Kennedy Healthcare Ad for Dodd

It’s hard to think of a more powerful ad than this,  given Dodd and Kennedy’s decades of friendship and the trials Senator Kennedy is himself going through now as he battles cancer.

Here’s the transcript:

SENATOR KENNEDY: Quality healthcare as a fundamental right for all Americans has been the cause of my life, and Chris Dodd has been my closest ally in this fight. Today more than ever, we have a real opportunity to bring healthcare reform to Connecticut and all across America, and I believe that with Chris Dodd’s leadership, our families will finally have accessible, affordable healthcare.

SENATOR DODD: I’m Chris Dodd and I approve this message.

You can see all of Dodd’s ads here.

NYT on Tibetan Monks’ Protests Stories

Ed Wong of the New York Times has a simply brilliant article documenting stories from Tibetan monks who have recently escaped into exile following participating in protests in the spring of 2008 in support of Tibetan independence.

“If we monks hadn’t seized the opportunity to express our feelings, which are feelings in all Tibetan monks, then we would have missed a chance to tell the world,” said Lobsang, 24, a squat man with a thin goatee who now lives in India. Following Tibetan custom, he goes by his given name.

The journalists left later that afternoon without knowing the names or the fates of the protesters. Some would be arrested and beaten, Lobsang said. For him and two other monks, it was the start of a harrowing year of flight from the Chinese authorities that ended only last month, when they arrived in this Himalayan hill town where the Dalai Lama lives in exile.

Over that year, the monks slipped out of their monastery, trekked into the mountains, slept in nomads’ tents, sneaked into Lhasa aboard a high-altitude train and crossed a raging river to Nepal. It was only here in a refugee center that they could tell their tale to a reporter, opening a rare window into the deep-rooted resentment that bloomed last year into the largest Tibetan uprising in decades.

Chinese officials insist that the protests were orchestrated by the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetans. The monks from Labrang say harsh Chinese policies sparked the tinder, especially limitations on Buddhist practice.

“I and my friends decided on our own to protest,” Lobsang said. “The protests were caused by human rights issues and Chinese policies toward Tibet. We couldn’t tolerate it anymore.”

He added, “I joined the protests with the idea of saving Buddhism, which is endangered by Chinese policy. I want His Holiness the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet, but the Chinese don’t even allow us to display his picture.”

Wong goes on to relay the incredible details of Lobsang’s protest and subsequent escape from authorities, as well as those of other monks involved in protests. It’s a must read.

Populist Dodd

Rough partial transcript:

“…when I pick up the morning newspaper and I read the first headline that “Fault Lines Emerge and Industry Groups Blast Plan to Create Consumer Agency,” what planet are you living on? The very people who created the damn mess are the ones now arguing that consumers ought not to be protected!  They’re the people who paid this price.  And the idea that you’re going to first attack the very clients and customers who depend on you every day is not the place to begin.”

More, please.

Dodd Staying Strong to the Public Option

Chris Dodd is effectively running the HELP Committee and quarterbacking the movement of their healthcare reform legislation. While the bill they have out so far does not have a public health insurance option, Dodd and other Democrats have repeatedly assured the public that it will be added by amendments. Thus far there are already in the neighborhood of 300-400 amendments to the bill, with many more expected before it leaves the HELP committee. What happens next is critically important, which is why it’s good to see Dodd guest blogging on My Left Nutmeg in support of the public health insurance option.  What’s less reassuring is his candor about there being such strong opposition to the public option.

But, as frustrating as it is to you and to me, I don’t know if we have the votes to pass a strong public health care option. What I do know is that whether we can get there or not is still an open question. What I do know is that I plan to fight hard to convince my colleagues on the committee and in the full Senate that we need a public option. What I do know is that I’m going to need your help. …

You and I are both committed to fighting for that bill to contain a strong public option so that we can keep costs down and offer more and better choices to American families.

