is the likelihood of more people competing for jobs, baby boomers delaying retirement and interest rates edging higher.

All this would come after a decade that created relatively few jobs: a net total of just 464,000. By contrast, 21.7 million new jobs were generated between 1989 and 1999.

Economist David Levy, chairman of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, says the country faces a new era of chronically high unemployment, averaging 8 percent or more over the next decade.

The "New Abnormal," he calls it.

Levy thinks the New Abnormal also means average pay will dwindle, along with consumer prices. That would make it harder for households to pay down debt, he warns.

By the Federal Reserve's reckoning, the jobless rate could remain as high as 7.6 percent in 2012. And it would take two or three years after that for the job market to return to normal, the Fed says.

It's possible jobs won't return to pre-recession levels at any point over the next 10 years, Levy says.

That's mainly because the economy's recovery, sluggish by historical standards, isn't expected to regain its vigor over the next few years. As a result, companies will be in no rush to ramp up hiring.

Other analysts think the economy will recover the jobs wiped out by the recession by 2013 or 2014 but that the unemployment rate will stay high. They note that the healing economy will cause more people to stream back into the labor force, vying for too-few jobs.

In addition, baby boomers whose retirement accounts have shrunk could put off retiring and stay in the work force longer. That would leave fewer positions available for the unemployed.

Other contributing forces – businesses squeezing more work from employees they still have and relying more on part-time and overseas help – have intensified. And record-high federal budget deficits and the threat of inflation could drive up interest rates, which could hobble growth and restrict job creation.

All those factors could combine to keep unemployment high.

"It will be the mother of all jobless recoveries," predicts economic historian John Steel Gordon.

On the other hand, it's possible some technological innovation not yet envisioned could generate a wave of jobs. Yet at the moment, most economists aren't betting that any such breakthroughs will rescue the labor market.

The last time the jobless rate reached double digits, in the early 1980s, it took six years to bring it down to normal levels.

Unemployment hit a post-World War II high of 10.8 percent at the end of 1982 as the country was emerging from a severe recession. The rate fell to around 5 percent in 1988. It took less than two years for the number of jobs to return to its pre-recession level.

In this recovery, the economy is far more fragile.

Hard-to-get credit is exerting a drag. Wounds from the banking system's worst crisis since the Great Depression will take years to fully heal. People and companies, scarred by the crisis, are likely to restrain borrowing, spending and investing.

Some analysts think the jobless rate might have already peaked at 10.2 percent in October. But most economists predict the rate will peak at around 10.5 percent by the middle of next year.

"We are digging out of a very deep hole," says Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego and chief economist for the National Association for Business Economics.

Reaser estimates it will take until 2015 for the unemployment rate to drop to 5.5 percent.

A sputtering job market carries other consequences. One is flat wages. When many people compete for few jobs, employers have no incentive to raise pay.

The economic shocks of the past decade already have cut into Americans' incomes. That's among the reasons why people feel they're standing still economically.

Median household income, adjusted for inflation, fell to $50,303 in 2008, according to the U.S. Census. That gauge combines wages and salaries, investment income and government benefit payments like Social Security. It's down 4 percent from a peak of $52,587 in 1999, when incomes were bolstered by stock gains from the dot-com boom.

That bubble burst in 2000. Since then, workers have seen meager wage gains. Adjusted for inflation, wages grew about 13 percent in the past 10 years – the slowest pace in five decades, according to calculations made by Scott Hoyt of Moody's Economy.com.

That trend is predicted to continue.

"There will be a continued hollowing-out of the middle class," says H.W. Brands, a historian at the University of Texas.

He points to productivity growth, which has let companies produce more with leaner work forces, the offshoring of service-sector jobs and the shrinking of factory jobs.

That's why Vicki Adriano, 51, who works at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, looks ahead to the coming decade with trepidation.

The economic wreckage of the past year means she'll probably have to work longer than she had expected at the factory_ at least seven more years. She frets about the loss of economic security.

"Everything you worked for all those years can be gone in a minute," she says.

More on Financial Crisis

Singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt has died, according to tweets from his friends and an announcement posted on the Constellation Records website.

From the announcement:

In the few short years that we knew him personally, Vic transformed our sense of what true character, grace and determination are all about. Our grief is inexpressible and Vic's absence unfathomable.

Chesnutt slipped into a coma after taking a large dose of prescription muscle relaxants. He died in Athens, Georgia, on Christmas Day. Since being in a car accident as a teenager in 1983, Chesnutt was only mobile in a wheelchair.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Chesnutt faced $70,000 in hospital bills, a subject he brought up in a Pop & Hiss interview earlier this month. From the interview:

I was making payments, but I can't anymore and I really have no idea what I'm going to do. It seems absurd they can charge this much. When I think about all this, it gets me so furious. I could die tomorrow because of other operations I need that I can't afford. I could die any day now, but I don't want to pay them another nickel.

Friends have set up a tribute page to Chesnutt, where fans are encouraged to donate money to his family to help them fulfill the singer-songwriter's medical debt.

Welcome once again to our year-end wrapup and awards ceremony. Honesty dictates that I immediately genuflect to The McLaughlin Group, from whom I have stolen all these award categories. We will begin this week with Part 1 of these annual awards, and then next Friday on New Year's Day, we will present Part 2, with reduced volume levels (for those who are nursing hangovers... ahem).

Before we begin, though, we have to insert a free plug, for another year-end awards column with a slightly different theme -- awards for idiocy in the mainstream media (a subject near and dear to my own heart, I confess). Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting has their "2009 P.U.-Litzer Awards" up, and I heartily encourage everyone to read it as well, because it is excellent and well worth your time.

And, for comparison, it simply wouldn't be Friday around here if I didn't throw in a few plugs for my own columns, so if you'd like to peruse my McLaughlin Awards from years past, here are the previous three years' worth:

[2008, Part 1] [2008, Part 2]
[2007, Part 1] [2007, Part 2]
[2006, Part 1] [2006, Part 2]

But enough of that -- let's get right to the awards themselves!

 

   Biggest Winner of 2009

 

I have a history of taking these first two categories literally (Michael Phelps won this award last year, for instance). And there were two political wins last year which stood out, for separate reasons, so we're going to hand out two Biggest Winner awards as a result.

The first, for "Biggest Deferred Win" goes to none other than Senator Al Franken, who had to wait until the end of June to be officially declared the winner in the Minnesota Senate race over Norm Coleman. Waiting eight months to be seated, on a razor-thin 314-vote margin, Al Franken certainly deserves some sort of award for his patience. Maybe I should call it the "Hardest-Fought Win" award, but whatever you call it, Senator Franken deserves a salute for becoming the 60th vote Democrats desperately needed in the Senate.

