... just in case it wasn't clear ...

... and in the event that my last post might have been criticized for being too gloomy, I note the following: Barack Obama's strategy of leaving the details of health care to Congress is now being criticized as an absence of presidential leadership that left a critically important issue to the government's least-trusted branch.

Fifteen years ago, Bill Clinton's strategy of immersing the presidency into the details of health care legislation was criticized as insisting on the president's preferred package, and of not permitting the legislative process to unfold naturally in the Congress.

To reiterate: The refusal of our government to enact the bare-minimum of health care reform that is necessary to America's is not a failure of our national politics. It is the function of our national government. It's what we do. And although it's commonly yet falsely said about our health care system, our uncomfortable-issue-avoidance system really is the best in the world.

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Update: Two weeks after the post above, the White House decided to veer back and reinsert the president into the health care debate. The response from the same message-machine that had been criticizing him for remaining too aloof, via this Daily Show episode, is that the president has become "overexposed."

Oh, by the way, in the meantime, financial regulatory reform has been pretty much buried, with Tim Geithner (natch) announcing that literally the least we could do, the least exciting option whose very mundaneness was highlighted in the moniker "vanilla option," is proving too spicy for Wall Street and therefore (natch) not going to introduced to Congress. (Via 'lix Salmon; h/t Ezra Klein.)

To re-reiterate, America, you're so fucked.

Possibly it's just my inner dropout speaking (given I've abandoned the western hemisphere for the time being, you might think "possibly" is too timid), but I really do wonder why Americans don't ever have a collective Fight Club moment, when the accretion of everyday indignities of the office and of the dating scene and of Starbucks, the depersonalization that isn't an incidental consequence of our jobs and our credit card company, our government and the way you never can reach your landlord but only their powerless agent, but the purpose of these institutions, just finally gets heavy enough on someone's shoulders that they realize there's no reason to keep hanging so tightly on that bottom rung anymore, that you don't have to give up to let go. (Thanks.) I guess maybe it just is that possible to keep telling people that it's the fault of illegal immigrants or whatever, but it really seems surprising to me that people don't eventually start to suspect that all the promises that they thought were getting made[fn1] are never going to be kept, and actually no one ever really promised them that working hard and playing fair would mean they would get ahead, not really. And people ask themselves a lot of questions at a time like this, but the question they never ask is why we keep playing this game, and who wrote these rules, anyway? Why are you still paying your credit card bill? I don't think these are rhetorical questions---I don't mean to suggest one answer or another. But it just seems sometimes so impossibly cruel to me.

fn1: I mean, there's a guy somewhere in Detroit who worked his whole life for a car company, right? kept at it every day, maybe even called Japanese imports "rice burners" and said Pearl Harbor had something to do with why he kept driving the Ford, who in the 70s said he'd give up a raise when the company asked him to take a bigger pension instead, who in the 80s said okay to a cut in the pension when the company said they'd go bankrupt otherwise, who in the 90s said okay to less health insurance when the company said they couldn't afford it, and now is hearing that his pension is going to be cut again---because Detroit executives couldn't figure out that the market wanted fuel efficient cars in the 70s and 80s (beaten by Japan's Honda and Toyota), or SUVs in the 90s (Land Rover, a British firm), or even after thirty years' warning still didn't make a fuel efficient car in 2004, because the Wall Street math guys told the suits not to approve wage hikes but that since pension obligations were future costs it wouldn't hurt their stock options which were vesting in two years---and this guy has to turn on the news and hear half of Congress say it's his fault that Detroit's uncompetitive, that if only it weren't for the union members making a living like a Chicago-Cadillac welfare queen, that maybe General Motors would still be in business, that they have to give up more, again, and maybe this guy turns off the TV and thinks he never asked for this, he just signed the union card when he was eighteen, he never asked for anything he wasn't promised, and wasn't this what he was promised? when he went to work for fifty years, that he could retire and pay his kids' college? And you think of that guy and you just wonder: Doesn't he get it?

