10/10/09 President Barack Obama Weekly Radio Address

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10TH, 2009 AT 12:01 AM
Weekly Address: New Momentum for Health Reform
Posted by Jesse Lee
"The President goes through the leading conservative and Republican figures who have come out one after another urging passage of health insurance reform. After a summer of intense debate, cooler heads begin to prevail to make progress for the American people."

read the transcript

Obama sees consensus outside Congress on health care overhaul, obstructionism on Capitol Hill

By WILL LESTER
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- "President Barack Obama sees both "unprecedented consensus" from outside Congress on his drive to remake the nation's health care system and obstructionism by some on Capitol Hill.

"The historic movement to bring real, meaningful health insurance reform to the American people gathered momentum this week as we approach the final days of this debate," Obama said Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet video address.

"The consensus "includes everyone from doctors and nurses to hospitals and drug manufacturers" - even Republican governors and former GOP lawmakers, Obama said.

"It does not extend to congressional Republicans, however, as nearly all of them oppose the Democrats' health care proposals.

"The president noted that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Senate Majority Leaders Bob Dole and Bill Frist, all Republicans, and former Health and Human Service chiefs Louis Sullivan and Tommy Thompson, who both served in Republican administrations, have all come out in favor of overhauling health care, even though they differ on some specifics.

"Dole said in an interview on the Fox News Channel late in the week that he has not endorsed any plan but is recommending that congressional Republicans "stay in the game" so they can have more impact on the final legislation through compromise and amendments.

"These distinguished leaders understand that health insurance reform isn't a Democratic issue or a Republican issue, but an American issue that demands a solution," Obama said.

"Democrats have made significant strides since Labor Day, when they returned to the Capitol after an August spent absorbing attacks from noisy conservative critics over health care.

"A health care bill soon to emerge from the Senate Finance Committee is the only one judged to meet Obama's conditions for expanding insurance coverage without raising the federal deficit, while also slowing the rise in medical costs.

"Yet Obama said he recognized the issue remains divisive among members of Congress.

"There are some in Washington today who seem determined to play the same old partisan politics, working to score political points, even if it means burdening this country with an unsustainable status quo," Obama said. That "status quo" includes rising health care costs, diminishing coverage and arbitrary decisions by big insurance companies, he said.

"Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell differs with Obama's views on cooperation.

"I've spoken about reform 44 times on the Senate floor on the need for health care reform," McConnell said. "But higher premiums, higher taxes, and more government? That's not reform. And this is precisely the problem Americans have identified with advocates of the administration's health care plans."

"In the the Republican radio address, Sen. George LeMieux of Florida acknowledged deep problems with the health care system, but cautioned "the solution should not be worse than the problem we are trying to solve."

"We in the Congress have a duty to tackle this problem, but the solution we settle upon should not be rushed," LeMieux said in the GOP's weekly address. Democrats maintain Republicans are simply trying to delay action.

"LeMieux said the Democrats' approach would:

-cost $1.8 trillion over 10 years, more than twice the total for the Senate Finance Committee's bill, as projected by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

-add a new tax burden by penalizing those who do not buy health insurance.

-deny millions of people the choice of health plans that best suit their needs by forcing them onto Medicaid.

-take about $500 billion out of Medicare.

"Taking money from a program already in financial trouble is not responsible," LeMieux said. "It's not fair to our seniors who paid into the program, and it's not fair to our children and grandchildren who will be burdened with massive debt obligations."

The preceeding Associated Press story appeared in mywesttexas.news, 10-10-09

White House Photo Chuck Kennedy 10-10-09

"The President goes through the leading conservative and Republican figures who have come out urging passage of health reform. After a summer of intense debate, consensus begins to emerge. "

'Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?' - Steven F. Hayward Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

Steven F. Hayward (American Enterprise Institute)

Steven F. Hayward, F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980-1989," has taken on the question: "Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?"

I would certainly find it very difficult to disagree with Hayward's contention that conservatism is brain-dead because of the plethora of instances that the right has had to prove the assertion correct.

Hayward reinforces my belief by lamenting that: "During the glory days of the conservative movement, from its ascent in the 1960s and '70s to its success in Ronald Reagan's era, there was a balance between the intellectuals, such as Buckley and Milton Friedman, and the activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, the leader of the New Right. The conservative political movement, for all its infighting, has always drawn deeply from the conservative intellectual movement, and this mix of populism and elitism troubled neither side.

"Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We've traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites."

William F. Buckley

Hayward pines for the old days; the era dominated by the likes of  the omnifarious "columnist, lecturer, TV host and debater," William F. Buckley Jr, who used "his weekly "Firing Line" show on PBS" to become a well known television personality who showed himself to be a "man of style and ideas who inspired two generations of conservative thinkers and more just a populist shock jock with a funny prep-school accent."

