Lieberman, Udall, Gillibrand Urge Colleagues To Pass Defense Bill In Lame Duck
Posted: Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Washington, DC - Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Mark Udall (D-CO), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) issued the following statement today urging the Senate to pass the National Defense Authorization Act and repeal the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy this year.
"The Senate should act immediately to debate and pass a defense authorization bill and repeal 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' during the lame duck session. The Senate has passed a defense bill for forty-eight consecutive years. We should not fail tomeet that responsibility now, especially while our nation is at war. We must also act to put an end to the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy that not only discriminates against but also dishonors the service of gay and lesbian service members.
"The National Defense Authorization Act is essential to the safety and well-being of our service members and their families, as well as for the success of military operations around the world. The bill will increase the pay of all service members, authorize needed benefits for our veterans and wounded warriors, and launchmilitary construction projects at bases throughout the country.
"The process established by the defense bill would also allow 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' to be repealed in an orderly manner, and only after the President, Secretary of Defense, and theChairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have certified to Congress that repeal is 'consistent with the standards of military readiness, military effectiveness, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention of the Armed Forces.' If Congress does not act to repeal 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' in an orderly manner that leaves control with our nation's military leaders, a federal judge may do sounilaterally in a way that is disruptive to our troops and ongoing militaryefforts. It is important that 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' be dealt with this year, and it appears that the only way that can happen is if it is on the defense bill.
"We are pleased that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has also called on Congress to repeal 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.' We must act upon our responsibility to our troops and their family members and to the thousands of gay and lesbian service members who serve their nation bravely and honorably by passing the National Defense Authorization Act before the end of the year."
After two consecutive “wave” elections handed Democrats the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House in 2006 and 2008, the wave crested and rolled back Nov. 2, 2010.
Republicans took the House by gaining 61 seats, including Minnesota’s 8th District, which had belonged to Democrat Jim Oberstar for 36 years.
“Wow,” Republican Chip Cravaack said to a raucous audience in Hinckley, Minn., after Oberstar conceded the race. “We did it. The voters have spoken, and I hope they are paying attention in Washington.”
They are. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn. — who easily held his seat in the state’s Fifth District, which includes Minneapolis — thinks the election turned on the issue of the high national unemployment rate.
“I think the root cause for [the election] is the economy,” Ellison said. “The economy’s bad. Whoever’s the incumbent during a recession is going to suffer.”
Democrats held the Senate, but lost six races to shrink their advantage to 53 seats, including two independents who caucus with the Democratic Party.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who rode a similar wave to office in the 2008 election, said not enough Democrats campaigned on legislation passed in the past two years, including health care reform and the economic stimulus.
“I think we didn’t really campaign on our accomplishments, and instead shied away from our accomplishments,” Franken said.
Neither of Minnesota’s senators — Franken and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. — were up for re-election this year, but Republicans gained seats in neighboring North Dakota and Wisconsin, where three-term senator Russ Feingold was defeated by businessman Ron Johnson.
In an election dominated by the rise of high-profile “Tea Party” candidates, two successfully gained spots in the Senate: Republicans Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky.
At least two other Tea Party candidates lost Senate races, including Sharron Angle, who unsuccessfully attempted to unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. In Alaska, Lisa Murkowski ran as an Independent write-in candidate, where she may have defeated Tea Party-supported Republican Joe Miller. The write-in votes, which outnumbered those received by Miller, will take weeks to count. If victorious, Murkowski has said she will caucus with the Republicans.
Ohio Republican John Boehner will take over as Speaker of the House, while Reid will remain Senate Majority Leader. “Strong philosophical differences”
With nearly 68 percent of the vote in his victory over challenger Joel Demos, Ellison was able to win comfortably in a year when his fellow Democrats suffered.
But the vote totals are revealing: In 2008, with Ellison running for his second term and President Barack Obama at the top of the Democratic ticket, Ellison received more than 228,000 votes. On Tuesday, he won re-election with about 155,000 votes.
Ellison said the absence of young voters, the 18-to-29-year-olds who made up 18 percent of the electorate in 2008 but only 9 percent this year, was also a factor in Democratic losses.
“You had a lot of people who Democrats normally rely on who just didn’t come out to vote,” Ellison said.
Similarly, in his loss to Cravaack, Oberstar received around 130,000 votes –– his lowest total in the past decade.
The swing does not spell a conservative majority among voters, Ellison said, and many voters consider themselves moderates.
“They tend to be voters who don’t watch [MSNBC host] Keith Olbermann or Fox News,” Ellison said. “They watch Dancing with the Stars. They’re not watching stuff super closely. They’re kind of voting with how they think one side or the other is doing.”
Before Republicans take the House, a lame-duck session of Congress will begin Nov. 15. Whether — and to what extent — the tax cuts enacted under former President George W. Bush will be allowed to continue is expected to be the central issue during the session.
Other issues will need to be addressed in the near future, Franken said, though he is not sure how that will happen.
“On all these major issues — on trade, on collective bargaining, on health care for God’s sakes, on the federal role in education — there are really just philosophical differences,” Franken said. “I mean there are strong philosophical differences, that I don’t know how we’re going to bridge them. And yet, in many cases, we’re going to have to.”
Enlarge By Evan D'Alessandro, University of Miami Elkhorm coral provides daytime shelter for tropical fish near Key Largo, Fla. Ocean acidification due to global warming is happening at a rate that hasn't been known to occur naturally for the last 60 million years.
Global warming that deposits carbon in the oceans and turns them more acidic is threatening the early life cycle of coral reefs near Florida and throughout the Caribbean Sea, a study published Monday says.
Although other research has looked at how the world's increasingly acidic oceans affect adult coral, this is the first one to document its impact on coral's early life stages.
Coral reefs don't just make pretty screen savers: They add $30 billion to the U.S. economy each year through tourism, diving, coastal protection and fishing, says study lead author Rebecca Albright of the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science
"There have been very few, if any studies that had looked at the effects on early life-history stages, such as fertilization, larval settlement and recruitment," Albright says. "Recruitment" refers to the process of replacing dead coral with new coral.
Over the next century, the study found, recruitment of new corals could drop by as much as 73%.