Meet the new boss....

[So in case the more casual readers haven't noticed what's become more or less blatant, this blog is pretty much going to be idle from now on. It's not entirely because it no longer comes up as the top result on Google for this blog's own gee-dee name. Those of you who've found the new locale should just head over there (not that there's much to recommend it, yet, but hopefully that will change). Traveling through the western United States this week and next, I feel inclined to sing one last meandering comment on American politics.]

I note from reading Krugman and Greenwald that I'm not alone in feeling this way, but I've become deeply disappointed---deeply not working here as an amplifier or a false superlative, but in the sense that my feelings are buried underneath many layers of complex and even contradictory thoughts---disappointed in the Obama presidency. I don't think I have ever looked forward to a political event as much as his inauguration---although that was probably exacerbated by everyone on the east coast treating it as a social event without peer, our generation's Woodstock. But beyond that, the excitement at the prospect of a legitimately new sort of politics, a politics with real dignity and purpose, a kind of American governance equal to the enormous challenges facing this country---it was a sense that the future really was now, and it lent the air a sort of energy that was almost palpable.

But I recently re-listened to This American Life's Inauguration episode, and the stark dichotomy between the hopes given voice there and the reality of what our American system has rendered out of those hopes was just soul-crushing. I defy you to listen to the segment (starting a little after 35 minutes) on the military lawyer speaking in favor of closing the Guantanamo detainee system and not squirm under the knowledge that Obama has done little besides continuing the regime of Bush-era policies.

More than that, though, I get the sense that nothing really has changed, that nothing can change in this country. Before Obama's election, the government existed only for the greater profit of the rich. Democrats lost some elections in the 80s and 90s and got paranoid about their "big government" reputation, so they all became free-market centrists, which meant promising hedge fund managers and other suits that they wouldn't ever do anything too ambitious and unsettling and in fact would secretly abet the way they made money. So a helluva lot of Democrats voted for a bill making it impossible to escape your credit card debt through bankruptcy, for instance. Republicans, meanwhile, had the reputation as corporate whores already and could do the same thing out loud. Then Obama got elected, and ... government still exists only for the greater profit of the rich and powerful. Take the bank bailout---the responsible option would have been to infuse government money into the banks in exchange for equity stock, to make it hurt those bankers that wrecked their balance sheets as well as to preserve an upside for the taxpayer. But Geithner insisted that what we had to do was to buy the crappy assets, instead, and proposed three or four different plans, the next each differing from the last only in being more and more complicated in order to obscure what was really going on. Or the stimulus package---CBO figures indicated the economy needed a $1.5 trillion package, including as much direct spending and as few tax cuts as possible. Instead what we got was $800 billion, half of which was tax cuts, and when Republicans criticized it for being too big, Senate Democrats cut it down to $700 billion, with even more tax cuts. Or healthcare---single-payer's the best solution, but it was never on the table, and in fact the only plan the administration seems ever to have had is one that so benefits the insurance industry that they'll have to champion it, contra the Clinton plan, ensuring its passage. But Republicans criticized the provision about end-of-life counseling, so that's out. And Republicans balked at even a public option, so that's apparently being dropped, too. Hence all that's left of the plan is an individual mandate to buy coverage with no public option to force competition into the market---about as clear a giveaway to the insurance industry as one can imagine. But hey, insurance company stocks are rising, and Citi and BofA reported great profits last quarter.

Politicians don't have the luxury of forgetting practical considerations, and in the real world unlike your fondest dreams you're hemmed in by what's possible. But running down the list of disappointments, you're struck by how goddamn many of them were in fact very possible. Putting a freeze on the firing of gay servicemen and -women, for instance, while don't-ask-don't-tell was being reviewed. Or making the receipt of bailout funds subject to lender approval of executive bonuses and dividends, just like real lenders do in the financial markets. Or introducing securities-law reforms while public was still paying attention to the massive amount of systemic risk our financial markets are imposing upon everyone else.

