Is Birther Donald Trump A Democratic Sleeper Agent?
I’m becoming concerned that a certain political figure in the 2012 presidential field has a sinister, hidden agenda. We all like to laugh and be dismissive–but it’s increasingly hard to ignore the questions about his birth certificate. One has to ask: Is Donald Trump, seemingly a “birther” running for the GOP presidential nod, really an Obama sleeper agent?
Trump has been ratcheting up his embrace of birtherism–the spurious accusation that President Obama was born outside of the United States but has cleverly covered it up, in part by inducing the state of Hawaii to produce a fake birth certificate testifying to his U.S. origin. Trump upped the birther ante Monday morning on Fox News Channel:
This guy either has a birth certificate or he doesn’t. I didn’t think it was such a big deal, but I will tell you, it is turning out to be a very big deal. People are calling me from all over saying please don’t give up on this issue. If you weren’t born in this country, you cannot be president. You have no doctors that remember, you have no nurses — this is the President of the United States — that remember. Why can’t he produce a birth certificate? I brought it up just routinely, and all of a sudden, a lot of facts are emerging and I’m starting to wonder myself whether he was born in this country?
(As an aside, I love the idea that in 1961, when doctors brought a half-white, half-black baby into the world, they should have committed the moment to memory because “this is the President of the United States.”
Trump’s comments are grabbing a great deal of attention. David Frum, for example, wants to know whether Trump is nuts or just thinks GOP primary voters are stupid. Like I said at the top, I’m wondering if perhaps the Donald is really an Obama catspaw.
Republicans firmly grounded in reality have long groused that birtherism is a construct of Democrats, liberals, and the media, a–no pun intended–trumped up issue designed to make conservative look like nutty conspiracy theorists. Polls showing large numbers of GOPers doubting Obama’s origins seem to belie that, as do apparent dog-whistles by GOP leaders who dance around the birther question by treating it as something other than proven fact (“we should take the president at his word,” Michele Bachmann said last month) or refusing to call out the birthers (“it’s not my job to tell the American people what to think,” John Boehner demurred last month).
But with a GOP primary field composed of professional politicians who know better than to tread beyond winks, nods, and dog-whistles, who benefits the most from a GOP candidate willing to go full birther? With Trump in a presidential debate (the first one will be May 2) making birtherism his signature issue, the rest of the GOP field will be forced to weigh in definitively and either alienate the rabid base (the people who vote in Republican primaries and, according to one recent poll, are majority birther) or risk alienating centrist voters.
The Democratic National Committee’s opposition research department must be licking their collective chops. They couldn’t have invented a better sabotage candidate than Trump: Unserious enough to actually wave the bloody birth certificate, but wealthy and famous enough that he’s impossible to ignore.
Now, do I believe that Donald Trump is really a Democratic plant? It’s tempting to say that I’m just raising questions about the Donald in the same spirit that he is about the president. But I’d put it this way: This conspiracy theory requires as big a suspension of disbelief as does contemplating President Donald Trump.
Politico’s Ben Smith brings the kicker to the whole story. Trump made a big show Monday of releasing his own birth certificate in an effort to push the “issue.” One problem: He didn’t release a legally valid birth certificate, which would have the New York City Department of Health’s seal and the signature of the city registrar. Smith adds, tongue happily in cheek:
Trump’s mother, it should be noted, was born in Scotland, which is not part of the United States. His plane is registered in the Bahamas, also a foreign country. This fact pattern — along with the wave of new questions surrounding what he claims is a birth certificate — raises serious doubts about his eligibility to serve as President of the United States.
Hmmm, makes you wonder…
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, March 29, 2011
The Affordable Care Act, One Year Later
A year ago this week, Capitol Hill was full of noise as the House of Representatives debated, and then voted, on the Affordable Care Act. But one of the most vivid memories of that experience for me was an extended moment of silence.
It came very late on Sunday evening–after the floor speeches, the votes, and the press conferences had ended. The galleries had long since emptied and the Capitol building itself was virtually unoccupied, so that it was possible to walk the entire length of the building, on the ground floor hallway that stretches from the House all the way to the Senate, without hearing so much as a single conversation.
It felt more than silent. It felt peaceful and, yes, satisfying. A prolonged, difficult debate had finally ended. It was time to move on.
Except that we haven’t moved on. We are still having arguments about health care reform. In fact, we are still having the same arguments about health care reform. The Affordable Care Act is law of the land now, yes, but its critics are determined to change that. And while the prospects of repealing it legislatively remain relatively slim, the prospects of repealing at least part of it judicially seem far more realistic than they did in the spring of 2010.
So perhaps it is worth taking a step back, just for a moment, and remembering how we got to this point–why this debate started in the first place and why it led to the enactment of this law.
