Partisan Gridlock with Geoff Berg

It’s pledge drive around KPFT and we met our goal — thank you. Today’s show was filled with lots of right-wing bashing and progressive agenda pushing…and if you didn’t give this week, there’s always next week’s pitch. Give, give, give.

Listen here.

[He] has neuroblastoma, which is a very rare form of childhood cancer that targets the nervous system and creates tumors throughout the body.

Due to successful treatment in 2007, Van Nocker’s cancer went into remission, giving him 12 months of pain-free life. Unfortunately, in Sept. 2008, the cancer returned, and Van Nocker was once again in need of treatment. Unfortunately, his health insurer, HealthAmerica, refused to pay for one form of treatment doctors believe could save his life (MIBG treatment) because they consider it “investigational/experimental” since it has yet to be approved by the FDA.

Yet in April 2008, the insurer approved cheaper treatment for Van Nocker that was also “experimental,” prompting Philadelphia Daily News columnist Ronnie Polaneczky to ask, “So why, pray tell, is HealthAmerica playing the ‘experimental therapy’ card in the case of the MIBG treatment Kyler now needs? Gee, money couldn’t have anything to do with the decision, could it?”

Van Nocker’s parents are suing HealthAmerica, citing the fact that the company has apparently been dishonest about its criteria for the types of treatment it will cover and is denying payment for treatment in this case because of the high cost of the procedure — $110,000 pays for only two rounds of MIBG treatment. “These companies have to be brought to the courthouse to get them to do the right thing [not in Texas, where the all-Republican Supreme Court routinely rules in favor of the insurance industry and against its victims - ED],” says the VanNockers’s family attorney. “This child needs this treatment, or else.”

Kyle’s probably going to die. Had the Democrats’ health care proposals become law last year, Kyle wouldn’t have had to worry about an insurance company dumping him when he got sick. First, it would have been illegal; and second, regardless of what the private company did, Kyle’s parents could always have gotten coverage through a public option, which would have paid for his treatment.

But of course Barack Hussein Oabma is a Kenyan socialist who wants to kill your grandparents, ban the bible, and oppress white people. If you play the Lee Greenwood music loud enough, maybe it’ll drown out the guilt you ought to feel killing the reforms that might have saved Kyle’s life.

Partisan Gridlock with Geoff Berg airs every Friday from 3:00 – 4:00 pm on KPFT, 90.1 FM in Houston, 89.5 FM in Galveston, and streamed live everywhere else at www.kpft.org. Connect through Facebook or at www.partisangridlock.com.

Yesterday at the teabagger convention, Sarah Palin made some cracks about President Obama’s use of a teleprompter. You know, because someone who can’t give a speech without reading it is nothing but an empty suit without the brain power to articulate a vision unless it’s literally spelled out for him.

Palin’s speech was written on note cards. (Note to tea party attendees: that’s called irony.)

During the question and answer session, Palin was unable to respond to the simplistic questions she knew were coming without checking notes she had written on her hand.

Contrast that performance with the one recently turned in by the man she had just accused of being too dumb to articulate  his views without a teleprompter:

Now imagine Sarah Palin giving those kinds of answers, even with a cheat-sheet scrawled on her palm like a 12 year old cheating on a test.

Reasonable people may differ about policy, but to claim that Sarah Palin (five colleges in six years) is some towering intellectual heavyweight and Barack Obama (Columbia undergrad, President of the Harvard Law Review) is too dumb to be president is just insane.

Conservatives have spent a lot of time speculating about why progressives can’t stand Palin. Their guesses range from ‘liberals disdain her non-Ivy League pedigree,’ to ’she had a child with Down Syndrome rather than aborting it.’

Common to each of the right’s theories is the idea that Palin is a victim of a powerful liberal system who nevertheless bravely stands up for the kinds of basic American values that progressives don’t like or just don’t understand. Unlike liberals, they claim, Palin has to overcome a hostile media to get her message across. (Odd that Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, and his well-qualified and thoroughly vetted son George W. Bush [tea partiers: that's sarcasm] didn’t seem to have that problem.)

Conservatives are wrong on all fronts. Here’s the real reason progressives don’t like Sarah Palin: they’re patriotic. She has absolutely no business holding public office at any level of government. Making her President of the United States would be damaging to this country in ways we can today scarcely imagine. Mitt Romney, Olympia Snowe, and Tim Pawlenty are all wrong on the merits, but each is at least capable of being president. Sarah Palin, who couldn’t finish a full term as governor of one of the least populous states in the nation, isn’t.

Not only is Palin unapologetically dishonest, she doesn’t understand government, doesn’t possess the basic knowledge necessary to formulate decent policy (even conservative policy), is without the intellectual capacity that progressives quaintly believe is vital to doing a good job at governing the country, and can’t put together a coherent sentence.