Over in the House, the "Most Impressive Winner" this year was none other than Representative Bill Owens, from the New York Twenty-Third Congressional District. Owens won a House seat that, when last held by a non-Republican, was a Whig -- in the 1850s. This stunning upset was made possible by the "Tea Party" movement within the Republican Party, which so savaged Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava that she actually dropped out days before the election -- and then endorsed the Democrat in the race. [Hundreds of television "journalists" immediately breathed a collective sigh of relief that they wouldn't have to learn how to pronounce "Scozzafava" correctly, as an indirect result.] Hopefully, we can all look forward to many more of these sorts of intra-party dogfights in 2010, but for his jaw-dropping upset, Bill Owens deserves to be named Biggest Winner this year.

 

   Biggest Loser of 2009

My first inclination for Biggest Loser was "Progressives," for obvious reasons. But then I thought about it, and Progressives may not be progressing as fast or as far as they thought they were going to under President Obama, but they certainly didn't "lose" as much as they would have under President McCain. This is small consolation indeed, but "losing" isn't just the absence of winning.

But, on a very closely-related and somewhat-overlapping theme, I'd have to award the Biggest Loser to the people pushing strongly for some version of the public option, Medicare-for-all, or single-payer healthcare reform.

Proponents of fundamental and bedrock change in America's health delivery system lost. Big time. Although there is a small chance (measured as the length of time a roughly-packed spheroid of frozen dihydro-monoxide would survive in Hades) of some shred of one of these plans surviving in the House/Senate conference on the healthcare reform bill, I'm not exactly holding my breath.

So, to the millions and millions of people who wanted to actually reform our healthcare system, and are having to swallow the bitter pill of being thrown under a bus instead, we award the Biggest Loser of 2009, with sorrow.

 

   Best Politician

This one is going to be a bit controversial, so allow me to explain up front. "Politician" can be either a neutral term or one loaded with negative connotations. But the best practitioner of politics this year was (surprise!) President Barack Obama.

Which pegs our definition somewhat towards the negative end of the scale. Obama was, to many, overcautious this year in flexing his political muscle, in using the mandate the voters gave him, and in spending political capital in general. All of which was true, to one extent or another.

But staying out of the sausage-making fray in Washington did exactly what President Obama intended -- allowed him to swoop in at the end, and claim credit for the legislative victory. He did this most noticeably on the stimulus package and on healthcare reform. In both cases, he was never tarred with the brush of "defeat" on any particular facet of the legislation, and emerged at the end with virtually the exact same line: "I got 90 percent of what I wanted."

Although this has frustrated a great many of his supporters no end, it (again) did exactly what Obama intended. So, tarnished as the term may be, Obama has to be seen as the Best Politician of the year for playing this political game on his own terms. I'm not exactly happy about it myself, but I have to give credit where credit is due.

 

   Worst Politician

There are two names which pop instantly to mind in this category, but one of them is no longer in office, so we're not sure he qualifies.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney showed the absolute worst traits a politician can -- sour grapes -- at pretty much every opportunity he could during 2009. You'd think he was gone for good (or, more accurately, for worse)... but then there he'd be, popping up on the television screen yet again, with his opinion of why Obama was sending this country straight to Hell, on the Handbasket Express. The fact that he was so bitterly wrong didn't seem to deter the teevee shows from allowing him on whenever he felt the urge, even though he was so utterly irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

But, again, he's out of office, and I simply don't feel like giving the man an award for anything, personally, so we'll skip over him quickly.

Now, there were plenty of examples of corporate-owned "Democrats" in Congress (most noticeably in the Senate) this year, for whom you could make a strong case of being the Worst Politician. But again, I take this category more literally.

Unquestionably the Worst Politician of the year was the titular leader of the Republican Party, Michael Steele. Steele was an embarrassment to his own party, pretty much every time he opened his mouth, and he provided his opponents with so many gleefully idiotic quips that it is impossible to accurately count them all. He was, for Lefties, the gift that just kept right on giving, over and over again. So, for embarrassing his own party while creating joy and delight for his opponents -- while delivering absolutely no tangible political benefit whatsoever, either way -- Steele is hereby awarded the Worst Politician.

 

   Most Defining Political Moment

Because it is fresh in the mind, it's tempting to say that the death of the public option in the healthcare reform debate was the Most Defining Political Moment of 2009.

But it really doesn't qualify, because it didn't define the debate so much as it did end it.

No, the truly Most Defining Political Moment this year was when Barack Obama named his economic team, and got them confirmed. This absolutely defined the first year of his presidency. Obama was stating loud and clear by his choices that he was going to be Wall Street's best friend, and that nobody should expect any radical populism from him whatsoever.

This shaded the debate on so many things during the year that, by definition, it was indeed the Most Defining Political Moment.

 

   Turncoat Of The Year

In an absolute upset, for the first time ever this award is not going to Senator Joe Lieberman, of the "Liebermans for Lieberman" party. Ol' Joe has walked away with this award every year we've handed it out; but this year -- even with a spectacular finish killing off every progressive notion of healthcare reform -- Joe just didn't measure up. Because he's already turned his coat. He would really only be eligible this year if he had become the most liberal member of the Senate, which (as we are all aware) did not happen (see: previous statement on snowballs in Hell).

Towards the end of the year, we had a minor contender in the House, who changed parties from Democrat to Republican, but in the grand scheme of things this was fairly non-eventful, although it does deserve a mention here. Also worth pointing out was Olympia Snowe, who certainly didn't make any friends in her own party by occasionally crossing the aisle to vote with Democrats. And John McCain, who has pivoted to the extreme right of his party so hard he is denouncing things he used to support (quite recently, in fact), in a naked attempt to get re-elected (see: comment on fratricidal Tea Party primary challengers).

But, although it has receded into memory for the most part, the true Turncoat Of The Year -- in the most positive sense of the term you can imagine -- is Senator Arlen Specter. Specter's switch from the Republican Party to the Democrats is what made most of the rest of the year possible. Before Al Franken was seated, Specter was the one who made it possible for a 60-vote majority by his party switch. I can't exactly cite him for courage in doing so, because he also swapped parties in a naked attempt to hold onto his seat, from (once again) a Tea-Party-type of primary challenger. But Specter is now facing a serious Democratic primary challenger next year, so it may have all been in vain for him to do so. But whether he gets booted out or retained by Pennsylvania voters next year; for this year, he is fondly awarded the Turncoat Of The Year.

 

   Most Boring

There are three candidates from the Democratic side for Most Boring. Actually, now that I think about it, pretty much "The entire Republican leadership team in both houses of Congress" should also qualify as well (Mitch McConnell? Seriously? That's all you've got? Wow.), but we'll stick to the Democrats for the actual award here.

