Month: March 2014

It’s fascinating to read Nikita Stewart’s write-up on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s hiring practices. On an informational level, the article is thorough and enlightening. Mayor de Blasio is creating a very progressive city government filled with people he feels are ideologically aligned with him. He tends to pick the people he wants first and then figures out the job they should do after.

But, on another level, the way this information is presented is one more example of how progressives are portrayed negatively in the Bigfoot media. Take a look:

In Bill de Blasio’s City Hall, it seems more and more, there is only a left wing.

The mayor, who advanced in politics by grass-roots organizing, has built a team filled with former activists — figures more accustomed to picketing administrations or taking potshots from the outside than working from within. His administration is heavily populated with appointees best known for the fights they have fought.

Do you sense the implied criticism? He is only appointing people who agree with him, and these aren’t the kind of people who have any experience in government or management. His administration is filled with professional leftists. The outsiders have infiltrated the realm. Progressives are supposed to be anti-Establishment; “don’t they know their place?”

Watch.

On Friday, Mr. de Blasio appointed Steven Banks, who is the attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society and a longtime critic of city policies affecting low-income residents, as commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration. Mr. Banks recently praised the new mayor for transferring hundreds of children and their families from two homeless shelters cited for violations that made the facilities unfit and unsafe for children.

Mr. Banks has spent his career facing off with city government at public meetings and in the courts. But he is embraced in a de Blasio administration.

Ms. Stewart, who just joined the City Hall desk for the New York Times, appears to think that putting an advocate for homeless children in charge of the city’s Human Resources Administration (HRA) is suspect. Let’s take a look at what the HRA does:

HRA serves more than 3 million New Yorkers through essential and diverse programs and services that include: temporary cash assistance, public health insurance, food stamps, home care for seniors and the disabled, child care, adult protective services, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS support services and child support enforcement.

Its 15,000 employees help provide unique individual services that offer sustainable employment along with self-sufficiency plans to overcome barriers to unemployment. HRA’s Employment Services offers job programs and training to help people gain employment. Programs like Back to Work and Business Link allow clients to improve basic skills and English proficiency, and move cash assistance recipients into the working world.

HRA’s commitment to move cash assistance recipients to employment has resulted in the lowest cash assistance caseload in more than 40 years. By providing essential work supports such as food stamps and public health insurance, former cash assistance recipients have a greater ability to stay employed and out of poverty.

Perhaps it is ironic that Mr. Banks is now heading an organization that he previously pilloried for its inefficiencies, but I fail to see how this experienced lawyer and expert on social services is unqualified for the position.

Yet, this idea that progressive activists are supposed to be working against the government rather than serving in the government is a theme in this piece.

Carmen Fariña, his schools chancellor, had quit the Bloomberg administration in protest over its emphasis on standardized test scores. The mayor’s top political strategist, Emma Wolfe, rose from campus activist to organizer for the advocacy group Acorn, the health care union 1199 SEIU and the Working Families Party before helping Mr. de Blasio get elected public advocate in 2009.

His wife’s new chief of staff, Rachel Noerdlinger, was the longtime gatekeeper for the Rev. Al Sharpton. And his new counsel, Maya Wiley, was most recently in the running to lead the N.A.A.C.P.

Ms. Fariña served in the Bloomberg administration, so it is only her ideological opposition to over-testing that merits a mention here, not her managerial skills.

Ms. Wolfe (like me) was a organizer for the dreaded ACORN, a housing advocacy group. You know who else was a community organizer? That big-eared guy in the White House.

Ms. Noerdlinger worked for Al Sharpton? Egads!

At least Ms. Stewart didn’t bring up Tawana Brawley. But she did bring up the N.A.A.C.P., an organization that considered Ms. Wiley for their leadership position, meaning (I infer) that she might have some leadership skills.

Laura Santucci, his chief of staff, is a former acting executive director of the Democratic National Committee and a former political aide at 1199 SEIU. Zachary W. Carter, his corporation counsel, was an appointee of President Bill Clinton as the United States attorney in Brooklyn and led the prosecution of police officers in the beating of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant.

Ms. Santucci was an executive director. Mr. Carter was a U.S. Attorney. But they are mentioned here because of their connections, respectively, to unions and a controversial legal case involving the NYPD. Is there something wrong with unions and prosecuting police brutality?

