Hmm. Not too well, looking at the coverage from the Middle East:

US Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Barack Obama has signed the order for a recent military strike on Yemen in which scores of civilians, including children, have been killed, a report says.

Upon the orders of Obama, the military warplanes on Thursday blanketed two camps in the North of the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, claiming there were “an imminent attack against a US asset was being planned,” ABC News quoted anonymous administration officials as saying on Friday.

The US air raids were then followed by a Yemeni ground forces attack.

The operation led to the death of around 120 people of whom many were civilians, including children, the report quoted Yemeni opposition as saying.

Oh boy.

UPDATE: In regards to the comments below, the point of this diary was to offer a glimpse at perceptions in the Islamic World, rather than being a diary about the still-sketchy incident itself, or my opinion of the quality of the linked journalism/opinion/whatever. It’s to point out – and express concern – that anger towards the US may be ratcheting up.

The Holiday the World Celebrates Each Year on the 25th of December Is Actually Tens of Thousands of Years Older Than Christianity Itself, So It’s Foolish For Christian Conservatives to Say That This Holiday Is For Christians Only When Almost Everything Associated With It Has Nothing to Do With the Birth of Jesus — and It’s Celebrated by Billions of Non-Christians Around the World

When we think of Christmas, images of Santa Claus, Christmas trees and wrapped-up gifts often come to mind. For devout Christians, the Nativity scene depicting the birth of Jesus comes first. But the truth is that the celebration of the birth of Jesus is a relatively recent addition to the late-December festival of the winter solstice, the most ancient holiday in the world — tens of thousands of years older than Christianity itself — and is one of the two major Pagan festivals that has survived largely intact in the Western world. The other is Halloween. (Image courtesy MySpace.com)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. Monday, December 21, 2009)

DEAR READERS: It’s that most wonderful time of the year again. And following a tradition started by the late advice columnist Ann Landers in 1956 to republish an updated version of her Christmas column each year, it is with great pleasure that I present the 2009 edition of my annual holiday article, “The Pagan Roots of Christmas.” Next Monday, December 28, I will present my third annual ‘Skeeter Bites Awards — “dishonors,” in the tradition of the Razzie Awards to the worst films of the year — to the people who in the past year have done more to bring misery to the lives of millions than anyone else. Enjoy this week’s article — and may your holidays be filled with joy, peace and love. Blessed Be and Happy Holidays.

By SKEETER SANDERS

(Original version published December 18, 2005)

Ah, December.

‘Tis the season when most of us are thinking about opening gifts under brightly lighted trees. Of kissing someone special under the mistletoe. Of eating, drinking and making merry. And, above all, of hoping for peace on Earth and goodwill to all.

But in 2009, on what ought to be the most festive time of the year — even in the face of the toughest economic climate in nearly 30 years — “goodwill to all” again appears to be in short supply in America among certain people, who continue to rail against what they perceive as a so-called “War on Christmas” because of what appears to be a lessening in recent years of the Christian symbolism of the holiday.

Once again, Americans appear locked in a conflict pitting Christian conservatives determined to preserve what they say are the use of Christmas symbols and traditions against secularists who argue that for government agencies to do so is a violation of the constitutional ban on government endorsement of any particular religion — in this case, Christianity.

FIGHT ON CAPITOL HILL OVER CHRISTMAS ERUPTS ANEW

And once again, the battle was being waged in the halls of Congress. Representative Henry Brown (R-South Carolina) earlier this month introduced a resolution calling on his House colleagues to express support for the use of Christmas trees, wreaths and other symbols of the holiday and to oppose any attempt to ban them.

“Each year, I could see a diminishing value of the spiritual part of Christmas,” Brown said in an interview with CNN. “It would seem like another group would go from the Christmas spirit to the holiday spirit. What I’m afraid of — if we don’t bring some kind of closure to this continuous change, then in 20 years it will almost be completely different from what we see today … and so we would lose the whole emphasis of what the very early beginnings of Christmas was all about.”