Just on stylistic points alone, Joe Lieberman and Harry Reid deserve special mention here. [Yawn!] Man, you see either of this characters on television, and your head just involuntarily starts nodding off. I mean, watching Lieberman speak is about as exciting as watching paint dry, and listening to a Harry Reid press conference is about as packed with thrills as watching an icicle melt.

I have to slap myself across the face to even keep awake when writing about them, I have to admit.

But continuing this year's upside-down nature of how I am interpreting these categories, I am awarding this as a positive award. Because Barack Obama was without question the Most Boring this year. And I do mean that in a good way. The "no drama Obama" campaign theme continued right on into the White House, and Obama was cool and collected throughout a very intense year. Raging scorn was heaped upon him from the Left and from the Right (and from the media, in bucketfuls), and he somehow managed to stay above it all.

To the media, in particular, he stated over and over again that he was simply not interested in the "24-hour news cycle" where everything is about "winning the day's story," and feeding into whatever idiotic storyline the media is going apoplectic over that particular week. Obama kept the "long view" and he saw the "big picture" and -- with only one notable exception (see, below: beer summit) -- completely kept out of the snarling dogfight of daily political ups-and-downs, and trivial issues blown up into gargantuan proportions by bored media types with nothing better to report on. Actually that's not true -- there was plenty of better stuff to report on, but most of it was above the intelligence level of the so-called "journalists," leaving them to squabble over meaningless sandbox issues.

For being this cheerfully boring in the face of such strident idiocy, Obama wins Most Boring -- in the nicest possible way.

 

   Most Charismatic

We're going to hand out two of these awards, one for the House and one for the Senate. Al Franken is trying as hard as he knows how to stifle his inherently and genetically (one assumes) hilarious nature, and thus appear as serious as is humanly possible in his new career as a politician. But every so often, he gets that wry smile on his face and just can't resist saying something amusing. This is a man who knows humor, and has a lighting-fast and razor-sharp sense of irony. To expect him to completely hide this light under a barrel is to ask too much of the man, and -- for these cracks of brightness which shine through occasionally -- we have to award him Most Charismatic in the Senate. No doubt this will be a disappointment to Franken, since, as I said, he's trying mightily not to let any of it show. But Al sometimes just has to be Al, and for that we are eternally grateful. Once he grows into his role as senator, and once he feels confident of his state electorate's support, we fully expect to see this side of him grow and mature; but, for now, we'll take what we can get.

Over on the House side is Representative Alan Grayson. Now, Grayson has occasionally overstepped the boundaries of good taste during the year, but he can be forgiven these rookie errors when you look at the totality of how energetically (and charismatically) he has injected himself into some very important debates, and (by doing so) made some very important points -- in plain, everyday, easy-to-understand language -- that nobody else on the Democratic side seems capable of making. Grayson has proved, this year, that he is a man to watch in the future of Democratic politics, and for his vigorous and entertaining ways of putting things, he has indeed earned Most Charismatic of the year.

So the "Als" sweep the category this year! Congratulations to both Franken and Grayson are in order.

 

   Bummest Rap

This category was chock full of bum raps this year, I am sorry to say.

Not only a bum rap, but also one of the stupidest raps I've ever witnessed in politics were the early complaints that President Obama relied upon his TelePrompTer too much. What a crock -- as if every other politician dating back to Ronald Reagan (and even earlier) hadn't used the same exact device for pretty much all their public speeches. Sheesh. I mean, it's like complaining about Obama "using some newfangled personal computing device that seems to function much as a typewriter does," or, even, "using that science-fictional device which some are calling 'the telephone,' instead staying in touch via the time-honored and known-to-be-reliable telegraph system."

Sorry, my eyes were rolling so much there that I had to take a deep breath, and then re-focus on the page in front of me. Ahem.

Obama likewise got two other bum raps which were simply laughable -- that he was some sort of pacifist peacenik, and that he had said he would never sign a bill with earmarks. The first was downright laughable, because every speech Obama has ever made on war -- back to and including his initial denouncement of the Iraq invasion -- references the fact that there are indeed "just wars," and that Obama himself isn't against all wars... just stupid ones. The earmarks thing was astounding, too, because it was a campaign promise made by his opponent! That's right -- John McCain was the one who foreswore all earmarks. And yet the brain-dead media kept hammering Obama about it, as if he were the one who had made such a promise. Once again: SHEESH!!

Joe Biden deserves a mention here, since he has never lived up (down?) to the "loose cannon" bad rap the media types (and, admittedly, late-night comedians) have delighted in all year. Sure, he's made a misstatement or two (as any human being would), but he's said simply nothing like what we were all led to expect from "journalists" (see: previous brain-dead comment). Also notable for "beating the rap" (as it were) was former President Bill Clinton, who has been remarkably quiet during his wife's first year as Secretary of State.

But there were two raps which stood out as being sheer moose poop during this past year, and to these we give the actual Bummest Rap award. The first of these was Dick Cheney's comments on President Obama's "dithering" on Afghanistan. Obama took three months to make up his mind to send the second of his surges into Afghanistan (the media, in another bum rap, didn't even credit Obama for the first one). But this absolutely ignores the fact that George W. Bush took exactly the same period of time when deciding on his surge into Iraq. Making Cheney a complete moose's ass for suggesting Obama was somehow shirking his duty, and making this Bummest Rap number one for 2009.

Bummest Rap number two was pretty much everything the Republicans said about Sonia Sotomayor. Man, they threw everything at her but the kitchen sink, in a desperate effort to paint her as something she simply was not. None of it had the slightest effect, other than in the inane nature of the questions in her Senate hearing -- all of which she absolutely hit out of the park in her answers. But the caricature painted of her by her opponents was one bum rap indeed.

 

   Fairest Rap

Two fair raps stand out for me. The first was a trivial one -- the rap that those claiming that "a million people" showed up for the Tea Party at the U.S. Capitol were, to be polite, talking through their hats. The photos showed a crowd of around 50,000 to 70,000 people. Now, as I admitted at the time, that's a pretty impressive crowd for a demonstration in Washington. But the Righties were simply not seriously credible when they attempted to inflate the crowd size beyond all reason, with their claim that a million people (or two million, or three million...) showed up. This got even more embarassing when Fox used photos of this rally to try and boost numbers for a later (and much smaller) rally by the same people. So the rap of wildly inaccurate crowd numbers was indeed a fair rap.

And, sadly, over on the Left, the rap that President Obama (and his chief henchman Rahm Emanuel) throws his supporters under the proverbial bus at pretty much every opportunity was indeed a fair rap. Emanuel comes out of the Clinton White House, with all the "triangulation" that implies. This thinking goes somewhat like: "we've already got the Left, we can afford to piss them off, we just need to peel off enough centrists to get things done." And, sadly (as I said) this is indeed a fair rap not just for Emanuel, but also for his boss.

