Jack & Jill Politics

The CBS affiliate in Raleigh, WRAL-TV, reports that sources close to John Edwards expect the ex-Senator and former presidential candidate to admit that he is indeed the father of his former mistress Rielle Hunter's child.

It's unclear exactly when he would admit this, but the station's sources said it could occur before the end of the current criminal investigation into whether Edwards illegally paid Hunter money from his campaign. The central allegation is that hush money was funneled to Hunter in order to keep her from revealing the affair.

Edwards admitted in the summer of 2008 that he did in fact have the affair with Hunter, but strongly denied that he was the father of her child. Hunter had previously stated that the father of her child was a former Edwards staffer, Andrew Young.

Recently, in two separate conversations, I heard senior Democratic officials remark that they were taken aback by the right's distortions in the health care debate. My initial reaction was surprise: What did they expect? We've seen this before. But I'm coming around to their point of view.

Exhibit number one is the treatment of Eziekel Emanuel, the distinguished oncologist and bioethicist who is working on health reform at the Office of Management and Budget. In the course of his writings, which span academia and popular publications, he has argued forcefully and clearly against physician-assisted suicide. Yet somehow Emanuel finds himself accused of--wait for it--advocating physician assisted suicide.

...
The attack on Emanuel is part of a broader offensive--an effort to persuade anxious Americans that health reformers will harm people who are seriously ill or who have disabilities. The argument seems to be resonating with at least some Americans. Whether it's a lot or a few is impossible to say from the television images. But even a few would be a few too many.

Every year, millions of families struggle to get affordable medical care for themselves or their loved ones--and end up in financial ruin, going without medical care, or some combination of the two. Many of these cases involve diseases like cerebral palsy or Parkinson's--or other conditions that require ongoing, expensive care.

Insurance companies try their best to avoid taking on these people. Apply for an indivdiual policy with one of these pre-existing conditions and an insurer will reject you if it can. If it can't--if, say, you're lucky enough to get coverage through an employer--you may well find the insurance doesn't cover what you need.

Changing that isn't merely a by-product of reform. It's the whole point of reform. The plan Obama and his allies support would make coverage avialable to everybody regardless of pre-existing medical conditions. It would require insurers to cover a broad range of medical servcies. And it would police insurers to make sure they didn't try to get around those requirements. No less important, the health reform measures moving through Congress have special provisions within them to help people with disabilities, like the Community Living Assistance and Services and Supports (CLASS) Act that disability community advocates support strongly.

It'd be one thing if the lunatics on the right had a coherent argument for why these initiatives might be ineffective or counterproductive. But they don't even bother to acknowledge them, preferring instead to throw out scare quotes like this one from Palin: "Who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course."

Of course, not all conservatives stoop to this level. You can have a rational, if still contentious, deate over health reform with the likes of Stuart Butler (who studies health policy at the Heritage Foundation) or Gail Wilensky (who ran Medicare for George H.W. Bush). But Butler, Wilensky, and others like them aren't driving the conversation right now. Palin, Bachmann, and their allies are.

We're stuck in what Josh Marshall has called a "nonsense feedback loop"--a conversation in which Zeke Emanuel wants to kill grandma, health care reform is bad for the people who can't get health care, and Stephen Hawking has been snuffed out by the British National Health System. Instead of arguments that are unrelated to reality, we're getting arguments that are the very opposite of reality.

Like I said, maybe those Democratic officials are right. Maybe this really is worse than what we've seen before

.... It's tempting to think that President Obama, with an electoral mandate, reasonably strong approval ratings, and a like-minded Congress, can have any kind of health care reform package he wants. The White House would draw certain lines in the sand -- a bill with no public option, for example, would draw a veto -- and lawmakers would follow his lead.

But Ezra Klein noted yesterday that FDR, Truman, Nixon, Carter, and Clinton all tried to reform health care, and all of them came up short. "[I]t's not a matter of presidential messaging, or toughness, or will, or strategy," Ezra said, adding, "The executive simply has limited power here."

Matt Yglesias agrees.

I know a lot of people on the left who seem to have voted for Barack Obama because they liked his progressive agenda, then gotten excited when Obama won the election because they liked his progressive agenda, then Obama proposed progressive measures to the congress and they were excited, then it turned out that key congressional players like Collin Peterson and Rick Boucher and Max Baucus were less left-wing than Obama so actually legislative outcomes would be considerably less left-wing than Obama's campaign proposal. It's all well and good to be disappointed with this situation but it doesn't make a ton of sense to me to do what a lot of people seem to be doing and becoming disappointed with Obama. [...]

