Shocking!

The Times Online:

China rounds up dissidents as President Obama touches down in Beijing

Chinese officials have rounded up dozens of Beijings’s tiny coterie of activists and petitioners in case any dissident tries to approach President Obama, who arrived in the city today.

The arrests continued to gather momentum even as Mr Obama told an unprecedented question-and-answer session with Shanghai students that freedom of information and expression were vital for a stronger, more creative society.

Among those detained was Qi Zhiyong, a dissident who lost a leg during the crackdown on the student-led protests in Tiananamen Square in 1989. He said that he had been held for trying to organise a human rights seminar on November 9 in a Beijing park. He and fellow organisers had planned for the seminar to last until the end of President Obama’s visit.

He had applied to police to stage a protest during Mr Obama’s visit “to press him to pay attention to human rights in China, people’s livelihoods and the relatives of jailed people, as he comes only to talk about climate change”.

Mr Qi said he was being held in the Beijing suburbs and had been charged with unlawful assembly and disturbing the social order.

As during the Olympics, the act of merely petitioning to lawfully to hold a protest was met by the Chinese government with arrest and imprisonment. And as is always the case under the Chinese Communist Party’s rule, there is no rule of law, only rule by law:

Also detained was the activist Zhao Lianhai, who attracted the attention of the authorities last year when he organised an online support group for parents of the thousands of children who fell sick after being fed tainted milk powder last year.

The activist group Human Rights in China said that Mr Zhao was handcuffed and taken from his home late on Friday night by police officers who searched his house and took away computers, a video recorder, a camera and an address book. When he refused to go with them, because the summons did not state a cause, the police filled in a summons for “provoking an incident”.

These are the actions of a government that deserves no support from President Obama.  It is tremendously disappointing that he  validates their hold on power by saying nothing or worse than nothing. He continued to support the “One China” doctrine and glossed over China’s ongoing illegal military occupation of Tibet as “differences”:

Mr Obama voiced public recognition of Tibet as a part of China – a remark that Beijing values. President Hu stood beside him impassive when he referred to the exiled Dalai Lama whom Beijing blames for unrest in Tibet and has branded a “jackal in monk’s robes”. Washington, Mr Obama said, supported the early resumption of talks between Beijing and the Dalai Lama “to resolve any concerns or differences the two sides may have”.

This is not leadership. It’s bland, ineffectual, and immoral passivism in the face of gross human rights abuses genocide and a brutal military crackdown.  Am I surprised? No, not terribly. But I am disappointed nonetheless.

No One Could Have Predicted…

No one could have predicted that a behind-closed-doors deal between the White House, Max Baucus, and the pharmaceutical industry to voluntarily cut their costs would not be honored by Big Pharma.

But the drug makers have been proudly citing the agreement they reached with the White House and the Senate Finance Committee chairman to trim $8 billion a year — $80 billion over 10 years — from the nation’s drug bill by giving rebates to older Americans and the government. That provision is likely to be part of the legislation that will reach the Senate floor in coming weeks.

But this year’s price increases would effectively cancel out the savings from at least the first year of the Senate Finance agreement. And some critics say the surge in drug prices could change the dynamics of the entire 10-year deal.

I expect we’ll see strong defenses from both Baucus and the White House of the pharmaceutical industry, accompanied by continued efforts to legislate any required cost schedules for brand-name prescription drugs. We will continue to be asked to trust Big Pharma and not cut into their bottom line by bulk negotiating drug prices, importing from Canada, or reducing the patent lifetimes that keep generics off the market.

The reason we’ll still see the White House and Baucus stand by Pharma is that they are both afraid of the pharmaceutical industry spending hundreds of millions of dollars in television advertising attacking reform. Now, the slight voluntary cost cuts in exchange for no negative ads will be traded in for maintaining the status quo in exchanged for no negative ads.

Cynics, myself included, have long expected that health care reform would be reform in name only. I never really expected that it would so literally be reform in name only, as we’re now seeing from the White House’s deal with Big Pharma resulting in literally no change in costs to consumers. Hopefully today’s news will show Baucus, the White House, and other Democrats on the Hill that non-binding verbal agreements are simply not going to be honored by the pharmaceutical industry. The only answer is to legislate reform. If the administration and leading Democrats on the Hill can’t see that, they will hopefully at least be clear-eyed about the electoral consequences for fake reform.