The examples of this are almost too numerous to recall. On gay issues, on medical marijuana, on single-payer, on the public option, on anti-war types, on pro-choice, on immigration, on Wall Street over Main Street populism, on national security issues -- the list is indeed a long one of things that Obama has either disappointed on, or simply kicked the can down the road (a telling statement: I am positive I have missed a few in that list...).

So the rap that the Left should be vary wary of Obama's support, because he has a tendency to throw them under the bus, on pretty much any of their key issues, is indeed a fair one. Actually, it's getting pretty crowded under this bus, now that I think about it... sigh.

 

   Best Comeback

The list of nominees for this one was fairly long -- Sarah Palin (for her book tour), Joe Lieberman (for being the most important senator for a few weeks recently), to perhaps even (from the other side) David Vitter. A good case could be made for "healthcare reform," since the entire effort was all but pronounced dead by the punditocracy (also known as the "inside the Beltway" set) around August. And yet, even with a heavily compromised bill, the effort marches on.

But my choice for Best Comeback is Mark Sanford, Governor of South Carolina. Sanford was caught in a sex scandal (see next week's category: Worst Political Scandal, for more) and the betting money was he'd either immediately resign, or be impeached and removed from office by his fellow Republicans. But when it came time to act, the state legislature did no more than slap Sanford on the wrist, and it is now clear he'll serve the remaining time in his term.

[Insert your own "don't cry for me, Argentina" joke here... ahem.]

But for such a downright "Clintonian" performance, Sanford deserves Best Comeback of the year, I have to admit.

 

   Most Original Thinker

This one is easy, although his name will likely be unfamiliar to you. Atul Gawande wrote a brilliant article on healthcare reform in The New Yorker at the beginning of June, which examined the way a few areas of the country delivered health services. He looked at areas that did it right (and were under the national average in costs), and areas that did it wrong (that were far over the national average), while both delivering similar results.

This article quickly became "must reading" for anyone in the White House, and was probably the most-quoted piece of writing in the entire debate. It was referenced uncountable times by politicians, and did more to influence policy-makers' opinions than perhaps anything else this year.

For writing this article, Atul Gawande is the Most Original Thinker of the year. The article (like most New Yorker articles) is extremely long, but is definitely worth reading.

 

   Most Stagnant Thinker

I have one group award here, and one special mention for an individual.

The group award: The Republican Party. The "Party of No." The idea-less ideologues. No further explanation should be necessary, really.

And for individual cognitive stagnation, a special "Retro" Most Stagnant Thinker for Governor Rick Perry (and all the others), who opened the door to Texas (and other states) actually seceding from the Union -- as if this was actually a valid political stance to take. Seriously, this throwback thinking from the 1860s goes beyond "stagnant," to downright "antebellum."

 

   Best Photo Op

While Michelle Obama's "Victory Garden" photo ops with Washington schoolchildren were endearing, and while Barack Obama's Nobel acceptance speech was (in his own admission) nothing more than a glorified photo op; we tend to forget that 2009 also included last January.

And January 2009 saw two million people stand around for eight or nine hours in sub-zero temperatures just to watch the Inauguration of President Barack Obama.

No photo op in the successive eleven months even came close, I have to say.

 

   Worst Photo Op

We're adding this category to the McLaughlin canon, just because.

There were a few "worst photo op" candidates, sadly all from Obama, in one way or another. The most galling of these were the two (one in the spring, one quite recently) photo ops of "Obama talks tough to Wall Street bankers," which produced exactly nothing in the way of tangible results.

And there was Obama bowing and being polite and overly-respectful (obsequious, even) to various world leaders. This is more symbolic than anything else, but I have to throw my lot in with the Obama-haters on this one (to my great chagrin and embarrassment). Because, I have to say, they're right on this one. America was built on an idea. Part of this idea was that we're all equal. This was a radical, radical idea for its time. And it meant that -- unlike the nobility and royalty in Europe -- no man would bow to our leader. He is not above us -- he is one of us. Equal. The first among equals, to be sure, but still: just a citizen. So we neither bow nor curtsey to him. But the flip side is that he also bows to no foreign leader. We are most decidedly not subjects of anyone. All of us -- individually and collectively -- are just not "subjects." Meaning we do not follow the protocol of royals. Like I said, both a minor issue, and a very major one. Such is the nature of diplomatic protocol. But Obama went too far in his efforts to reach out to the world, I have to conclude.

The third silly photo op was the whole "beer summit." The less said about this episode the better, at this point.

But the real Worst Photo Op -- which topped all of these in idiocy -- was having Air Force One (actually, technically, it was not "Air Force One" at the time, since that designation is reserved for when the president is actually onboard the plane) buzz Manhattan in order to get a photo of it flying by the Statue Of Liberty. Guys, really, there's this thing called "Photoshop," y'know? And... um... 9/11?

Sigh. Nothing really came close to this visual screwup all year long. What were they thinking? Were they thinking? Apparently not.

 

   Enough Already!

As usual, there's a bunch of things which easily qualify for the "Enough Already!" award.

Here's where we just start ranting without abandon.

Tiger Woods? Enough Already!

Balloon Boy's parents? Enough Already!

Michael Jackson's dead? Enough Already!

Gate-crashers at the White House? Enough Already!

Death panels? Enough Already!

Town hall screaming idiots? Enough Already!

Tea Parties? Enough Already!

Sarah Palin? Enough Already!

Obstructionist Corporatist Democrats? Enough Already!

But the actual award has to go to a parliamentary rule, and how it is being abused. Filibusters (and attendant Republican obstructionism)? Enough Already!

 

   Worst Lie

My first inclination was to just give this to "everything the Tea Partiers and town hall idiots let fly from their pie-holes," but then I thought a little more, and remembered this doozy:

Mark Sanford, explaining his absence from the state he was (and is) Executive Officer of (while he was really boinking his mistress down in South America) with the lamest lie of the entire year -- that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail at the time. Further irony was heaped upon this, by the bare-naked fact that during the period he was maintaining this falsehood, there was a nationwide celebration of "Nude Hiking Day," which must have included a few brave nudists hiking on that very same trail.

No other lie even came close, really, from Maine to Georgia (and in all other points of our great country, for that matter).

 

   Capitalist Of The Year

This one's fairly obvious, when you think about it.

President Obama did more to advance the interests of Wall Street, and by inference "capitalism in general" than anyone else this past year. From naming his economic team at the start of the year, to allowing them to have their way with his healthcare reform plan at the end of the year; Obama did what he was told to do by his advisors, and by Wall Street itself.