To date, Brown’s resolution has 73 co-sponsors — all but one of them Republicans. The House has adopted similar resolutions in years past when it was controlled by Republicans, but with the Democrats now in charge, the lawmakers this year departed Washington for their holiday recess without taking it up.

And as far as the Reverend Barry Lynn is concerned, that’s a good thing.

Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the resolution reflects “this bizarre view by some members of Congress that there is a war on Christmas and that they have to be the generals in some responding army.”

Lynn told CNN that he doesn’t have a problem with members of Congress promoting religion privately as individuals, but that they shouldn’t violate the First Amendment’s Establishment of Religion Clause by acting in their official capacity on Capitol Hill “trying to ‘help’ the baby Jesus by passing a resolution on his behalf. It is arrogant and ridiculous at the same time.”

He lamented that some people feel a “false sense of some kind of attack on Christmas” if a school holds a winter concert instead of a Christmas concert, or if retailers declare “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

O’REILLY STILL RAILING AGAINST SO-CALLED ‘WAR ON CHRISTMAS’

Tell that to Bill O’Reilly. The acerbic Fox News Channel talk-show host has been raising hell about a so-called “War on Christmas” for more than five years.

“All over the country, Christmas is taking flak,” O’Reilly said in a Christmas Eve 2004 broadcast of his “O’Reilly Factor” program. “In Denver . . . no religious floats were permitted in the holiday parade there. In New York City, Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg unveiled the “holiday tree,” and no Christian Christmas symbols are allowed in the public schools. Federated Department Stores — that’s Macy’s — have done away with the Christmas greeting “Merry Christmas.”

O’Reilly goes on: “Now most people, of course, love Christmas and want to keep its traditions, but the secular movement has influence in the media, among some judges and politicians. Americans will lose their country if they don’t begin to take action. Any assault on Judeo-Christian philosophy should be fought.”

Baloney. There is no such assault going on. On the contrary, what is happening is a growing recognition of America’s religious and spiritual diversity.

The thought has apparently never occurred to O’Reilly and other Christian conservatives that there are literally millions of Americans who are not Christian and have December holidays of their own. Why should Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or Yule not get the recognition they richly deserve?

Why should those holidays be ignored or subsumed under Christmas? And contrary to what O’Reilly and other Christian conservatives say, Christmas is not a strictly Christian religious holiday in the first place. It’s celebrated by billions of non-Christians around the world and is a public holiday even in countries where Christians are a small minority.

THE HISTORICAL TRUTH ABOUT CHRISTMAS

Christmas has never been — and will never be — a Christian-only celebration and the time has come for Christian conservatives to stop denying the holiday’s true origins, for it didn’t start with the birth of Jesus in a Bethlehem stable. The truth is, the holiday the world celebrates each year on the 25th of December pre-dates the birth of Jesus by tens of thousands of years.

Indeed, it is the most ancient holiday on the planet.

What we now call Christmas is actually the Christian adaptation of the many millennia-old Pagan celebrations of the winter solstice. With the notable exception of the Nativity creche, all of the symbols and decorations that we associate today with Christmas — the tree, the wreath, the holly and the ivy, the lights, the mistletoe, the eggnog, the Yule log, the caroling and even Santa Claus — are of Pagan origin and have nothing to do with the birth of Jesus.

Indeed, the very word “Christmas,” with its direct reference to Jesus as “The Christ” — which is derived from the Greek word kristos, or “savior” — is almost exclusive to English-speakers. In only nine other languages — Dutch (Kerstfeest), Farsi (Cristmas-e-shoma), French (Noel), Greek (Kristouyenna), Indonesian (Natal), Italian (Natale), Portugese (Natal), Spanish (Navidad) and Ukranian(Khrystouvym) — does the name of this holiday come even close to referring to the birth of the Christ child.