It’s not confidence inspiring, but since Dodd is running the show in Kennedy’s absence from HELP, it is important. After all, if the guy shepherding the legislation through is saying he’ll do everything he can to get the public option in, then there’s little much else we can ask of him. If the HELP bill does not include an amendment covering the public option, it will be because all the Committee’s Republican members and at least one Democrat stood in its way. There will be inevitable questions about why it wasn’t included in the first place in that event; after all, we’ve been told it’s for strategic reasons to prevent the GOP and the insurance lobby from having something specific to attack. That always struck me as a big gamble and right now, it seems very uncertain as to whether or not it will pay off.

In my experience, you win in politics when you fight with conviction for what you believe. The video above shows Dodd as strong as anyone in the Senate on the public option. But at this point, I have to wonder if it’s going to be too hard to overcome Republican obstructionism and the cowardice of a few conservative Democrats. The fetishization of bipartisanship has already cut the public option out of the Finance Committee’s draft legislation.  So if this all fails, I can’t see how it could be reasonably put at Dodd’s feet. Instead I’d look to blame those who demanded Republican participation in the legislation that comes out of the Senate and in so doing, dismisses the will of the American public, which is overwhelmingly in favor of the public health insurance option.

Green Dam Back On

Despite reports earlier this week that the Chinese government was backing off its requirement that all new computers sold after July 1 have the censor-spyware platform Green Dam-Youth Escort installed, it now looks like there has been no such let-up in their commitment to this program. The New York Times reports:

American computer makers say the Chinese government has not backed down from a requirement that Internet censorship software be preinstalled on all computers sold in China after July 1, despite reports this week that the rule had been relaxed.

In a further sign that Chinese officials are trying to assert more Internet control, the city of Beijing wants to recruit 10,000 volunteers by summer’s end to monitor online content, said an employee of the city government’s Spiritual Civilization Office.
…
Four trade groups based in the United States have sent a statement to the Chinese government asking it to “reconsider implementing its new mandatory filtering software requirement.”

On Wednesday, the major American computer makers said they had yet to hear anything concrete from China regarding the possibility of making installations of Green Dam optional.
…
Confusion was sown Monday when China Daily, the country’s official English-language newspaper, quoted an unnamed official in the software department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology saying that the government was requiring that the software be offered on a CD-ROM packaged with new computers or be placed on hard drives as setup files only.

Some people interpreted that as the government backing down from its rule that Green Dam be installed, but soon it became clear that the official was not speaking in an authoritative role. Employees at the ministry’s software department, reached by telephone, refused to clarify the government’s position. No government official has given any statement this week indicating that the policy has changed.

Well, there you go. China hasn’t back down yet and it’s not clear if they will. The question then becomes, will foreign tech companies comply with this unethical request? Will American computer companies like HP and Dell help the Chinese government spy on their citizenry and limit what information they can find on the internet? Or will they show some spine and commit to not doing the Chinese government’s dirty work for them? We’ll see what happens, but I’m not about to place any sum of money betting that American tech companies will do the right thing at the expense of access to the Chinese market.

Repeal FISA

Wow. The New York Times editorial board calls for Congress to repeal the FISA reauthorization and modifications of 2008:

The 2008 expansion of FISA is a deeply flawed law. Congress needs to repeal it and re-examine, carefully this time, what powers the government really needs to eavesdrop on Americans and what limits and safeguards need to be placed on those powers.

This would be a necessary and needed step to restoring the rule of law in America. Unfortunately I don’t think it will likely happen any time soon. David Waldman at Congress Matters points out that Attorney General Eric Holder just defended that law and the retroactive immunity for telecoms contained there in as “settled law.” Holder did not give any indication that the administration viewed the law, which President Obama voted for, as unconstitutional or going too far in giving the government the power to spy on Americans without warrant. While I’ve heard that Senator Chris Dodd might try to legislate on FISA in the future, I cannot imagine it would happen any time soon, given his leadership on healthcare reform and financial sector reform. That said, I don’t see Congress pushing hard on legislation that reduces the ability of the government to spy on Americans without the support of the administration, which may or may not be forthcoming.