More in sorrow than in anger, we have to give Obama the Capitalist Of The Year award.

 

   Honorable Mention

This is a lead-in category to the final one for this week, and is somewhat of a catchall for odds and ends not adequately covered by the other categories in the list.

In that spirit, I'd like to give Bill and Hillary Clinton an Honorable Mention here. The fear of bringing Hillary into Obama's cabinet was that she had some baggage, and that this baggage was named "Bubba." But Hillary has been more than competent in her job, and has done so without attempting once to steal the spotlight from her boss. And Bill must be on a very short leash indeed, because there simply have been no "Bimbo eruptions," or other miscellaneous scandalous behavior (such as spotlight-stealing) from the Big Dog himself this year. For proving all the naysayers wrong, I give this extraordinary political couple the special mention they deserve.

And I have to say, it was a shame that Farrah Fawcett Majors died on the day that she did. Farrah was pretty much "Queen Sex Kitten Of The Universe" in the 1970s, with countless adolescent males discovering the joys of... um... a special type of self-love (that's as far decency allows me to go)... whilst staring fixedly (and sweatedly) at this ubiquitous bathing suit poster (still, if I'm not mistaken, the best-selling poster of all time).

Without the existence of this poster, for instance, Baywatch simply never would have occurred to anyone, later on. Farrah deserved better, on her grand exit from life's stage, than being a footnote. Which is what she wound up as, since she unfortunately chose the same day to die as Michael Jackson. All the "Charlie's Angel is now really an angel" prepared footage was woefully foreshortened and overshadowed by the final act in the circus known as the "King of Pop." Which was sad, in a way, for Farrah. So we're giving her an Honorable Mention, just for the smile she's wearing in that iconic poster.

[Full disclosure: I'll have you know, I do not speak from experience, since as a young lad I personally lusted after Kate Jackson ("Sabrina," or the "brainy one"); but I saw that Farrah poster in more of my friends' bedrooms than I saw Led Zeppelin posters -- which, for the 1970s, is saying something indeed.]

 

   Person Of The Year

While both Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid deserve a lot of credit they simply do not get from pixel-stained wretches (such as myself) for shepherding through a raft of small-bore (and large-bore, for that matter) legislation that does not receive media attention, nobody else in particular stood out this year as deserving of the "Person Of The Year" award.

Obama obviously had the chance to shine, and pick up this award as a matter of course. But, sadly, he didn't. He fell short of the bar on any number of issues, and was simply not seen in Washington as driving the debate -- rather (sadly) as a bystander to the debate who would occasionally yell something from the sidelines.

In all honesty, and with absolutely no tinge of suck-up-i-tude, I have to say that Arianna Huffington is right. The "Person Of The Year" this year was "The Lobbyist." Here is her entire blog post on the subject:

This week, Time named Fed chair Ben Bernanke its Person of the Year. The magazine says its choice is "not an award," but rather a recognition of the person who "most influenced the news during the past year -- for good or for ill." Based on that criterion, Time should, without a doubt, have picked Washington lobbyists -- because no person or group was more influential in 2009. After an inspiring presidential campaign that promised to take on the special interests, the lobbyists flexed their muscles (and their wallets) and showed who really runs the show in DC. Lobbyists carried the day on health insurance reform, banking reform, financial reform, drug pricing, cramdown legislation, and credit card interest rates, to name just a few. And every time they won, the American people lost. It's Time for a reshoot. The Lobbyists: The Real Persons of the Year.

Sad to say, I couldn't agree with Arianna more this year.

Sigh.

 

As usual, for anything or anyone I've forgotten (or otherwise inadvertently omitted), please feel free to let me know your choices in the comments. Until next week's "Part 2" of these awards, I wish you a Happy Holiday!

 

Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Cross-posted at: Democratic Underground

 

More on Afghanistan

The global economic decline has hit Central America hard. Unemployment has increased, remittances from emigrants have declined and governments face rising deficits and debt that jeopardize their ability to meet increased social demands. The story is similar in much of the world, but the situation is particularly precarious in these countries, because they are among the poorest nations in the Americas and have weak economic and social safety nets.

Governments in the region have responded to the economic decline by promoting fiscal adjustments to improve their balance sheets. El Salvador recently passed a gasoline tax and revised its value-added tax, and President Mauricio Funes hopes to pass tax increases on liquor, tobacco and luxury goods. In Honduras, de facto President Roberto Micheletti proposed sweeping reforms, before withdrawing the media-dubbed paquetazo due to pressure from Congress and president-elect Porfirio Lobo to put off major legislation until the new government assumes power. Meanwhile, Guatemala has witnessed the fiercest budget fight of all. Supporters of President Alvaro Colom's proposed reform have taken to the streets and threatened opposition legislators, but these efforts have failed to keep Colom's opponents from obstructing congressional proceedings. Thus far, Colom appears to be losing the legislative battle.

Taxation is a contentious issue in every country in the world, but the topic is especially fraught in Guatemala. Guatemala has long had the lowest tax ratio--tax revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product--in Latin America, a region notorious for weak tax collection. The low tax ratio is part of a legacy of a racist, extractive Guatemalan state, predicated on making profits for economic elites through the cheap (for many decades, forced) labor of a predominantly indigenous majority. Since the state cared little about the needs of most Guatemalan citizens throughout most of the country's history, social spending was minimal and taxes remained negligible.

To confront this legacy, the 1996 Peace Accords stipulated an increase in the tax ratio, from 8 to 12 percent, as an integral part of the settlement to end the 36-year civil war. But, by 1999, Guatemala's tax ratio was still only 9.1 percent, compared to the Latin American and Central American averages of 19.1 percent and 19.4 percent, respectively. (According to the IMF, typical tax ratios are 40 percent for high-income countries, 25 percent for middle-income countries, and 18 percent for low-income countries.) Right-of-center governments and well-organized economic elites nominally accepted Guatemala's 12 percent goal, but obstructed implementation. By the middle of this decade, and after continued international pressure, Guatemala finally met the 12 percent mark. But the tax base has remained narrow, and exemptions and loopholes abound for the wealthy to avoid paying into the system.

This year, president Alvaro Colom--the first left-of-center president elected in Guatemala since the 1954 coup ousted Jacobo Arbenz--has renewed the tax fight. His proposal to Congress includes increasing taxes on businesses, commercial rents and the cellular telephone industry.

Colom's proposal has met predictably fierce opposition. Digging their heels in against Colom, opposition legislators stayed away from several sessions of Congress, preventing the legislature from reaching its quorum. When they did attend, they used procedural quirks--similar to a filibuster in their effect--to prevent further debate and voting on Colom's proposed reforms.