Many Americans often refer to Christmas as “the Yuletide.” And no wonder: Yule is the winter solstice. Most modern Pagans still celebrate Yule. Even most Christians use “Christmas” and “Yule” interchangeably to describe the season without even thinking about its Pagan origins.

Yule — which this year is today (Monday) — celebrates the beginning of the sun’s light and warmth returning to the northern hemisphere after reaching its southernmost point on the Earth at the Tropic of Capricorn on the winter solstice.

It is one of the two very ancient Pagan holidays that are still widely celebrated in the Western world — and beyond — relatively intact. The other is our modern celebration of Halloween.

[In the interest of full disclosure, this writer is obliged to state for the record that I, a former Roman Catholic, am a Pagan; more specifically, a Wiccan. Yule has special significance for me personally, especially this year; today marks the 25th anniversary of my conversion in 1984 to Wicca, the largest and best-known “denomination” of modern Western Paganism.]

THE ORIGIN OF THE CHRISTMAS TREE

If you really want to be historically accurate, then the Christmas tree should rightly be called the Yule tree, for it dates back nearly 5,000 years to the Celtic Druids. They revered evergreens as manifestations of deity because they did not “die” from year to year, but stayed green and alive when other plants appeared dead and bare. The trees represented everlasting life and hope for the return of spring.

Best known today for their celebrations of the summer solstice in June at Stonehenge, the Druids decorated their trees for the winter solstice in December with symbols of prosperity: a fruitful harvest, coins for wealth and various charms such as those for love or fertility.

Scandinavian Pagans, particularly the Norse, became the first to bring their decorated trees indoors, as this provided a warm and welcoming environment for the native fairy folk to join in the festivities.

The Saxons, a Pagan tribe from what is now Germany, were the first to place lights on the their trees in the form of candles (an extremely dangerous fire hazard by today’s standards). For centuries, the ancient Romans decorated their homes with evergreens at the winter solstice festival of Saturnalia — which also marked the Roman New Year — and exchanged evergreen branches with friends as a sign of good luck.

Christians’ use of the tree symbol for the December holidays did not begin until the 16th century, when devout Catholics in what is now Italy brought decorated trees into their homes. The German-born Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, is credited with starting the tradition in England in 1841 when he brought the first Christmas tree into Windsor Castle.

THE EIGHT PAGAN HOLIDAYS

Nature’s cycles of winter, spring, summer and fall (and everything else in between) are so much a part of human life and society on Earth that to acknowledge, celebrate and even sanctify those cycles is a primal need we simply cannot ignore. Just ask any ski-resort operator in winter or swimming-pool operator in summer — or any farmer, for that matter.

Yet those who follow the world’s three great monotheistic religions — Christianity, Judaism and Islam — have long been reluctant to do so and instead instituted their own rituals, holy days and festivals. The fact that many of the major Christian, Jewish and Muslim holidays — and even some civic and national holidays — often occur in tandem with the eight major Pagan holidays during the course of the year is no accident.

In addition to the winter solstice celebration of Yule on December 20-22 (depending on the actual date of the solstice itself from one year to the next), the other seven Pagan holidays are:

• Imbolg or Candlemas (Groundhog Day, February 2) — also known among Catholics as St. Brigid’s Day;

• Eostre or Ostara (Spring Equinox, March 20-22);

• Beltaine (May Day, May 1);

• Litha (Summer Solstice, June 20-22);

• Lammas or Lughnasadh (Midsummer’s Day, August 1);

• Mabon (Autumn Equinox, September 20-22);

• Samhain (pronounced SOW-en), the Wiccan New Year (Halloween, October 31).

This is why Easter (whose name in English is a derivative of Eostre) always falls on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. And why Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, almost always falls near the autumn equinox.