Schrei vs PRC on Lincoln & Obama

My friend Josh Schrei has a powerful rebuttal to the Chinese government’s statements that Obama should support their position on Tibet because he is black and a fan of Abraham Lincoln. Here’s a good chunk:

President Obama, we will not insult your intelligence — as your current hosts have –  by explaining to you why it is racist, colonialist, and utterly unfounded to make comparisons between the Confederate South and Tibet.  I’m sure you are as shocked and outraged as we are, as is the entire world community.

What we do question is why the world community continues to legitimize, fund, and coddle a dictatorship that is so dangerously out of touch with the norms of modern society. The Chinese government is positioning itself as — and quickly becoming — the next great world superpower, and we are busily helping them. It is high time this stopped. You did not meet with the Dalai Lama before you left for China. But you can make a difference now. We urge you to publicly distance yourself from the Chinese Government’s recent statements and to push for immediate improvements in Tibet, where the people enjoy no freedom of speech and are still suffering the results of a brutal crackdown after last year’s March protests. As someone who respects Lincoln’s name and has an understanding of his politics, this is the least you can do.

The simple truth is that the people of China and Tibet have no freedom, and the fundamental issue is the right of people to determine their own future, which our President Lincoln was a champion of to the end. In the absence of that right — and in defense of the repression of it — mad minds make ludicrous claims. Comparing Lincoln to the current leadership in Beijing is a violation of all that we as Americans value. We trust that — as our President — you will respond accordingly.

Shock: PRC Racism

I’m sure there’s  a lot of what follows that could be connected to cultural obtuseness and a simple lack of understanding that in America we don’t really talk or think the way the Chinese government is suggesting President Obama thinks. But then again, most of this is straight up racism. A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry has suggested that since President Obama is black, he should support what the Chinese government says was an abolition of slavery in Tibet.

A Chinese government spokesman said Barack Obama should be especially sympathetic to China’s opposition to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan independence, as a black president who lauded Abraham Lincoln for helping abolish slavery.

…

After Obama’s inauguration, the U.S. president said he would not have been able to reach that position without the efforts of Lincoln, said Qin.

“He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement,” said Qin.

“Lincoln played an incomparable role in protecting the national unity and territorial integrity of the United States.”

Beijing calls the Dalai Lama a dangerous “splittist” encouraging Tibetan independence, a charge he denies. He says he is merely seeking true autonomy for Tibet, which last year erupted in riots and protests against the Chinese presence.

China’s stance was like Lincoln’s, said Qin.

“Thus on this issue we hope that President Obama, more than any other foreign leader, can better, more deeply grasp China’s stance on protecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said Qin.

Wow.  Just wow.

There’s so much historical inaccuracy, abject racism, and ignorance in Qin’s statement to unpack, it’s hard to know where to start.

On the American Civil War: the union government had not previously conquered an independent confederacy prior to the South leaving the union. The US was always one united country, north and south, prior to the South’s attempt to leave the union and establish their own government. That effort lead to a brutal, bloody war and was only resolved through shattering violence. Today the North and South is strongly united and the North maintains no occupying military presence in the South.

Contrast this to Tibet and China. Tibet, a historical independent country with documented independence going back hundreds of years, was invaded by the Chinese army under Mao in 1949. It has been occupied illegally since then and remains a totally militarized territory where tourists, foreigners, and journalists are subject to massive restrictions of movement.

Or, to put it more succinctly, there is no similarity between Lincoln’s role to preserve the union during the Civil War and Hu Jintao’s current crackdown in Tibet to maintain China’s military occupation.

Also, just because Barack Obama is an African-American, it does not mean he will blindly embrace whatever position the Chinese government fantasizes Abraham Lincoln would hold with regard to Tibet and China.

The Chinese government has been putting immense pressure on President Obama to say Tibet is a part of China and cancel all meetings with the Dalai Lama. There’s certainly some evidence that their pressure has been working. But I have to imagine that even if the Obama administration is inclined to relax American support for the Dalai Lama and Tibet, this sort of racist, anti-historical insanity from the Chinese government will slow Obama’s movement to where China wants him to be. At least, one would hope that he doesn’t let crap like this influence his foreign policy strategy.

China Running Illegal Prisons

According to the BBC and Human Rights Watch, the Chinese government is running illegal, secret prisons to hold political dissidents and regular citizens who went to Beijing to file grievances about local problems.

China is running a number of unlawful detention centres in which its citizens can be kept for months, according to Human Rights Watch.