This isn’t even a partisan issue. Virtually everyone who worked with Palin during John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign found her to be just as obtuse as she appears to be. Steve Schmidt, McCain’s chief strategist, has said that picking her as the GOP’s 2012 nominee for president would be “catastrophic.”

But to the we’re-always-victims crybaby extremists on the right, Sarah Palin is a martyr. Her inability describe basic details of policy, her embarrassing platitudes which serve as substitutes for answers to substantive questions are, rather than what they appear to be — a manifestation of her ignorance — evidence of her brilliance. The candidate she and they opposed won the presidency? The democratically-elected party in power wants to help 47 million uninsured Americans get health care? Democrats are working to mitigate the near-depression left to them by the previous administration? The marginal tax rate on the rich is being raised to Reagan-era levels? Not enough crying bald eagles and Lee Greenwood music at White House events? Well, it must be time for another revolution.

Why does the far right love her so much? Take your pick: She wears a flag lapel pin, she wants to outlaw a woman’s right to choose, she wants to turn the US into a Christian nation (which so many conservative extremists wrongly believe it used to be). Or maybe it’s because so many sexually repressed right-wingers fantasize about getting it on with her. It doesn’t really matter: rather than evaluate her rationally, conservatives take each gaffe, each misstatement, each lie, each amateurish stumble not as evidence that she probably shouldn’t become the most powerful person in the world, but as further proof of her authenticity and thus suitability to lead the nation they claim to love. How patriotic.

Partisan Gridlock with Geoff Berg airs every Friday from 3:00 – 4:00 pm on KPFT, 90.1 FM in Houston, 89.5 FM in Galveston, and streamed live everywhere else at www.kpft.org. Connect through Facebook or at www.partisangridlock.com.

According to a poll released this week by DailyKos/Research 2000:

39 percent of Republicans believe Obama should be impeached, 29 percent are not sure, 32 percent said he should not be voted out of office.

36 percent of Republicans believe Obama was not born in the United States, 22 percent are not sure, 42 percent think he is a natural citizen.

31 percent of Republicans believe Obama is a “Racist who hates White people” — the description once adopted by Fox News’s Glenn Beck. 33 percent were not sure, and 36 percent said he was not a racist.

63 percent of Republicans think Obama is a socialist, 16 percent are not sure, 21 percent say he is not

24 percent of Republicans believe Obama wants “the terrorists to win,” 33 percent aren’t sure, 43 percent said he did not want the terrorist to win.

21 percent of Republicans believe ACORN stole the 2008 election, 55 percent are not sure, 24 percent said the community organizing group did not steal the election.

23 percent of Republicans believe that their state should secede from the United States, 19 percent aren’t sure, 58 percent said no.

53 percent of Republicans said they believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Obama.

These are the great thinkers normal people are supposed to work with to pass legislative remedies for the nation’s problems? What exactly are the sane supposed to offer them by way of a compromise? That’s the topic on today’s Partisan Gridlock. Listen here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

George W. Bush’s appointee to the US Institute of Peace, Daniel Pipes, says Obama could and should improve his poll numbers by bombing the crap out of Iran (hey, it could be his 9/11 — awesome). What a sad, desperate cry for attention from yet another unemployed, bloodthirsty cretin.

Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush’s meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene. It would sideline health care, prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, and make the netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon.

The president nominates federal judges. Once the Senate approves the nomination, the judge serves for life. Any senator can hold up a nomination, preventing the nominee from receiving a straight up or down vote on the senate floor. That’s exactly what mega-conservative Jim DeMint of South Carolina is doing to one of President Obama’s judicial nominees:

DeMint (R-SC) has said he is holding up Marisa Demeo’s nomination to serve on the D.C. Superior Court because she has a “history of very leftist activism,” the Legal Times (sub. req.) reported today.

“There are just a number of things that don’t look like a fair and balanced approach that you’d like in a judge,” DeMint told the Legal Times.

DeMint’s criticism seems to be centered on Demeo’s work for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF).

The Legal Times story says Demeo has been pending “longer than the wait for any other [Obama] judicial nominee.”

Demeo, who is openly gay, was nominated nearly one year ago and was approved by Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee in May 2009.

Here’s something DeMint might keep in mind while he undemocratically prevents the Senate from voting on the President’s nominee:

There is a reason Barack Obama was elected to serve as President of the United States. It is because the majority of Americans trusted him to nominate judges.

There is a reason the American people elected a majority of Democrats to the Senate. They trusted our judgment to vote on judicial nominees.

There is a reason the Republican Party is in the minority in Congress. It is because the American people did not trust them to make these decisions.

