Musing's musings

The caution flag is waving

For the second time, officials in the Obama administration (at a considerably higher level than HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius this time) seem to be walking back the president's commitment to the public option, in advance of his speech to a joint session of Congress later this week. If past history is any indication, it is entirely possible that further statements and clarifications that directly contradict today's will be issued tomorrow--but the very fact that the administration is even looking ready to give up on this wimpy-ass public option is a matter for concern.

As I said last month, the only way we're ever going to get real health-care reform (as opposed to a purely cosmetic health-insurance reform, which is basically what the administration's plan boils down to) is to go the single-payer route. That option was never even on the table. The one plus to the public option was that it would at least fire a warning shot across the bow of the rapacious insurance giants that are the real arbiters of health care in America. It isn't a matter between a patient and her doctor (which it should be, and the way Republicans, Blue Dogs, and other opponents of reform would like to pretend that it is)--rather, it's a matter between a patient, her doctor, and the insurance company that mediates everything the first two partners do. Absent some kind of new regulations, these companies will continue on as they have been--raising premiums well beyond the rate of inflation, reducing coverage, cutting services, refusing to pay for expensive or experimental treatments, and generally doing everything they can to suck as much profit out of as many people as possible--never mind that their purpose is supposed to be helping those people get the medical care and attention that they need.

I was never under the impression that Obama was a liberal, and I certainly didn't buy into all of the hype his campaign put out about hope and change. That was simply rhetoric and a marketing strategy. Anyone who's looked at his record (to say nothing of his campaign platform) can see that Obama is a centrist: slightly to the left of center, yes, but still a centrist. Consequently, I'm not terribly surprised to see him embracing a centrist and fairly corporatist agenda through the first eight months of his term in office.

But what does surprise me--and concern me, as it should concern Democrats and progressives and liberals of whatever political stripe--is how staggeringly ineffective the Obama administration has been at selling its message. This is a huge contrast to the campaign, where message discipline was one of the hallmarks of the operation that crushed all opposition in a bruising two-year primary, and then snuffed the life out of the McCain-Palin ticket in the general. What we have seen since Inauguration Day has been a hapless, unfocused, undisciplined tacking hither and yon, without any discernible course. Further darkening the horizon, one of the few campaign promises President Obama has yet delivered on is his desire to be a bipartisan president.

Bipartisanship has become the shibboleth of the Obama administration. If these people had a signature tune, it should be "Bipartisanship über alles." Long past the time when most people would have given up, long past the time when the handwriting on the wall should have been obvious to the man some have called one of the most astute politicians in a generation, the president continues to woo his opponents, even though those opponents have made it perfectly clear that the only thing they want to do with the president is hand him one defeat after another. There will be no working compromises: they want what they want, and the only acceptable outcome to them will be getting it. Never mind that the Democrats have working majorities in both houses of Congress--Obama doesn't seem willing or able to move forward on anything unless he's got cover from the other side of the aisle.

His political advisers had better be sending him memos telling him to back off on that, because the hemorrhaging is getting serious. Obama hasn't picked up any ground with Republicans (not surprisingly), and he's lost a plurality of independents who are now solidly on the fence. But the worst drop in support for the president has come from his base: Democrats' opinion of the president's job performance has been trending steadily downward, just as the campaign season for the 2010 midterm elections gets under way.

Ergo, the title of this post. The president has gotten off track, and he needs to hear it from us--just as he asked us to do during the campaign. The problem there is, there's a very small, but even more incredibly vocal cadre of Obama hyper-partisans who will tromp on anything that looks even remotely like dissent, criticism, or any suggestion that President Obama isn't the smartest, most perfect, bestest, most liberal, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious president EVAH! Speak but one discouraging word about the president, and these folks come out of the woodwork screaming about how it's only been eight months, and how Bush the Lesser left the country in such a God-awful mess how could anyone possibly have done better than Obama, and how he's way smarter than we are, and a much better politician, so shut the fuck up with your negativity already and wait and see: he'll get around to giving you your goddamn pony, you whiny single-issue voter--and oh, by the way, I suppose you think a President McCain or a President Palin or a President Romney would be doing a better job?

