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Kildee vs. Stupak and Health Care's Final Countdown

— By Nick Baumann

| Fri Mar. 19, 2010 5:20 PM PDT

— Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.) | Flickr/edlabordems (Creative Commons).

UPDATED, 11:00 AM EST Saturday

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) wants pro-life Dems to join him in voting against the Democrats' health care bill unless there are significant abortion restrictions. But Stupak has a surprising obstacle in his path: his old friend Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.). Kildee isn't just opting out of his pal's voting bloc: He told reporters on Friday that he's been working hard to convince other anti-abortion Democrats to abandon Stupak's effort. As the final hours before the vote tick down, the battle between these two Democrats could determine the fate of the party's biggest legislative priority.

Kildee and Stupak have much in common. They're both pro-life Democrats from Michigan. They're been social and political comrades for years. Kildee, who's 81, knew the 58-year-old Stupak when Stupak was a young Michigan state trooper. But for now, at least, the two lawmakers are on opposite sides of the dramatic health care tussle.

Stupak, who sponsored a strict anti-abortion amendment that was added to the House version of the health care reform bill, maintains that the Senate's plan (which doesn't contain his amendment) allows for federal funding of abortions. Kildee disagrees. Neither doubts the sincerity of the others' beliefs—at least according to Kildee. But while Stupak is trying to hold together a bloc of pro-life Dems that he claims will join him in voting against the Senate bill, Kildee has been pressing other members to accept his position that the Senate bill is "without any question" pro-life.

"I've always been pro-life," Kildee said, adding, "I'm 81 years old and I'm not going to change my mind now. I'm not going to jeopardize my eternal soul." Confidence in his own position has allowed Kildee to lobby "a number" of other anti-abortion Democrats to vote for the legislation, which is scheduled to come up for a vote on Sunday afternoon. "God willing, I've changed a few votes," Kildee remarked.

But he hasn't convinced Stupak. "We've agreed to disagree," Kildee said. Recently, Stupak has been making noise about a possible compromise (perhaps his friend's arguments are having an impact), and multiple outlets reported on Friday night that Speaker Nancy Pelosi had struck a deal with Stupak to allow a vote on a "concurrent resolution." The New York Times explained how this might work:

[The deal] would add tougher abortion restrictions to the bill after it is approved but before it is sent to the president — a technique typically used to make minor or technical changes with the consent of both chambers, an unlikely prospect.

But the House pro-choice caucus threatened to bolt en masse, and Stupak later cancelled a press conference he had planned for Saturday morning. That was probably a smart strategic move. Holding a last-minute presser would mean Stupak would face put-up-or-shut-up time. If he can produce at a press conference—or any other time—the 11 or 12 House Democrats he has claimed are with him, health care reform could be in serious trouble. If his allies are much less than that, the bill's passage could become a foregone conclusion. Half-dozen or so House Democrats who voted against the bill in November have announced they will vote for the Senate bill on Sunday, and that spell problems for Stupak. If his gang is much smaller than the group of no-to-yes switchers, Stupak will be irrelevant. (I'm on the Hill Saturday to count Stupak's allies, so stay tuned.)

Stupak's public waffling about what once seemed to be an unshakeable stand has lcaused some vote-counters to wonder whether the congressman wants to vote for health care reform, realizing he's wrong about the bill funding abortion, but has backed himself into a corner. With that in mind, I asked Kildee about Stupak's statement that he relies on groups like the National Right to Life Committee and Focus on the Family (groups that have generally opposed the Democrats' health care reform plans) for guidance. Kildee questioned the wisdom of depending on these outfits. Members of Congress have to be wary of groups that "start out with a premise and only seek out facts that support their premise," Kildee warned. He added, "You have to know where they come from. You have to know what their purpose is—they gather information that supports their purpose."