It says these centres – known as black jails – are often in state-run hotels, nursing homes or psychiatric hospitals.

Among those detained are ordinary people who have traveled to Beijing to report local injustices.

China says it is a country ruled by laws, but there are other sources to suggest that black jails do exist.

The human rights group report, entitled An Alleyway in Hell, says ordinary people are often abducted off the streets and taken to illegal detention centres.

They are sometimes stripped of their possessions, beaten and given no information about why they have been detained.

Human Rights Watch said it collected information for the report by interviewing 38 detainees earlier this year.

…

Many of those held are petitioners, people who travel to Beijing to present their complaints to the State Bureau for Letters and Calls.

This national government department is supposed to help ordinary people across the country redress their grievances.

But some petitioners are detained by plainclothes security officers when they arrive in Beijing.

“The existence of black jails in the heart of Beijing makes a mockery of the Chinese government’s rhetoric on improving human rights and respecting the rule of law,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

This is not dissimilar in process to the Chinese government offering protest permits prior to the 2008 Olympics and then subsequently arresting anyone who came to apply for the permits.  Apparently peaking out against government abuses at any level in China is cause for being treated like a terrorist.

This situation also makes clear how fundamentally problematic it is for the US government to have maintained secret prisons and CIA black sites, where terror suspects were rendered to, detained without habeas corpus, and tortured. The US has little legal or moral standing to critique this sickening behavior by the Chinese government.  But that does not mean that it is not wrong and people of conscience cannot speak out. Granted, even the US government can and should speak out, but do so with the foreknowledge that the Chinese government will laugh them out of the proverbial room.

I can say with some ease that what the Chinese government is doing with these black jails is immoral, illegal, and wrong. It is also yet another sign of the tenuous hold the Communist Party has on power in China. These are the actions of a government that is fundamentally afraid of its citizens and such fear-driven responses will only generate greater outrage from the Chinese people. Thus the CCP is setting themselves down a path to their own downfall.

Targets

Twenty-three Democrats voted in favor of the Stupak amendment to dramatically ban the sale of insurance plans that offer coverage for abortion in the insurance exchanges that will be created in the health care reform bill, and subsequently voted against the House bill on final passage. That is, they made a move to make the legislation immeasurably worse, despite having zero intentions to support the bill.Here is the list of these Democrats in name only:

Jason Altmire (PA-4)Bobby Bright (AL-2)John Barrow (GA-12)John Boccieri (OH-16)Dan Boren (OK-2)Ben Chandler (KY-6)Travis Childers (MS-1)Artur Davis (AL-7)Lincoln Davis (TN-4)Bart Gordon (TN-6)Parker Griffith (AL-5)Tim Holden (PA-17)Jim Marshall (GA-8)Jim Matheson (UT-2)Mike McIntyre (NC-7)Charlie Melancon (LA-3)Collin Peterson (MN-7)Mike Ross (AR-4)Heath Shuler (NC-11)Ike Skelton (MO-4)John Tanner (TN-8)Gene Taylor (MS-4)Harry Teague (NM-2)

While some of these representatives serve in strongly Republican districts, not all of them do. Paul Rosenberg paired the full list of Yes on Stupak Democrats with their demographic information for their district. Altmire, Boccieri, Chandler, Holden, Marshall, McIntyre, Peterson, Ross, Shuler, Tanner, and Teague come from districts that range from Lean Democratic to Swing to Lean Republican. Barrow and Artur Davis come from Strong Democratic districts.Additionally, Chris Bowers points out that over one out of every twelve dollars the DCCC spends has gone to these 23 people.First, these 23 Democrats should no longer receive the benefit of DCCC contributions. They add no value to the caucus and have substantively made it a less effective body, thereby damaging the reelection chances of actual liberals in swing districts.Second, this list should be the basis for groups seeking to run primary challengers against conservative Democrats. It is especially true for the 13 that come from districts that are Democratic, swing, or only slightly Republican. Barrow and Artur Davis should be facing immediate, credible challengers backed up by the weight of the progressive infrastructure.This group of Democrats are the tip of the spear when it comes to the path that will lead Democrats out of the majority. The House caucus would clearly be stronger without them. At best there should be active campaigns to excise them from office. At worst, not a cent should be spent defending them.Update:Artur Davis is not running for re-election. Kristopher in comments points this out, as did a friend who read the post. Davis is, however, running for Governor of Alabama in a contested Democratic primary. So while the DCCC won’t have to spend money to defend Davis, Democrats in Alabama and elsewhere may want to think about supporting someone else in that race.