But the contemporary state of what describes itself as conservatism in Hayward's opinion is a mediascape in which the best that its nascent era provided; now dominated by a a group of conservative movement imitators who have "thrown off" the "balance" struck by the founders of the early years "with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We've traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites."

I cannot disagree with Hayward's observation of conservatism thrown into disarray by its present generation of representatives who may be engaged in activities that are "authentic and laudatory, it is unfocused, lacking the connection to a concrete ideology".

And I agree with Hayward's assessment of the trashy tombs that promote conservatism today: "The best-selling conservative books these days tend to be red-meat titles such as Michelle Malkin's "Culture of Corruption," Glenn Beck's new "Arguing with Idiots" and all of Ann Coulter's well-calculated provocations that the left falls for like Pavlov's dogs. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these books. Politics is not conducted by Socratic seminar, and Henry Adams's dictum that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds should remind us that partisan passions are an essential and necessary function of democratic life. The right has always produced, and always will produce, potboilers."

Ann Coulter

Hayward contrasts the "frivolous paranoia as the face of conservatism" with what is: "Conspicuously missing, however, are the intellectual works. The bestseller list used to be crowded with the likes of Friedman's "Free to Choose," George Gilder's "Wealth and Poverty," Paul Johnson's "Modern Times," Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," Charles Murray's "Losing Ground" and "The Bell Curve," and Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man." There are still conservative intellectuals attempting to produce important work, but some publishers have been cutting back on serious conservative titles because they don't sell. (I have my own entry in the list: a two-volume political history titled "The Age of Reagan." But I never expected the books to sell well; at 750 pages each, you can hurt yourself picking them up.)

"About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism," which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had. But because it deployed the incendiary f-word, the book was perceived as a mood-of-the-moment populist work, even though I predict that it will have a long shelf life as a serious work. Had Goldberg called the book "Aspects of Illiberal Policymaking: 1914 to the Present," it might have been received differently by its critics. And sold about 200 copies.

Jonah Goldberg

Of course, it's hard to say whether conservative intellectuals are simply out of interesting ideas or if the reading public simply finds their ideas boring. Both possibilities (and they are not mutually exclusive) should prompt some self-criticism on the right. Conservatism has prospered most when its attacks on liberalism have combined serious alternative ideas with populist enthusiasm. When the ideas are absent, the movement has nothing to offer -- except opposition. That doesn't work for long in American politics."

Hayward correctly summarizes his discontent with conservatism's present dilemma: "The single largest defect of modern conservatism, in my mind, is its insufficient ability to challenge liberalism at the intellectual level, in particular over the meaning and nature of progress. In response to the left's belief in political solutions for everything, the right must do better than merely invoking "markets" and "liberty." Hayward admits that conservatives lack the gravitas of the next William F. Buckley when he admits: "The single largest defect of modern conservatism, in my mind, is its insufficient ability to challenge liberalism at the intellectual level, in particular over the meaning and nature of progress. In response to the left's belief in political solutions for everything, the right must do better than merely invoking "markets" and "liberty." And who does Hayward end up pinning his hopes on for a conservative resurgence? Glenn Beck.

Hayward admits: "Beck may lack Buckley's urbanity, and his show will never be confused with "Firing Line." But he's on to something with his interest in serious analysis of liberalism's patrimony. The left is enraged with Beck's scandal-mongering over Van Jones and ACORN, but they have no idea that he poses a much bigger threat than that. If more conservative talkers took up the theme of challenging liberalism's bedrock assumptions the way Beck does from time to time, liberals would have to defend their problematic premises more often."

Somehow this line of Hayward's argumentation fails to convince that America is sitting on the cusp of a conservative resurgence. Glenn Beck?

Glenn Beck Ranting

Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to Three Molecular Biologists

A ribosome reads an mRNA sequence and produces protein according to its genetic code.

"Two Americans and an Israeli won a Nobel Prize in chemistry; Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath, Wednesday for creating detailed blueprints of the protein-making machinery within cells, research that's being used to develop new antibiotics."

 From left, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England; Thomas A. Steitz of Yale University; and Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel will share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

"Ribosomes are key to life," Malcolm Ritter of The Associated Press explained: "They use instructions from genes to make thousands of different proteins that control what happens in the body. Many antibiotics kill bacteria by attacking their ribosomes, and the detailed descriptions by new Nobelists are being used to develop new drugs." 

"The chemistry prize was awarded for research into how information on strands of DNA is translated into proteins."

"Ribosomes were discovered in the 1950’s by George Palade, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the makeup of cells, but scientists weren’t able to take a close look at those organelles till the end of the century. Thomas Steitz, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, and Ada Yonath developed tricks for examining the tiny structures with x-rays and electron beams. The high-resolution 3D images they acquired will help chemists develop a host of better medications."