"Reproductive failure of young coral species is an increasing concern since reefs are already highly stressed from bleaching (because of unusually warm seawater), hurricanes, disease and poor water quality," says study co-author Chris Langdon, an associate professor at the Rosenstiel School.
Scientists in this study looked at one species of coral — Elkhorn coral, known as acropora palmata— a prime reef-building species that once dominated tropical coral reef ecosystems.
Elkhorn was placed on the U.S. Endangered Species List in 2006 because of severe population declines.
"In order for that species to not go extinct, we have to be replacing them as we're losing them," Albright says. "The implications of this work show that ocean acidification ... is interfering with that ability. "
Ocean acidification refers to the increased amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide (caused by the burning of fossil fuels) absorbed into the world's oceans. This additional carbon not only warms the oceans, but also radically transforms their chemistry, according to a National Research Council report published this year.
Is the fear of ocean acidification overblown? Perhaps, say the authors of a study published in May 2009, also in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The authors of that study, led by Rebecca Gooding of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, dispute the belief that ocean acidification harms all marine life-forms and urged that caution should be taken when examining "overgeneralized predictions."
Albright says the field of ocean acidification research has only blossomed in the past 10 years, and it's only in the past couple of years that scientists have shifted their focus to look at the early life cycle in addition to the adults of various species, such as coral and shellfish.
U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks will give up the driver’s seat in key committees that have helped him bring federal dollars back home for Puget Sound restoration and national defense.
But the Belfair Democrat has played the minority role before — such as before the Democrats gained a House majority in 2006. He hopes his influence won’t dry up completely.
The Republican takeover of the House next year will force Dicks to give up his chairmanship of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. It will also prevent him from vying for chairmanship of the powerful Appropriations Committee, a post he was in line for following the retirement of Wisconsin Rep. David Obey.
“Chuck Knox (former Seahawks coach) said it pretty well,” Dicks noted as he prepared to board a plane back to the nation’s capitol. “You have to play the hand you are dealt.”
When Dicks was the ranking minority member of the House Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee before 2006, he raised concerns about the condition of national parks across the United States. The Republican chairman and other committee members agreed to boost the budget for the National Park Service. That started a trend, and Dicks pushed for increasing the budget even more when he became chairman of the committee.
Fortunately, Dicks said, bipartisanship has been the name of the game on the Defense and Interior appropriations subcommittees since he came into Congress in 1976.
“When you’re the chairman, you make the ultimate decisions,” Dicks said. “When you’re the ranking member, you try to convince the chairman to go along with your perspective.”
In many cases, committee chairmen are trying to reach a consensus among all committee members, he said. The notion of trading votes is less common than many people think.
“Sometimes a chairman will want you to go along with something,” he said, “but it’s mostly a matter of persuasion. I have always felt that if you treat people nicely when you are in power, they will remember that when they are in power.”
Dicks said he can’t predict how the Republican takeover of the House will change the atmosphere this time around.
“We’re just going to have to wait until they submit their budget,” he said, “and the president will have a budget. I hope we can pass our bills. I hope we can find the appropriate balance. But it is going to be messy.”
Dicks said he was “disheartened” that so many people failed to recognize how many jobs were created by the federal stimulus package and how that program kept the economy from sinking.
“The message on the Republican side was very effective,” Dicks said, “but it is ridiculous to stay the stimulus didn’t work. Now the other side is going to have to say what they are going to do to create jobs.”
The nation’s roads, bridges and tunnels are falling apart, Dicks said, and Congress can help local communities rebuild them. Sewer systems are in poor shape in many places, and improvements would be a good investment — for Puget Sound and other places in the country.
The Puget Sound Partnership has identified 614 projects in the Puget Sound region funded by $460 million in stimulus dollars. Those projects have created more than 15,000 jobs while helping address the problems of Puget Sound, Dicks said.
But House Republicans are likely to promote a very different approach to stimulating the economy.
John Boehner, R-Ohio, the next speaker of the House, has said his goal is to reduce federal spending and encourage job creation by bringing more certainty to the business community.
U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, next in line to become chairman of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, is calling for budget reductions.
“We all ought to be concerned about the debt we are incurring that we are putting on our children,” he said in a hearing last summer. “We can point fingers at Republicans, at Democrats, it doesn’t matter, but everyone needs to be concerned about the debt we are piling on our children’s future, on our grandchildren’s future, and on our great-grandchildren’s future.”
Dicks said he will work with Republicans, but he has yet to see a clear strategy to aid the economy.
“All they can talk about is tax cuts. Well, we have done tax cuts, so there’s a big question mark out there,” he said, explaining that a third of the stimulus funds were used to reduce taxes on middle-income people.
Dicks remains proud of the ecosystem-restoration projects he helped bring to Washington state, including removal of the Elwha dams, restoration of the Nisqually and Skokomish estuaries, and setting Puget Sound on par with Chesapeake Bay in terms of federal spending. He also secured funding to deal with the low-oxygen problems of Hood Canal.
With respect to military spending, Dicks was a key player in the construction of the submarine base at Bangor, conversion of Trident submarines and sustaining workloads at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.
This year, both Democrats and Republicans worked together to cut $7 billion from the Department of Defense budget. That resulted largely from a collaboration between Dicks and U.S. Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla., a 30-year member of the House who will slide into the chairmanship of Defense Appropriations next year.
“It’s going to be more difficult, because they (Republicans) want to make major cuts in discretionary spending,” Dicks said, referring to programs approved for each budget. “Those are the programs that create a lot of jobs.”
Asked if the shift in power makes him think about retirement, Dicks said everyone who gets older must think of such things.
“We’ll have to see how things go,” said Dicks, whose 70th birthday is next month. “If and when I make a decision, it will be in a timely way so that everyone who wants to run can run. That may be out in the future or whenever. When a person makes up their mind (to retire), they usually give at least a year’s notice.”
Dicks said he’s ready to face the “important work” of the coming congressional session.
“You work as hard as you can,” said Dicks. “Democrats are still in control of the White House and the Senate, so I have some people I can talk to.”