Conventional Wisdom Sucks

Manu Raju and Jonathan Allen of Politico have a piece that reflects quite perfectly how wrong Conventional Wisdom is. Going into Tuesday’s election, the CW was that (1) the election was a referendum on Obama and (2) New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races had federal implications for 2010, while actual federal races in NY-23 and CA-10 didn’t (well, unless the teabagger candidate in NY-23, Doug Hoffman, won). The CW manifests itself off the bat in the Politico piece today:

Election Day losses in Virginia and New Jersey have congressional Democrats focused like never before on jobs — their own.

This sentence could just have easily been recast:

Election Day losses in traditionally conservative districts in New York and California have congressional Republicans focused like never before on jobs — their own.

Or:

Election Day victories in traditionally conservative districts in New York and California have congressional Democrats focused like never before on accomplishing President Obama’s agenda.

But both of those castings cut against Conventional Wisdom, and so they are simply impossible to think. Democratic victories being good things for Democrats is simply a lacuna for the Beltway Conventional Wisdom set.

I’ll say that I think New Jersey is an outlier – Corzine’s loss was connected to a horrible economy that voters didn’t see him doing enough to fix. It was indicative of an anti-incumbent backlash around local issues.

Virginia, on the other hand, was lost because Creigh Deeds refused to campaign on the issues and attitudes that delivered the state to Barack Obama in 2008. He ran away from Democratic positions on health care reform, most notably the public option. He ran to the right on jobs and labor law reform. In essence, he was like so many other losing Democratic candidates in recent memory who bizarrely think being Republican Lite is helpful.

Contrast Deeds’ chickenshittery with the position of Bill Owens in NY-23, a district that Democrats hadn’t won since the mid-nineteenth century. Owens embraced President Obama’s agenda and came out in favor of a public option for health care reform. And he won. Likewise, John Garamandi won in California’s 10th congressional district. This seat had been held by the very conservative Democrat Ellen Tauscher and Conventional Wisdom held that you had to be, at minimum, a conservative Democrat to win there. But Garamandi came out not only in favor of the Obama agenda, but even staked out positions to Obama’s left on health care reform. And he won, too.

Looking forward to 2010, the lesson of 2009 should be clear. Democrats need to be strong in their commitment to a reform agenda, led by President Obama. They need to run as proud Democrats, which in some cases will mean running to Obama’s left. For Democrats in Republican leaning districts, it’s critical that they not try to be Republican Lite candidates. They need to show voters that they have ideas, that their ideas are good, and that they will bring change by staying in office and working alongside the Obama administration.

Now is not the time for Democrats to run to the right. Doing so is a proven recipe for failure. Just ask Creigh Deeds.

Why Last Night Means Nothing for Health Care Reform

Prior to people going to vote yesterday, the national media narrative was focused on the New Jersey and Virginia governors races, as well as the race in New York’s 23rd Congressional district as loci for an assessment of the public’s support of President Obama. This was always absurd, as gubernatorial races are about local issues (traffic congestion dominated in VA and local taxes in NJ). Additionally, the NY-23 is one of the most long-standing Republican held districts in the Northeast; no Democrat had ever won there before last night. In any event, the popular push in the press was, not surprisingly, that only Democratic losses were possible and meaningful. Indeed, this morning pundits are already telling us that only the Democratic losses in Virginia and New Jersey mean anything.

Reading tea leaves for national meaning on an election day that saw the Republicans take two governor’s mansions, Democrats take two House seats,  one win (Washington) and one loss (Maine) for marriage equality, and two defeats of TABOR ballot initiatives (Maine and Washington). Instead, I’m interested in how these results will impact legislative debate in Congress, primarily on health care reform.

Going into yesterday, there was already discussion by Blue Dog Jason Altmire that Democratic electoral losses would strengthen conservative Democrats and slow the pace of reform, something that he bizarrely thinks is a good thing. Similarly, the Glenn Beck Teabagger set, including leading voices like Erick Erickson of RedState.com, predicted that conservative candidate Doug Hoffman’s expected win in NY-23 would lead to an emboldened Republican base and greater opposition to change.

On the other side of the aisle, there were a good number of savvy progressives who pointed out that since the gubernatorial races didn’t have anything to do with the Obama administration, they shouldn’t be seen as informative of the course for reform. Additionally, the results of a district Democrats have no tradition of being competitive in wouldn’t be informative, either.