Maybe we should pine for politicians who cower before the Fraternal Order of Police?

This next bit makes the explicit case that progressives are only supposed to make progress in court or (somehow) in the streets:

In any case, Mr. de Blasio’s mayor’s personnel choices are just one means by which he appears to be easing the mayoralty from the practical details of governing into a platform for the kind of social change usually achieved on the streets and in the courts.

It is a far different approach from that of his predecessor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who favored agency heads and staff members with button-down business backgrounds.

I also want to note that Ms. Stewart has created a false dichotomy in which a mayor must choose between the “practical details of governing” and achieving “social change.” A mayor cannot conceivably do both. And then she enlists former mayoral candidate Mark Green (whose liberal credentials she says are unimpeachable) to stick a knife in de Blasio’s ribs.

“Old habits die very hard,” said Mark Green, a former public advocate and mayoral candidate, and no slouch himself as a liberal. “Giuliani was a prosecutor, Bloomberg was a C.E.O., and so far, Bill’s a political labor activist.”

…Mr. Green, who was Mr. Bloomberg’s opponent in the 2001 election, warned that New Yorkers needed “more of a leader and manager than activist and advocate.”

“He’s been preparing for years to run for mayor but not to be mayor,” Mr. Green said. “The most-asked question I get from earnest citizens is, ‘Can he manage the city?’ ”

That is how Ms. Stewart concludes her piece, but not before taking another shot at progressives.

Last week, Mr. de Blasio turned City Hall’s stately Blue Room, the venue for countless announcements by generations of sober-toned mayors, into the scene of a boisterous rally to celebrate a legal settlement that could decide the fate of Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn.

Mr. de Blasio had been arrested during a protest of the hospital’s potential closing. Now he could not resist praising each labor leader and activist who had helped in the fight — including a councilman he called “the best damn cellmate an inmate ever had.”

Over the years, I have written repeatedly about the problems progressives face in getting power because they emerged out of the counterculture and are so suspicious of power institutions. I have said that the goal of progressives should be to take over our institutions and implement our ideas, not to stay on the outside forever throwing rocks. I have argued that we will not be trusted to run organizations like the Pentagon or the NSA if we are perceived to be hostile to those organizations. It’s part getting ourselves to believe in our institutions again and part getting others to see us as the natural leaders of the country again. We can’t do that as anti-establishmentarians. We can’t be the counterculture; we have to be the culture.

What we’re seeing in New York City is the most high-profile effort at this project that we have yet seen, but the way we are treated in the pages of the New York Times shows how far we have to go.

It’s insulting to read this coverage, but it’s part of the price we pay for giving the impression that we’re more interested in being critical than in governing.

It’s fascinating to read Nikita Stewart’s write-up on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s hiring practices. On an informational level, the article is thorough and enlightening. Mayor de Blasio is creating a very progressive city government filled with people he feels are ideologically aligned with him. He tends to pick the people he wants first and then figures out the job they should do after.

But, on another level, the way this information is presented is one more example of how progressives are portrayed negatively in the Bigfoot media. Take a look:

In Bill de Blasio’s City Hall, it seems more and more, there is only a left wing.

The mayor, who advanced in politics by grass-roots organizing, has built a team filled with former activists — figures more accustomed to picketing administrations or taking potshots from the outside than working from within. His administration is heavily populated with appointees best known for the fights they have fought.

Do you sense the implied criticism? He is only appointing people who agree with him, and these aren’t the kind of people who have any experience in government or management. His administration is filled with professional leftists. The outsiders have infiltrated the realm. Progressives are supposed to be anti-Establishment; “don’t they know their place?”

Watch.

On Friday, Mr. de Blasio appointed Steven Banks, who is the attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society and a longtime critic of city policies affecting low-income residents, as commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration. Mr. Banks recently praised the new mayor for transferring hundreds of children and their families from two homeless shelters cited for violations that made the facilities unfit and unsafe for children.

Mr. Banks has spent his career facing off with city government at public meetings and in the courts. But he is embraced in a de Blasio administration.