Some of the individuals and groups that have endorsed Kildee's argument that the Senate bill is sufficiently anti-abortion came to the Hill on Friday to back Kildee. These pro-lifers included nuns who signed a letter supporting the bill; Professor Tim Jost, an expert on health law who has written detailed analyses of the Senate health care bill's abortion provisions; and other academic and faith leaders. After the press conference, several of the attendees, including Jost, headed over to the office of Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-Ind.). Ellsworth, who had been considered a potential member of Stupak's bloc, announced on Friday afternoon that he would vote for the Senate bill. He cited the nuns' letter as evidence that the bill doesn't fund abortion.

President Barack Obama talks to a Member of Congress. | White House photo/Pete Souza (Government Work).President Barack Obama talks to a Member of Congress. | White House photo/Pete Souza (Government Work).There's one more factor that could influence Stupak and other wavering House Dems: President Barack Obama. The White House has been eagerly telling reporters that the president is working the phones, trying to get members of Congress on board with his plan. (He's apparently had 64 meetings or phone calls will members of Congress on health care reform during this week.) They even went so far as to release the photo to the right, of Obama making a call during his trip back to the White House after a health care rally Friday.

On Saturday, the president will continue his pitch in person. He and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will address a meeting of House Democrats at 3 p.m. We'll be there to let you know how it goes.

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Ladies, Stand Up and Pee!

— By Elizabeth Gettelman

| Fri Mar. 19, 2010 4:39 PM PDT

— Photo courtesy of SheWee.com

Though from the looks of this thing I guess all we ever needed was a funnel. I guess it's that easy? Fashion a funnel at an angle with a curved shoehorn-like bowl, and presto, women are liberated! It's true that we gals really, really need an alternative to sitting on (or squatting above) nasty gas-station toilets. It's a big-time pain in the ass for women to have to sit and squat all the time, same goes for things like menstruating, childbirth, and childrearing; we put up with a lot because of our anatomy. But on the pee front I'm not yet convinced that the Brits' SheWee has broken the porcelain ceiling.

First off, the physics of it seems really challenging, which is probably why we haven't seen a SheWee before. I mean, we have a female condom, we have boxer shorts for women, but, like lady Viagra, the bipedal pee has heretofore alluded us. Second, the site insists that you can use the SheWee "without removing your clothes." Hmm, I'm not trusting that molded funnel to catch everything and keep my clothes, and shoes, wee free. Plus, it's reusable and is supposed to be put back in a bag between uses, which means you're carrying around urine between liberated pee stops. The SheWee is perfect, says the site, for so many occasions: in the car, while scuba diving, on Everest. In fact, the SheWee promises that NOW you can "hike/climb/ski/jog off the beaten track, miles from the nearest toilet." Because women wouldn't even think of doing any of these things if they didn't have a plastic urine-covered funnel in their pocket.

It's the usual feminine hygiene sell, that a device, whether it's a Swiffer, douching with Lysol ("Still the girl he married"), or NuvaRing ("Let Freedom Ring"), is what's going to free women from the bonds of their pesky vaginas.

All this said I just might get me a SheWee and give it a try, because how could anyone resist a product that lets you "travel the world with the comfort of home in your pocket."

Cookbooks Threaten Fish?

— By Julia Whitty

| Fri Mar. 19, 2010 3:54 PM PDT

An innovative analysis of seafood-eating trends in the past 125 years shows that in the US at least we're 'eating up the food web'—not because fish high up on the food web are more abundant fish but because they're less abundant. In other words, the more expensive the fish, the more desirable it is as a main ingredient in recipes.

The researchers from the Northwest Fisheries Science Center deciphered this when they gathered 3,092 seafood recipes from 105 cookbooks published in Pacific Northwest between 1885 and 2007. In past decades we ate many more lower trophic level seafood (small planktivorous fish, like sardines). Whereas over time our cookbooks have come increasingly to call for much higher trophic level seafood (large carnivorous fish, like tuna).