It is possible that the most stunning story of the past week is not the brutal midterm loss suffered by the Democrats, but the release of former President George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, and his attendant book-promoting pubic appearances.
Sitting with NBC’s Matt Lauer President Bush breezily defended his use of water boarding torture, explaining that he relied on the judgment government attorneys who advised him the practice was legal. He also told Oprah he was “sick” about not discovering weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but he went onto confidently assert that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein. But for me the jaw-dropping, headline-making revelation of this week is President Bush’s assertion that the low point of his presidency came when 33-year-old, hip-hop artist Kanye West went off-script during a Hurricane Katrina benefit concert, looked into the camera and asserted, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
Of this moment the president writes:
"I faced a lot of criticism as president. I didn't like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low."
Public outrage about the President’s assessment of this moment as a definitive low is both predictable and understandable. After all, one might expect that thousands of American deaths and the brutal entrance of the United States in the terrorist age on September 11, 2001, would be a reasonable moment to recall as the worst of his presidency. The economic devastation of 2008 is also a good candidate, as are the disgusting disclosures about American troops dehumanizing and torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib. Even if Hurricane Katrina were the defining event, many might expect the President to view the terrible loss of life, breathtaking destruction of property, and massive displacement of American citizens in the aftermath of the levee breach as worse than with the singular assessment of a young, if vocal, critic.
Still, I think there is a lesson in the President’s anxiety about having been labeled racist. It is a lesson about America’s relationship to race and racism and one that might help us better understand our own history, motivations, anxieties, and political choices.
President Bush describes Kanye West’s statement as his presidential low, a personal nadir. Recall that the nadir of American history is the time between 1877 and World War I. These are the decades immediately following the end of Reconstruction. After fighting a brutal and bloody war to preserve the Union and to end intergenerational chattel slavery, American Reconstruction lasted for an astonishing decade from 1866-1876. These were some of America’s greatest years in terms of the nation's willingness to pursue the vision of the founding documents. In these years black men ran for and held office, black families gained a toe hold as property owners, black and white laborers experimented with cooperative organizations, and former Confederates were expected to accept that black people were full citizens.
But the 1876 Presidential election provoked a crisis in the transition of national leadership (not unlike that of Bush v. Gore 2000). In response, America’s political parties chose backroom bargaining and partisan power-sharing over American ideals. Together they cut a deal that allowed Rutherford B. Hayes to ascend to the American presidency in exchange for an immediate end to Reconstruction. The parties were hastened and supported in this choice by the vocal and angry organizing of white Americans in the North and South. The visible evidence of black citizenship embodied in black male office-holders, black voters, and black property ownership disgusted, angered, and terrified white Americans who felt their grip on power slipping away under the policies of a strong, empowered, national government. They argued for states' rights, organized into klans, created racist cultural images, spread rumors of black criminality, and decried economic competition by new laborers. These white Americans called themselves patriots and pressured both Parties to abandon strong central government by ending Reconstruction.
With this 1877 compromise America plunged in the nadir. The decades of the nadir are marked by unthinkable racial terror, the destruction of black civil and political rights, the erosion of black economic capacity, the imposition of segregation, and the violent assertion of white supremacy as a governing norm. This is America’s most shameful chapter. Her nadir. Her low point. Perhaps because the tentacles of the nadir reach so deeply into the 20th century, it is a period that retains an unmatched ability to shame contemporary Americans. Even a causal encounter with the fully documented, indisputable, and indescribable racial horrors of those decades annihilates American triumphalism that asserts the United States as a unique and consistently free and equal nation. As late as 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, described racism as the American Dilemma. Racism and its material effects on the lives of black Americans have always stood in direct contrast to an American creed that emphasizes liberty, equality and fairness.
Empirically, racism may be as American as apple pie, but morally, ethically, and philosophically racism is a betrayal of America. In this sense, when Kanye West pointed to the Bush administration’s non-response as an act of racism, he called Bush a traitor.
West was not the only one who felt this way. More than 80% of black Americans reported in a November 2005 national survey that they believed America’s responses to Hurricane Katrina would have been faster if the storm's victims were mostly white. Black Americans were not alone in this assessment of the racial lessons of Katrina. On September 8, 2005, The Economist described the aftermath of Katrina as "The Shaming of America." Americans take great pride in understanding themselves as a prosperous, just and fair nation steeped in relative equality and uncompromised liberty. The televised dehydration deaths of elderly, black people in a major urban center did not fit this triumphant narrative.
The disconnect between American identity and racial suffering was clear in the images of Katrina survivors who called on their government as citizens but were rhetorically relegated to the status of refugees. Parnell Herbert, a New Orleanians and Katrina survivor whose story is recorded in the oral history text, Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond, explains that even the visual images of Katrina told the story of black Americans laying claim to their rights as citizens. He says: "Something that really surprised me was the number of African Americans in New Orleans who had large American flags in their homes. Were they flags that once draped a loved one’s casket?"
This is the shame that leads President Bush to asses West’s comments as his personal nadir.
And President Bush is technically accurate. In the weeks following Katrina the Pew Research Center conducted a national survey and found that 67% of Americans believed that President Bush could have done more in his handling of the relief effort and nearly 60% rated the response of the federal government as only fair or poor. The Katrina disaster also caused many Americans to reconsider the nation's security, with 42% reporting that the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina made them feel less confident that the government can handle a major terror attack. In the aftermath of the hurricane, job approval ratings for President Bush plummeted and never fully rebounded. In 2006 the Democratic Party won a majority in the House of Representative and the Senate. In 2008 Democrats won the White House. These 2006 and 2008 Democratic wins were, in part, about a repudiation of President Bush as incompetent in the face of domestic disaster and foreign war, but they were also fueled by an American desire to rewrite the narrative of racial inequality to which Katrina so forcefully reintroduced them.
