Tea Party Members Blow Gasket Over Scott Brown's Job Bill Vote

Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown recently voted, along with 4 other GOP members, for cloture on President Obama's $15 billion jobs bill. The Tea Party goers are not amused, and they are blasting Brown's and his daughter's Facebook pages with angry commentary (Gawker and Wonkette have absolutely devilish takes on the subject). Apparently, the concept of a "New England Republican" escapes them.

Query: The Republicans originally agreed to a much larger jobs bill -- $85 billion -- but Harry Reid slashed it to its current level. Why didn't the Tea Party folks flip out over the original Republican position, which was more expensive? Perhaps, they did not complain because the original bill was laden with business tax cuts (as is the final bill) or because Fox spun Reid's decision as an act of partisanship. If conservatives voiced complaints with the original bill please send me the links. Thanks.

Why Aren't Self-Proclaimed Fiscal Conservatives Questioning Afghanistan Troop Surge?

Self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties approach healthcare reform with a high degree of skepticism. Senator Joe Lieberman, who has received $1 million from the insurance industry over the course of his Senate career, has vowed to oppose any reform package that contains a public plan option. Lieberman explains that he is voting his "conscience" and that he cannot endorse an expansion in government during an economic downturn.

Senator Mary Landrieu has expressed a similar view. Some media outlets report, however, that in exchange for her vote allowing debate on the latest Senate healthcare reform bill, the White House promised to secure an additional $100 million in Medicaid assistance for Louisiana (the state Landrieu represents).

Across the aisle, Republicans are behaving like "born-again budget conservatives." They suddenly embraced fiscal restraint following the election of President Obama, but they recklessly agreed to cut taxes and increase spending during the Bush administration. Their newly found fiscal salvation leads them to oppose healthcare reform and basically any other element of government spending unrelated to wars and cops.

Fighting Wars versus Healing the Sick
After weeks of deliberation regarding a military-endorsed troop surge in Afghanistan, President Obama, according to emerging reports, has agreed to send an additional 34,000 troops to fight the Taliban. The troop surge would take place over the next 9 months. The estimated cost for the war over the next decade approaches $1 trillion -- more than the cost of each healthcare reform package pending in Congress.

Two Democrats in Congress -- Senator Carl Levin of Michigan and Representative David Obey of Wisconsin -- have called for a surtax on upper-income earners to finance the troop surge. Self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives, however, have remained virtually silent regarding the expense and deficit-impact of the war in Afghanistan. Most of these individuals strongly endorse the troop surge and voted for the war in Iraq.

Bombing foreign nations and leading young Americans to their deaths in the name of national security (however skeptical the claim) is worth the expense. Funding healthcare for almost all Americans is reprehensible and socialist. Someone please explain this logic.

OK, Kids: Protests = Good; Disrupting Meetings, Punching People, Hurling Racial Slurs, Etc. = Bad

Just added: Sarah Palin Is Latest Heartless Person to Attack Protestors.

I want to have a heart-to-heart conversation with the Left and the Right. Last week was truly one of those moments when shocking behavior by others made me feel like I was stuck in some horrific episode of the Twilight Zone (the ones where some unsuspecting person suddenly loses the ability to communicate with others).

The spooky feeling resulted from the headline story of the week: The, um, passionate behavior occurring at various healthcare reform forums. I blogged about the highly unsatisfactory nature of the public discourse even before the Tampa/St.Louis outbursts occurred. The same day, the Pew Center released a study demonstrating that 70% of the public believed that media coverage was poor or fair. That night, "the people" took to the streets in Tampa and St. Louis.

The Messy Details
The news from Tampa, Florida (my home state) emerged first. Apparently, opponents of the Democrats' healthcare proposals, many of whom are conservative, stormed a townhall meeting conducted by Representative Kathy Castor, a Democrat. As soon as she started speaking, protestors shouted and made it impossible for others to hear what she was saying.

Responding to my harsh criticism of the circus, several of my loyal conservative readers defended the protestors on free speech grounds. Today, the immensely popular and very open-minded Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit), mockingly reminded commentators that "protest" was a form of patriotism, a line often employed by anti-war activists to justify their protests against charges of treason and demands that they "support the troops."