In response, the country's teachers' union blocked several major roads last week to pressure the Congress to approve an expanded state budget, including increased funds for the Ministry of Education. Matters then got out of hand when dozens of pro-Colom mayors--who support the reforms because of promised funding increases for municipal coffers--descended on Congress to pressure legislators. They burst into a meeting of legislators and then surrounded, grabbed and pushed opposition members around the room. The mayors' goal was to pressure the opposition into action. But their ill-conceived plan backfired, however, as the President of Congress--himself a supporter of Colom's reforms--subsequently had to declare a recess until January.

Colom's opponents--the strongest of which come from the right-wing Patriotic Party--have justified their position by arguing that more taxes will reduce investment and new employment opportunities. They further criticize Colom's government for a lack of transparency in social spending and argue that spending reforms must precede tax increases.

In particular, these legislators have accused Colom of distributing benefits through Mi Familia Progresa, a conditional cash transfer program, along partisan lines. Colom's opponents have argued that the First Lady, Sandra Torres de Colom, who heads Colom's signature Cohesion Social council, is using Mi Familia Progresa as a patronage tool to drum up support for her potential presidential candidacy. Recently, Colom's opponents declared victory when the Constitutional Court demanded that the government make public the list of program beneficiaries. The government complied with the order last week.

Opposition parties have also raised concern over financial transfers to Cohesion Social from other ministries' budgets. These are legal, but in large scales may undermine key ministries' effectiveness, so legislators have pleaded for greater transparency.

Colom should certainly introduce as much sunlight as possible to demystify government spending. Critics are also probably right that Colom should have been more diplomatic in introducing the reform, instead of declaring his unwillingness to negotiate with his opponents. Finally, real concerns exist about the cellular telephone tax. Colom has promised to create an oversight commission to ensure that the tax would not be passed on to consumers, as this would mean just another regressive tax in an already regressive tax system. Basic economic theory, however, suggests that it would be very difficult--perhaps impossible--to ensure that the firms absorb the full weight of the taxes.

Surely then, Colom is not faultless in the reforms' failure thus far. But a longer-term view makes it hard to see the opposition as acting in good faith. Simply put, Guatemala has seen this kind of right-wing foot-dragging on tax reform before. Recent events reflect continuity with events leading up to and following the Peace Accords, when CACIF (the Coordinating Committee for Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations) obstructed tax reform and efforts to address land and social inequality. Now, CACIF is among the groups of elites pushing back against Colom's efforts to collect more taxes from the business community and make the entire system more equitable.

The claims that increased taxation will hurt the country ring hollow when one realizes that, even if Congress passed all the reforms, Guatemala's tax ratio would still pale in comparison with virtually all Latin American countries. The truth is that Guatemala has dire social needs that the state must address, as the market alone will not solve them. One pressing example is this year's drought and the ongoing wave of acute malnourishment and hunger-related deaths. In arguing for greater assistance to affected communities, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food made clear that increased taxation must be part of the equation. This is one of many examples that underscore a simple reality: without greater tax revenue, the government will not be able to meet the needs of Guatemala's most vulnerable citizens.

Now, if Congress cannot reach an agreement, Colom will face the choice between accepting mounting public debt and implementing austerity measures. Significant increases in debt could hurt Guatemala's macroeconomic outlook and raise concerns for creditors. Having to repay such debt in the future could also mean a less ambitious long-term development agenda. Meanwhile, short-term cuts in education and health care would deal a blow to Colom, whose agenda centers on the expansion of social service coverage. Such a cost reduction strategy could also hurt the government's plan to increase the size of the police force, a pressing concern in a country with rampant drug and gang-related crime.

In short, the current tax reform debate in Guatemala may well shape the last two years of Colom's presidency. If Colom's opponents win this fight, it could embolden them to attack Colom's other priority areas, ultimately undermining his agenda for the remainder of his term.

(Copied with permission from www.americasquarterly.org.)

More on Global Financial Crisis

In this Week 15 post-game analysis, we rejoice in the G-Men's drubbing of the hapless Washington Redskins. In so doing, we give credit to Eli Manning, Ahmad Bradshaw, Kevin Gilbride, Will Beatty, and the rest of the New York Giants for a job extremely well-done (except for Michael Boley, on whom Greg is very down). Also, we discuss the NFC playoff picture, DeSean Jackson, the Vikings (including the Favre/Childress affair), the Saints, Mike Francesa's goody bowl, and much, much more. As always, we address fan email and comments, give out awards, and call our top teams, including Week 15's "Beast of the East." And don't miss our call for The NYGMen Podcast's "Generic" Condom "Breaking" Play of the Game as well as the Gauthier "Mic 'em up" Consideration. LET'S BASK IN THE GLORY, no matter how briefly it may last.

Listen to The NYGMen Podcast Episode #13 here:

For more, go to www.giantspodcast.com.

There are many lessons to learn from the health care war that has raged over the past year. We'll get to some of them below. But here's the bottom line: Pass the bill, then improve it.

The health care bill that will emerge from the House-Senate conference committee won't be what most progressives had hoped for, but it is a major, historic turning point in American social reform legislation, comparable to the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, the Fair Employment Practices (minimum wage/40 hour year) Act, Civil Rights Act, the Clean Air Act, and other progressive breakthroughs. None of those laws were what their advocates wanted. They all involved compromises that, at the time, were heart-breaking to activists. Each one was subsequently improved by amendments, although not without reformers doing battle with reactionary opponents.

It is incredibly irresponsible for radicals and progressives to call for killing the health care bill. It is important to push for changes that would improve the Senate version of the bill. For example, the House funding plan (a tax on families with incomes over $1 million) is much better than the Senate version (a tax on so-called "Cadillac" health insurance plans). That's what the labor movement, liberal and progressive Democrats in Congress, pro-choice advocates, and others will be doing in hopes of putting a better bill on President Obama's desk, as Harold Meyerson discusses in his latest Washington Post column: (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/22/AR2009122202842.html?hpid=opinionsbox1) But the idea that we should scrap this bill and start from scratch next year is both immoral and impractical. If we don't pass health care reform now, we won't have another chance for at least a decade. And, like taking food out of the mouths of hungry children, killing this bill will hurt tens of millions of real people who are now suffering physically, psychologically, and economically.