In a previous article for The Nation, my husband, James Perry, and I argued that the racial angst caused by the visible, televised, disproportionate suffering of black Americans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was one motivating cause for Americans embrace of Senator Obama in 2008. We wrote:
"Not only did the Bush administration’s bureaucratic failures in response to Katrina give Democrats a way to effectively critique Iraq but the racial politics of Katrina temporarily and jarringly reawakened America to the painful realities of racial inequality. A yearning to soothe this national shame and heal the gaping racial wound that was reopened by Katrina is partly responsible for America’s enthusiastic embrace of Barack Obama. American willingness to confront racial injustice dissipated as quickly as Bush’s promises to rebuild the city, but Katrina had awakened a deep desire to prove that America is not a nation marred by racism."
And so it was that the televised suffering of black New Orleanians was part of the extraordinary path walked by the first black person to be elected president of the United States. But the American racial story did not end on January 20, 2009. We did not enter into a post-racial America. We carried with us into this new moment all the shame, anxiety and inequality of our nation's long history.
As an observer, I find the 2010 midterms uncomfortably familiar to the era of Redemption that followed Reconstruction. Current calls for small government and states rights during the administration of a black president sound suspiciously like 19th century efforts to weaken the state so that racial terror could be enacted with impudence against the black men who were then governing. After the aggressively anti-immigrant and more subterranean anti-black sentiments of the health care debate and the midterm election I have wondered if we lost our ability to be shamed by open displays of cultural bigotry and political action motivated by white anxiety.
In this sense I welcome President Bush’s comments. At my most optimistic I can read his comments as an assertion that nothing is more harmful than racism, nothing more embarrassing, nothing more un-American, nothing we must more fully and completely renounce. I know that is not exactly what he said, but I take a glimmer of hope from the idea that President Bush has reminded us that to be called a racist is not a badge of honor.
Once again, George W. Bush is not telling the truth about Iraq.
He has, as you may have heard, a book coming out this week. It's not a full-fledged memoir. It's an examination of various decisions he has faced during his life. (Andover or Exeter?) But he ducks much. He avoids the deregulation and free-market policies of the Bush-Cheney years that helped cause the economic meltdown at the end of his presidency. He doesn't confront his decision to divert resources from the war in Afghanistan to Iraq. Nor does he cover the administration's cherry-picking of the intelligence regarding Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. He spends more time on his trouble with booze. ("Was alcohol becoming my god?")
But Bush is mounting a defense, as selective as it might be, of the Iraq war. He acknowledges that he experiences "a sickening feeling every time" he recalls the absence of WMDs in Iraq, but he contends that invading Iraq was the right move because "America is safer without a homicidal dictator pursuing WMD."
Yet that statement is flat-out wrong. Not the "safer" part, but the description of Saddam Hussein and WMDs. Bush is still trying to mislead the American public, for at the time of the invasion, Saddam, brutal dictator that he was, was not pursuing the development or production of WMDs. The Bush administration's own investigation found this. Following the invasion, there was a probe of Iraq's WMD activity conducted by Charles Duelfer, a hawkish fellow who had been handpicked by the administration to handle this sensitive job. In 2004, his Iraq Survey Group submitted its final report. The report noted that Saddam "aspired to develop a nuclear capability." But it was quite clear on the key point: Iraq had not been actively working on WMD projects. The Duelfer report concluded that Iraq's ability to produce nuclear weapons -- the most troubling W in the WMD category -- had "progressively decayed" since 1991 and that inspectors had found no signs of any "concerted efforts to restart the program." In plain talk: nada on nuclear. The same was true, the report said, for biological and chemical weapons. It found that by 1995, under U.N. pressure, Iraq had abandoned its biological weapons efforts and that there was no evidence Iraq had made any chemical weapons in the preceding 12 years.
The report was blunt:
The former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners.
Nobody working on WMDs; no schemes to develop or obtain such weapons. The bottom line: Saddam was not pursuing weapons of mass destruction. The U.N. inspections of the 1990s and the international anti-Iraq sanctions had rendered Iraq's weapons programs kaput.
So once again, Bush is not being accurate -- or honest. To justify the war, the ex-president maintains he took out a dictator who was seeking the worst weapons imaginable. Did Bush not read the Duelfer report -- at the time of its release or in the six years since? Or does he not care about the real truth of his war? There's a question that ought to be put to him during the PR blitz for "Decision Points."
And allow me to pile on. In a push-the-book interview with NBC's Matt Lauer, Bush claims that had he not invaded Iraq, Saddam "would still have the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction." Again, that's not so. See above. Per the Duelfer report, Saddam did not have such a capacity.
In that same interview, Bush, still on the subject of Iraq, declares, "I gave diplomacy every chance to work." This is another super-sized whopper. As Michael Isikoff and I revealed in our book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," on May 1, 2002 -- almost a year prior to the invasion -- Bush angrily told press secretary Ari Fleischer, "I'm going to kick [Saddam's] sorry motherf****** ass all over the Mideast." (Our source, Adam Levine, a White House aide, was a witness to the encounter.) Those are not the words of a fellow committed to a diplomatic solution.
That anecdote aside, the facts contradict Bush's claim: At the time of the invasion, the U.N. weapons inspections program was under way and succeeding in Iraq. The inspectors were resolving key issues, such as whether aluminum tubes obtained by Iraq were for a project to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons (they were not). They also were finding no signs of WMDs. The inspectors were getting a difficult job done and, as we know now, deriving the right answers. Certainly, they were encountering problems. Saddam was not cooperating 100 percent. But the inspectors were navigating the roadblocks, and robust inspections were proceeding.
Occasionally you will hear some Bush defender say that Saddam tossed out the inspectors and that's why Bush had to invade. This is not so. The inspectors were yanked out of Iraq by the U.N. because of the pending invasion. That is, by invading Iraq, Bush ended the ongoing diplomatic process that was effectively dealing with the supposed Iraqi WMD threat. He did not give it "every chance to work."
Will Bush get away with these, uh, misrepresentations? He did so as president, and history may repeat itself this week.
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I'm trying to make sense out of "Dirty Coal, Clean Future," James Fallows' latest piece in the Atlantic, but I'm not having much luck. In one sense it's simple. Fallows makes two points:
Like it or not, the world is going to be using a lot of coal for a very long time.
China and America are collaborating very nicely on development of clean coal technology.
