There's no "liberal media" on the Republican-friendly Sunday talk-show circuit

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Our friend Steve Benen performs yet another valuable service in identifying who made the most appearances on the major Sunday talk shows in 2013:

You'll note the obvious, and if you've been paying attention you'll see confirmed what you saw this past year:

The general impression is rooted in fact: the Sunday shows love Republicans. "Meet the Press," "Face the Nation," "This Week," "State of the Union," and "Fox News Sunday," hoping to reflect and help shape the conventional wisdom for the political world, collectively favor GOP guests over Democratic guests every year, but who were the big winners in 2013?

The above chart shows every political figure who made 10 or more Sunday show appearances this year, with red columns representing Republicans and blue columns representing Democrats. For 2013, the race wasn't especially close – House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) easily came out on top, making 27 appearances this year.

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In all, 10 of the top 13 are Republicans, as are six of the top seven.

I actually had no idea that Rogers had made that many appearances (though it makes sense that the media would favor him, given his intelligence role, just like McCaul with his homeland security role), but otherwise it's the usual suspects, the right-wing darlings who command the media attention in Washington, notably McCain, Gingrich (who of course doesn't even hold office), Graham, Paul, and King.

Sure, there are a few Democrats on the list, but they're of the establishment variety (Durbin, Schumer) or otherwise on the right wing of the party (Manchin, likely there in large measure for his bipartisan efforts to enact pro-gun gun control after Newtown). And while there are a number of far-right Republicans on the list (Cruz, Corker, Paul), there are no genuine progressives at all.

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Calling bullshit on the Republicans' desperate supercommittee ploy

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Republicans have backed themselves into a corner. They've allowed a teabagging minority of their own party to shut down the government, they're toying with global economic catastrophe by threatening to vote against a debt ceiling increase, and, in general, their petulant-child approach to fiscal policy amounts to nothing more than hostage-taking. And the polls are clear: The American people are correctly blaming them for causing the current crisis.

So what do they do? Allow a majority in the House to prevail with a vote on a "clean" continuing resolution to reopen the government? Nope. Rein in their bluster and agree that the debt ceiling isn't something to use as a political weapon? Hardly. Accept that Obamacare is the law of the land and stop trying to kill it by any means possible? Yeah, right. Say enough is enough to Ted Cruz and his teabagging radicals? Of course not.

No, they posture, grandstand, and attempt, with one last-ditch effort, to turn the tables on President Obama and the Democrats:

House Republicans will bring to the floor a bill to create a bipartisan, bicameral committee to address the current fiscal impasse that has shut down much of the government and threatens a debt default.

A GOP leadership aide said the committee wouldn't just handle the continuing resolution needed to fund the government. It would have broader jurisdiction similar to the 2011 Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, also known as the supercommittee, and would cover the debt limit and other fiscal issues.

A GOP appropriations aide also described the working group as similar to the supercommittee, but on a smaller scale, and without instructions.

"I want to have a conversation," said Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio. "I'm not drawing lines in the sand. I'm requesting to sit down to resolve our differences."

Boehner said, "There's no boundaries here. There's nothing on the table, there's nothing off the table. I'm trying to do everything I can to bring people together and have a conversation."

What complete and utter bullshit.

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So you think Ray Kelly should head up the Department of Homeland Security?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well, whether you do or don't, you should read Conor Friedersdorf's excellent piece at The Atlantic, "Prominent Democrats Are Now Comfortable With Racial and Ethnic Profiling," which includes:

Under Ray Kelly, the NYPD infiltrated Muslim communities and spied on hundreds or perhaps thousands of totally innocent Americans at mosques, colleges, and elsewhere. Officers "put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity," AP reported, citing NYPD documents. Informants were paid to bait Muslims into making inflammatory statements. The NYPD even conducted surveillance on Muslim Americans outside its jurisdiction, drawing a rebuke from an FBI field office, where a top official charged that "the department's surveillance of Muslims in the state has hindered investigations and created 'additional risks' in counterterrorism."

Moreover, "In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques," the Associated Press reported, "the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation." The horrifying effects on innocent Americans are documented here. But despite the high costs and lack of counterterrorism benefits, Kelly stands behind the surveillance on Muslims.

