Monday Mashup (7/27/09)

(And I also posted here.)

Concerning the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Christian Science Monitor tells us the following (from here - and by the way, I didn't know that average earnings of about $31K for Cambridge, MA qualified it as a "liberal bastion")…

…last week, Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested after one of his neighbors called police saying that two black men were trying to break into Professor Gate’s house.

As CNN tells us here today…

The woman who made the 911 call that led to the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. never referred to black suspects when she called authorities for what she thought was a potential break-in.

Police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, released the 911 phone call Monday. In the call, Lucia Whalen reports seeing "two larger men, one looked kind of Hispanic, but I'm not really sure, and the other one entered, and I didn't see what he looked like at all."

I really don’t want to waste a lot of people’s time by rehashing this story again (I’m sure that, if Gates and Sgt. Crowley could get a “do-over” here, it would be a whole different story), but I believe that it was important to note that.

We also learn the following from John Harwood of the New York Times today (here)…

In this uncertain moment for the party of Lincoln, behold the jaunty, robust specimen of Republican centrism.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California strides into a conference room in his Sacramento office with a smile, having wrestled down his state’s mammoth budget deficit in a compromise with a Democratic-controlled Legislature.

Public service “brings me joy” just as Hollywood stardom did, he declares, walking a visitor toward the outdoor tent where he shares stogies with fellow politicians in the search for common ground. As sour as the nation feels toward most incumbents, tourists still crane to glimpse the Austrian émigré who first gained fame as a champion bodybuilder.

How anyone can claim to feel “joy” over the budget wrangling of the state of Kaa-Lee-Four-Nee-Aah is something I cannot imagine (whether they be a “centrist” or otherwise).

As noted here…

Wayne Clark, president of the California Mental Health Directors Association, said cuts in funding for county mental health services would ''inevitably result in increased high-cost inpatient hospitalizations and ... more people unnecessarily ending up in jails and prisons.''

Paula Campbell, president of the California School Boards Association, said cuts in school funding would lead to ''increased class sizes, cuts to key education programs, additional layoffs for teachers, librarians, counselors and administrators, and a shorter school year.''

Allan Zaremberg, president of the California Chamber of Commerce, said he was relieved that the new budget-balancing package didn't include tax increases, but he was concerned there could be new pressures to boost taxes if state revenues fall short again.

The budget package approved by the Legislature in February included more than $12 billion in higher income and sales taxes, and other levies, but those increases will expire in 2011.

The February plan also included a series of tax breaks for the film industry and other businesses.

Supporters said the breaks would help stimulate the economy, but the California Budget Project, a nonprofit organization that analyzes state fiscal policies, predicted the breaks would cost the state treasury at least $2.5 billion over five years, potentially putting additional pressure on future budgets.

Yep, go ahead and cut funding for schools, jails and mental health treatment, but you’d damn well better not better mess with Hollywood! I mean, the world is waiting breathlessly for the next “Herbie, The Love Bug” Sequel – am I right?

And from here - hat tips to Atrios for both links...

One of the key elements of the new California budget is to have the state use money that is normally allocated to cities. This is a crushing blow to the finances of many cities.

…

"Some of my cities are in good shape, some are teetering on the edge," [State Sen. Bob Huff, R- Diamond Bar] said. "It's not fair for the state to outsource its miseries to the local level."

If this is “centrism,” then I’ll take “socialism” faster than the “Governator” can crunch his biceps.

And finally, I give you Harwood’s Times colleague Adam Nagourney (here)…

WASHINGTON — The decision by Senate Democratic leaders last week to devote more time to winning Republican support for a health care overhaul has allowed President Obama to keep alive the possibility of bipartisanship on one of the most contentious issues on his agenda.

Oh yes, forget instead about whether or not whatever comes from Congress has a public plan or single payer option (and I thought this was an interesting post on the subject)…

In addition, the go-it-alone course could cost Mr. Obama and, more important, Congressional Democrats political cover should the health care plan prove ineffective, unpopular or excessively costly before the 2010 or 2012 elections.

It could also set a polarizing pattern for the remaining three years of Mr. Obama’s first term, complicating his efforts to get through an ambitious agenda by forcing him to rely only on Democrats for votes.

Oy vay – as Matt Yglesias points out here (concerning another legislative centerpiece from the Obama Administration)…

Personally, I’m more interested in a good bill than a bipartisan one. But the atmospherics of bipartisanship are important to the press. But the quality has been defined in a way that makes it essentially impossible to achieve. Normally, a bill that unites the base of one party with moderates in both parties counts as “bipartisan.” And that’s exactly what the (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – i.e., the stimulus) did. There just happen to be very very very few moderate Republicans. But that’s not Barack Obama’s fault.

Nagourney actually admits some of this later on in his column (a disingenuous act to concoct a straw man he can so readily torch himself).

And as kos points out here, “(Daily Kos blogger Jed Lewison) points out, it is in fact possible to have a Democratic-only bill, but (Dem Sen. Kent) Conrad is carrying water for the GOP and the insurance lobbyists that have purchased his office” (and as Jed/kos also note, “reconciliation” would require only 50 votes, despite the screeching of outrage from the Repugs and their media minions such as Nagourney – and speaking of chicken Senate Dems on health care, I pointed out earlier that Bob Casey of PA claimed to support a public option, when in fact he supports a “co-op” that would never be able to compete with private carriers…Specter claims to support a public option also, but that’s what he says today).

And as HuffPo’s Robert Creamer notes here…

It's no surprise then that in the current debate, the advocates of (“bi-partisanship”) have made it clear that, to them, "bi-partisanship" means one thing: Americans should be denied the choice of a public health insurance option like Medicare. Their problem is that while a public health insurance option may not have bi-partisan support in Congress, it has big time bi-partisan support among the voters.

But it doesn’t have “bi-partisan” support among the Villager punditry, including Nagourney, who would rather see a “bi-partisan” health care bill that does nothing except preserve the sorry status quo (thus giving them an excuse to recycle the same talking points once more), as opposed to a some baad, Democratic “partisan” bill that actually manages to hold down costs, allow for greater health care coverage for those without it, encourage competition, and provide something approximating universal coverage for the first time in our history (which is only right after all, seeing as how we spend more on health care on a per capita basis than any other country in the world).