It’s really not that complicated. Around one-fifth of the non-elderly population, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million people, have no health insurance. Many millions more have insurance with major gaps or limitations, leaving them at risk of financial or medical catastrophe. Notwithstanding legitimate debates over exactly how many people go bankrupt or suffer physical hardship because they can’t pay their medical bills, virtually nobody denies that the human toll is real and significant.
These problems are the product, in part, a dysfunctional health insurance system that evolved haphazardly during the 20th Century. They also the product of a medical system as inefficient as it is costly. The United States pays more–far, far more–for health care than any other developed nation. But the care does not seem to be better overall, to say nothing of the fact that it is patently less available.
The goal of reform was really two-fold: In the short term, to make sure everybody can afford to pay for medical bills without financial distress; it the long term, to make the health care system as a whole more efficient, so that it no longer applied such a crushing financial burden on society. A single-payer system, like the ones in France or Taiwan, would have accomplished this. So would a scheme that turned health insurance into a regulated utility, as the Dutch and Swiss governments have done.
Political compromises, dating back to the earliest days of the 2008 presidential campaign, left the U.S. with a second-best–or, more accurately, a third- or fourth-best solution. It bolsters two existing insurance arrangements: Employer-sponsored coverage for workers in most companies, Medicaid for the very poor. It creates a new, regulated marketplace–insurance “exchanges”–for everybody else. Then, through a combination of tax changes and alterations to Medicare, it tries to reengineer medical care itself, wringing out administrative waste and focusing resources on the treatments, and care styles, that provide the most bang for the buck.
It’s easy to find the flaws–and to figure out who’s responsible for them. Doctors, hospitals, drug manufacturers, and device makers fought changes in the delivery of medical care that might affect their incomes; unions lobbied against tax reforms designed to discourage overly generous insurance; everyday Americans resisted changes to plans they already had. All of this blunted the Affordable Care Act’s efforts at cost control, which explains why, ten years from now, the best projections suggest we’ll have spent roughly as much on health care–as a government and as a country–as we would have if the law never passed.
At the same time, political conservatives fought to limit the bill’s expanse, demanding that the new outlays not exceed a $1 trillion, give or take. They had extra power, thanks to the filibuster, and were able to make the demand stick. As a result, the expansion of insurance coverage–via Medicaid and subsidies for private insurance–will not begin until 2014. Even then, somewhere around 20 million people, or 8 percent of the total population, will remain uninsured. And for some of the insured, the coverage will remain meager.
But the law’s shortcomings should not tarnish its many virtues. Eight percent uninsured means 92 percent insured, or around 95 of residents here legally. Or, to put it another way, more than 30 million additional people will have health insurance because of this law. The coverage, if not always as generous as it should be, will be enough to keep many if not most of the newly insured out of bankruptcy–and it will be available to almost everybody, regardless of pre-existing condition or insurance status.
The cost picture is also encouraging. The official projections suggest that, as of 2021, government spending (and, apparently, the country’s total spending) on health care will not be rising as fast as it is now. This is the critical distinction, because it’s the long-term burden of health care that threatens to bankrupt us. Critics doubt that officials will enforce planned changes to health care financing, but today’s lawmakers have no way to force action by their counterparts in the future. All they can do is put laws on the books–and that’s what they have done.
Are there better alternatives? Of course. But the loudest critics of the law, from the right, don’t have them. For all of their screaming, they have yet to put forward a credible plan that can do as much, let alone more, for less money. Their plans, stripped of misleading rhetoric, generally involve covering far fewer people, dramatically reducing the coverage that people have, or some combination of the two. Their dispute is not with the means Democrats have used to make health care affordable to all. It’s with the goal itself.
No, the way to improve the law is to build upon it–to bolster the insurance coverage, reach those Americans the law as written will not reach, and to strengthen the experiments in cost control that work. The best analysis of the law remains the one Senator Tom Harkin gave: The Affordable Care Act is not a mansion. It’s a starter home. But it’s got a solid foundation, a sturdy roof, and room for expansion.
A year from now, the presidential campaign will be well underway and the debate about the Affordable Care Act will likely be, if anything, more acrimonious than it is now. But perhaps after the election and, hopefully, after 2014, the country really will move on.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, March 23, 2022
Stop The World, I Want To Get Off: Boehner Agonistes
Suzy Khimm on the dilemma facing House Speaker John Boehner:
The House passed yet another short-term extension of the budget on Tuesday. But John Boehner faced a revolt by 54 Republicans who voted against the bill for not going far enough to slash spending, effectively forcing the GOP Speaker to rely on Democratic votes for the stop-gap measure to pass. As Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler explains, the vote now puts Boehner between a rock and a hard place: either he makes concessions to Democrats to pass a final budget, risking provoking greater fury from the tea party right, or he gives in to the GOP’s right flank—risking a government shutdown, as the Democratic Senate is unlikely to pass any bill that guts spending to satisfy hard-line conservatives.