Ms. Stewart, who just joined the City Hall desk for the New York Times, appears to think that putting an advocate for homeless children in charge of the city’s Human Resources Administration (HRA) is suspect. Let’s take a look at what the HRA does:

HRA serves more than 3 million New Yorkers through essential and diverse programs and services that include: temporary cash assistance, public health insurance, food stamps, home care for seniors and the disabled, child care, adult protective services, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS support services and child support enforcement.

Its 15,000 employees help provide unique individual services that offer sustainable employment along with self-sufficiency plans to overcome barriers to unemployment. HRA’s Employment Services offers job programs and training to help people gain employment. Programs like Back to Work and Business Link allow clients to improve basic skills and English proficiency, and move cash assistance recipients into the working world.

HRA’s commitment to move cash assistance recipients to employment has resulted in the lowest cash assistance caseload in more than 40 years. By providing essential work supports such as food stamps and public health insurance, former cash assistance recipients have a greater ability to stay employed and out of poverty.

Perhaps it is ironic that Mr. Banks is now heading an organization that he previously pilloried for its inefficiencies, but I fail to see how this experienced lawyer and expert on social services is unqualified for the position.

Yet, this idea that progressive activists are supposed to be working against the government rather than serving in the government is a theme in this piece.

Carmen Fariña, his schools chancellor, had quit the Bloomberg administration in protest over its emphasis on standardized test scores. The mayor’s top political strategist, Emma Wolfe, rose from campus activist to organizer for the advocacy group Acorn, the health care union 1199 SEIU and the Working Families Party before helping Mr. de Blasio get elected public advocate in 2009.

His wife’s new chief of staff, Rachel Noerdlinger, was the longtime gatekeeper for the Rev. Al Sharpton. And his new counsel, Maya Wiley, was most recently in the running to lead the N.A.A.C.P.

Ms. Fariña served in the Bloomberg administration, so it is only her ideological opposition to over-testing that merits a mention here, not her managerial skills.

Ms. Wolfe (like me) was a organizer for the dreaded ACORN, a housing advocacy group. You know who else was a community organizer? That big-eared guy in the White House.

Ms. Noerdlinger worked for Al Sharpton? Egads!

At least Ms. Stewart didn’t bring up Tawana Brawley. But she did bring up the N.A.A.C.P., an organization that considered Ms. Wiley for their leadership position, meaning (I infer) that she might have some leadership skills.

Laura Santucci, his chief of staff, is a former acting executive director of the Democratic National Committee and a former political aide at 1199 SEIU. Zachary W. Carter, his corporation counsel, was an appointee of President Bill Clinton as the United States attorney in Brooklyn and led the prosecution of police officers in the beating of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant.

Ms. Santucci was an executive director. Mr. Carter was a U.S. Attorney. But they are mentioned here because of their connections, respectively, to unions and a controversial legal case involving the NYPD. Is there something wrong with unions and prosecuting police brutality?

Maybe we should pine for politicians who cower before the Fraternal Order of Police?

This next bit makes the explicit case that progressives are only supposed to make progress in court or (somehow) in the streets:

In any case, Mr. de Blasio’s mayor’s personnel choices are just one means by which he appears to be easing the mayoralty from the practical details of governing into a platform for the kind of social change usually achieved on the streets and in the courts.

It is a far different approach from that of his predecessor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who favored agency heads and staff members with button-down business backgrounds.

I also want to note that Ms. Stewart has created a false dichotomy in which a mayor must choose between the “practical details of governing” and achieving “social change.” A mayor cannot conceivably do both. And then she enlists former mayoral candidate Mark Green (whose liberal credentials she says are unimpeachable) to stick a knife in de Blasio’s ribs.

“Old habits die very hard,” said Mark Green, a former public advocate and mayoral candidate, and no slouch himself as a liberal. “Giuliani was a prosecutor, Bloomberg was a C.E.O., and so far, Bill’s a political labor activist.”

…Mr. Green, who was Mr. Bloomberg’s opponent in the 2001 election, warned that New Yorkers needed “more of a leader and manager than activist and advocate.”

“He’s been preparing for years to run for mayor but not to be mayor,” Mr. Green said. “The most-asked question I get from earnest citizens is, ‘Can he manage the city?’ ”

That is how Ms. Stewart concludes her piece, but not before taking another shot at progressives.