Jews transformed the three ancient harvest festivals of the Canaanites into the three festivals of Creation (Tabernacles), Revelation (Pentecost), and Redemption (Passover). Likewise, Christians and Muslims transformed their ancient, Nature-based festivals into celebrations of the singular events in, respectively, the life of Jesus and the career of the Prophet Mohammed.

HOW AN ANCIENT ROMAN HOLIDAY BECAME CHRISTMAS

After Christianity was proclaimed the state religion of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine in 312 C.E. (Common Era), the early Christian church — now the Vatican — used the transformation of the ancient holidays and festivals as a tool to convert Pagans to Christianity throughout the empire and beyond.

Yet the church barred Christians from holding any kind of celebration to honor the birth of Jesus, primarily because the actual date of his birth was unknown — and remains unknown to this day, although there is some astronomical and archaeological evidence suggesting that Jesus was actually born in the spring.

The church’s ban was lifted in 350 C.E., when Pope Julius I proclaimed a feast day to celebrate Jesus’ birth — and deliberately chose December 25 as the date to hold “Christ’s Mass” to absorb and Christianize not only Yule, but also Saturnalia, which honored Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture.

Saturnalia was celebrated with feasting, gift-giving and role-reversal between men and women and between slaves and their masters. It was also marked by the unabashed enjoyment of sensual and erotic pleasures, which many conservative Christians today strongly condemn as wanton debauchery, but still survives in our time (primarily around New Year’s Eve).

And because Saturnalia also marked the Roman New Year under the Julian calendar, the changeover to the present-day Gregorian calendar in 1582 resulted in the one-week interval between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.

Upper-class Romans also celebrated the birthday of Mithra, the sun god, on December 25. It was believed that Mithra, an infant god, was born of a rock. For them, Mithra’s birthday was the most sacred day of the year — especially since the daylight from the sun began to lengthen on the 25th, following the winter solstice.

CHRISTIANITY VS. PAGANISM

The current debate in the United States over “Christmas” versus “Holiday” trees, decorations and greetings is part of a much deeper clash of cultures that has gone on for centuries: Christianity vs. Paganism.

Paganism is pantheistic and circular; Christianity is monotheistic and linear. Pagans celebrate the eternal natural cycle of being. Christians venerate the linear concept of progress, from creation to ultimate redemption.

Pagans live in the realm of the eternal recurrence. Pagan rites maintain harmonious relationships among the gods; thus, these rituals guarantee the continuity of Nature’s cycles, which Nature-based human societies depend on for their sustenance.

Christians (as well as Jews and Muslims) worship the God who created all natural things and stands above them. To them, when God intervenes in the world, it is not to create a disruption of natural events, but rather to generate some wonderful new direction in human affairs.

It is at the winter solstice — more so than at any other time of the year — that people of Judeo/Christian/Muslim faith feel most acutely the tension between the origins of their religion in Pagan Nature worship on the one hand and the evolution of their faith into belief in a single God and a linear remembrance of historical events and teachings on the other.

SURVEY REVEALS AMERICA’S GROWING RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY

And for many conservative Christians in particular, that tension could only have grown sharper in recent years as the number of Americans who do not identify themselves as Christian has been growing sharply since 1990, according to data compiled by the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), a private poll conducted by researchers at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and funded by the Lilly Endowment and the Posen Foundation.

The U.S. Census Bureau is constitutionally barred from directly compiling data on the religious affiliations of Americans, thus the ARIS survey — the third conducted by Trinity College since 1990 — is considered authoritative.

The latest ARIS survey of more than 54,000 people conducted between February and November of 2008 and released in March of this year showed that the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Christians — inclusive of all its denominations — has fallen to 76 percent of the population, down from 86 percent in 1990.

Those who do call themselves Christian are more frequently describing themselves as “nondenominational” “evangelical” or “born again.” Significantly, the ARIS survey found, this increase corresponds strongly with a dramatic decline in the number of Americans who identify themselves as so-called “mainline” Protestants — particularly Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists and Presbyterians — which fell from 17 million in 1990 to only five million today.