But collaborating on what? Here's where it gets confusing. Primarily, there's the fact that China is just building lots and lots of coal plants, which provides a lot of scope for experimentation:
In the search for “progress on coal,” like other forms of energy research and development, China is now the Google, the Intel, the General Motors and Ford of their heyday — the place where the doing occurs, and thus the learning by doing as well. “They are doing so much so fast that their learning curve is at an inflection that simply could not be matched in the United States,” David Mohler of Duke Energy told me.
....“You can think of China as a huge laboratory for deploying technology,” the official added. “The energy demand is going like this” — his hand mimicked an airplane taking off — “and they need to build new capacity all the time. They can go from concept to deployment in half the time we can, sometimes a third. We have some advanced ideas. They have the capability to deploy it very quickly. That is where the partnership works.”
But this type of progress, Fallows says, is strictly incremental. The Chinese are building new plants that are a bit more efficient or a bit cheaper or a bit cleaner, but even decades of this will only amount to modest improvements. When it comes to really getting the carbon out of coal, there's still only one way to do it: via sequestration. That is, capture the CO2 somehow and pump it underground where it will (hopefully) stay put forever. As Fallows notes, the U.S., Europe, and Australia have been building experimental sequestration facilities for many years now, and so far nothing has gotten beyond the small-scale stage. But:
America’s FutureGen was proposed early, and China’s GreenGen was proposed late. Now — surprise! — GreenGen is closest to being completed, with its scheduled opening moved up from 2015 to 2013, and FutureGen has only recently begun to move beyond the congressional-wrangling stage.
No question about it: FutureGen has been plagued with difficulties. But what about GreenGen? Will it work? Are they using any innovative tech? Is it cost effective? Is it really any better than any of the world's other sequestration demonstration projects?
It's a mystery. There's nothing further in the piece about GreenGen, and it's the only piece of the puzzle that provides any hope of seriously reducing the carbon emissions of coal plants. So I'm not sure what to think. All the collaboration sounds wonderful, and even a 20% or 30% improvement in coal technology would be welcome. But that said, sequestration is the holy grail and I still don't know if the Chinese are doing anything more on that front than the rest of us. Maybe that'll be in the sequel.
DADT was gone - done - and Barack Obama brought it back, probably for years. That's just a fact.
Glenn was talking about the fact that the Department of Justice is appealing a September district court ruling that held DADT unconstitutional. But this is an argument I have a real problem with. It's not because I have a problem with court rulings on issues like this, but because I have a problem with district court rulings on issues like this being used as a handy excuse for presidents to overturn laws they don't like.
Let's face it: if you pick your jurisdiction right you can probably find a district court judge to rule just about anything unconstitutional. It would be easy, for example, to find a district court judge somewhere to say that the healthcare reform law was unconstitutional. If this happened in 2013 and President Palin decided not to appeal the ruling, thus overturning the law, what would we think of this? Not much, and rightfully so. A district court judgment is just flatly not sufficient reason to overturn an act of Congress.
I guess the reason this is on my mind is that George Bush is back in the news, and it strikes me that this is the same category of reasoning he used to justify the use of torture on enemy combatants. Bush, of course, didn't bother with the fig leaf of a court ruling, but he used OLC memos to provide the same kind of excuse to uphold only the laws he wanted to uphold. A lot of liberals spent a lot of time condemning this at the time, and we were right to do so. This is really not a tactic we should be defending now just because the law at stake is one we don't like.
On a different note, I sometimes think that Republicans must be busting a gut over all this. Here they are, working loudly and relentlessly to prevent the repeal of DADT, and what's the result? Lots of liberals sniping at each other. You can almost hear Karl Rove cackling over his Diet Coke. Political strategy rarely pays off so beautifully.
Anne Applebaum writes today about the Senate election in Alaska, which pitted a tea partier who refused to endorse actual spending cuts against an old-style pol who bragged about bringing home the bacon. It highlighted the Republican Party's root problem in all its squalid glory, and the winner, as we all know, was Lisa Murkowski, the old pol:
When offered a direct choice, in other words, the majority of Alaskans chose the corrupt, big-spending Republican Party of Murkowski over the shallow, hypocritical radicalism of [Joe] Miller.
If nothing else, Alaskans' interesting choice must be keeping the Republican leadership awake at night: When faced with the reality of actual funding cuts, a year or two from now, might not other Republican voters suddenly feel they need someone like Murkowski, too? This must be a particular dilemma for the new Republican speaker, John Boehner....Poor Boehner must feel pulled in two directions, particularly because so many Republicans — and so many Americans — don't practice what they preach. They want lower taxes, higher defense spending, more Social Security and, yes, balanced budgets. They want the government to leave them alone, but at the same time they aren't averse to the odd federal subsidy. They like the way Miller talks, but, in the end, will they vote for Murkowski?
Answer: they'll vote for the Murkowskis of the world. Even the tea partiers will vote for the Murkowskis if the alternative is losing spending they care about. And that's the only spending that matters since there isn't enough spending they don't care about to make even a dent in the federal budget deficit. Boehner, I assure you, knows this perfectly well. There aren't too many ways to square this circle, so the smart money says the next couple of years are going to be full of fireworks, most of them very carefully designed to obscure the fact that Republicans aren't really serious about trying to cut much of anything. It should be very productive.
Soldiers with Special Operations Task Force - South prepare to load an all-terrain vehicle on to a CH-47 Chinook helicopter in preparation for a rapid offload during operations Oct. 1 in the Maruf District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Photo by Spc. Jesse LaMorte, Special Operations Task Force - South
Browse > Home / Articles / Health Care Spin — Again
Wild new claims top off a major campaign to discredit the law with misrepresentations.
October 28, 2010
Summary
As the election draws near, some conservative groups are making ever-wilder claims about the new health care law:
An elderly man in a Crossroads GPS ad makes the death-panel-esque claim that the law “threatens our lives.”
The 60 Plus Association has a World War II veteran evoking the Normandy invasion and claiming that “your freedoms will be chipped away,” unless the legislation is repealed.
The American Action Network made the false statement that “jail time” would be the punishment for not having insurance, when the law in fact forbids any criminal penalties.