Specifically, between 1885 and 2007, the average trophic level of the recipes rose from 2.92 to more than 3.4. (Sharks, apex predators, have the highest trophic level of 4.) This is a counterintuitive finding, as New Scientist reports:

"[Lead author Phillip] Levin had expected the opposite trend, because decades of intense fishing have depleted the populations of many fish with a high trophic level, and as a result more and more of the world's fish harvest is now made up of smaller "trash" fish of lower trophic levels. He suggests it didn't work out that way because cookbooks don't reflect what we eat so much as what we aspire to eat. "It's more about culture than fish," he says. Indeed, Levin suspects that rarity may be partly responsible for the prestige of fish like cod and tuna. "When food is expensive, that's the stuff that shows up in cookbooks," he says. If so, cooks will continue to seek out these species even as their populations dwindle still further—a perverse demand that could stymie efforts to restore healthy fish populations."

In their paper in Fish and Fisheries the authors conclude:

"Ultimately, sustainability of fisheries and marine ecosystems is not solely a biophysical problem—sustainability must also include the viability of socially shaped relationships between people and the sea. Knowledge of the drivers underlying the pattern of 'eating up the food web' should aide in developing policies that move beyond managing pressures (fishing), but also deal with the social drivers that generate those pressures."

 

Why You Should Read This Blog

— By Mac McClelland

| Fri Mar. 19, 2010 3:53 PM PDT

What this is: This is Mother Jones' new blog.

Who I am: Mother Jones' new human rights reporter.

How I got this job: While working as MoJo's copy editor, I wrote a book about Burma. To quote the very flattering note in the March/April issue, which features an excerpt, "It so impressed her editors that they persuaded her to become our roving human rights reporter. Look for her new blog at MotherJones.com."

The topic: human rights. Yeah, it's pretty broad: LGBT issues; domestic violence; sexual violence; trafficking, human; trafficking, drugs, and the effect on humans of; asylum policy; refugees; peacekeepers; peacemakers; crimes against humanity; gender/racial/ethnic/class discrimination…Almost anything goes.

As a blog, this blog will indeed contain bloggy summaries, quick and dirty analysis, hot and fast regurgitations of interesting info and highlights about aid organizations on the ground, United Nations offices I watch closely, tweets from witnesses or diplomats that offer perspective that's slipping through the cracks. But there will also be a lot of research and deep reportage.

Re the research: Know who Than Shwe is? You should, especially this year, and next week I'll tell you why. Want to meet hot humanitarians busting their asses to alleviate all manner of bad scenes here at home and around the world? Hear how the DOJ tracks down domestic slave traders? What 250,000-member-strong organization lobbies to send battered spouses seeking US asylum back to their murderous abusers? Ever heard of the Nepalese minority that ended up displaced and enslaved because of the United States-led global malaria eradication program? Oh, you will.

The Rights Stuff will not just cover topics that should be (but probably aren't) in your news, but will also provide context that wasn't in your schoolbooks. Par exemple: When I was on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth on Tuesday, a caller asked, after I'd talked about the CIA's first secret war having been in Burma, what some of the upshots of that war had been. At which point I regaled him with the backstory that that United States' violation of Burmese sovereignty helped make their government the superparanoid and isolated freaks that they are, and pushed them toward building the massive military machine they felt they needed to protect their independence. Plus that we gave them some weaponry and money with which to do that building up, because we wanted them to help us fight commies, or at least like us enough to not become commies.

This was news to me when I dug it up a couple of years ago, as it's news to most people; the incredibly sharp, informed, and charming host of the radio show responded only, after missing a beat: Hm. Here at Mother Jones, we've got a big research and fact-checking department, and we're not afraid to use it.

Re the deep reportage: We're talking dispatches from long stints embedded in the field, in Utah or Uganda, where I'll tell stories about not just conflicts or issues but people, as people, multidimensional and personal and not cardboard victims or floating quotes. Never dry. Never boring. Nothing so dire but also flat that I wouldn't want to read it myself or tell somebody about it over drinks. So readers can come with me, get to know the characters and the situations, figure out large parts of the story while I do—which is not unlikely to involve my getting to know the subjects over drinks.

We're not yet sure where I'll go next, but we're excited. I'm excited, and looking forward to collaborating with and taking suggestions from commenters and Twitter followers. Be sure to become one so you don't miss news about what's new—a post about an eccentric oppressor you've never heard of as part of the Better Know an Asshole series? What major American tourist destination you should skip on vacay because its government sometimes guns down political and economic refugees?—on the blog.