A SHARP RISE IN ‘SPIRITUAL, BUT NOT RELIGIOUS’ AMERICANS — ESPECIALLY IN NEW ENGLAND

At the same time, the ARIS survey found the proportion of Americans who declined to state any religious affiliation has skyrocketed, from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 15 percent today, with the vast majority of this group identifying themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.”

This group is most heavily concentrated in northern New England and the Pacific Northwest. Vermont leads all other states in this category by a full nine percentage points, with a record-high 34 percent of its residents identifying themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.”

Out of a total U.S. adult population of 175.4 million people who professed a religious or spiritual belief system in the first ARIS poll in 1990, 151.4 million, or roughly 85 percent, identified themselves as Christian.

In the second ARIS survey in 2001, 159.5 million out of a total 207.9 million believers — 76 percent — identified themselves as Christian.

Now, out of a total U.S. adult population of 228 million believers, 173.4 million identified themselves as Christian, unchanged in percentage terms from the 76 percent the ARIS survey found in 2001.

A SHIFT IN ROMAN CATHOLIC POPULATION TO THE SOUTHWEST

The 2009 ARIS survey notes that America’s religious geography — particularly of the nation’s 57.2 million Roman Catholics — has been transformed since 1990. “Religious switching along with Hispanic immigration has significantly changed the religious profile of some states and regions,” the survey’s principal authors, Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, reported.

“Between 1990 and 2008, the Catholic population proportion of the New England states fell from 50 percent to 36 percent and in New York state, it fell from 44 percent to 37 percent, while it rose in California from 29 percent to 37 percent and in Texas from 23 percent to 32 percent.”

BAPTISTS, MORMONS, MUSLIMS AND PAGANS UP; BUDDHISTS, HINDUS DOWN; JEWS HOLD STEADY

Other key findings in the 2009 ARIS survey:

• Baptists, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, have increased their numbers by two million since 2001, to 36.1 million, but continue to decline as a proportion of the population, from 16.3 percent in 2001 to 15.8 percent today.

• Mormons — members of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — have increased in numbers enough (3.1 million) to hold their own proportionally, at 1.4 percent of the population.

• The number of Muslim Americans continues to grow, from 527,000 in 1990, to 1.3 million today. Immigration accounts for the most of the increase, including Iranian refugees from the 1979 revolution, Bosnians from the 1990s war in the Balkans and Somalians from the still-ongoing violence there.

• Adherents of co-called “new religious movements” — including Wiccans and self-described Pagans — have grown faster this decade than in the 1990s. While there was no census of American Pagans in 1990, the 2001 ARIS survey did report at least 307,000 Americans identifying themselves as such, with 134,000 professing to be Wiccans, 33,000 as Druids and 140,000 as eclectic “neo-Pagans” of a wide spectrum of traditions.

(For the 2009 survey, there was no faith-specific breakdown of adherents in the “new religious movements” category, instead listing 2.8 million such Americans today, compared to 1.7 million in 2001.)

• The number of American adherents of Eastern religions — Buddhism, Shinto and Hinduism — which more than doubled in the 1990s — has declined slightly, from 2.02 million in 1990 to 1.96 million today. However, the number of Buddhists alone edged up slightly from 1.08 million in 2001 to 1.18 million now.

(Buddhists have their own major holiday in December: Bodhi Day –December 8 — which celebrates the story of how the philosopher Siddartha Gautama of India became the Buddha by sitting under a bodhi tree and vowing to remain there until he achieved total enlightenment.)

• In strictly religious terms, Jewish Americans continue to decline numerically, from 3.1 million in 1990 to 2.7 million today — 1.2 percent of the population. However, when defined more broadly as an ethnic group, including those who do not practice the faith, the American Jewish community has remained remarkably stable since 1990.