It's too early to think about primarying the president. But it's not too early to start expressing concern about the direction and tone his first year in office has taken. It is certainly time to let the party leaders know that unless things start changing for the better, we're going to be a lot harder to get motivated to donate and work for Democratic candidates next year--let alone this president in 2012. Sure, it's only been eight months--but eight months is enough time to get a pretty good idea of what the next eight months are going to look like. Thus far, I don't like the picture I'm seeing.

What he said

As far as I'm concerned, Dan Savage has said all that needs to be said about President Obama's shameful record on gay rights since winning election--and also about the "wait your turn, faggot" crowd that inevitably pops up every time anyone has the temerity to point out that the Dear Leader is naked. The Dear Leader really hasn't been all that dear as far as the gay community is concerned, and he sure as hell hasn't been a leader. Or even that good of a follower.

But then Obama was sworn in under Rick Warren’s porcine gaze and the "fierce urgency of now" quickly morphed, in Andrew Sullivan’s damning turn of phrase, into the "fierce urgency of whenever." Never mind that gay people are being turned away from their partners’ bedsides during medical emergencies now. Never mind that people are being kicked out of the military now. Never mind that Arkansas banned adoptions by same-sex couples on the very same day that Obama was elected. (Gosh, where’s that bully pulpit when you need it?) The man who wasn’t afraid to appeal directly to us for our votes as a candidate -- and certainly wasn’t shy about asking us for our dollars -- couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge the promises he had made to us and seemed to greatly resent being asked to actually honor them.

That paragraph says, eloquently and concisely, everything I've been struggling to say for the last seven months. In all likelihood, I will be turning to it again and again throughout the next three and a half years because, as Savage concludes his piece:

Last fall we, along with everyone else, got swept up in the momentousness of the campaign, in the symbolism and the history and the drama, and lost sight of something important: Obama is a politician -- and a Chicago politician at that. Nothing is ever given to you. You have to ask and tell and demand and do the work -- not passing the legislation ourselves or signing it ourselves (no coup gay’tat is in the offing), but in making sure our "friends" in the White House and Congress understand that we won’t take "wait" for an answer.

What do we want? What we were promised. When do we want it?

Now.

We're not going to go away. We're not going to sit back and let you shove us back into the closet, or put our issues on a back burner until the next time you feel like coming around and begging for our time, our talent, and our treasure to help you get (re-)elected. In fact, if we don't start seeing some action--and I mean concrete action, not just pretty words or a cocktail party for the A Gays or a proclamation that carries with it no actual substance--you can beg us all you want for our support, but you still won't get it. Come 2010, if we're still standing on the outside looking in, the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are going to find out what "I just can't seem to find the votes" really means.

Not to take the wind out of your sails, Republicans...

...But could you, for once in your miserable hate-filled and fear-driven lives, try arguing a position based on facts and using something bearing at least a casual resemblance to logic?

This health care thing is beyond crazy. I'm not wild about what President Obama is trying to get through Congress--not because I think it goes too far, but rather because I'm quite sure that it doesn't go far enough--like so many other things the president has tried in his first few months in office. But to hear the Republicans talking about it, any change to our manifestly broken and equally manifestly shitty health care system would be a disaster at least an order of magnitude greater than Armageddon. What's more, they're cackling to themselves with barely concealed glee, thinking that this is the president's Waterloo.

This debate may turn out to be a Waterloo moment for somebody. But I doubt it will be President Obama. But before I get to that, let's deconstruct a few things that people really ought to know about this health care thing. First and foremost, our system is not the greatest and bestest one on earth. How do I know that? Well, we could start with the fact that some 50 million people in this country (which prides itself on being the wealthiest in the world, although that is almost certainly not true either) don't even have health insurance, much less access to actual health care. Or we could notice that 28,000 children under the age of one year die in the United States, meaning that our infant mortality rate is higher than Cuba's, among 28 other countries. Or consider that the average life expectancy at birth in the U.S. is roughly 78 years--forty-fifth among 191 nations, and little more than a decade better than the worldwide average of roughly 66 years. Bosnia and Herzegovina does better than we do, as does Puerto Rico, Jordan, Macao, and virtually every country in western Europe except for Denmark, Ireland, and Portugal.