I think Boehner’s problem here is pretty obvious, so there’s no point in belaboring it. The more interesting question is: which way does he jump?
My guess is that he sides with the tea partiers and forces a government shutdown. I don’t have any special insight here, just a feeling that, in the end, the hardcore right holds the whip hand in the Republican Party these days. If this is correct, though, it leads to a second question: how does this end? Obviously Republicans can’t keep the government shut down forever, and eventually this means that Obama will win some kind of compromise and it will get passed by a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans. The tea partiers will lose.
Given that this almost has to be the case, wouldn’t it make more sense for Boehner to compromise in the first place and avoid the humiliation of giving in down the road? In a rational world, sure. But in the tea party universe, he can’t. The forces working here will force Boehner into the worst of both worlds: he won’t assert control over the tea party faction from the start, which is bad, and then he’ll end up caving in to Democrats a few weeks or months down the road, which is worse.
But maybe I’m missing something here. Is there some other scenario for Boehner that works out better for him?
By: Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, March 16, 2011
Republican Budget Cuts Will Come Back to Bite Them
Something about the Republican dance with populism these days reminds me of one of those classic Twilight Zone episodes: Aliens come down to earth. They want to help us! (They even have a book called To Serve Man!) Wait a minute … they want to eat us! (It’s a cookbook.) From there things take a decidedly downward turn.
One suspects that Republicans may be in for a similarly demoralizing experience. Here’s why:
When NPR asked Sen. Jim DeMint this week why Republicans were pressing to reduce Social Security benefits (a subject that had long been considered off limits for politicians interested in re-election), he answered, “It is politically dangerous, but I think the mood of the country is different than it has been [at] any time in my lifetime.” The “mood” he’s talking about is the so-called “new populism,” the voter anger expressed everywhere from Tea Party rallies to voting booths in 2010.
When you think of traditional populism, it evokes images of regular people rising up against a remote, usually corporate, elite that’s run roughshod over their rights. Farmers and working people taking on runaway industrialists and robber barons. Traditionally, Democrats have been most receptive to these kinds of appeals. In response, they’ve pushed government to enact programs aimed at protecting those most vulnerable to the predations of more powerful interests.
For the new populists, government is the remote elite. Instead of unsafe working conditions or unfair lending practices, they’re protesting the ills of government spending and overreach, the wasting of taxpayer dollars. And if their efforts undo the kinds of programs that a more traditional brand of populism might embrace—those aimed at helping the less advantaged make their way—so be it. It’s populism Republican style. And Republicans look like they’re going to ride it for all its worth.
But what happens when you start cutting programs that are in and of themselves something of a check on potential populist anger? That’s one way to look at government programs: There’s a need that’s not being addressed, and rather than let it ferment, government, however clumsily, tries to fill the gap. Sometimes the proposed gap filler is ridiculous (Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s “Department of Peace” springs to mind). Other times, it becomes part of the very fabric of our country.
Take public schooling. Public schools reflect a societal judgment that children should have a chance to succeed without regards to wealth or socioeconomic background. To help get them there, we don’t give every kid a million dollars and say “have at it,” we offer them a tuition-free classroom with a curriculum designed to put them on an equal footing with everyone else when they enter the workforce. What they do from there is up to them.
It doesn’t always work out, of course. Some schools are better than others. So are some teachers. But wherever our various debates about education reform end up, public schools reflect a deeply held American value: that there are some public goods (like an educated workforce) that we, as a society, believe are worth individual (taxpayer) costs. That seems to have become lost in the current debate.
Take another look at what’s underway in Wisconsin. A centerpiece of Gov. Scott Walker’s budget is a $1 billion cut in education funding. That’s a big number that may sound appealing to people worked up about government spending today, but in September when they send their kids to schools with classroom sizes twice as big as a year before, they may begin to remember why they thought it was a good idea to fund education in the first place. Presto! New populists transformed into traditional populists. Only now their target has shifted from Democrats to Republicans. And you can imagine the same phenomenon playing out across a whole host of issues, from Social Security to shared revenue.
Republicans may have momentum on their side at the moment, but there’s a long way to go in the various budget battles playing out across the country. To be sure, Democrats can overplay their hand, too, by opposing any kind of spending restraint.
But one way or the other, populism is sure to play a role in determining how it all turns out. Which strain of populism wins? For Republicans, the answer is kind of like the difference between To Serve Man (they’re helping us!) and To Serve Man (oh wait, they’re eating us). And they had better hope they’ve got it right.