Last week, Mr. de Blasio turned City Hall’s stately Blue Room, the venue for countless announcements by generations of sober-toned mayors, into the scene of a boisterous rally to celebrate a legal settlement that could decide the fate of Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn.

Mr. de Blasio had been arrested during a protest of the hospital’s potential closing. Now he could not resist praising each labor leader and activist who had helped in the fight — including a councilman he called “the best damn cellmate an inmate ever had.”

Over the years, I have written repeatedly about the problems progressives face in getting power because they emerged out of the counterculture and are so suspicious of power institutions. I have said that the goal of progressives should be to take over our institutions and implement our ideas, not to stay on the outside forever throwing rocks. I have argued that we will not be trusted to run organizations like the Pentagon if are perceived to be hostile to those organizations. It’s part getting ourselves to believe in our institutions again and part getting others to see us as the natural leaders of the country again. We can’t do that as anti-establishmentarians. We can’t be the counterculture; we have to be the culture.

What we’re seeing in New York City is the most high-profile effort at this project that we have yet seen, but the way we are treated in the pages of the New York Times shows how far we have to go.

It’s insulting to read this coverage, but it’s part of the price we pay for giving the impression that we’re more interested in being critical than in governing.

Over at The New Republic, Julia Ioffe counsels that the best way to anticipate Russia’s actions is to take the most pessimistic view possible. Apparently, that’s what she learned from covering the Moscow beat. It’s no secret that Ms. Ioffe takes a dim view of Vladimir Putin, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.

One of the reasons I left my correspondent’s post in Moscow was because Russia, despite all the foam on the water, is ultimately a very boring place. Unfortunately, all you really need to do to seem clairvoyant about the place is to be an utter pessimist. Will Vladimir Putin allow the ostensibly liberal Dmitry Medvedev to have a second term? Not a chance. There are protests in the streets of Moscow. Will Putin crackdown? Yup. There’s rumbling in the Crimea, will Putin take advantage and take the Crimean peninsula? You betcha. And you know why being a pessimist is the best way to predict outcomes in Russia? Because Putin and those around him are, fundamentally, terminal pessimists. They truly believe that there is an American conspiracy afoot to topple Putin, that Russian liberals are traitors corrupted by and loyal to the West, they truly believe that, should free and fair elections be held in Russia, their countrymen would elect bloodthirsty fascists, rather than democratic liberals. To a large extent, Putin really believes that he is the one man standing between Russia and the yawning void. Putin’s Kremlin is dark and scary, and, ultimately, very boring.

I share the following merely because I admire the imagery.

This is another howl you often hear rending the skies over Moscow: Western double standards. But let’s get real for a second. We’ve spoken already about the U.N., but what about the holy Russian mantra of non-interference in a nation’s internal affairs? When it comes to Syria, to take a most recent example, the fight between Assad and the rebels is something only the Syrians can sort out. Ditto every other country in the world—unless it’s in Russia’s backyard, where Russia still experiences phantom limb syndrome. The internal issues of former Soviet republics, you see, are not truly internal issues of sovereign nations.

The thing is, true amputees don’t have the option of putting their limb back together. For Ukrainians, the concern is that they are about to be reattached.

Freshly-retired Washington Post honcho Robert Kaiser was a front-row witness to the Reagan Revolution and its consequences, and he did not particularly care for what he witnessed. His long Goodbye-Cruel-World farewell to Washington DC is an interesting read, even if it hardly breaks any new historical ground.

He places particular blame on Tony Coelho for leading the Democrats astray in the 1980’s in pursuit of corporate cash. I found that insightful, as I have generally placed most of the blame for that on the ascendancy of the Democratic Leadership Council, as well as political exigencies flowing from 1970’s Supreme Court rulings on campaign financing.