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On its own, Kelly's treatment of Muslims ought to disqualify him from the position, and even from being praised by the president of the United States. On its own, his treatment of blacks and Hispanics ought to disqualify him from being promoted, too. But his tenure has also been characterized by a dearth of transparency that has exacerbated his abuses. As Murray Weiss explains, "The lack of transparency during the Kelly administration played a pivotal role in keeping the public -- and by extension the NYPD -- from recognizing years earlier that the number of stop-and-frisks in New York was escalating to troubling levels. Kelly failed to disclose the stop-and-frisk numbers for seven years despite being required by law to do so. When he was finally forced to release them, the numbers were stunning, and caused critics to ask why stop-and-frisks escalated from 100,000 during Bloomberg's first year in office to 500,000 seven years later."

Yet New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer is lobbying for him, and on Wednesday President Obama said Kelly's "obviously done an extraordinary job" and would be "very well qualified for the job" of Homeland Security secretary.

Sadly, this isn't at all surprising, though it is to the immense discredit of both men.

Make their day: Why Democrats should stand firm on raising the debt ceiling

By Mustang Bobby 

Oddly enough, the Democrats are itching for a fight with the Republicans over the debt ceiling even to the point of letting them shut down the government.

Well, at least one is: 

Echoing President Obama's refusal to negotiate on the debt limit, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) warned Republicans on Friday that Democrats have no intention of giving in to any of their demands in exchange for lifting the nation's borrowing limit to pay its bills.

"I think that risking government shutdown, risking not raising the debt ceiling, is playing with fire," Schumer told reporters in the Capitol, in response to a question from TPM. "Anyone who wants to come and negotiate, and say 'we will raise the debt ceiling only if you do A, B, C' will not have a negotiating partner. And if then they don't want to raise the debt ceiling, it'll be on their shoulders. I would bet that they would not go forward with that."

The No. 3 Democrat declared that Obama and congressional Democrats have learned their lesson from the 2011 fiasco that nearly led to a default. He predicted that Republicans will give in and cleanly raise the country's borrowing authority — which expires around March — if Democrats stonewall and give them no other option.

"If they realize for sure that they're not going to have a negotiating partner, they'll have to find another route to bring the change that they want and they won't risk the full faith and credit of the United States. The only way they get leverage is when they think we might negotiate on those issues," he said. "There was a very sad moment in 2011 when that happened. And I think there's a strong consensus at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue among Democrats not to repeat what I would call — I think what most of us would regard — as a mistake."

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Bill Clinton is taking to the campaign trail

By Richard K. Barry

I've still got it.

If you are wondering what Bill Clinton's role in President Obama's campaign will be from here on out, BuzzFeed Politics reports that he will be a frequent presence on the campaign trail, focusing much of his effort in the Midwest.

This is according to Sen. Chuck Schumer. I'm not exactly sure why Schumer is the go-to guy for Bill's schedule, but apparently he has some inside knowledge.

If you were asleep last night, or maybe had some need to watch the New York Giants get embarrassed by the Dallas Cowboys, you might not know that, according to nearly everyone, Bill Clinton gave one of the most impressive political speeches ever heard as he nominated Barack Obama for a second term (unless you're Charles Krauthammer or Jennifer Rubin, in which case it was one of the worst political speeches ever heard).

As BuzzFeed reports:

Clinton's well-received speech Thursday night transformed him from an uneasy presidential ally into the central defender of Obama's record and promoter of his right to a second term. He is particularly effective for two reasons: His appeal to white working class Democrats who are this year's key swing voters; and the fact that many of the season's Republican attacks are based on allegations that Obama has broken with a more centrist Clinton legacy.

Schumer assures us that the message Clinton provided at the DNC, "he's gonna repeat across the country."

Thanks, Chuck.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Will Ford challenge Gillibrand in New York?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

According to the Times, "Harold Ford Jr., the former congressman from Tennessee, is weighing a bid to unseat Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand in this fall's Democratic primary."

I wasn't exactly much of a Gillibrand fan when Gov. David Paterson appointed her to replace Hillary Clinton last year, but my sense since then is that she's done fairly well.

And how is she any worse than Ford? (She certainly has her colleague Chuck Schumer's support, and that's huge.)

Does New York need yet another carpetbagger, and a centrist one at that, one with close ties to Wall Street and who is being pushed to run by prominent, NYC-oriented donors and insiders who don't like -- and look down upon -- Gillibrand's upstate credentials?