“Scientists around the world are using the winners’ research to develop new antibiotics that can be used in the ongoing battle against antibiotic-resistant microbes that cause so much illness, suffering and death.” said Thomas Lane, president of the American Chemical Society, in a press release."

"Dozens of antibiotics — including tetracycline and clindamycin — work by gumming up the ribosomes inside bacteria. Each of those medications is made up of relatively small molecules that can wedge themselves into crevices in the ribosome, destroying the microbes’ ability to make protein, and thus rendering them helpless.

"Armed with 3D images of antibiotic molecules wedged into ribosomes, medicinal chemists can refine their strategy for fighting bacteria. They can find new weak spots in bacterial ribosomes.

"That approach is a lot like the way that the Rebel Alliance destroyed the first Death Star: by looking at its blueprint and finding a weak spot. Except, in this case the researchers are looking for vulnerable nooks and crannies in a blob of RNA and protein, rather than a thermal exhaust port.

"Dozens of 3D images that show antibiotics sticking to ribosomes are available in the Protein DataBank, and you can look at them yourself with a tool called First Glance.

"Just type the Protein DataBank ID number for the ribosome that you want to look at, and then start exploring.

"Here are some of the best structures:

Ribosome with Clindamycin: 1YJN
Ribosome with Azithromycin: 1NWY
Ribosome with Erythromycin: 1JZY"

Following the announcement, Professor Gunnar von Heijne told senior editor Simon Frantz how the achievements awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry not only provided insights into life at the atomic level, but also provided insights into how to save lives.

Hofstadter's Paranoid Style at Work in Today's GOP?

Yesterdays post took a look at two real life examples of how Republicans, since the 1980s,  have built their party on fear and intolerance of the 'other' to fragment the American electorate and use the slim majorities their tactics fostered to shape the direction of political discourse for some three decades. As the nation has entered a new century, the GOP has held on to their political playbook but have been forced to face new electoral realities as the party has fallen from power and the Democratic Party has ascended to controlling both the presidency and the congress. With so few elected political leaders in positions of power, a power vacuum has confronted the Republican's leadership apparatus. The party is still controlled by the conservative-business-evangelical triad that has held power since Reagan; but having been subjected to crushing electoral defeats in the 1998 and 2000 election cycles, a new type of 'public' leadership has emerged to assume the face of the Republican Party.

A number of recent political commentators have drawn on historian Richard Hofstadter's essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" that highlighted the effects of fringe groups that influence American politics to compare present day affairs with those that invoked "...the ghosts of McCarthyism and the more immediate significance of Barry Goldwater's candidacy for president of the United States. The Hofstadter commentary "was particularly concerned about assessing "how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority."

 

Rush Limbaugh

Of course, today "... right-wing radio hosts and cable news commentators like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh give voice to the new millennium's paranoid impulse, "many observers of the American political scene readily suggest. A great deal of attention has gone into examining "the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups."

Glenn Beck

Geoffrey Dunn has commented: "Indeed, the paranoid style often rears its ugly head during transformative moments in American history - from the advent of Jeffersonian democracy and the onset of the Civil War, on through to the New Deal presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and, a generation later, the election of John F. Kennedy. Come now the transformative election of Barack Obama, and the paranoid style has once more found fertile soil in America's political landscape."

Dunn further observed that: "In his essay, Hofstadter was careful to distinguish clinical paranoia in an individual from "paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people." ... The paranoid tendency, Hofstadter contended, is "aroused by a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise."

Members of the John Birch Society

Drawing further attention to the influence of fringe groups in American politics Arthur Goldwag observed: “More than half a century ago, the John Birch Society raised an alarm that Dwight Eisenhower wasn't the genial war hero and popular president he seemed, but rather "a conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy." Bill Clinton, we were told in the 1990s, ran illicit drugs out of an airport in Mena, Ark., when he wasn't bumping off a long list of enemies and associates who knew too much about his other nefarious activities (Monica Lewinsky accepted, of course). The so-called 9/11 Truth Movement accuses George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Israel, the Federal Reserve and the real estate industry -- virtually anyone except Al-Qaida -- of orchestrating the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, much as conservative journalist John T. Flynn indicted Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940s for treasonously sacrificing Pearl Harbor. A not inconsiderable slice of today's electorate (and many of its elected representatives) believe President Barack Obama not only harbors an implacable hatred for white people -- and is seeking to euthanize their grandparents -- but that he's not even an American citizen.”