Here’s a little history on this topic, from page 147 of Daniel Hellinger and Dennis Judd’s 1991 book: The Democratic Facade:

The financial edge enjoyed by corporations, conservatives, and Republicans has a qualitative dimension not readily grasped from a superficial analysis of the data on contributions. Corporate capital has managed to organize itself in such a way as to maximize its influence at critical pressure points in the system. Business PACs have effectively targeted members of key congressional committees and subcommittees vital to their particular interests. A good example is the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In 1982, labor PACs contributed the sizable sum of $665,757 to members of this Committee. However, the combined PAC contributions solely from energy companies ($468,820) and from the real estate and construction industry ($223,223) surpassed total labor contributions. Additional contributions to committee members from PACs linked to banking and finance and corporations involved in food automobiles, communications, doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical, insurance, aerospace, and other firms together matched the labor contributions a second time over. The situation was similar for other key committees, such as the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee, where business PACs accounted for 68 percent ($11 million) of all PAC contributions made to committee members in 1984.

The need to attract corporate PAC contributions has strengthened the hand of Democratic leaders who seek to cure the party’s ills by loosening its ties to minorities the unions, and the working class and poor. Stung by their loss of the presidency and control of the Senate in 1980, the Democrats decided to seek corporate PAC contributions aggressively. Rep. Tony Coelho (D Calif.) persuaded big Democratic financiers to contribute to the party’s congressional fund and at the same time helped the Democrats to organize more effectively to solicit corporate PAC donations. Both major parties and politicians within each party established “clubs” to facilitate interaction between wealthy contributors and politicians. (Richard Gephardt’s “Democratic Leadership Council” is an example.) Major party figures gave speeches and held conferences for such clubs, but Coelho indicated that political education was hardly the driving motivation for joining. “Access. Access,” he told columnist Elizabeth Drew, “that’s the name of the game. They meet with the leadership and with the chairmen of the committees. We don’t sell legislation: we sell the opportunity to be heard.”

Impressive signs of Democratic gains in fundraising lie in the comparisons of contributions to the congressional elections in 1984 and the off-year elections in 1986. In this two-year period, Democratic challengers and candidates for open seat races greatly increased their share of contributions from corporate, trade, and “nonconnected” PACs, while maintaining their near monopoly on labor PACs. Democratic candidates’ share of corporate contributions rose from only 8 percent in 1984 to 28 percent in the 1986 off-year elections. In 1988, their share compared to contributions to Republicans rose to 27 percent.

Despite (or because of) the Democratic gains in fundraising, it is clear that the ideological pendulum did not swing back toward liberalism. The Democrats’ courting of corporate and trade PACs reflected a swing to the right in the congressional wing of the party. As the National Journal pointed out after the 1984 elections, business gave more to the Democrats because “there was a dearth of vulnerable Democratic incumbents with voting records that the business community opposed.” The American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Malbin attributed shifting corporate funding to “congressional Democrats…speaking more about capital formation and other business issues.” Representative Coelho’s attempts to attract corporate money prompted the chair of the PAC funded by Tenneco Inc., the third largest corporate PAC giver in 1984 and fourth largest in 1986, to comment that “the political climate has changed somewhat and is more [supportive of] the private sector.”

Rep. Coehlo went on to serve as Majority Whip and eventually as Al Gore’s campaign chairman, before an illness forced him to hand his responsibilities over to William Daley.

On the Republican side, Mr. Kaiser is much harsher in his criticisms, and he is unsparing in his assessment of Newt Gingrich:

Newt Gingrich understood the opportunity those ’80s Democrats had created for Republicans. Gingrich was the most effective and most destructive political figure I encountered in five decades covering Washington. He invented the partisan warfare that has produced today’s gridlock. He encouraged the disregard for facts that has defiled our public life. He believed, fiercely, that the end justified the means. The end he sought was a Republican House, and he had no qualms about how it was achieved or maintained. He and his successor as lead enforcer, Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, helped destroy collegiality in Washington.

I’d agree that Gingrich and DeLay helped destroy collegiality in Washington, but I think they are products of the real criminal in this case, which is the Conservative Movement. I believe that collegiality was destroyed when conservatives achieved a certain critical mass of control over the Republican Party, and that mass was met after the 1994 midterms.

The other big factor in killing collegiality was that the generation that went off to fight in World War Two got old and began retiring. That generation, unlike the Baby Boomers who followed them, had enough shared experience to understand and even like each other across partisan lines.

On the whole, though, I blame conservatives more than Boomers for the current state of American politics. What the country needs is for some group of concerned citizens to rise up and take back control of a substantial part of the Grand Old Party.