In addition, we continue to see claims from the Republican side that the law creates “government-run” health care, or will cause a steep rise in premiums for typical families, or will give health insurance to illegal immigrants, or will lead to widespread cuts in Medicare benefits. As we’ve written before, none of that is true. We also see claims that the law allows tax dollars to be used to fund abortions, despite specific language in the law forbidding that.
Misrepresenting the health care law has been perhaps the single most dominant theme of attack ads by GOP candidates, party groups and independent conservative organizations. A record estimated $4 billion is being spent on both sides in this midterm election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And from our observations, a large part of that is being spent to discredit the health care legislation and the Democrats who voted for it. In this article we wrap up all this health care spin, examining both the latest claims and those that have been repeated most often.
Analysis
The midterm campaigns have been ripe with false and misleading claims about — what else? — the health care law. By our count, this is the fourth roundup of claims about the legislation that we’ve written. And it very well may not be the last.
A Government-Run Threat to Life and Freedom?
Some of the more outrageous recent claims appear in ads that call the new law "government-run" health care or a "government takeover." But much to the chagrin of a minority of lawmakers who wanted a true, government-run, single-payer system, that’s not what the law delivers. Yes, there’s an expansion of Medicaid, but the law builds on the country’s private insurance system, creating more business, in fact, for those private companies by requiring individuals to have coverage.
That hasn’t stopped opponents of the law from making this claim — and going much further than that. In an ad attacking Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, Crossroads GPS harkens back to pull-the-plug-on-grandma claims by having an elderly man say the law "threatens our lives."
How exactly does it do that? A spokesman for the group told us this was a reference to $500 billion in Medicare cuts in the law. That’s $500 billion in cuts in the future growth of spending over 10 years — more on this later — and the move, if it happens, puts Medicare on much better financial footing. The program’s board of trustees reported that [t]he financial status of the [hospital insurance] trust fund is substantially improved by the lower expenditures and additional tax revenues instituted by the Affordable Care Act," and that the savings would extend the life of the trust fund by 12 years. But there’s a big caveat. That’s only if Congress sticks with the reductions in the legislation and previously scheduled cuts in payments to physicians, set up by a late 1990s law, and that’s not likely. Legislators postponed the physician cuts until December this year, and they’ve repeatedly canceled them in recent years.
So, either the cuts the man in the ad fears won’t happen, or Medicare would be in much better shape financially. Either way, we fail to see how this "threatens" anyone’s life, so we judge this claim to be false.
Crossroads GPS ad attacking Sen. Patty Murray of Washington: "Problem with Patty," first aired Oct. 7
Multiple Speakers: We sent Patty Murray to DC almost 20 years ago. That’s plenty for Patty Murray. We trusted her to fix things. Heck, Patty’s become part of the problem. The debt that Patty has supported is going to affect our children for generations. Her bailouts have done nothing. For heaven’s sake, she supported Obamacare and that threatens our lives. She’s been there too long. We can’t afford six more years of Patty Murray.
Announcer: Crossroads GPS is responsible for the content of this advertising.
Speaking of over-the-top claims, this week the 60 Plus Association launched a minute-long spot that has a World War II veteran claiming "your freedoms will be chipped away" if the health care law isn’t repealed. Philip Storer tells viewers that he "was one of thousands that landed on D-Day. We fought to protect something we all hold very dear, our freedoms." Now, Storer says, those freedoms are "threatened" by this "government takeover of health care." We contacted 60 Plus to ask what basis the group had for those claims. We haven’t yet received a response.
This is the same group, readers may recall, that had former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop on camera making the bogus assertion that the United Kingdom considers seniors "too old" to qualify for artificial joints, pacemakers and coronary stents. We put the "freedoms" claim in the growing category of unsubstantiated hyperbole.
Announcer: June 1944. D-Day. Allied troops land at Normandy. Their mission: save the world from a deadly and growing oppression.
Philip Storer, WWII and D-Day Veteran: I was one of thousands that landed on D-Day. We fought to protect something we all hold very dear, our freedoms. Today, our freedoms are threatened by a very different kind of enemy. The enemy is big government, wasteful spending, and crushing debt. Nowhere is this threat more apparent than in the attempted government takeover of healthcare. The first step has been taken. If we don’t repeal the healthcare bill, government will grow, debt will explode, choices will become fewer and your freedoms will be chipped away. I still believe our freedoms are worth fighting for. The fight to repeal the government takeover of health care is up to you.
No ‘Jail Time’ Here
A group called American Action Network resurrected an old falsehood that the law calls for "jail time" for anyone who fails to get health insurance. It doesn’t. As we wrote in May, the law nullifies the possibility of prison time for those who don’t get coverage and refuse to pay a fine. It specifically says: "In the case of any failure by a taxpayer to timely pay any penalty imposed by this section, such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty with respect to such failure." The AAN ad ignores what the final law said, instead referring to an outdated news item from Politico from September 25 of last year. The bill was amended soon after.
The false "jail time" claim appeared in an ad that first aired Oct. 22 against Democratic Rep. Chris Murphy of Connecticut. And the assertion raised eyebrows at one TV station. AAN Communications Director Jim Landry told us that a station questioned the ad, prompting AAN to revise it to remove the reference to "jail time." Landry told us the ad was updated sometime on Oct. 26 or 27. According to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, a unit of Kantar Media, the original "jail time" version aired 92 times through Oct. 25. CMAG hadn’t captured a revised ad yet. That version says that those who didn’t get insurance would be subject to "penalties." That’s true.
The ad also says the law requires "thousands of IRS agents." That’s based on a partisan analysis using false assumptions. We knocked down that whopper in an earlier item, pointing out that the law requires the IRS mostly to hand out tax credits, not collect penalties.
Announcer: A government health care mess, thanks to Nancy Pelosi and Chris Murphy. 500 billion in Medicare cuts. Free health care for illegal immigrants. Thousands of new IRS agents. Jail time for anyone without coverage. And now a 47 percent increase in Connecticut health care premiums. 47 percent. Call Chris Murphy. Tell him to repeal his government health care mess. American Action Network is responsible for the content of this advertising.
Coverage for Illegal Immigrants?