At least the editors of the Times have it right. Hopefully they continue to use their back page as a forum to highlight this issue and create pressure for change.

Make Bankers Mad

Joe Nocera has a very interesting column in the New York Times critiquing President Obama’s financial sector overhaul, as compared to the changes FDR pushed through during the Great Depression to put in place a regulatory structure for the financial industry. I haven’t sorted through the full Obama plan yet, but I think Nocera’s closing line is a very good indication of how the public and the White House should be thinking about these needed reforms:

If Mr. Obama hopes to create a regulatory environment that stands for another six decades, he is going to have to do what Roosevelt did once upon a time. He is going to have make some bankers mad.

I think this is obvious to anyone who’s watched in anger as the banksters who got this country in the economic mess we’re currently in get bailout after bailout – and then direct substantial sums to reward their executives for failure. Taxpayer have been asked to carry all of the risk, while the banksters get to play in an economic-political structure where they say “Heads we win, tails you lose.” This is not a cohort that should wind up happy with what the administration puts in place. Quite simply, if it isn’t making bankers mad, it isn’t good enough.

Who’s Responsible?

Reading Peter Daou’s post at his new project, Consider This News, on the bipartisan repudiation of the left wing of American politics, I caught this line:

I challenge anyone to envision a President Barack Obama without the unrelenting defiance of the netroots during the Bush years.

While I personally agree 100% with Daou’s sentiment that the defiance of proud progressives in the netroots, especially in the period of 2004-2008, lead to the conditions that allowed Obama to win, I think there are many people – especially here in DC – that would disagree with it.  For example, I can imagine any number of campaign operatives I’ve worked with in professional politics who could recast that sentence as such:

I challenge anyone to envision a President Barack Obama without the unrelenting efforts to defeat Republican incumbents with centrist candidates by Chuck Schumer of the DSCC and Rahm Emanuel of the DCCC.

Do I agree with this statement? Certainly not as much as I agree with Daou’s postulation on the importance of the netroots, but it sort of makes clear that looking at politics in absolutes as if in a vacuum is very difficult.

More importantly, while Daou may well be able to issue his challenge, the fact that there would so readily be a cement block of Conventional Wisdom standing in the way of it being accepted proves his point that both Republicans and Democrats have worked efficiently to marginalize voices from the Democratic left in accepted political discourse. Were we in an environment where the massive contributions the online progressive community has made to electing Democrats — often regardless of where they fit on the Democratic political spectrum —  I would expect to see a far greater appreciation of the concerns and critiques of activists online. That appreciation simply doesn’t exist now and as a result the netroots is treated by Democratic politicians at best like a demanding ATM machine and at worst like a group of whack-jobs who should be marginalized to show your friends in DC how Serious you are.

No One Could Have Predicted…

No one could have predicted that if Congress retroactively legalized illegal domestic surveillance and set up a new legal infrastructure for spying on Americans that the NSA wouldn’t find a way to still illegally spy on Americans without warrant.

The N.S.A. is believed to have gone beyond legal boundaries designed to protect Americans in about 8 to 10 separate court orders issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to three intelligence officials who spoke anonymously because disclosing such information is illegal. Because each court order could single out hundreds or even thousands of phone numbers or e-mail addresses, the number of individual communications that were improperly collected could number in the millions, officials said. (It is not clear what portion of total court orders or communications that would represent.)

“Say you get an order to monitor a block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at a big corporation, and instead of just monitoring those, the N.S.A. also monitors another block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at that corporation,” one senior intelligence official said. “That is the kind of problem they had.”

While there may be some further investigating by Congress into how this happened, I wouldn’t hold my breath that either FISA will be returned to its pre-Bush era strength or that the people responsible for illegally spying on Americans will be held to account.