For proof, check out this chart, putting together by Jonathan Cohn and Jonathan Gruber (a health care economist at MIT), based on CBO cost estimates of the Senate bill. (http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Columns/2009/December/~/media/CC9EB727BC494A1BB5FE01E9B71EA036.gif)
It shows the health care cost projections for a family of four at different income levels. For example, a family of four earning $60,458 -- 250 percent of the federal poverty line -- would pay an estimated annual premium of $12,042 and an annual out-of-pocket maximum of $12,600 without the legislation (in total, 41 percent of annual income). If the legislation passes, the comparable numbers are $5,797 and $6,300, respectively (or 20 percent of annual income). Families with lower incomes benefit even more. Here's Cohn's article, that explains this in greater detail http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Columns/2009/December/122109Cohn.aspx

After the Senate passed its version of the health care bill earlier today, Obama said: "This notion that somehow the health care bill that is emerging should be grudgingly accepted by Democrats as half a loaf is simply incorrect," Mr. Obama said. "This is nine-tenths of a loaf. And for a family out there that right now doesn't have health insurance, it is a great deal. It's a full loaf for a lot of families who have nothing to fall back on if they get into a medical emergency."

We can differ with Obama on the math -- I'd say the House will is 3/4 of a loaf and the Senate bill is 2/3 of a loaf -- but he's basically correct about the real human impact. The bill will make life better for most Americans - those who don't currently have health insurance and those who currently have inadequate health insurance. Every serious progressive health care expert agrees that the bill is a significant step forward -- a stepping stone toward universal health insurance -- although they may differ on some particular issues. The health care experts writing this week in the left-wing The Nation, the progressive American Prospect, and even the barely-liberal New Republic share this view.

Here's what J. Lester Felder writes in The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100111/feder2):

"Despite these very serious shortcomings, however, the bill the Senate passed would reduce the number of uninsured Americans by 31 million by 2019. The Medicaid program will be open to new ranks of the country's poorest residents, and the near-poor and middle class will get subsidies to buy insurance. The Senate also advanced some important delivery system reforms that could chart a path towards reining in costs.

As disappointed as progressives are with the compromises Democratic leaders made to get this bill through the Senate--and as tempting it is to believe they may have gotten a better deal if they'd pursued a more aggressive strategy--they are on the verge of doing many other lawmakers have tried and failed to do. And if this effort fails, another generation may pass before another chance will come to try again."

Here's what Jacob Hacker, the policy expert and Yale political scientist who is credited with devising the original "public option" plan, wrote in the New Republic (http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-treatment/why-i-still-believe-bill):

"Since the first campaign for publicly guaranteed health insurance in the early twentieth century, opportunities for serious health reform have come only rarely and fleetingly. If this opportunity passes, it will be very long before the chance arrives again. Many Americans will be gravely hurt by the delay. The most progressive president of my generation--the generation that came of age in the anti-government shadow of Ronald Reagan--will be handed a crippling loss. The party he leads will be branded as unable to govern...

The public option was always a means to an end: real competition for insurers, an alternative for consumers to existing private plans that does not deny needed care or shift risks onto the vulnerable, the ability to provide affordable coverage over time. I thought it was the best means within our political grasp. It lay just beyond that grasp. Yet its demise--in this round--does not diminish the immediate necessity of those larger aims. And even without the public option, the bill that Congress passes and the President signs could move us substantially toward those goals.

As weak as it is in numerous areas, the Senate bill contains three vital reforms. First, it creates a new framework, the "exchange," through which people who lack secure workplace coverage can obtain the same kind of group health insurance that workers in large companies take for granted. Second, it makes available hundreds of billions in federal help to allow people to buy coverage through the exchanges and through an expanded Medicaid program. Third, it places new regulations on private insurers that, if properly enforced, will reduce insurers' ability to discriminate against the sick and to undermine the health security of Americans.

These are signal achievements, and they all would have been politically unthinkable just a few years ago."

Paul Krugman in the New York Times (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/the-wysiwyg-president), Ezra Klein in the Washington Post (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/jane_hamshers_10_reaons_to_kil.html), Paul Starr in the American Prospect (http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=deal_or_die_on_health_care), and many others echo versions of these same sentiments.

The bill that eventually winds up on Obama's desk won't be what we'd hoped for a year ago. There will be lots of articles and even some books diagnosing what went wrong and what went right. Some initial thoughts:

1. The biggest obstacle to more progressive reform is our system of campaign finance. The drug companies, insurance companies, the hospital lobby, and the American Medical Assn. have too much political influence because they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions and lobbying -- something I've written a lot about over the past year. The Republican Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the medical industrial complex, as they've shown during throughout the battle over health care reform. Unfortunately, a handful of moderate Democrats in both Houses are also in the pockets of the health industry lobby - most obviously Senators Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Mary Landreiu, Blanche Lincoln, and Kent Conrad. And let's not forget one-time-Democrat-now-Independent-who-acts-like-a-Republican Joe Lieberman, whose vanity, hypocrisy, and double-cross should be rewarded by the Demos by stripping him of his committee chairmanship and whom all Democrats around the country should unite in defeating when he runs for re-election for his Senate seat from Connecticut in 2010. I've written about Lieberman as the "Senator from Aetna" (http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/12/17/joe_lieberman_senator_from_aetna), but he's worse than that. Lesson #1: we need campaign finance reform, preferably mandatory "clean money" public financing plan (http://www.publicampaign.org), as an alternative to our current system of legalized bribery.

2. Lefties have been too quick to criticize Obama and the Democratic Party for compromising with the moderate Dems and their sponsors, the insurance industry. The truth is that of the 58 Democrats in the Senate, 53 of them supported the public option and, later, even more supported the Medicare buy-in proposal (for people 55-64), as a way to create competition with the insurance industry. In a true democracy, 53 votes (out of 100) should be enough to pass a bill. So the second obstacle to real reform is the filibuster rule, which gave the five-member "Baucus Caucus" (who together represent states with 3 percent of the country's total population), and then Lieberman, too much influence. Lesson #2: Kill the undemocratic filibuster rule.
3. Lesson #3: Grassroots organizing saved health care reform from an early death. Recall, at the end of the summer, pundits were already writing obituaries for major healthcare reform. Particularly during the August Congressional recess, an epidemic of right-wing anger against Obama and his policy agenda--of which healthcare reform was simply an immediate and convenient target--captivated the media, which reported disruptions at Congressional town hall meetings as though they were an accurate reflection of public opinion rather than a pep rally for extremists, encouraged by Fox News and talk-show jocks. The right-wingers stoked fear and confusion by warning that Obama's "socialized medicine" plan would create "death panels," subsidize illegal immigrants, pay for abortions and force people to drop their current insurance. Republican officials, including Senator Charles Grassley, Senator Jim Demint, and Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele, and conservative pundits Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Betsy McCaughey repeated these myths. And support for the public option tumbled over the summer in response. In June, 62 percent of Americans told Washington Post/ABC pollsters that they favored a public option. By mid-August, support had slipped to 52 percent. Obama's popularly fell, too, as jobs continued to disappear and the administration's proposals to bail out the banks and the auto industry met with right-wing attacks and public skepticism. The death in August of healthcare reform stalwart Senator Ted Kennedy bolstered Baucus' influence as chair of the Senate Finance Committee. As Marshall Ganz and I wrote in the Washington Post at the end of August (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/28/AR2009082801817.html), the grassroots momentum from the Obama campaign seemed to be stalled.