Well, that will be for New Yorkers to say, should Ford run, but my sense is that sticking with Gillibrand might not be such a bad thing.

The public option has stalled. So what now?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Sen. Tom Harkin thinks he has the votes to pass a health-care reform package that includes a so-called "public option," and he may very well be right -- it's possible, if (and it's a huge if) Democrats pull together to break an expected Republican filibuster) -- but, as of right now, the public option has stalled in the Senate Finance Committee, which, despite a Democratic majority voted today against two separate proposals put forward by Sens. Chuck Schumer and Jay Rockefeller. The problem is not so much that the Republicans all voted against them (including Schumer's compromise), it's that so many Democrats did, including Committee Chairman Max Baucus, who delusionally continues to push for a bipartisan package (without a public option) even with almost all Republicans clearly opposed to any and all compromise. (As Steve Benen notes, the Republican arguments against the public option were predictably stupid.)

We have long known that the Republicans are against meaningful health-care reform. What is so annoying now, though, is that the main obstacle is Democratic opposition in the Senate, from Baucus and Kent Conrad and so on. It is a small bloc of centrists, but it is a bloc that could side with the GOP on a filibuster (in refusing to break it, even against the wishes of an overwhelming majority of fellow Democrats).

So what now?

Well, Democrats could, and should, still push for the inclusion of a robust public option in any reform package. All it not lost yet.

And yet, as many health-care experts have pointed out, quite persuasively, you may not need a public option to achieve some of key goals of reform. And there is one country, as TNR's Jonathan Cohn writes, that is a model of how to do it: The Netherlands:

Liberals, understandably, are in agony. But they can take at least some comfort in looking overseas -- where one tiny country has managed to build a popular and successful universal health care program based entirely on private insurance. That country is the Netherlands, which several years ago overhauled its health care system and achieved most of the goals the liberal reform movement holds dear: near-universal coverage, affordable insurance, and quality health care.

Under the new system, the Dutch government has required that everybody gets insurance; in return, it makes sure insurance is available to everybody, regardless of pre-existing medical conditions or income. Although the government finances long-term care through a public program, it has turned over the job of providing basic medical coverage exclusively to private insurers, including some for-profit companies. Surveys show that the Dutch are happier with their health care than are Americans -- or the people of any other developed country, for that matter.

The "catch," as Cohn notes, is that health care in the Netherlands, however private, "operates more or less like a public utility."

Read the whole piece. It's an interesting model, and a viable alternative, though perhaps unworkable in the U.S., given the general reluctance to reform industry as vigorously as would be required. Still, with the public option in trouble, and with the distinct possibility that whatever reform package is passed will not include it, it may be time to start looking for next-best approaches, if we haven't already, that would, at the very least, be steps in the right direction and that could, eventually, lead to the sort of universal public system many of us desire.

I'm with Chuck

By Michael J.W. Stickings

From The Hill:

The healthcare reform bill that emerges from Congress this year will include a government-run public health insurance option, regardless of the bipartisan negotiations seeking a compromise in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Sunday.

"Make no mistake about it, the president is for this strongly. There will be a public option in the final bill," Schumer said on CBS News's "Face the Nation."

I hope he's right.

For Democrats, there's simply no excuse. Any reform bill without a "public" option, without an option that would guarantee coverage for all Americans, would be not just a disappointment but a failure to do what is right, what must be done, when given the opportunity.

No, it's not all with the Democrats. The Republicans who will vote en masse, and perhaps unamimously, against a bill with a public option, deserve perhaps even more of the blame. They are against universal health care, after all, and do not seem to care about the millions of uninsured Americans.

But the Democrats are in a position to do something about it. And this is no time for excuses.

What to do about Joe Lieberman? (update)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For the record, I still want him to be given the boot, though I understand and appreciate Obama's desire to keep him on board.)

WaPo: Obama wants Democrats to keep Lieberman in caucus (but not necessarily in his chairmanship).

FDL: Schumer and Durbin want Lieberman stripped of his Homeland Security chairmanship (which, I would add, is the least that should be done to him).

TPM: "The full Democratic caucus will vote on whether Joe Lieberman is allowed to keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security committee at its caucus meeting next week."

More reaction at Memeorandum.