News from St. Louis arrived later (much of it after I had analyzed the Tampa mayhem). Apparently, Democratic operatives and Democratic voters sparked much of the madness in St. Louis. In response to the anticipated presence of conservative protestors, liberals mobilized and brought out their supporters. During the meltdown, a black conservative was assaulted. Liberal media have not really covered this aspect of the event, although though they have portrayed conservative protestors as racists. And while many conservatives have used the racial assault in St. Louis to stigmatize liberals, a lot of these same commentators very recently decried "race cards" and vigorously dismissed allegations of racism by blacks themselves as nonsense and as continued victimology.

Hello, Kids. Today's Lesson Is. . . .
Since people are acting like kids and because I feel that meeting them on their own terms is probably more helpful, I will break things down in mental-age appropriate language for both liberals and conservatives.

1. Racism = Wrong. Racism is a pathology. Nevertheless, our society has denied its existence or the harms it causes even during slavery and Jim Crow (see Racial Exhaustion). But current events demonstrate that it persists.

Being liberal does not excuse a person of his or her racism, nor does it mean that other liberals should refrain from criticizing the person. In addition, being conservative does not mean that it is fine only to acknowledge or see racism when it impacts conservative people of color. If liberal racism exists (which it does), then so does conservative racism. Condemn it on all sides and assist, rather than impede, causes that seek to rid the country of racism and racial inequality.

2. Protest = Good; Disruptive Behavior and Violence = Bad. The First Amendment guarantees the right of individuals to engage in speech and to come together for expressive purposes. And while this includes a right to engage in boisterous speech, the constitutional guarantee of free speech is not absolute. Instead, so long as the government is not attempting to alter the content of speech, it can nonetheless regulate the "time, manner and place" of the speech (that takes place in a public forum).

Making governmental venues or other public spaces available for a townhall discussion is not the same thing as permitting groups to hold marches, parades, rallies, carnivals or other expressive activities. The townhall discussion requires a back-and-forth between participants. This can only occur when participants listen while others are speaking. This is not what the conservative protestors did in Tampa. This is not what liberals did in St. Louis. Both sides were wrong.

Commentators who attempt to justify the protestors' disruptive behavior by calling it "speech" are missing the point. Yes -- the protestors were engaging in speech, but their speech silenced the expression of others. The Constitution does not give us a private right to silence participants in a public political debate.

I have always been consistent on this issue. In fact, unlike many liberal bloggers, I never condemned the "tea party" movement. Granted, I found the groups' protests peculiar because their sudden concern for fiscal soundness seemed unprincipled -- or as Ron Paul would say, it made them look like "born-again fiscal conservatives." Nevertheless, the tea party protestors have the right to organize, mobilize, protest and criticize fiscal policy -- even in a way that is unprincipled -- until they collapse from exhaustion. The protests, however, were self-contained; they took place in locations where they did not silence the speech of others; the groups did not seem to break any laws with their activities. Rather than flooding local government and shouting down proceedings, they staged their rallies in appropriate venues and brought public attention to their cause. That is a model of advocacy. I do not agree with the advocacy, but the form in which it occurred is sound! The healthcare protestors used a different and unacceptable model.

Final Thoughts
I invite people to toss aside partisanship for a moment and actually begin the process of having a real discussion about healthcare reform. Due to lack of space, I will not delve deeply into the substantive issues of healthcare reform, but I will isolate two things that bother me on the Left and the Right.

First, when conservatives condemn the Democratic plans as "socialism," they are making a "nonargument." First, the assertion is purely descriptive -- and, given the definition of socialism espoused by people like, say, Karl Marx, the description is grossly inapplicable to this setting. Even if the liberal reform amounted to a "socialist" policy, this alone does not tell us whether the plan is desirable or not. Conservatives could replace the word socialist with "crazy," "zany," "liberal," "bad," "harmful," or "nasty," but these adjectives do not provide details. Instead, they simply seek to stigmatize the plans.

Second, to my fellow liberals, I share the opinion of those of you who want a public plan option (this is not the same as a "single payer" regime that eliminates private insurance altogether). The public plan option would likely reduce costs. I have not seen any reliable literature that disputes this. In fact, much of the conservative opposition to new public sponsorship assumes that a public plan would reduce costs and make private insurance nonviable.

