Dave Lindorff

In an article in Sunday's The New York Times, headlined "Medicare for All? 'Crazy,' 'Socialized' and Unlikely," reporter Katherine Q. Seelye did her best to damn the idea of government insurance for all with faint praise.

To begin her article, Seelye quoted from a 2005 episode of the NBC drama "West Wing," in which two presidential candidates, a Democrat played by Jimmy Smits and a Republican played by the always loveable Alan Alda, are discussing health care reform. The Smits character says his "ideal plan" would be Medicare for all. "That's crazy," counters the Alda Republican. Then Seelye segued to an opinion piece recently penned by real-life one-time Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern (a noble figure who nonetheless has long since been typecast as an out-of-touch extreme liberal loser), who favors expansion of Medicare into a national single-payer system.

Turning to the real world, Seelye then trotted out several economists, ostensibly to give a broad spectrum of arguments about the idea of single-payer, but in fact carefully avoiding including anyone who actually supports the idea of expanding Medicare.

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For the last two weeks, I've been contemplating the mysteries of a post-and-beam barn, trying to work out how to rescue the long-ignored structure from the fate of many barns of its vintage (probably about 150 years old), which is total collapse.

This particular barn was left unattended for years by its last owner, and I am guilty of continuing that neglect for the 12 years that I have owned it. I knew that the shingles on its roof had long passed their sell-by date. When we first bought the property, the shingles had that telltale roughness that announced that they were eroded and brittle. The chronically wet ground floor was also a pretty convincing sign that the roof wasn't doing its job of keeping the rain out. But the real evidence of looming disaster were the plants that began to sprout right out of the roof this wet summer. Big plants. Even a few young trees. And the mushrooms growing out of the ends of exposed beams. Not a good sign.

I made my way gingerly up the rickety stairs to the second floor in August, and looked around at the underside of the roof. Someone had obviously once re-roofed the structure perhaps two decades ago or more, using plywood sheathing over the old slats, but the plywood from the front wall on up halfway to the ridge was all rotten. One corner of the roof had actually fallen in, so there was an eight-foot-by-four-foot unimpeded view of the sky. Several rafters were so rotten they had cracked and were sagging downward, held up only by the rusty nails coming down into them from the gimpy plywood and slats above them.

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Liberals are acting all righteous and offended that a member of the Republican opposition, Rep. "Joe" Wilson of South Carolina, would deign to besmirch the "dignity of the presidency" by calling out "Liar!" in the middle of President Obama's address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday evening.

But what's wrong with that? Whatever the veracity of Obama's claim that his proposed health care "reform" would not pay for the health care of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S. (and one can only hope that statement was fatuous, because at a minimum we would certainly want the government to pay for the care of an illegal immigrant in childbirth, or of an illegal immigrant who came down with a contagious disease), and even if Rep. Wilson is a racist bozo who wrongly thinks or wants to imply that Obama's plan would be out there enrolling undocumented workers in the millions at taxpayer expense, why shouldn't members of Congress call out a president if they think he's lying to them from the podium?

One of the big problems with American democracy is that the presidency has over the years been elevated to the level of a monarchy, with all the imperial trappings and pomposity formerly associated with royalty. Presidents surely should get no more respect than a prime minister, and look at the hoots and catcalls PMs have to endure when they address Parliament in the UK. That's a good thing.

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The Obama Administration's freakout, as expressed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, over The Associated Press' belated circulation of a photograph of a dying U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard (above), is the latest example of the hypocrisy of U.S. authorities who claim to be concerned about the feelings of American military families, while really simply desiring to censor the war's horrors from the eyes of the American people.

The truth: Americans, until only the last 18 years, have been able to see the carnage of war as it has been felt by our own troops from as long ago as there were cameras. Pioneering photographer and war chronicler Mathew Brady brought home the horrors of the U.S. Civil War with photos such as this one of dead Union and Confederate soldiers after the Battle of Antietam.

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My Fellow Americans.