Welcome!



 

Student Loan Reform Tied to Health Care

— By Jessica Calefati

| Fri Mar. 19, 2010 3:30 PM PDT

— Flickr/ AMagill (Creative Commons)

The House won't just be voting on health care this weekend. Packaged with it is a bill that cuts funding for private college loan lenders and redirects the billions saved to cash-strapped students.

If it's successful, the reforms will end a program started 50 years ago whereby banks receive government subsidies to lend students money for college. The federal government, meanwhile, assumes nearly all the risk of default. Thanks to the recession, that default rate has continued to rise. Under the new plan, the government will loan to student borrowers directly, a policy already in place at more than 2,000 colleges.

The money saved will finance a $36 billion expansion of the federal Pell Grant program. Each student who qualifies currently receives $5,550, but that number will increase to nearly $6,000 with the infusion of this new funding. And private finance companies will stop profiting off the loans because they will no longer be getting big government subsidies.

"This legislation offers the most sweeping changes to the federal student loan program in a generation," California Representative and House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller said in a statement. "This is really about making a simple choice. Congress can either continue the longstanding boondoggle that rewards banks with tens of billions of dollars in subsidies at the expense of families and taxpayers—or we can invest that money directly in students and America's world economic leadership."

In a conference call with reporters yesterday Iowa Senator Tom Harkin confirmed that the student loan reform was packaged with health care reform at the last minute to help it meet the cost-savings requirements of reconciliation, the legislative procedure House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is using to get the Senate's version through the House. Pelsosi decided on reconciliation after floating the unpopular notion of "deem and pass," which Nick Baumann and Kevin Drum reported on earlier this week.

Afghanistan's Boy Sex Slaves

— By Michael Mechanic

| Fri Mar. 19, 2010 2:49 PM PDT

— Photo courtesy Frontline

Say what you will about the Taliban. They're small-minded, repressive, religious zealots who exert their power through fear and intimidation. But certain aspects of Afghan society can make the black turbans look downright righteous. Consider the ancient tradition of Bacha Bazi, which means "boy play." Banned by the Taliban, this illicit activity is on the upswing across Afghanistan. The Guardian reported on it last fall, and on April 20, Frontline is airing a special report with the same title: The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan.

Here's how the Frontline producers describe it:

Hundreds of boys, some as young as eleven, street orphans or boys bought from poor families by former warlords and powerful businessmen, are dressed in woman's clothes, taught to sing and dance for the entertainment of male audiences, and then sold to the highest bidder or traded among the men for sex.

With remarkable access inside a Bacha Bazi ring operating in Northern Afghanistan, Najibullah Quraishi, an Afghan journalist, investigates this practice, still illegal under Afghan law, talking with the boys, their families, and their masters, exposing the sexual abuse and even murders of the boys, and documenting how Afghan authorities responsible for stopping these crimes are sometimes themselves complicit in the practice.

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Rep. Ortiz: Wavering and Playing Hard to Get

— By Suzy Khimm

| Fri Mar. 19, 2010 1:03 PM PDT

Two days before the expected House vote on health care reform, it's proving tough to budge wavering Democrats off the fence. Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D-Tex.) says he's "still undecided." Ortiz voted for the House's health care bill last year, but he said couldn't take a leap of faith that the Senate would pass the changes he wants. (The strategy is for the House to pass the Senate bill and then for the Senate to approve a separate package of fixes sought by House Dems.) And even a deal on abortion might not be enough to bring the anti-choice Texas Democrat on board. 

"We don't know what they're going to do, if they're going to include some of the things that we passed here [in the House]," Ortiz tells Mother Jones. "I'm undecided until I see the product."

The fate of the health care bill rests on the votes of wavering House Democrats like Ortiz. But when asked what further assurances he needed to sign onto the bill, he seemed to set up a straw man by blaming the upper house. "Most of the members are waiting to see what's coming from the Senate," he says. "Some of the changes we want to be sure about are pre-existing conditions, are they going to care about young children, up to age 26—there's a lot of stuff like that."