ATHEISTS, AGNOSTICS ONLY A TINY FRACTION OF U.S. POPULATION; SECULARISTS DROPPED FROM SURVEY

Only a tiny fraction of Americans call themselves atheist or agnostic, the new ARIS survey found. But based on stated beliefs, 1.62 million, or 2.3 percent, are atheist (believe there is no God) and 1.98 million, or 4.3 percent, are agnostic (unsure if God exists or not).

The 2001 ARIS survey counted only 53,000 Americans as identifying themselves as “secular” and even fewer — 43,000 — calling themselves “humanists.” There was no accounting of either group in 1991 and they were dropped from the 2009 survey as statistically insignificant.

The truth is, America in the closing days of 2009 is more religiously and spiritually diverse now than it’s ever been before in its more-than-233-year history — and conservative Christian majoritarians are going to have to deal with it, whether they like it or not.

IS IT A PAGAN CHRISTMAS OR A CHRISTIAN YULE?

If they wanted to, today’s Pagans could reclaim the Christmas tree — indeed, all the decorative trappings of Christmas, save for the Nativity creche — as being rightfully theirs, since Pagans created them in the first place.

But modern Pagans are a practical lot, with most viewing Christmas simply as the Christian world celebrating Yule in their own way — albeit, three to five days after the actual winter solstice — and thus see no conflict in celebrating at least the secular aspects of Christmas themselves.

And December isn’t called the holiday season for nothing. There’s also Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day and scores of other holidays and festivals around the world this month — all of which culminate in the ringing in of the new year at midnight on December 31.

Thanks to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar as the universal calendar used worldwide and the global system of 24 time zones, New Year’s Day is our only truly global holiday — which we all got to watch unfold on our TV screens in all its joyful glory a decade ago as we greeted the turn of the millennium (albeit, a year too soon, since there mathematically never was a Year Zero).

So whichever way you celebrate the holidays, may yours be filled with joy, peace and love.

Blessed Be! And Happy Holidays.

###

SUGGESTED BOOKS (Available at Amazon.com):

<Pagan Christmas: The Plants, Spirits, and Rituals at the Origins of Yuletide by Christian Rätsch and Claudia Müller-Ebeling (Paperback – November 4, 2006).

The Origins of Christmas by Joseph F. Kelly (Paperback – August 2004).

Yule: A Celebration of Light and Warmth by Dorothy Morrison (Paperback – September 1, 2000).

###

Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been out of touch lately and just so focused on personal stuff that I’ve found it difficult to keep up with the day to day changes in the health care bill and the many permutations it’s experienced, but I don’t care about the battle, except as a means to an end.

I want to be clear: this isn’t aimed at anyone’s specific comments or point of view.  It’s more of a general perspective on the overall tone I’ve read and seen in a lot of different places.  

But here’s the short and simple: I don’t care about the battle here.  I don’t care who wins and who loses.  I don’t care who comes out of this on top or looking best or anything else.  I just care about health care reform and what we can get, what we will get, and how to get the best possible end result.

Franky, I think we’re kind of screwed, at least in the short term.  We’re dealing with an opposing party that has, in no uncertain terms, demonstrated its complete and total unwillingness to be part of any sort of rational debate and discussion.  They want nothing more than to take all of us down and that’s all they’ve got.  It’s their one move, and I give them some small credit for playing it well and with consistency.  

But our problems aren’t with them.  They’re with our own side.  It’s our own weaknesses that make this such a monster.

The legislation I’ve been reading about has good things in it, but it’s got some pretty bitter pills that we’d have to swallow and I’m having real trouble figuring out whether or not it’s worth swallowing.  I am so completely and totally torn on this and I just can’t figure out which side I’m on.  I’m leaning towards supporting passage with the hopes that we can improve upon it in reconciliation.