We haven’t heard much about this claim since Republican Rep. Joe Wilson’s "you lie" moment. But American Action Network’s ad above, and another from the group, resurrects the charge, saying the health care law provides "free health care" or "spends our tax dollars on health insurance" for illegal immigrants. The ad below is airing against Reps. Mark Critz of Pennsylvania and Stephanie Herseth Sandlin of South Dakota.
The law doesn’t provide any "health insurance" for illegal immigrants. In fact, it stipulates that insurance plans sold on the state-based exchanges are available only to citizens and lawful residents.
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: ACCESS LIMITED TO LAWFUL RESIDENTS.—If an individual is not, or is not reasonably expected to be for the entire period for which enrollment is sought, a citizen or national of the United States or an alien lawfully present in the United States, the individual shall not be treated as a qualified individual and may not be covered under a qualified health plan in the individual market that is offered through an Exchange.
It also doesn’t provide any subsidies for illegal immigrants or any new "free" care for them. What American Action Network objects to is Senate Democrats’ rejection of an amendment to require some type of verification system of legal status. AAN also points to the fact that citizens are required to have insurance, while illegal immigrants aren’t — but those here illegally can still get emergency care at hospitals. However, that was the case before the health care law was passed. Illegal immigrants, and others who aren’t insured, are able to get treatment for emergencies (but not non-emergencies, unless they pay for it). U.S. law requires that.
The change that might occur is which pot of government money is used to reimburse hospitals for this uncompensated care. We called the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and talked with spokeswoman Mary Kahn, who explained how this works. Hospitals either get payments for emergency care through what’s called Emergency Medicaid (for patients who would be eligible for Medicaid but don’t have it) or the disproportionate share hospital (DSH) funds, provided for hospitals that treat a lot of uninsured people, Khan explained. The health care law expands Medicaid eligibility, so hospitals may find themselves filing paperwork for more money through Emergency Medicaid than DSH, whether those who are treated are illegal immigrants or not. Either way, it’s government money. And either way, illegal immigrants get treatment for emergencies and hospitals get reimbursed.
AAN also referred us to two news reports that undercut its own claim. A 2007 Reuters report said: "Less than 1 percent of Medicaid spending went to health care for illegal immigrants, according to a study that the researchers said defied a common belief that they are a bigger drain on taxpayer money." And the group cites a January 2008 USA Today article (yes, that’s a year before Obama was even sworn in) that states: "The sweeping overhauls of the nation’s health care system proposed by Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards would not provide coverage for illegal immigrants."
By the way, about half of illegal immigrants actually had health insurance before the law was passed, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
Announcer: Obamacare. A trillion dollar health care debacle. Yet Congressman Mark Critz says he opposes repealing it. It means $500 billion in new job-killing taxes, cuts billions from Medicare for seniors, and spends our tax dollars on health insurance for illegal immigrants. Yet Congressman Critz says he wants to keep it. Tell Congressman Critz to vote for repeal in November. The American Action Network is responsible for the content of this advertising.
Medicare Cuts
This might be the most common line of attack of them all. We’ve seen many versions of the claim that the health care bill cuts Medicare by $500 billion. That’s actually a reduction in the future growth of spending over 10 years, not a slashing of the current budget, as we’ve pointed out. To put that in context: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that federal Medicare spending will be $519 billion this year, and $929 billion in fiscal year 2020, even with these cuts. The health care law calls for a reduction in the currently projected growth of federal outlays of about 7 percent over the decade.
Claims that these cuts will "hurt the quality of our care" — like the one below from the 60 Plus Association — ignore the fact that the law adds some benefits to Medicare, such as free preventive care and more prescription drug coverage. And the law (section 3601) says that guaranteed Medicare benefits can’t be reduced. But one group of seniors — those on Medicare Advantage plans, about 10 million beneficiaries — will likely lose the extra benefits they receive, such as gym memberships or spare eyeglasses. These private plans currently get paid more by the government per enrollee than traditional Medicare, and the law brings those payments in line with the regular program, over time. 60 Plus ran ads similar to this one, which targets Rep. Steve Kagen of Wisconsin, against 15 other House Democrats.
Person #1: Steve Kagen betrayed Wisconsin seniors. Person #2: Instead of protecting us , he supported Nancy Pelosi’s liberal agenda. Person #3: Kagen voted for Pelosi’s health care bill… Person #1: …which cuts $500 billion from Medicare. Person #2: That threatens our ability to keep our doctors… Person #4: …and keep our health plans like we were promised. Person #5: These cuts will hurt the quality of our care. Person #2: Steve Kagen voted against Wisconsin seniors… Person #1: …now it’s time for us to vote against him.
Announcer: 60 Plus Association is responsible for the content of this advertising.
More Expensive Premiums?
Other ads, such as these from Revere America and American Crossroads, have claimed that under the law "costs will go up" or families will see "higher insurance premiums." But for most Americans with health insurance, premiums are expected to stay the same or decrease a bit, compared with what would have happened to costs without the new law. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, those in the large group market would see between no change and a 3 percent decrease in the average premium in 2016. The small group market would see between a 1 percent increase and a 2 percent drop in the average premium. Again, that’s in comparison to what premiums would do without the health care law.
For those who buy insurance on their own, the average premium would go up by between 10 percent and 13 percent. Why? Because the benefits in this non-group market would improve. Plus, 57 percent of those in this market would get federal subsidies — the extra money would entice them to buy more expensive plans than they normally would, says CBO.
On one point the ads make a valid criticism: The overall cost of health care is projected to rise because of the new law — but barely. In April, the chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Richard Foster, projected an increase of less than 1 percent in overall health spending over the next decade:
CMS Chief Actuary Foster, April 22: "[W]e estimate that overall national health expenditures under the health reform act would increase by a total of $311 billion (0.9 percent) during calendar years 2010-2019.
Foster predicted that the slight increase would come about largely because 34 million persons who would otherwise be uninsured will gain coverage under the new law, and that others will gain improved coverage, and all will make greater use of health care services.