To the rescue came Health Care for America Now (HCAN), a coalition of unions, community organizations, consumer groups, environmentalists and netroots groups such as MoveOn, has been spearheading the reform campaign since the group was launched in July 2008. I've written about HCAN's influence elsewhere. (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091109/dreier). Suffice it to say that in late August, seeing defeat on the horizon, HCAN and other reform activists regrouped. They decided to act more like a grassroots movement and less like an interest group. That meant mobilizing voters, focusing attention on the insurance industry, humanizing the battle by giving insurance company victims an opportunity to tell their stories and using creative tactics to generate media attention. They sponsored rallies and protests, including civil disobedience, in cities around the country. They helped focus public attention on the insurance industry's outrageous profits and executive compensation, its abuse of consumers and its outsized political influence. And they warned Democrats not to get duped by the industry's pledges of cooperation. Public support for the public option recovered after taking a tumble over the summer. In late October, a Washington Post/ABC poll found that 57 percent favor a public insurance option, while 40 percent oppose it. If a public plan were run by the states and available only to those who lack affordable private options, support for it jumps to 76 percent. Under those circumstances, even a majority of Republicans, 56 percent, favor it. That kind of grassroots pressure helped the liberal Democrats in the Congress fight to keep a decent bill alive, even though eventually Lieberman forced the Dems to compromise on the public option and then the Medicare buy-in.

4. Lesson #4: Watchdog the media. The mainstream media made it very difficult for Obama, the progressive Democrats, and health reform advocates. During the past year, the mainstream media gave right-wing activists a megaphone that gave them a much larger voice than they deserved. The ultra-right -- including the "tea party" lunatics, and reactionary Republicans like Senators Jim DeMint and Charles Grassley, egged on by Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and their Fox News colleagues -- got much more attention than they should have. As Todd Gitlin and I noted, the media covered the right-wing protests AGAINST health care reform, but barely reported on the protests sponsored by health care reform activists like HCAN. http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/demonstrations_at_ceo_mansions.php The mainstream media acted like stenographers, repeating their lies about the health care plans, without trying to verify them or put their outrageous statements in context. At the same time, the mainstream media completely shut out the voices of the left wing of the health care debate, the advocates for a single-payer system. With a few exceptions, the media repeated the right wing's lies about Canada's health care system without correcting them, and allowed them to frame the mainstream Democrats' public option plan as "socialism." Trudy Lieberman, the nation's best media critic, has been keeping tabs on the media's misreporting of the health care debate all along. http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/trudy_lieberman_campaign_desk.php It is worth reading her regular columns and blogs to see how much the media set the public agenda and framed the debate in ways that undermined progressive activists and President Obama.

5. Lesson #5: This isn't just about health care. Last summer, Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina said out loud what most Republican members of Congress were thinking and plotting. DeMint called the president's health care proposal "D-Day for freedom in America" and said that stopping Obama's plan for health care overhaul could be the president's "Waterloo," a reference to the site of Napoleon's bitter defeat in 1815. What DeMint meant, and what his Republican colleagues and their allies like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and others intend, is that defeating Obama's health care reform would undermine his presidency, and set the stage for major GOP victories in the 2010 elections and again in 2012, including defeating Obama's re-election bid. They understood that if the unholy alliance of medical industry muscle, right-wing mob tactics, Republican Party hardline unwillingness to compromise, and a handful of conservative Democrats' obfuscation is able to defeat Obama's health-care proposal, it will write the conservative playbook for blocking other key components of the president's and progessives' agenda -- including action on climate change, immigration reform, marriage equality, a second jolt of economic stimulus, and updates to the nation's labor laws. So those progressives, like Howard Dean, who say, "kill the bill" are doing more than dooming tens of millions of Americans to health care hell; they are setting the stage for a Republican resurgence.

Obama has certainly disappointed many progressives on a number of fronts, including the Wall Street bail-outs, the weak foreclosure program, the too timid stimulus plan, and most recently by expanding the war in Afghanistan. What's missing from these criticisms is the failure of progressive forces to mount an effective grassroots movement to push Obama and the Democrats. Both grassroots groups (including unions, enviros, community organizing groups, gay rights groups, peace groups, and others) and the Obama administration haven't yet learned how to play the inside-outside strategy game as effectively as they could. Like FDR, Obama's success depends on the existence of a progressive movement that organizes, protests, influences public opinion, lobbies, and keeps the heat on so that the inevitable legislative compromises are stepping stones to further reform. When activists asked FDR to support progressive legislation, he told them, "I agree with you. Now go out and make me do it." Obama has sent the same signals. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/go-out-and-make-me-do-it_b_281631.html.

The Right understands this. That's why Glenn Beck, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Congressmembers King and Issa, and others have been so persistent at attacking SEIU, ACORN, Van Jones, and others. They want to destroy the progressive movement and make it more difficult for Obama to be a successful (and two-term) president.

Speaking of ACORN: the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service released this report the other day about ACORN, documenting that the various accusations against the group -- especially about alleged "voter fraud" -- are totally bogus: http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/CRS-ACORN091222.pdf Here are some of the key findings:

There were no instances of individuals who were allegedly registered to vote improperly by ACORN or its employees and who were reported "attempting to vote at the polls." Memorandum from the Congressional Research Service to the House Judiciary Committee, "ACORN Investigations" (December 22, 2009), at 1.

As of October 2009, there have been 46 reported federal, state, and local investigations concerning ACORN, of which 11 are still pending. "ACORN Investigations," Table 1.
No instances were identified in which ACORN "violated the terms of federal funding in the last five years." "ACORN Investigations," at 1.

Recently enacted federal legislation to prohibit funding to ACORN raises significant constitutional concerns. The courts "may have a sufficient basis" to conclude that the legislation "violates the prohibition against bills of attainder." Congressional Research Service, "The Proposed 'Defund ACORN Act' and Related Legislation: Are They Bills of Attainder?" (November 30, 2009), at 25. [A recent court ruling did, in fact, find that the legislation violated the law]

Concerning recent "sting" operations relating to ACORN, although state laws vary, two relevant states, Maryland and California, "appear to ban private recording of face to face conversations absent the consent of all the participants." Memorandum from the Congressional Research Service to the House Judiciary, "Allegations of Recording Conversations with Various ACORN Affiliated Individuals without Their Consent" (October 9, 2009), at 1.

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