There wasn't any mystery in why the administration did it the way they did, though---health care was priority number one, and Obama wasn't spending any political capital, even on this person or that one's favorite issue, until he was sure he had enough for health care, and possibly climate change legislation after that. Which was a defensible decision, but now that we see what proposed health care reform looks like, now that we understand what we were being asked to wait in line for.... I suppose it makes sense that we are the ones we've been waiting for, because frankly I've never been that impressed with us. I kind of always knew we would let us down. It's still disappointing, though.

I've mused before that, but for the timing of announced appointments, we could have had Secretary Daschle getting confirmed despite his tax troubles while Tim Geithner was forced to withdraw from consideration---given Daschle's familiarity with the Senate, where health care reform has gone to die, that possibility is exquisitely painful, now, when one contemplates what might have happened. But I'm less inclined to think of it as a consequence of this personnel decision versus its alternative, and instead think that this is actually the way Obama wants it to be, or at least Rahm Emanuel. This team isn't just reluctant to fight battles they can't win; they're scared of fights that they might lose.

So I think again on those pet issues we had to table while we waited for the stimulus, for health care. And I think: We were waiting for this?

Blog dump

Best. Weary, furious indignation at our low-brow political discourse. Ever!

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Yglesias and Balko have already dealt with this terrifying fuckwit thug with a badge more responsibly, probably, than I shall, but Bad Boy Ygs's conclusion leaves me shaking my head:

Most people like and respect cops, and honor the work they do. But it's a profession that's honored precisely because the people doing the job correctly don't do the job this way.... This is the mentality of a foreign occupying army, not a well-functioning police force.

Now who's being naive, Diane? Most of my readers won't agree, I'm pretty sure, but I simply don't agree that most cops in fact do perform their jobs the way Yglesias thinks, or at least hopes. Certainly in LA, corruption is so widespread, tales of LAPD wrongdoing are so unsurprising, at those moments when even that department's culture of silence can't hide it anymore the list of dirty cops is always so long and the details of their sins so horrifying, that one can say of pretty much any LA cop that, if he's not dirty himself, he knows and abides cops who are. But outside those easy cases like the LAPD, there's a different but I think equally persuasive charge against the police. Ta-Nehisi Coates makes an interesting point, that cops want the power to arrest and to kill, but that they're discordantly unwilling to assume the responsibility for the choices that accompany that power. I'd put it slightly differently---we give cops the guns and the power to use them because the cops have told us that they need that power in order to keep safe the innocents of the public, but when comes the moment they do use them, they use them consistent with protecting themselves. Why'd they fire forty-one shots at Amadou Diallo? Why fifty at Sean Bell? Because police procedure is---and this isn't ambiguous---when cops shoot, they keep shooting until they kill. If you're innocent or if you're guilty, once a cop thinks you represent a threat to his life, that gun and that power that was justified to help protect you gets turned, quick.

So Yglesias is drawing a false contrast, I think. It's not that Patterico's pseudonymous guest a lousy cop because he treats his charge like the other side in a war. He's a lousy cop, sure. But all the rest of the cops are already treating us like the other side in a war, too.

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Update: You know what? I was too restrained. Cops---every cop, every single goddamn one---joined that line of work simply because they're sociopaths with a psychological need to be able to control other people, who get off on other people having to suck up to them. They way they perform their jobs, in practice, is nothing short of a mockery of the philosophical ideal of a free society. Fuck. Them.

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UpUpdatedate: So the response from the right seems to be, a cop who sends racist mass-emails has a free speech right not to be punished therefor, because citizens have the right under the First Amendment to call people names and otherwise be offensive. I wonder what they would think about a citizen being arrested for calling a police officer names and otherwise being offensive....