David Greenberg

David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers has a different take on the 'paranoid over usage phenomenon.' Greenberg contends: "Richard Hofstadter's classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." ... "is often invoked without giving much attention to the essay's actual content" ... "It's hard to deny that the title recommends itself"... "Lately, from the rise of Sarah Palin to the spring's "tea parties" to the "birther" frenzies and health care town halls of this summer to the Joe Wilson contretemps, allusions to Hofstadter have never seemed more widespread... Today's ultraconservative activists exhibit many core elements of the style that Hofstadter identified: the penchant for 'conspiratorial fantasy,' the apocalyptic stakes imagined to be involved in policy debates, the imperiousness to rational persuasion. Nonetheless, Hofstadter's thesis ought to be used carefully and sparingly, Greenberg contends ... "Hofstadter's contribution to The New American Right was "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt," which actually makes more of an effort than does "The Paranoid Style" to identify the sources and hallmarks of ultraconservative thought that is "situated these individuals within a rapidly shifting culture. Contributing to their frightened, aggressive, and bitter disposition were, among other factors, the "the growth of the mass media of communication," the "long tenure in power" of liberals, and the feeling during the Cold War of "continued crisis" rather than the periodic involvement in world affairs that the United States had enjoyed before 1939."

Greenberg cogently adds: "Ironically, the historical portion of Hofstadter essay, though seldom cited these days by journalists, was groundbreaking, though not very controversial. It traced the tendency in our political culture, on the left and right, to see all-powerful conspiracies devoted to subverting the American way." 

Greenberg continues discussing Hofstadter's most valuable insights raised by his essay: "Hofstadter identifies real aspects of a familiar right-wing type, from the hyper-competence he ascribes to his conspiring enemies ("he is a perfect model of malice; a kind of amoral superman") to his taste for pseudo-pedantry ("McCarthy's 96-page pamphlet McCarthyism contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch's fantastic assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, is weighed down by a hundred pages of bibliography and notes"). And as countless admirers have noted, some of Hofstadter's language about the right of that era—from anti-fluoridation cranks to John Birch Society members—perfectly describes today's extremists. To wit: "The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major states—men seated at the very centers of American power." Direct links between the Goldwater-era conspiracism and today's are easy to find: the right's criticisms of President Obama's health care reform, for example, carries the distinct whiff of Ronald Reagan's early-1960s alarums against "socialized medicine." 

Greenberg chastens: "Those who talk about being frightened today or act as if Obama is the first president to suffer the slings of what Franklin Roosevelt called "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror" would do well to note that on the back cover of my 1996 reissue of The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays is a quote from Hofstadter's sole equal among his generation of political historians, Arthur Schlesinger:
 

"Recent months have witnessed an attack of 

     unprecedented passion and ferocity against the 

             national government. … Unbridled rhetoric is having 

consequences far beyond anything that 

    antigovernment politicians intend. The flow of 

     angry words seems to have activated and in a 

  sense legitimized what the historian Richard 

             Hofstadter called the "paranoid strain" in American 

                                            politics."

"Schlesinger," Greenberg explains "published his comment in the Wall Street Journal on June 7, 1995.

"The "paranoid" style did not return suddenly this summer," Greenberg correctly observes: "On the contrary, Hofstadter was surely correct when he wrote that while "it comes in waves of different intensity, it appears to be all but ineradicable." 

Richard J. Hofstadter

The Truth Lies Before Us If We Only Take the Time to Accept It

This past Saturday morning at a gathering of Georgia Republicans; congressman and candidate for governor Nathan Deal introduced the GOP's latest 'hate speech' when he spoke of "Ghetto grandmothers," who lack birth certificates as just another cynically framed phrase that easily traces it's lineage back to the Reagan era and it's holier than thou reference to "welfare queens."

Ronald Reagan, the godhead of modern conservative politicians

Both terms are despicably aligned to sustain a politics of an us versus them mentality that fractures the American public and employs all of the sophistication of a club indiscriminately used against the Democratic opposition.

But lets return to our latest purveyor of hit and run hate speech, Nathan Deal, who said just a few days ago: “We got all the complaints of the ghetto grandmothers who didn’t have birth certificates and all that. We wrote some very liberal language as to how you can verify it. My mother was born in 1906 and she didn’t have a birth certificate. They didn’t give birth certificates back then. But we got her one, because you can do it under the proper procedures of your state.”



Republican hate speech extends beyond bashing ghetto grandmothers and regularly seeks out opportunities to attack gays. Oklahoma State Representative, Sally Kern has made her contempt well known



and identifies with the true Republican party, also known as the Party of Jesus.

Perhaps Paul Krugman sums it up best when he reflects on today's Republican Party and its all out war against President Obama as he remarks: "How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?

"The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.

"Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.

"The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance. Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.

"The result has been a cynical, ends-justify-the-means approach. Hastening the day when the rightful governing party returns to power is all that matters, so the G.O.P. will seize any club at hand with which to beat the current administration.

"It’s an ugly picture. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America’s real problems has to understand."