Although I believe that conservatives are overstating their position, there are other implications of a public plan that warrant debate. In particular, the mix of services under a public plan seems highly relevant to these talks, but liberals do not want to engage this issue. Part of the cost reduction under a public plan would result from the government using its power to negotiate cheaper care from providers. Cost reductions will also occur if uninsured people begin to receive preventive care and, rather than obtaining expensive emergency room treatment of their illnesses, visit a primary care physician who can attend to their health needs.

Some of the cost reductions, however, could (and perhaps should) involve a changed mix in covered services. Congress could diminish this tradeoff potentially if it reduced its enormous subsidization of employer-sponsored (supposedly "private") plans. Nevertheless, the mix of services subject to governmental financing seems like a legitimate subject for these debates. Liberals have run from this issue, but evading an issue by running is as unhelpful as evading it by yelling. Liberals have also neglected to get input from nurses, who could play a much larger (and less expensive) role in the delivery of health care.

Here's hoping for a better week.

New Conspiracy Theory: Chrysler Dealerships Selectively Closed Based on Owner's Political Party Affiliation

Oy vey! Here's the latest conspiracy theory:

Evidence appears to be mounting that the Obama administration has systematically targeted for closing Chrysler dealers who contributed to Republicans. What started earlier this week as mainly a rumbling on the Right side of the Blogosphere has gathered some steam today with revelations that among the dealers being shut down are a GOP congressman and closing of competitors to a dealership chain partly owned by former Clinton White House chief of staff Mack McLarty.

Remain Calm
Did anyone tell these people that nearly 80% of car dealers give money to the Republican Party and are therefore likely owned by Republicans? The statistics mean that we should see substantially more Republican-owned dealerships among closed sites. Get the information on OpenSecrets.Org (which allows the reader to search for campaign donations by industry).

"Born-Again Budget Conservatives"? You Betcha!

Earlier this month, Ron Paul chided fellow Republicans for behaving like "born-again budget conservatives." While Republicans blasted the stimulus package for increasing the national debt and burdening future generations, they failed to vote against Bush's extraordinary deficit- and debt-based spending during his eight years in office. Their support for his policies led to a dramatic explosion in the public debt. Blogger Infidel753 has the scoop:

When Bush took office at the beginning of 2001, the national debt (accumulated over the previous 224 years of American history) was $5,727,800,000,000. By the time he left office eight years later, it had grown 86%, to $10,626,900,000,000. . . an increase of $4,899,100,000,000.

Here's an illustration of how much money $4,899,100,000,000 is: if you spent a million dollars per day, it would take you 13,422 years to spend that much. That's more time than has passed since the dawn of agriculture. It's more than twice as long as humans have had writing.

Here's another: if the Bush debt increase were converted into a stack of one-dollar bills, the stack would be 327,000 miles high. This is almost one and a half times the distance from Earth to the Moon.To put it yet another way, during Bush's Presidency the average American's share of the national debt rose from $19,093 to $35,423, an increase of $16,330.

Infidel goes on to discuss the recent addition to the debt caused by the stimulus, although I suppose tax revenue will fund costs for a portion of the legislation. Regardless, the statistics are very sobering.

This should lay to rest claims that suggest the stimulus is crippling future generations. Eight years ago, the national debt was almost 1/2 its present size (not counting the stimulus), and there was a budget surplus. Arguments that focus only on the present grossly distort this history. We can only improve the situation -- as I tell my liberal colleagues -- by not acting like hypocrites and by pursuing honest assessments, even when they hurt. I believe this is such a moment for conservatives who want the nation's leaders to do a better job. Don't fall for the partisan trap of blaming others and not looking inward.

I do not agree with all aspects of the stimulus package and have some pretty significant concerns about it. But this does not permit me to ignore the past eight years of tax cuts coupled with a dramatic increase in spending by the government. Those policies did far more to enlarge the government's deficit and debt ratios than the stimulus.

Note: You can view the level of the public debt for any given day or range of days on the Bureau of the Public Debt website. This is a bureau within the Treasury Department. Here's the debt page: National Debt.