I would love to take credit for that kind of epic partisan smackdown, but I can’t. I’m afraid the credit goes to…Senator Jim DeMint, who in 2005 said:

One of my goals as a Senator is to confirm highly qualified judges by ensuring timely up-or-down votes for all nominees no matter who is President, no matter which party is in the majority. That is my commitment, and I have encouraged Senator Frist to consider all options, including the constitutional option, to end the undemocratic blockade of judicial nominees. Senators were elected to advise and consent, not to grandstand and obstruct.

I would like to say something to my colleagues across the aisle. There is a reason George W. Bush was elected to serve as President of the United States. It is because the majority of Americans trusted him to nominate judges.

There is a reason the American people elected a majority of Republicans to the Senate. They trusted our judgment to vote on judicial nominees.

There is a reason the Democratic Party is in the minority in Congress. It is because the American people did not trust them to make these decisions.

The fact that Jim DeMint is a sanctimonious religious extremist makes his hypocrisy even more entertaining than it might ordinarily be. What a bunch of suckers South Carolina voters are.

Partisan Gridlock with Geoff Berg airs every Friday from 3:00 – 4:00 pm on KPFT, 90.1 FM in Houston, 89.5 FM in Galveston, and streamed live everywhere else at www.kpft.org. Connect through Facebook or at www.partisangridlock.com.

Pastor David Grisham of Amarillo is not shy about his fundamentalism. He recently set up a website encouraging Christians to boycott Houston because, in his words, the election of an openly gay mayor and opening of a Planned Parenthood facility in the city:

are [] abomination[s] in the eyes of God and should be boldly confronted by Christians seeking to preserve life and decency in the state of Texas. We have the absolute right to spend our money as we see fit. We also have the absolute right to withhold our money from things that offend God. In fact, we have an obligation to be good stewards of our money so it is not spent on evil.

The boycott has gotten plenty of local attention, though its effect is likely to be negligible.

Pastor Grisham was on Partisan Gridlock today to discuss his views, the status of the boycott, and why he believes it’s necessary for Christians to avoid spending money here. He gets credit for (1) being confident enough in his outrageous views to appear on a progressive talk show; and (2) being a gentleman…but that’s it.

Listen here.

Partisan Gridlock with Geoff Berg airs every Friday from 3:00 – 4:00 pm on KPFT, 90.1 FM in Houston, 89.5 FM in Galveston, and streamed live everywhere else at www.kpft.org. Connect through Facebook or at www.partisangridlock.com.

No doubt President Obama will deliver an inspiring and substantively appealing State of the Union speech tonight. With a year of history as a guide, it seems unlikely that either the White House or Congressional leadership will have the guts to stand up for anything he says. (Last year, Obama promised to “call out” Republicans who lied about health care reform. When virtually all of them lied about it — “death panels,” “rationing,” “government takeover” — the White House promptly called none of them out on it in any way that could’ve been described as effective.)

Now health care reform and the Democrats’ electoral prospects this year are pretty much done:

With no clear path forward on major health care legislation, Democratic leaders in Congress effectively slammed the brakes on President Obama’s top domestic priority on Tuesday, saying they no longer felt pressure to move quickly on a health bill after eight months of setting deadlines and missing them.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, deflected questions about health care. “We’re not on health care now,” Mr. Reid said. “We’ve talked a lot about it in the past.”He added, “There is no rush,” and noted that Congress still had most of this year to work on the health bills passed in 2009 by the Senate and the House.

Republicans of course are claiming that it’s the American people who stopped health care reform. True to form, this Republican argument is at odds with what might be called “reality.” Most people want a public option or a Medicare buy-in.  Put another way (for those of you from Wasilla): If a majority of the people wanted to kill health care reform and the Democrats responded by killing reform (which they’ve now done)…why would the Democrats be in such bad political shape right now?

Democrats started last year with the White House and overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. Part of what energized the the base in 2008 was the party’s promise to finally deliver on comprehensive health care reform. Every other civilized nation on Earth has managed to get universal care to its citizens, so why not finally drag our own country into the 20th Century?

After Arlen Specter switched parties and Al Franken was sworn in, the Senate’s Democratic caucus had 60 members. The Democrats had an overwhelming House advantage (which today stands at 257 Democrats to 178 Republicans).

Fortunately for Republicans, the only thing that stood in the way of the President implementing his agenda was other Democrats, who promptly stood in the way.

The progressive base of the party is now deeply disappointed in the White House and Congressional leadership for their combined failure to deliver on health care. Giving up on the legislation will only further alienate the most committed Democrats.