Another bugaboo the Republicans are trying to make hay out of is the spectre of "the government" controlling your access to doctors, controlling your choices, and making medical decisions instead of you. Oooooh, scary! Except, how is that different in any relevant way from the situation most of us are in right now, where our choices, our access to doctors, and our ability to make medical decisions for ourselves are all dependent upon, more or less, blind luck? For those of us lucky enough to have health insurance, it almost always comes with a whole host of restrictions--can only see in-network providers, procedures can't cost more than some set amount, this and that and the other thing aren't covered, and so on and so forth. This fiction that we're all free as birds to choose whatever doctors we want and to get whatever treatments we want is exactly that--fiction. Maybe if you're a member of Congress or fabulously wealthy--but for the average working stiff, not so much. You go where your insurer tells you you can go, and you take what your insurer tells you you can take, and you'll like it. (And chances are pretty good that your insurer will tell you something different next year--at the same time as it tells you that your premiums have just increased by 50%.)

The president is not proposing "socialized medicine"--or anything even close to it. I wish he were proposing something of the kind--because then I'd be considerably more vocal in my support for his health care agenda. I said it during the primaries when he announced this plan, and I'll say it again now: health insurance isn't the same thing as health care. I don't give a shit if people have health insurance. I insist that people have health care. And, frankly, the only system I can see that makes any kind of sense at all is a government-run single-payer model, similar to what you'll find in most of the developed world (including, as the Republicans are eager to point out, places like Canada and the United Kingdom).

Why does single-payer make sense? If for no other reason than something the Republicans are usually in favor of, to wit, economies of scale. When you buy flipping great wodges of something, you usually get quite a price break because you're buying so much. When you're buying prescription drugs for most of the people in America, you should be able to get them at pennies per dose--at least as long as the lobbyists for Big Pharma don't manage to stick a rider on this bill like the one they got inserted into the Medicare reform bill a few years ago--the one that precluded the federal government from doing what Big Pharma certainly does with the companies that supply them with raw materials--negotiate a reduced price on a high-volume contract.

Let me illustrate with some specifics. The State of Illinois sets fringe benefit costs for all of its employees every year. Since I work in grants administration, I have access to those numbers (which are part of the public record, so I'm not revealing any state secrets or violating confidentiality by disclosing this information). For an employee with a spouse (or a domestic partner) and a couple of dependents who wants something like a standard Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan, the state has to pay out roughly $21,000 per year, per employee. The university where I work employs around five thousand people who are eligible for benefits. Let's assume their average insurance cost per employee works out to something like $16,000 per year, since not all employees have dependents, and not all employees choose the most expensive insurance option available. Multiply $16,000 by 5,000 and you get $80 million. Eighty million dollars a year, just for employee health insurance--and that doesn't even take into account things like what the employees themselves contribute toward their benefits, or things like worker's compensation, and other forms of health care costs. If I remember correctly, that $80 million represents about a quarter of the annual operating budget for the university.

Now multiply that by all the businesses in the country. It's a standard assumption that salaries and fringe benefits are going to account for around 75% of the cost of operating any business. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S.'s gross domestic product last year was on the order of $14 trillion in current dollars. One-quarter of that amount is still $3.5 trillion. That's roughly twice the Congressional Budget Office estimate of what one of the reform proposals currently floating around Capitol Hill would cost over its first decade. That $3.5 trillion, however, represents costs that businesses are already paying for employee health care premiums--each and every year. Hell, at $150 billion per year, Obama's plan would be cheap at twice the price--and still a huge savings (as in an order of magnitude) over current costs. Imagine what those businesses could do if they could use that 25% of their annual operating expenses as working capital. I think we could put a few more people to work, for starters--and maybe even manage to pay most of them a living wage and give them benefits.