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Pelosi's March to the Sea

— By Tim Murphy

| Fri Mar. 19, 2010 12:33 PM PDT

— Flickr/The U.S. Army (Creative Commons)

Georgia Rep. Paul Broun (R-Oath Keepers), in addition to spelling his name wrong, also is something of a lunatic. In 2008, he compared the Bush-era bank bailout to "a huge cow patty with a piece of marshmallow stuck in the middle," which he was "not going to eat." (Imagine if Eric Cantor had brought one of those to the health care summit!) He was also among the first to warn that then-President-elect Obama might lead us down the slippery slope to a radical socialist dictatorship, using language that would vex even Texas schoolbook purveyors: "That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany...he's showing me signs of being Marxist." So naturally, when he took to the floor of the House last night to discuss the imminent passage of health care reform, great things were expected. And Broun did not disappoint. In his words: "If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that's in people's pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the war between the states—the great war of yankee aggression."

It all depends on how the Congressional Budget Office scores it, of course...But I think the news that the health care bill not only covers millions of uninsured Americans, but also apparently frees the slaves, could be enough to win over on-the-fence Democrats.

Distateful though it may be (Lee Fang calls Broun's language "racial" and "militant"), Broun's analogy is actually a really fun one. Obama is obviously Abraham Lincoln in this scenario, which is pretty neat. Taking it even further, congressional Democrats (pictured above, "jamming the bill through") are the Union Army: Harry Reid is Ulysses S. Grant (minus the drinking, of course); Nancy Pelosi is William Tecumseh Sherman; and Joe Lieberman is, of course, George McClellan—infuriating, backstabbing, and incompetent. Who'd I miss? Let me know in the comments.

Friday Cat Blogging - 19 March 2010

— By Kevin Drum

| Fri Mar. 19, 2010 11:55 AM PDT

I asked Inkblot to do something interesting this morning so I could take a picture of him, but he just yawned at me. And then fell back asleep. Meanwhile, Domino headed out to the backyard to snooze among the spring flowers.

Speaking of which, spring starts tomorrow. And then on Sunday, the first full day of spring, we should get ourselves a shiny new healthcare reform bill. Nice symbolism, I think.

And now I'm off to lunch, followed by another session of Windows 7 troubleshooting. The upgrade basically went OK, and I'm now working through the list of annoying things that don't work quite right. Like the color balance on my monitor and the fact that I can't get VNC to work. (This is highly detrimental to my maternal tech support duties.) Top of the list, however, is my printer. It doesn't work. Plug it in and nothing happens. Just the little USB thunk sound effect and that's it. No error message, no searching for drivers, no nothing. My computer just sits there, providing no clue about what's wrong. And yet, the USB port works fine with other devices, the printer works fine on a different computer, and I don't think there are any conflicts since everything I own worked fine together on the old computer. Very strange.

Sprawl Revisited

— By Kevin Drum

| Fri Mar. 19, 2010 11:45 AM PDT

Matt Yglesias responds to yesterday's post about sprawl:

It’s true that the problem of overly restrictive land-use rules is in large part a problem of voter-preference. But it’s not a problem of voter-preference for sprawl per se. It’s a general problem of homeowner eagerness to exclude outsiders.

I know it's wildly unfair to do this, but I didn't get much sleep last night and my brain isn't working. So I'll just say that I think he's wrong. Or, to be a little more precise, I think he's mostly wrong. Sure, exclusion is part of the dynamic here, but by far the bigger part of it is that lots and lots of people actively like living in non-dense developments. Seriously: they really do. It's not a trick. So they vote with their feet and move to the suburbs and then vote with their ballots to keep big-city living at bay. Given an ideal world, of course, they'd love to have a nice 3,000 square foot house with a big yard right in the middle of Manhattan, but one way or another, they want that house.

Obviously not everyone likes living this way, but an awful lot of people do. You can say they like a big house with a big yard, or you can say they like sprawl. It's pretty much the same thing.