But I want to say something fairly simple: there are a lot of people who support health care reform who are very angry with one another right now and not treating one another particularly well.  I’m not talking about the politicians.  I think we have an active obligation to challenge Sanders, Leahy, Dean and every other public figure who supports health care reform to do the right thing on this bill, even if we’re not in agreement as to what the right thing is.  We need to let them know that there is pressure from the left and that we’re not pleased and keep that pressure on, even if it’s just to ensure that all this gets addressed in reconciliation with the budget process.  

But I don’t believe for a moment that we’re acting in bad faith.  I don’t believe for a second that people on either side of this specific bill are being disingenuous, duplicitous or acting out of anything but an honest point of severe frustration with what they’re seeing go down.

We all want health care reform.  We want it sooner rather than later.

What we’re disagreeing on is how best to get there.  

We’ve got good reasons for disagreeing.

I have no answers here.  I just want to say– I respect that we can have this fight and I respect our passion for our views, our ideas and our points of view.

I don’t care who wins this.  I just don’t want us all to lose.

(I asked the folks at FDL to crosspost this latest diary from Jon Walker at GMD. In my opinion, it responds to the opinions many are expressing. This is a great and important debate, folks. Thanks to everyone for participating. – promoted by odum)

Cross posted from FDL Action, authored by Jon Walker.

There is a very insidious myth right now that there is a large group of progressive leaders who want to “kill” health care reform in its entirety. While there might be some progressive leaders out there who have advocated for this position, I have yet to hear from them. What I have heard from people like Howard Dean, Markos Moulitsas, Keith Olbermann, Jane Hamsher, etc… is that they simply want to kill the current version of the Senate bill. None of them, to my knowledge, have advocated ending all efforts to pass a health care reform bill. I believe each and every one of them have advocated for simply passing a different bill through different means. Do not heed those who are working to create a false dynamic where the only two options are passing this horrible Senate bill or passing nothing at all. The idea that there is a large group of progressive leaders trying to kill health care reform is a red herring.

The other great myth is that if this current Senate bill, thoroughly compromised to get 60 votes, does not become law it will be impossible for any health care reform to pass during this Congress. President Obama made sure to include instructions to pass health care reform using reconciliation in the budget for a reason. It is still completely possible to pass an arguably better bill with only a simple majority in the Senate using reconciliation. Progressive activists are demanding to “kill this particular Senate bill” because they know Democrats will not walk away from health care reform empty handed. If need be, they will use reconciliation. While Senator Harry Reid and Barack Obama for some reason think it is preferable to let Senators Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Blanche Lincoln gut health care reform; if they are forced to, they will use a special procedure that completely cuts these conservadems out of the debate.

While I cannot speak for other progressives, I personally have outlined at least four strategies to produce a better reform package:

1. Try to pass a version of the House bill using reconciliation. Take provisions removed by the Byrd rule and pass them by attaching them whole or piecemeal to the next few big defense and/or agricultural appropriations bills.

2. Use reconciliation to pass a bill with only Byrd-rule proof provisions. This would include an expansion of Medicaid, expansion of CHIP, early Medicare buy-in, public option, possibly employer mandate, etc…

3. Pass the bill with no individual mandate for right now. Let progressives hold the individual mandate hostage until some point between now and 2015 (when the individual mandate goes into effect), and they will trade it in exchange for better reforms. There is zero need to have the individual mandate just sitting on the books unused for the next few years.

4. Force Harry Reid to use the “nuclear option” like former Senator Bill Frist threatened to do.

I will admit number four is a long shot (although in reality it is the simplest and best solution), but the first three should be completely doable. All the progressive leaders I know who are against this particular Senate bill have advocated for similar strategies to produce a better reform package.

The real choice is between: this current terrible Senate bill, a potentially much more progressive reform package passed using hardball tactics, or no health care reform bill at all. Obama and the Democratic leadership clearly prefer the first option, but they have also made it clear that they will not accept complete failure by passing no bill at all. If they can’t get this massive, corporate giveaway Senate bill passed into law and are left with no other option, they will using reconciliation.