But here’s the thing – last night’s election was really very similar to the August congressional recess. During the recess there were rabid, disruptive protests by teabaggers that received widespread attention. There were also even larger numbers of town halls filled by supporters of health care reform, calling on Congress to get the job done. As a result, elected officials returned to Washington after the August recess…but no one had changed their minds. Those who opposed reform looked at the angry teabaggers and cited their actions as evidence that they are right to oppose reform. And those who support health care reform listened to the pleas from their constituents and felt greater resolve in their drive for change.

Expect the same thing from Tuesday’s election results. Erickson is trumpeting even the NY-23rd loss as a win for conservatives and for opposing health care reform.  But Democrats gained two House seats, both votes for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker and likely both votes for whatever health care reform legislation Pelosi puts forward. Additionally Doug Hoffman, the most rapid advocate of “No” on a ballot yesterday, was defeated. Expect liberal members of Congress to see the federal results as support for the work they are doing.

All of that adds up, in my view, to the election having no meaningful impact on the course of health care reform legislation. Positions will be hardened on both sides, but don’t expect anyone to move an inch. As far as the prognosticators go, expect most of them to miss this point in an effort to create a story around a non-existent rebuke of Obama. Plus ça change…

“A Private Understanding”

Well isn’t this interesting:

Sen. Joe Lieberman has reached a private understanding with Majority Leader Harry Reid that he will not block a final vote on healthcare reform, according to two sources briefed on the matter.

Chris Bowers asks what people think the “private understanding” is.  Booman guesses that Reid threatened Lieberman with taking away his position as Homeland Security Committee Chair if Joe voted against cloture at any procedural point in the Senate debate.

Lieberman would have to get something in return for not voting against cloture on a health care reform bill he opposes. Keeping his Committee chairmanship, something that Lieberman has repeatedly bet he could do anything to retain (remember, he campaigned for John McCain), isn’t likely to be considered something by Joe Lieberman. He thinks he owns it already and there has been essentially zero will publicly expressed by the Democratic Senate caucus towards removing Lieberman from his chair as a consequence of his actions.

It’s also worth pointing out that while Lieberman has already said he won’t oppose a Motion to Proceed to the bill and sources are now saying he won’t oppose cloture on final passage, there is a third major cloture vote that has not yet been discussed. As I wrote on the SEIU blog, there is a cloture vote on the manager’s amendment to substitute the debated and amended healthcare bill onto a bill from the House Ways and Means Committee.

Cloture Motion on Manager’s Amendment (Substitute Amendment): After considerable debate and amendment to the substitute, the Majority Leader will file Cloture on the Substitute. If there are 60 votes here, the Merged reform bill/Substitute as amended will get an up or down vote after 30 hours of post cloture consideration.

So, in some sense, it seems that both Senator Lieberman and Leader Reid are weaseling on process questions right now. At least, neither are speaking publicly about Lieberman’s expected stance on the cloture vote that will occur between the Motion to Proceed and the cloture motion on final passage of the measure.

Getting beyond the weaseling on process, I don’t know what Lieberman is seeking to extort from Reid. Job security is clearly something he already thinks he has in the bank. More job security would certainly be helpful for Joe, but would it really be enough for him to vote with the caucus on procedural votes that he already sees as tantamount to the substantive vote on the bill itself on final passage?

Lieberman’s real problem is with the public option. Perhaps what Reid promised Lieberman was an opportunity to vote on an amendment to remove the public option from the bill, with a threshold of only 51 votes. This would increase the likelihood of it getting stripped out, as well as the likelihood that Lieberman will actually vote with the caucus on all cloture votes (as he said he would if he was happy with the underlying bill). The flip side, obviously, is that if Reid were to push for a 51 vote threshold for an amendment to strip the public option in the Unanimous Consent agreement governing the debate, he would essentially be guaranteeing its removal from the bill, after showed rare leadership by fighting alongside Chris Dodd for its inclusion.  If this is the case, expect a huge uproar from the people who have worked to get the public option as part of health care reform legislation.

Of course, I think Open Left commenter bento is probably most right about what the private understanding means: “Reid, in the privacy of his head, understands Lieberman will not filibuster. Joe in his privacy understands he will. ”

Update:

Lieberman spokesman Marshall Whitman has strongly denied the reporting of a “private understanding” in a quote to the National Review.

…Adding, Reid’s office is now denying the report of an understanding as well.