By: Anson Kaye, U.S. News and World Report, March 17, 2011
Man Versus Wild–What Japan’s Disaster Can Teach Us About American Politics
The earthquake and potential nuclear catastrophe in Japan have brought home a set of questions that have haunted philosophers for hundreds of years—and have played an important role in American politics for over a century. They have to do with the relationship between humanity and nature—not nature as “the outdoors,” but as the obdurate bio-geo-physiochemical reality in which human beings and other animals dwell. To what extent does nature set limits on human possibilities? And to what extent can human beings overcome these limits?
The past million years or so provide much evidence that humanity can overcome natural limits, including the seasons, the alternation of night and day, infertile soil and swamps, gravity (think of airplanes), and infectious disease. But every once in a while, an earthquake, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, the exhaustion of precious metals, a huge forest fire, or the spread of a mysterious disease can bring home the limits that nature sets on humanity. Politicians don’t debate issues in these terms, but that doesn’t mean that these questions aren’t stirring beneath their platitudes.
In the United States, concern about the limits of nature used to be primarily a Republican priority. Theodore Roosevelt, of course, made conservation a governmental concern. But Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon also made their marks as conservationists—in Nixon’s case, as the president who presided over the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Democrats, and liberal Democrats, were more associated with a kind of can-do/anything-is-possible Americanism that aimed for everything from going to the moon to eradicating poverty.
But the political parties and ideologies have reversed dramatically on these issues. Republicans and conservatives have become not just less concerned than Democrats and liberals about the limits that nature puts on humanity; they insist, for the most part, that these limits don’t exist. They are in denial—whether about the availability of petroleum or the danger of global warming; and their denial imperils not just America’s future, but that of the world.
The big switch between the parties happened in the early 1970s, in response to increasingly serious air and water pollution, and to the first of several energy crises that saw the demand for oil exceed the supply. One of the first prominent politicians to respond to these twin crises was California Governor Jerry Brown, who proclaimed an “era of limits.” Brown’s crusade for clean air and alternative energy was taken up by Jimmy Carter during his presidency, and by the environmental movements, which had been associated as much with Republicans as Democrats, but which became increasingly supportive of the Democratic Party, eventually endorsing and helping fund liberal Democratic candidates.
During the ‘70s, the key figure in transforming the Republican outlook on nature was Ronald Reagan. In his 1980 campaign, Reagan criticized Carter’s measures to limit energy consumption and to finance alternative fuel sources. He blamed rising oil prices entirely on the restrictions that Carter had placed on the market. He denied that a problem of pollution existed—“air pollution has been substantially controlled,” he declared during a campaign stop in Youngstown, Ohio.
Once in office, Reagan put a foe of conservation, James Watt, in charge of the Interior Department; a critic of environmental protection, Anne Gorsuch, at the Environmental Protection Agency; and he cut the research and development budget for alternative energy by 86 percent. Under Carter, the United States had become the world leader in alternative energy. By the time Reagan left office, the country was beginning to lag behind Western Europe and Japan. Reagan didn’t try to overcome the limits that nature was placing on economic growth; he wished them away.
Reagan’s successors have followed his lead. Their “solution” to the prospect of a global shortage in oil is “drill, baby drill.” Their solution to global warming is to deny that it exists and to kill off measures such as high-speed rail that might reduce pollution and oil use. As my colleague Jonathan Chait has noted, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously rejected an amendment that said that “Congress accepts the scientific finding of the Environmental Protection Agency that ‘warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.'”
The Republicans, it should be noted, didn’t just deny that human activities are contributing to global warming, but that global warming itself exists—a position that is completely outside the realm of scientific belief. It doesn’t qualify as argument, but as delusion.
Yet during the last year, we’ve seen two disasters that show the price humanity can pay for harboring illusions about the workings of nature. First was the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that occurred in early 2010. Yes, it occurred due to lax regulation from the Department of Interior and a rush to profit by BP and Halliburton. But the reason behind the failure of the Interior Department to regulate, and the failure of BP to heed the dangers of a spill, was a belief that nature would not exact revenge. It was a refusal to take the limits set by nature seriously.
The Japanese, of course, cannot be blamed for the calamity that has befallen them. Lacking domestic access to oil, they relied on nuclear power, and they built their reactors to withstand the largest earthquakes and tsunamis—though they didn’t count on both happening simultaneously. Yet what happened in Japan shows vividly that millions of years after humans began inhabiting the earth, nature is still a force to be reckoned with, and it still imposes limits on the decisions we make as a society. Will Republicans come to understand that? Or will they continue to believe that the only limits worth acknowledging are those that government puts on the bank accounts of their corporate sponsors?
By: John B. Judis, Senior Editor, The New Republic, March 16, 2011
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 