Now, of course, there are rounding errors in my numbers, and factors that I didn't take into account. Still, they are likely to be trivial in comparison to the size of the numbers we're talking about. The basic point is that virtually anything we do to change the fucked-up mess that is the American health care system will represent an improvement. All the Republicans in the world can't change that fact--but that fact won't stop them from trying to make you think that they know what they're talking about.

Don't fall for the lies of the Party of No. And keep the pressure on the president not only to get his health care agenda passed, but to work for the next step in the process, which is actual health care for everyone in America--not just health insurance.

Mr. President, I need your voice

The following is an e-mail I sent to the White House last night:

To quote your recent e-mail to me, Mr. President, I need your voice. You wanted me to speak up in favor of your health plan. Well, Mr. President, I want you to start speaking up on gay rights. You and your staff keep telling me how fierce an advocate you are on gay rights. When were you planning to start proving those repeated assertions? Vermont legalizes gay marriage--you say nothing. Iowa legalizes gay marriage--you say nothing. The Department of Defense fires an Arabic linguist because he's gay--a policy you promised to do away with--and you say nothing. The California Supreme Court twists itself (and the law) into a pretzel to uphold an amendment saying that only marriage between one man and one woman is valid, but the 18,000+ marriages that don't fit that definition and that took place before the amendment was enacted are still valid. And you say nothing.

Are you starting to see a pattern here? I sure am.

Now, I'm not surprised at the shape of that pattern. I was never under the impression that you were a liberal or a gay-rights supporter. But an awful lot of your supporters kept telling me that you were both, and that if I'd only wait a little while longer, you'd show me how wrong I was.

Well, Mr. President, I've been waiting for forty-five years thus far. Just how much longer do you think I'm going to have to wait? Because, as happy as it makes me to be able to rub the noses of those people who told me you'd be a great president for gay rights in your failure to live up to that promise, I would be far happier to have them rubbing my nose in my epic fail after you stepped up to the plate and proved me wrong.

A common excuse that's offered in your defense is that you've just started your term and there are plenty of huge problems on your plate to handle, so gay rights will just have to wait. My answer to those people is one I'm sure you're familiar with, because it's from Martin Luther King's famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail":

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was "well timed," according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease .... For years now I have heard the words [sic] "Wait!" ...This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

I'm not waiting any longer, Mr. President. And if you expect to keep my vote in 2012, you won't, either. Show me some concrete progress on those issues you campaigned on, and we're OK. But keep putting me off with empty words and insincere promises, and I'll be looking for a better candidate to support in 2012.

I'm not expecting any reply, directly or indirectly. But I'd love to be proven wrong.

In which, yet again, I prove to be anomalous

Via Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com, I came across the Center for American Progress's new interactive quiz. Nate's analysis found that there wasn't really much of a pattern in the answers given by conservatives and progressives/liberals--which is somewhat odd, given that the two groups are normally conceived of as being, if not exactly mirror images of one another, at least at opposite ends of the spectrum from one another. It would seem, however, that there's a bigger mushy middle than we had imagined.

Then there's me. I've always thought of myself as being liberal, but not ultra-ultra anything. The CAP quiz has a possible score of 400, out of which I scored 350. According to them, that makes me "extremely progressive." The average (by which they mean "mean") score for all Americans is 209.5. The average score for Catholics is 210.8; for people with a post-graduate education, 227.0; for progressives, 237.6; for Democrats, 237.7; for liberals, 242.3; for 2008 Obama voters, 244.0; and for liberal Democrats, 247.1. I'm a hundred points more liberal than liberals, Obama voters, and liberal Democrats. I'm almost a hundred and fifty points more liberal than the average Catholic, and around a hundred and thirty points more liberal than the average person with a postgraduate degree.