Until that happens, more and more people will leave Washington, like Mr. Kaiser, in disgust.

It may be ancient news, but discussing why the Clinton White House bungled health care reform is certainly not wholly irrelevant considering that Hillary Clinton is the strong favorite to be the next president of the United States. After all, it seems probable that she would have the responsibility for fleshing out the Affordable Care Act and making it a permanent fixture in our politics. But, even without currency, the history is interesting and informative.

At the outset of the Clinton reform effort, the administration did not anticipate that the Republicans would feel compelled to oppose reform as a bloc. The most important document in this history is William Kristol’s December 2, 1993 memorandum. It began this way:

What follows is the first in what will be a series of political strategy memos prepared by The Project for the Republican Future. The topic of this memo is President Clinton’s health care reform proposal, the single most ambitious item on the Administration’s domestic policy agenda.

These four pages are an attempt to describe a common political strategy for Republicans in response to the Clinton health care plan. By examining the president’s own strategy and tactics, this memo suggests how Republicans might reframe the current health care debate, offer a serious alternative, and, in the process, defeat the president’s plan outright.

The most important part of the memo is its political rationale. Defeating the health care bill was considered to be important for winning a larger ideological battle about the role of government and how the two parties were perceived by the public.

Any Republican urge to negotiate a “least bad” compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president “do something” about health care, should also be resisted. Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent an unprecedented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy–and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security. Its success would signal a rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment we have begun rolling back that idea in other areas. And, not least, it would destroy the present breadth and quality of the American health care system, still the world’s finest. On grounds of national policy alone, the plan should not be amended; it should be erased.

But the Clinton proposal is also a serious political threat to the Republican Party. Republicans must therefore clearly understand the political strategy implicit in the Clinton plan–and then adopt an aggressive and uncompromising counterstrategy designed to delegitimize the proposal and defeat its partisan purpose.

The reforms would have signaled a “rebirth of [the] centralized welfare-state.”

…the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse–much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for “security” on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.

It goes mostly unstated today, but these are the same reasons that the Republicans have opposed ObamaCare so vociferously. Last August, Senator Ted Cruz argued explicitly that the rollout of the exchanges needed to be prevented or the middle-class would become addicted to the subsidies:

Cruz, who has thrilled his conservative base with his promise to shake up business as usual in Washington, says that once the insurance subsidies kick in at the beginning of 2014, it will be too late to undo the Affordable Care Act.

He said that is precisely President Obama’s goal.

“His strategy is to get as many Americans as possible hooked on the subsidies, addicted to the sugar,” Cruz told a Kingwood Tea Party gathering. “If we get to Jan. 1, this thing is here forever.”

This analysis, whether right or wrong, formed the reasoning behind last fall’s government shutdown. If the Republicans retain control of the House in the upcoming midterm elections and take over the Senate, it’s possible that they might succeed in gutting ObamaCare, but even Ted Cruz is on the record as predicting that it is already too late to roll back the law completely.

In this sense, the ideological war that the Republicans won back in 1993-94 was lost in 2010, and particularly after Obama’s reelection in 2012. Yet, the GOP is still thrashing about, trying to figure out a way to put the genie back in the bottle.

Do the Democrats have any reason to fear nominating someone to defend this victory who so prominently failed on the same battlefield in the early 90’s?

I think the answer is mostly ‘no.’ Twenty years have elapsed, Congress has changed, the Democratic Party has changed, and Hillary Clinton has gained a tremendous amount of experience, as a senator, a presidential candidate, and a high profile cabinet member. In particular, she now understands her opponents much better than she did back in 1993.

But for much of 1993, the White House didn’t see the political realities that would bring the plan crashing down — including the pressures within the Republican Party that eventually created a solid wall of opposition.

She doesn’t have to pass the law, she just has to keep it going. She knows enough now not to think that she can get the Republicans to cooperate in making the law more efficient. If it is to be reformed, it must be on the strength of overwhelming Democratic majorities.

If Hillary can deliver those majorities, and other Democratic candidates cannot, then she will be in the best position to protect and improve Obama’s health care victories.