On foreign policy and some other matters the president has tons of discretion and it's a different story. But big-picture domestic legislation in the modern era is controlled by Congress.

And Congress isn't designed to be an especially constructive branch.

There are a whole host of institutional obstacles to health care reform, including a timid congressional majority, a reactionary congressional minority, an easily-misled public, and a media that's reluctant to sort out fact from fiction when outlets aren't just passing along what both sides of an argument have to say.

The president has taken on a daunting challenge, and I hope he realized what he was getting himself into. But in the bigger picture, while Obama brings some tremendous skills and qualities to the process, what reaches his desk isn't entirely up to him.

President Obama's aunt, Zeituni Onyango, who appeared on the national radar during the 2008 presidential campaign amid reports that she was living illegally in the United States, spoke out Thursday against rumors about the president's citizenship.

Addressing debunked speculation that Obama's mother may have given birth to him in Kenya, Onyango called it inconceivable that the president was born anywhere but Hawaii.

"If my brother was in [the] United States, in Hawaii - Honolulu, Hawaii - when Barack was born, and he wasn't in Kenya, who gave birth to Barack in Kenya?" she told WKYC in Cleveland. "Ann [Obama's mother] is an American white woman. Where was she? How could she have given Barack birth in Kenya?"

"I don't understand the arithmetic," she said.

Reader JP just alerted me to an email blast from a group called "The Pray In Jesus Name Project." It suggests that ObamaCare will not only pull the plug on grandma, but also result in a gay and transgendered takeover of the entire health care system. Among the bogus claims in the group's petition:

Your tax-dollars will pay for preferential hiring of homosexual hospital administrators, who distribute $50,000 grants to gender-confused activists for unneeded elective surgery to mutilate their own genitals, (and force Christian doctors to perform it.)

The group attempts to back this up by citing drafts of the House and Senate bills that make fleeting references to gender and sexual orientation, but which have nothing to do with mandated free sex-change operations. (PolitiFact, The St. Petersberg Times fact-checking service, does a great job debunking these allegations, many of which were put forth by Liberty Counsel--a group affiliated with Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.)

As for the gay takeover of hospitals? The section of the Senate bill that's cited--requiring the "participation in the institutions' programs of individuals and groups from ...different genders and sexual orientations"--actually refers to government grants awarded to students doing research in mental and behavioral health. I suppose that such a dangerously diverse group of students could decide that they, the gay mafia, should run the nation's hospitals,whose names will be "changed from ‘St. Luke's Memorial' to the ‘Obama Government' hospital" when atheists strip all Christian icons from the buildings, as the email predicts. But, then again, that's absolutely crazy.

(Seen any other loopy ads trying to demonize ObamaCare--ones that no one's talking about yet? Email them to me: skhimm at tnr dot com.)

In a NYT op-ed bemoaning the trivialization and sexism still plaguing our Secretary of State, Judith Warner references the ill-conceived joke from the WaPo's now-defunct "Mouthpiece Theater" that, basically, called Hillary a bitch. (Full disclosure: I'm close friends with the often inflammatory Mr. Milbank.)

Obviously, the gag was offensive, and it should have come as no shock to anyone at the WaPo when a bunch of women went ballistic over it. But the entire episode got me wondering if, more generally, it's time for women to reclaim the "bitch" label--perhaps even start taking pride in it.

Seriously. As often as not, when men in particular call a woman a bitch, it simply means she's a tough broad who isn't giving them their way, the poor little dears. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the workplace, where the strong-male-leader vs. bitchy-female-leader double-standard still holds sway. But it also plays a recurring role in relationship squabbles, when a guy thinks his woman is getting too uppity for his comfort. Regardless of which gender deploys it, the word tends to say more about the user's irritation with the existing power dynamic than anything else. (Think: I can't believe that bitch stole my boyfriend.)

I've never really minded being called a bitch. (Unlike, say, a cunt, which aims to reduce an entire person to a sexual organ--although, to be fair, I find "dickhead" pretty hysterical, so maybe I'm working my own double standard here.) Why? Because Tina Fey is dead-on with that whole bitches-get-stuff-done riff. The word may (as yet) be a slur, but it is a slur that implies strength or power or, yes, a willingness to be mean. I can think of countless worse characterizations of "the weaker sex."

Rise up, ladies: The next time someone calls you a bitch, just flash 'em your biggest, most sincere smile and say, "Thanks, Dickhead."

"White people wants their America back...go tell that to the Indians"

..."White people had a good run...but it's over!

...This is what happens when you have a melting pot, the stew get's darker"

..."The country is getting darker...deal with it"