By contrast, the average score for conservative Republicans is 160.6; for Republicans, 168.4; for 2008 McCain voters, 169.0; for conservatives, 177.9; for Baptists, 196.4; for whites, 203.7; for men, 204.3. I find it interesting that apparently the average McCain voter is a little more conservative than generic conservatives, and a little less conservative than self-described conservative Republicans. I'm also intrigued to note that Republicans seem to be out-conservativing their traditional base (white men)--which does not bode well for them making any kind of a real comeback anytime soon, since if you ask Republicans what they need to do to get back into power, they say it's to be more conservative, more ideologically pure rigid, and less open to compromise (which I'm not sure it's possible to be).

I'll be interested to see what else Nate has in store after chewing on these numbers a bit more.

I'd call it cognitive dissonance, except...

...In order for there to be cognitive dissonance there has to be actual, you know, cognition, and that seems in very short supply among Republicans lately.

It appears that some of the bloviating blockheads at Fixed Noise are doing that most Republican of things, making an "enemies list." Not surprisingly, lib'ruls and the sites they frequent are pretty high thereon:

BERNIE GOLDBERG: Number three is the Daily Kos. And they are very significant in this current media world in which we live. They have one of, if not the biggest left wing political web sites. They are rabidly anti-conservative. Yet, its founder Markous Moulitsas has so much clout that not only does he get on the most mainstream of shows, Meet the Press, to talk politics but the Democrats who are running for President of the United States went there and made speeches to the Daily Kos convention. That’s how afraid they are of offending the Daily Kos.

BILL O'REILLY: And it’s about as hateful as you can possibly...You can’t get a more hateful web site than them.

GOLDBERG: They started this rumor that Sarah Palin’s child with Down Syndrome may not have been her child, but the daughter’s. It’s just terrible, terrible stuff.

My, oh, my, where to start?

Let's hit the Wayback Machine and set it to, um, last week. Remember all those Republican "leaders" kowtowing before the Great and Powerful Rushbo? Funny how it seems to have escaped the notice of the Republican media machine.

I can't speak for Daily Kos, but I think "anti-conservative" is an accurate description of the prevailing philosophy there. And perhaps some folks there are hard on conservatives once in a while. But Goldberg's frothing at the mouth would look considerably less foolish if he and his fellow conservatives hadn't been spending most of the last decade pissing all over every liberal they could find an excuse to mention, and making scads of money from their followers doing it. Anybody else remember these conservative blockbusters yawners?

• Michael Savage, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder
• Ann Coulter, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)
• Michael Savage, The Enemy Within: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on our Churches, Schools, and Military
• Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism
• Ann Coulter, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
• Sean Hannity, Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism
• Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism
• Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror

Those are just the "best of" selections that struck me as I perused a few "people who bought this also purchased..." links at Amazon.com. And while I wouldn't soil my hands with any of the preceding titles, and tend to doubt that any reasonable human being, considering them objectively, would be able to find in them even a shred of a cogent or coherent argument, that didn't stop them from raking in the bucks. Three of those eight books made it to the top of the New York Times best seller list at least once: Coulter's Godless, Goldberg's Liberal Fascism and Hannity's Deliver us From Evil. Neither should we forget that Coulter, Hannity, Michelle Malkin, and dozens of other conservative, um, pundits, routinely call for liberals to be killed, stripped of their civil rights, exiled, tortured, imprisoned, and the like.

And if O'Reilly is convinced that Daily Kos is the most hateful website out there on the intertubes, perhaps he should spend a little time dredging his way through the hate-filled sewer that is Little Green Footballs, or the Free Republic before he makes such an absurd claim. Threats of violence get very short shrift at Daily Kos. They're a staple in trade at most of the conservative websites out there--and instead of being castigated, they're regularly applauded.

Yes, there were some disturbing allegations made about Trig Palin at Daily Kos: by a tiny fraction of the community there. They were universally decried by the rest of the community; a fact which Goldberg conveniently omits to mention. Apparently he was unaware of the smear campaign (widely believed, and probably with some justice, to have been promoted by the Bush campaign) directed against John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary when, among other accusations, it was alleged that McCain was the father of an illegitimate black child. Then there was the time when Rush Limbaugh (the Face and Voice of the Republican Party, according to all of its leaders) compared a teen-aged Chelsea Clinton to a dog.