As Democrats size up the 2016 field of candidates, they will want to assess how well each candidate understands the history of the health care wars, and how big their coattails might be. Hillary has weaknesses that will concern progressive Democrats (including me), but this area should be one of her strengths.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the 1954 Hudson ruin. The photo that I will be using is seen directly below. I will be using my usual acrylics on an 8×10 gallery-wrapped canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

 

Since that time, I have continued to work on the painting.

Okay, the painting looks a bit like it has been tie dyed.  In fact, I have covered all areas with thin watery coatings of color.  These help delineate things and set loose boundaries for the various elements.  And they provide a weak preview of things to come.  There will be many things to come including eventual changes to these colors and adjustment of that shadow beneath the car.

 
The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week.  See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

.

[Update] Marcy Wheeler at her best, her response to Mark Ames:

Of Neo-Fascists and Smiley-Face Neoliberals

I will make a follow-up shortly. Bear with me …

Unwittingly, the saga of the faked black-ops sniper video published by RFERL on 20 February 2014, is connected with the publication by Mark Ames and response of Marcy Wheeler to the NGOs and media outlets under responsiblility of billionaire Omidyar.

My reply in a new diary – Confirmed: Omidyar’s NGOs Clearly Partner in Regime Change

h/t somebody @MoA. In article below, Russia expert Mark Ames makes an astonishing revelation which must be an embarrassment to Glenn Greenwald and Marcy Wheeler under Pierre Omidyar at The Intercept. I quoted Mark Ames on the Ukraine in another recent article – From The eXile – Misinformation Proxy War Ukraine.

Pierre Omidyar Co-funded Ukraine Revolution Groups With US Government, Documents Show

(Pando Daily) – Just hours after last weekend’s ouster of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, one of Pierre Omidyar’s newest hires at national security blog “The Intercept,” was already digging for the truth.

Marcy Wheeler, who is the new site’s “senior policy analyst,” speculated that the Ukraine revolution was likely a “coup” engineered by “deep forces” on behalf of “Pax Americana“:

“There’s quite a bit of evidence of coup-ness. Q is how many levels deep interference from both sides is.”

These are serious claims. So serious that I decided to investigate them. And what I found was shocking.

Continued below the fold …

Wheeler is partly correct. Pando has confirmed that the American government – in the form of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) – played a major role in funding opposition groups prior to the revolution. Moreover, a large percentage of the rest of the funding to those same groups came from a US billionaire who has previously worked closely with US government agencies to further his own business interests. This was by no means a US-backed “coup,” but clear evidence shows that US investment was a force multiplier for many of the groups involved in overthrowing Yanukovych.

But that’s not the shocking part.

What’s shocking is the name of the billionaire who co-invested with the US government (or as Wheeler put it: the “dark force” acting on behalf of “Pax Americana”).

Step out of the shadows…. Wheeler’s boss, Pierre Omidyar.

Yes, in the annals of independent media, this might be the strangest twist ever: According to financial disclosures and reports seen by Pando, the founder and publisher of Glenn Greenwald’s government-bashing blog,”The Intercept,” co-invested with the US government to help fund regime change in Ukraine.

* * * *

When the revolution came to Ukraine, neo-fascists played a front-center role in overthrowing the country’s president. But the real political power rests with Ukraine’s pro-western neoliberals. Political figures like Oleh Rybachuk, long a favorite of the State Department, DC neocons, EU, and NATO–and the right-hand man to Orange Revolution leader Viktor Yushchenko.

Last December, the Financial Times wrote that Rybachuk’s “New Citizen” NGO campaign “played a big role in getting the protest up and running.”

New Citizen;, along with the rest of Rybachuk’s interlocking network of western-backed NGOs and campaigns– “Center UA” (also spelled “Centre UA”), “Chesno,” and “Stop Censorship” to name a few — grew their power by targeting pro-Yanukovych politicians with a well-coordinated anti-corruption campaign that built its strength in Ukraine’s regions, before massing in Kiev last autumn.

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According to the Kyiv Post, Pierrie Omidyar’s Omidyar Network (part of the Omidyar Group which owns First Look Media and the Intercept) provided 36% of “Center UA”‘s $500,000 budget in 2012– nearly $200,000. USAID provided 54% of “Center UA”‘s budget for 2012. Other funders included the US government-backed National Endowment for Democracy.

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