Sure the Republican party is a collection of extremists: birthers, teabaggers, religious kooks, and amateur constitutional scholars who can’t tell the Necessary and Proper Clause from the Nasonex and Pampers aisle. Michael Steele is a buffoon. Fox News is a right-wing circus which ought to insult the intelligence of even the least sentient among us (eg, Sarah Palin).

Polls show that Americans don’t much like Republicans either. But that doesn’t really matter with national Democrats finding new and ever more demoralizing ways to humiliate themselves.

The fact is that Democrats started 2009 with every bit of influence, money, and popularity any party could ever reasonably expect to have. The Republican freak show alone couldn’t have stopped them. It took Democratic ineptitude to do that. So now that Democrats have (to this point) proven themselves incapable of delivering on their promises, who exactly do they expect will donate money, volunteer and get out the vote for them in November?

Partisan Gridlock with Geoff Berg airs every Friday from 3:00 – 4:00 pm on KPFT, 90.1 FM in Houston, 89.5 FM in Galveston, and streamed live everywhere else at www.kpft.org. Connect through Facebook or at www.partisangridlock.com.

Who de-balled the Democrats? The obscene Citizens United decision from the Supreme Court which will permit ExxonMobil to decide who serves in what office…plus listener calls and quotes of the week.

Listen here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown, the Republican who defeated Democratic candidate Martha Coakley yesterday, ran a great campaign. Coakley ran a horrible one — expressing shock that anyone would think that she needed to stand in the cold to shake hands with actual voters. She spent more than a week vacationing when she should have been campaigning and called Red Sox hero Curt Schilling a Yankee fan. She earned her loss.

But is what happened in Massachusetts a signal that America rejects the President’s agenda? To hear conservatives tell it, the Massachusetts results mean exactly that. Here’s influential writer Kathryn Jean Lopez in the National Review:

If you had any doubt that Barack Obama is not the political savior, it was clear tonight. A year in, he is clearly just another politician, and America sent him a message, via Massachusetts.

Lopez’s fellow editors at the right wing National Review write today that the “national environment” doomed Coakley. They say:

The Massachusetts race was as close to a referendum on [health care reform] legislation as can reasonably be imagined, and it lost.

Wow — the voters of one state speak for the entire nation. Interesting that when the entire nation spoke for the entire nation, conservatives didn’t seem to hear what it said.

Following Obama’s clinching of the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, the National Review said that

The Democrats have gone all the way. They have nominated arguably the most left-wing major party presidential nominee ever, certainly the most left-wing since George McGovern.

But when he crushed John McCain 365 electoral votes to 173, the National Review couldn’t quite find the message amidst the results:

[T]he public has not embraced many of the central aspects of liberalism. President-Elect Barack Obama’s record and positions put him well to the left of any president in the last four decades. But to judge from his campaign, he is a man who wants to cut taxes, defend an individual right to own guns, take a hard line on terrorists in Pakistan, reduce the abortion rate, allow people to keep their health-care plans, and keep trade free. The polls suggest that he was wise to run in this fashion: They show that the public remains as skeptical about federal activism and social liberalism as they have been for years.

Kathryn Jean Lopez blogged on election night 2008 that

What freaks me out about this election is how oblivious to facts people have been. Everything about Obama’s judgment and radicalism — whether Sean Hannity or Stanley Kurtz or Andy McCarthy etc. is telling you about it — was essentially deemed irrelevant (including largely by the McCain campaign, save for Palin eventually talking about Ayers). Abortion? Near no one outside a handful of conservatives were talking about his record on infanticide — beyond abortion.People are in for a rude awakening.

So when conservatives win, people are paying attention and sending important messages that politicians ignore at their peril. When progressives win, people are just too stupid or uninterested to know how badly they’ve been duped and the nation’s political leadership ought to just ignore them.

To sum up:

1. Senator Obama was “arguably the most left-wing major party presidential nominee ever.” The right wing took note of it. Obama won the election. In the wake of his victory, he was recast as a conservative candidate who has no mandate to govern from the left because the country, despite having just elected him, didn’t want him to be as liberal as they pointed out he was just weeks before; and
2. Massachusetts held a special election in an off-year. The pro-choice Republican defeated a lackluster, uninspiring Democratic candidate, which means that the entire nation rejects President Obama’s agenda and demands to see his birth certificate at the country’s first national tea party / prayer breakfast / Lee Greenwood concert.

Democrats would do well to assess what lessons can be learned from Coakley’s loss. But there is absolutely nothing to be gained by trying to divine any political wisdom from conservatives.

Partisan Gridlock with Geoff Berg airs every Friday from 3:00 – 4:00 pm on KPFT, 90.1 FM in Houston, 89.5 FM in Galveston, and streamed live everywhere else at www.kpft.org. Connect through Facebook or at www.partisangridlock.com.