* * *

Random thought: When I was in high school civics class, the model we got was that members of Congress and presidents were self-interested politicians who introduced legislation to serve their own electoral needs, but that this was okay because the national media would act as a check, forcing them to justify those electoral moves in terms of good public policy. Since I've been a grownup it appears that it's quite the reverse: no matter how earnestly a politician might believe in legislation as good public policy, he will face a national news media prepared to grill him on whether it's smart politics.

Nerdism scorecard

Just so we're steady:

Google hits for "silas marner":  546,000.
Google hits for "silas warner":  8,850.
Google hits for "silas murder," 631, only one of which appears to be an intentional to the series also including "Jean-Gary Diablo, in... Murdermarch!"

My new favorite blog

Zero Hedge.  I haven't, you know, actually read it yet.  But its reputation commends it highly.

brb, brc

I was literally wearing that t-shirt when I saw this picture. 

I miss that place.  Anyone going?  You can, like, get shitty updates on what I was thinking about the Washington Post's editorial page and its flagrant biases whilst on the john ten minutes ago, live and in person!  

Madoff victims: The SEC owes us compensation

I'd first heard this theory mentioned obliquely on NPR's Planet Money podcast [fn.1] the other day, and I have to admit I was most confused.  The SEC isn't an administrator of benefits, nor of recovery funds, nor are they involved in banking really at all (although their capital-markets beat of course abuts the banking sector). If the SEC had an obligation to make whole any victims of financial fraud, it was certainly a new bit of knowledge to me. Comes the invaluable Joe Nocera to alert me to the assortment of victims' actual claim:

I got an e-mail message earlier today from a public relations executive who works for a law firm that is suing the Securities and Exchange Commission on behalf of a small handful of the victims of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. The legal theory, apparently, is that the agency's negligence in failing to catch the now-famous crook means that it should be legally liable for the victims' losses. 

Ah then. I have a new target of diffident outrage, then; viz., the plaintiffs lawyer, who should be sanctioned by the court for advancing a frivolous legal argument.  This one is black letter, and as was explained to me in bar prep:  "Because the government owes a duty to everyone, it owes a duty to no one."  (That's an actual quote; I don't have notes on me, but I can remember rolling my eyes at the instructor's reductiveness like it was yesterday.  Ironically, that's when I got rip-roarin' drunk out the couch and watched season 1 of The Wire, so I actually cannot remember yesterday.)  Recovery for tort requires the showing of a duty, its breach, damages, and causation; if the government fails to protect you, it has breached no duty to you, because it had no legal duty to protect you. (Furthermore, the plaintiffs made a lot of money off Madoff's scheme, before they lost it, so they'd have a heckuva time proving causation and damages.  But that's beyond the threshold issue, and hence obiter dicta, as they say.) 

The leading case is kind of a famous one:  Riss v. City of New York, wherein the plaintiff had requested police protection from her jealous boyfriend, but the police failed to prevent him from having acid splashed in her face.  New York City was absolved in the lawsuit on precisely the grounds that it owed no duty to the plaintiff.  The movie Crazy Love from a couple years back was about the couple, who reconciled and apparently spent the rest of their lives together. 

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fn.1:  Query:  Ital or quote the titles of podcasts?  I'm sure the Bluebook offers no guidance on this,[fn.a] but my inclination is to analogize from printed fiction (self-contained novels ital, short stories or chapters contained therein "quoted") and journals (journal title, "article title") and published music (album, "song") to conclude that the title of the podcast series itself would be italicized, and the title for any particular episode relayed in quotations.  But I'm not at all sure I've thought this through.  

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 fn.a:  Idea:  Bluebook Wiki.  Anonyme, get on that.  That million-dollar idea is my gift to you, your wife and kids, and your mortgage broker.[fn.i]   

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  fn.i:  Sorry for the infinite regression of footnotes; I've just been cruising too many David Foster Wallace sites recently.  And by "cruising" I mean frequenting in the pursuit of anonymous gay sex.  It doesn't work as well over the internet.