In short, the take-home message seems to be that Republicans can do anything to anyone and no one dares to take offense. But let anyone do anything even remotely critical of Republicans, and it's the end of the world as we know it, a sign of the moral decay of American society, and imputable as guilt to absolutely every liberal on the planet and anybody who has ever even thought about voting for a Democrat. As for being put on the conservacons' enemies list, I'd say that was more of a badge of honor than something to be ashamed of. Or, to quote the immortal Molly Ivins, apropos of the Limboob, it's "...an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn't actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle."

I'd like to make a few suggestions...

...for additions to the "For Dummies" series of books. We can start with The Constitution for Republicans, since it does not appear that many of them have ever actually read it--or if they have, they've failed to retain any of the salient points. As evidence, I present the following, from the peroration to Rush Limbaugh's closing plenary address to the Conservative Political Action Public Asshattery Convention, last Saturday in Washington, D.C., in which he was attempting to argue that President Obama's policies represent a "bastardization" of the Constitution:

We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. [Applause] We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life. [Applause] Liberty, Freedom. [Applause] And the pursuit of happiness. [Applause]

For the purposes of comparison, I herewith present the actual Preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Sorry, Rush, but of the words you thought were in there, only "Liberty" actually appears--and not in the context you wanted. What you were looking for was the Declaration of Independence, which, of course, you also got wrong. Here's the pertinent passage in the original:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

"Freedom" is not in there, guys. But note that "Government" is. Ooops. The Limboob, and all the boobettes who stood and mindlessly cheered his pompous pontifications at CPAC should all have to go back and retake high-school civics. Oh, and the leaders of the Republican Party might want to rethink all that groveling at his feet they're doing, lest they embarrass themselves even further than they already have.

"Depart, I say, and let us have done with you!"*

Roland Burris is turning into Rod Blagojevich's gift that keeps on giving--whether or not we want it to. Virtually every leading Democrat in Illinois--and not a few from other states as well--has asked him politely to consider stepping down, but he steadfastly refuses to do so. Even when Dick Durbin, his fellow Illinois senator, urged him to quit, he announced his intention to stay put.

Fine. We'll just have to wait for the Senate to expel him, or for a competent authority to remove him. Or, in the worst-case scenario, we'll just have to wait out the end of his term, which has only a little more than a year and a half left in it. Burris did seem to hint, after his meeting with Durbin yesterday, that he was not considering running for re-election in 2010--which is just as well, given that everyone in Illinois (except, possibly, Roland Burris) knows that he'd get absolutely trounced in the Democratic primary and if, by some miracle, he managed to pull off a victory in the primary, he'd get his ass handed to him in the general.

At this point, I'm less annoyed with Burris (he's just doing what he's always done) than I am with some of his more clueless supporters. The local NPR station this morning ran a story, which I only heard in bits and pieces as I was shaving, about a group of black ministers who are insisting that Burris has done nothing wrong and that he shouldn't have to quit anything. And then there's Danny Davis, who seems to have become Burris's BFF after losing the Senate appointment to him, who seems to feel that the Senate seat formerly held by President Obama is now somehow the property of Illinois's African-Americans. And, since I seem to be on a Brit-quoting kick in this post, I'll borrow from a later British politician (Sir Winston Churchill) and say that's nonsense up with which I will not put.

There are no quotas for Senate seats--or for any other political appointments, for that matter. The idea is unconstitutional on its face, and it's simply ludicrous thereafter. If we're going to divvy up our representation according to the race of Illinoisans, then we need to have 1.422 white senators, 0.294 black senator, 0.292 Latino senator, 0.084 Asian senator, 0.04 Native American senator, 0.164 "other" senator, and 0.03 biracial senator. I won't even attempt to do the parallel calculations for our House delegation, since I'd have to do it by the racial makeup of the various legislative districts. Davis should content himself with getting another Democrat in Obama's old seat--and leave race out of it.

(*Oliver Cromwell, dismissing the Rump Parliament, 1653: "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!")

Does somebody have a scorecard I could borrow?