I stand before you a chastened president. I made a mistake. Two mistakes really. (wild applause from Republican side)

I thought that Congress could do its job and through the deliberative process, produce a health care reform plan that would win broad support across the aisle and among all of you. But I'm afraid that I was wrong. Health care is an enormous industry -- maybe the biggest and most powerful industry in the country -- and it has far too much power in Congress. Literally thousands of lobbyists, carrying tens of billions of dollars in campaign contributions -- have invaded these halls and distorted the process, and in the end have stymied reform. (some hissing)

Meanwhile, I have realized that the answer has been staring us in the face all along.

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It is refreshing to hear the new head of the AFL-CIO, former mineworker and Mineworkers President Richard Trumka, get mad at sell-out Democrats and make a threat not to "support" them next year.

As Trumka pointed out in a talk to the Center for American Progress this week, for years, Democratic politicians, and the Democrats as a Party, have counted on the labor movement to get out the vote of its membership on Election Day, only to turn on workers after getting to Washington, on the issues that really matter, such as jobs-killing free trade agreements, the gutting of bankruptcy law and credit law protections, and, most recently, the undermining of needed labor law reform.

Trumka, quoting from a famous mineworkers song by Florence Reece, later popularized by Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, said that going forward, Democrats will have to make it clear to labor, "Which side are you on?"

But really, that's only half the question. Reece, in her song, was asking that question of workers themselves. And indeed, the reason Democrats have become such traitors to working class interests in recent decades is that the labor movement itself has not answered Reece's question resolutely or honestly.

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By Dave Lindorff

The way I see it, President Obama has a couple of months to turn his failing
administration around.

The war in Afghanistan is going south, and within a couple of weeks,
his General William Westmoreland, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, will be
coming to him asking for more troops.

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By

Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama has staked his presidency on winning his
"necessary" war in Afghanistan.  Coming into office, one of his first acts,
on Feb. 18, was to boost US troop levels in that country by 17,000, bringing
the total number of soldiers and Marines in the country to  about 57,000, to
which one must also add about 33,000 other soldiers from NATO countries and
Australia.

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You see, here's the thing. When you hear about the sick, twisted things that America's torturers have been doing, courtesy of President George W. Bush and Vice President Darth Cheney, you have to remember that the U.S. military and the CIA were not really all that reliable when it came to picking up the real terrorists. In fact, their batting average was pretty lousy.

According to even the Pentagon's own reckoning, for example, probably 85% of the captives being held at Guantanamo over the past eight years were not terrorists at all, and a fair number -- probably the majority -- weren't even fighting anyone when they were captured. I'm sure that the averages at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or at the secret prison in Iraq are no better. The military was offering bounties in Iraq and Afghanistan for alleged terrorists, you see, and probably still is, but in both of those lawless, tribal countries, many people have used the offer to settle old feuds, turning in people they wanted to punish or dispose of, and many others just turned in random people to get the reward money.

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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Federal District Court Judge Fernando Gaitan of the Missouri Western District Court have at least two things in common: they are both appointees of President Ronald Reagan, and they both think it's just fine for the U.S. to execute innocent people. The same can be said for Judge C. Arlen Beam of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In a recent dissent in a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling ordering a habeas hearing in federal court for South Carolina death row inmate Troy Anthony Davis, a man slated to die after being convicted for the murder of an off-duty Savannah police officer, Scalia wrote, "This court has never held that the constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

For his part, Judge Gaitan, in Missouri, had two shots at considering the case of Joseph Amrine, a death-row inmate slated to die for the killing of a fellow prisoner in a Missouri state prison. Amrine (see my article "Dead Man Walking Home" in Salon, May 1, 2003) had been convicted of the knife slaying on the basis of the testimony of three alleged eyewitnesses -- all of them fellow prisoners. When two of those witnesses later recanted (suggesting that it was the third witness who had actually been the killer), Judge Gaitan rejected the habeas appeal, arguing that the two recantations couldn't be believed, because the third witness had not changed his testimony. Later, when the third witness also recanted, Amrine's attorney brought the case back to Judge Gaitan, but this time, the Judge again rejected the appeal, claiming that none of the witnesses was credible "because they are all criminals." (Which of course begs the question of why Amrine should have been convicted in the first place based upon the testimony of the same three witnesses.).

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