This is one area where President Obama has conspicuously failed to meet campaign promises that his health care overhaul would reduce costs in addition to expanding coverage. Foster noted: "Although several provisions would help to reduce health care cost growth, their impact would be more than offset through 2019 by the higher health expenditures resulting from the coverage expansions."
Announcer: Congressman Hall voted for Obamacare. Government-run health care, it’s a bad plan. Government bureaucrats will benefit. Seniors will get hurt. Costs will go up. Care will go down. Longer waits in doctors’ offices. Your right to keep your own doctor may be taken away. It’s a plan we didn’t want and don’t need. But Hall voted for it anyway. Defeat Congressman Hall. Revere America is responsible for the content of this advertising.
Announcer: Not only does Ami Bera support Obamacare he says it doesn’t go far enough. Obamacare’s 525 billion dollars in job killing taxes Isn’t far enough? The higher insurance premiums aren’t far enough? What about the 500 billion dollars cut from Medicare? And reduced benefits for 1.5 million California seniors? Ami Bera and Obamacare. They’re bad medicine for California. American Crossroads is responsible for the content of this advertising.
Taxpayer-funded Abortions?
This emotional issue was a major point of contention in the final days of debate on the health care bill, and neither the anti-abortion or pro-abortion rights camp walked away happy. Does the law use ”our tax dollars” to pay for abortions, as claimed by the following ad from CitizenLink, a family advocacy group, and the anti-abortion rights group Susan B. Anthony List?
As we’ve said before, strictly speaking, it does not, except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother’s life, the same government restrictions that have applied to Medicaid recipients, federal workers and the military. The controversy stems from how the law aims to guarantee those rules are followed when the government provides subsidies to purchase insurance.
The law says that those receiving subsidies to buy insurance through state-based exchanges must submit a separate payment to cover abortion services (if they choose a plan that covers abortions), and insurance providers must keep federal money separate from private payments to ensure the federal money does not go toward abortion coverage. President Obama also signed an executive order reaffirming the federal rules on only funding abortion in cases of rape, incest and danger to the mother’s life. Does that go too far or not far enough? That depends on one’s viewpoint, and we’ll let readers be the judge.
The CitizenLink/Susan B. Anthony List ad (this one, targeting Rep. Joe Donnelly of Indiana) also makes the unfounded claim that the law is the "biggest expansion of abortion in decades.” But that’s conjecture. We looked at the question of whether more women would get abortions if more had insurance that covered the procedure, and we found the evidence didn’t support that claim.
Announcer: The fate of Obamacare came down to a few key votes, legislation that uses our tax dollars to pay for abortion, and Joe Donnelly had a choice to make. Protect life or side wth President Obama and Speaker Pelosi. And he chose them. Joe Donnelly betrayed you and voted for the biggest expansion of abortion in decades. Votes have consequences, Congressman. Citizen Link, Susan B. Anthony List, and Indiana Family Action are responsible for the content of this ad.
Almost two years and one disastrous election later, we're still waiting for the other Barack Obama to make an appearance, and from the gab coming out of Washington right now, it looks like we'll be twiddling our thumbs a bit longer (if not forever). Once again, the sweet talk of compromise and bipartisanship is on the lips of the president, but not[1], of course, on the lips[2] of top Republicans[3]. Talk about consistency!
Right now, all the news chatter is about domestic policy (health care, tax cuts, etc.), but count on the Republicans—Rand Paul aside[4]—to light out after the president sooner or later at least as hawkishly on foreign policy as they have domestically. Already, Senator John McCain and others are preparing[5] the ground to launch[6] what's likely to become a jihad against Obama's civilization-busting "mistake" in announcing a vaguely "conditions-based" drawdown of vague numbers of US troops in Afghanistan for July 2011. And that's just a start[7]. On a whole host of issues from the Iraq and Afghan wars to Israel, Iran, and North Korea, buckle your seatbelts and hold onto your hats. The critical weather in Congress, especially in the House, is going to get fiercer, and a president with a most un-Harry-Truman-ish tendency to placate is unlikely to stake his fighting future on foreign policy.
So expect war drums and alarums to the horizon (i.e. 2012) from congressional Republicans. And when it comes to the famous Republican urge to cut every budget in sight, be assured of one thing: our wars, the Pentagon budget, and the industrial part of the military-industrial complex—in other words, our next generation weaponry[8], however ill-conceived[9]—will surely be removed from the "table" where "all options" are always placed.
According to Chris Nelson of the invaluable Washington insider newsletter, the Nelson Report, "The likely new chair of House Armed Services, 'Buck' McKeon (R-Ca.), is a big supporter of Missile Defense and the Navy, while the Armed Services appropriations subcommittee will likely be chaired by Bill Young (R-Fla.), and between his and McKeon's districts, there are very few ‘missing' major space and defense contractors." McKeon has already made it crystal clear[10] that he's in favor of "boosting" the already bloated Pentagon budget.
Oh, and to complete the trifecta, the likely new head of the House Foreign Affairs committee is Cuban refugee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. (She once said[11]: "I welcome the opportunity of having anyone assassinate Fidel Castro and any leader who is oppressing the people.") She's guaranteed to push[12] for an ever fiercer policy on Iran, while offering total support to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Israeli government against the Obama administration. She's already called on[13] Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to expel all Palestinian diplomats from the US, and to cease sending[14] American Muslim religious leader Feisal Abdul Rauf, creator of "the mosque at Ground Zero,"[15] abroad to represent the country.
None of this should surprise anyone. Starting in January, it will evidently be morning in America again for Islamophobes. As co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus[16] andTomDispatch regular[17] John Feffer points out[18], there's a little bit of history going back a mere thousand years or so that, when it comes to Islamophobia, we ignore at our peril.
Posted Tuesday, November 09, 2010 1:29 PM | By David Weigel
Sean Bielat ran a tough race against Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), earning serious national attention, but coming up short by 10 points and 24,510 votes. He has not, however, conceded, because he was offended by the tone of Frank's victory speech. Here's that speech:
Also, Bielat has retained his Twitter account, and is using it to promote stories about possible voter fraud in the Bay State.
The story linked to doesn't actually demonstrate massive fraud in the Frank-Bielat race.
Like it or not, the world is going to be using a lot of coal for a very long time.