OK, so I left the office about three and a half hours ago after a busy day, got on the train, took a cab to the hotel, checked in, registered for the conference, and then went back to my room to check e-mail, check in with friends and family, and see what was going on in the world. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there's been yet another startling development in the As The Obama Cabinet Turns drama, namely, that President Obama is now 0-for-2 on nominees for the Department of Commerce, soon-to-be-ex-New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg having abruptly withdrawn his name from consideration today.

The ostensible reason for his withdrawal was that he had come to realize, apparently never having considered the possibility before lobbying to get the nomination in the first place, that he had irreconcilable differences with the Obama administration on policy matters directly relevant to the department which he had been nominated to lead. While I applaud his decision not to stand in the way of the president's agenda, I must say that it strikes me as more than a little odd that the fact that Senator Gregg, being a Republican, might have some issues with a Democratic administration and the way it wanted to run things, seems not to have ruffled the edges of Senator Gregg's beautiful mind even a little before now. In fact, I'd have thought that he'd have thought that possibility through quite thoroughly before ever asking to be nominated to the position in the first place, much less accepting the nomination once it had been offered.

And while I understand that President Obama campaigned on the idea of ending the partisan political divide and reaching out to qualified people with good ideas who wanted to serve their country, I've got to say that so far, that idea doesn't seem to be working too well for him in practice. I'd suggest he try appointing a Democrat this time, and preferably someone who has never even had to pay a late fee to the Internal Revenue Service.

Meanwhile, now that I'm here, I'm going to spend most of the next several days immersed in science and science policy. My itinerary of sessions I'd like to see at least part of over the next four days stretches to a dozen pages. Chances are good that I won't even get the opportunity to check my e-mail other than first thing in the morning and after the last session of the day is done.

One session I am definitely trying to get into, however, is the invited address tomorrow night by a certain Mr. Gore. Yes, that Mr. Gore. He of the Nobel Peace Prize and former vice president. It's all I've heard anyone talking about since I checked in here this afternoon. I'm hoping that whatever is on my schedule just before his address lets out early so I can be in line in plenty of time to have at least a shot at getting a decent seat for that talk tomorrow night, after which I'm going to go out for dinner with some friends.

Change we shouldn't believe in

I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone tried to make a little political hay out of the political mess that is Illinois politics right now. And Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold fired the opening salvo today at Big Orange, announcing his intention to sponsor a bill to amend the federal Constitution to require that all vacancies in the Senate be filled by special election, just as they are for vacancies in the House. Markos seconded the idea, and I see that the editorial board of the Washington Post actually beat both of them to the punch.

Well, since they're all for democracy and power to the people, this Democrat votes "Nay."

I think the Seventeenth Amendment as it now stands is perfectly adequate to our needs. If the Blagojevich mess requires any kind of constitutional remediation, I would argue that what needs amending is the state Constitution, not the federal one. If we'd had a recall provision in our state Constitution, Rod Blagojevich would almost certainly not have been in a position to attempt to barter an appointment to fill President Obama's vacant Senate seat for his personal gain--he'd have been tossed out on his ear at least a couple of years ago.

As it now reads, the Seventeenth Amendment leaves it up to the individual states to decide how they want to proceed when a Senate seat falls vacant for some reason. The amendment sets the default as an election, by requiring the state's executive to issue writs of election to fill the vacancy. But it then gives the states the option to opt out, by allowing the various state legislatures the opportunity to pass laws allowing that state's governor to fill such vacancies by appointment "until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct." I think the fact that only four states (Oregon, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma--though there's an exception in the last-named state, such that if the vacancy occurs after March 1 of any even-numbered year and the term expires the following year, no special election is held; rather, the governor is required to appoint the candidate elected in the regular general election to fill the unexpired term) do not fill vacancies by appointment suggests that this is not an issue of particularly grave concern to the populace to begin with--and I would be enormously surprised if it were terribly high on anyone's list of things they would like to see the 111th Congress take up this early in its term as opposed to, say, economic stimulus packages, a new federal budget, or ending the war in Iraq.