The argument is not between people who say pass this imperfect bill and uncompromising, ideological, progressive straw men saying “kill all health care reform because we are unhappy.” The argument is really between some who say we should cheer for our representatives in Washington whenever they pass some terrible of pile of broken promises and others who are demanding that our elected officials use every tool at their disposal to fulfill the promises they made. Progressive leaders are not upset that the reform is imperfect. They are angry because our elected officials have the ability to fulfill their promises to pass a much better reform package but refuse to use hardball tactics to live up to their promises. Killing this current Senate bill is not an act of progressive nihilism; it is the first step in a strategy to force our members of the Senate to admit they can, in fact, pass a more progressive bill.

Until progressives start demanding Democrats in Congress serve us something better than BS sandwiches that will be the only thing we ever get to eat. Those on the “left” who say we should push for the passage of this terrible Senate bill because it is “the best we can get” are lying to you. By being enablers of this myth that Democrats can’t do better, they are, in fact, fighting against long term progressive change.

Things will never get better until you demand they get better. Do not buy the nonsense of those who say you must accept expectations so low that you are practically eating dirt. Do not buy the lie that we need to elect “just a few more Democratic senators,” because the real problem is that the ones we have refuse to do their jobs. We need thousands of voices all calling out the truth that the Democrats in Washington have the tools at their disposal to do much better. This is what it means to speak truth to power.

As a lobbyist I'm often in the position of trying to figure out an answer to this question: should we fight, and hold out for what we want, or should we take what we think is the best we can get now, even though it's a lot worse than what we want, and try to get more later?

This is the question that activists are addressing on the health care bill. On the one hand we have people like born-again Democrat Howard Dean and many posters at GMD, arguing that the bill is so bad that it would be better to kill it. On the other hand, we have Democrats and pundits who have been reliably progressive voices but are now being targeted as sellouts for supporting passage.

In evaluating this question, a number of other questions come to my mind:

1. The public option? Really? That's what we wanted?
It's not the only argument against passing the bill now, but the fight over the public option was what fueled much of the controversy through the summer and fall, and particularly the treachery of Joe Lieberman. We need to keep in mind, though, that the public option was always a weak compromise, a recognition that progressives can't get what we really want, single-payer, at least this time around. At GMD we've mocked Catamount Health, Vermont's version of the public option, but we recognize that even an inadequate program is better than nothing.
The public option was definitely an idea worth having, and so was Medicare buy-in. Still, it's a matter of displacement of our true desires that leads us to think the public option is something we need to fight to the death over.

2. We were never going to get anything close to what we wanted.

In these times we know that we need sixty votes in the Senate to get anything passed. In a controversy like this, where getting anything at all passed depended on getting the majority of a handful of moderate Republicans–Snow, Collins, Landrieu, Lieberman, and Nelson, none of whom really care about passing anything, means that the bill that passes will be a compromise of a compromise. That's the way life is and there's not much point in calling Reid and Obama useless, ineffectual losers because they can't get 100% of the votes in their putative caucus.

3. What's the alternative?
One concept in negotiation theory is BATNA, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. For our purposes, before telling our representatives to kill the bill we should think about what will happen if they do.
I don't see any likelihood that we will see anything approaching health care reform if this bill is killed in the foreseeable future. None of the conditions that are present now, or that are likely to come about in the future, are going to get any better than what we have now.
First, the politics aren't getting better. We have seen several Democratic representatives announce they are retiring, and there are a number of Democratic senators, including Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, and Arlen Specter*,  who are in trouble and may not get reelected.  This is consonant with the fact that the President's party typically loses votes in the off-year election; I don't see any signs that this won't happen in 2010.
Second, the economics aren't getting better. Whatever the costs of health care are now, and whatever we need to spend to cover those costs, they will only go up. This means that every year into the future will be harder to create a health care financing program than it is now.
Third is the fiscal situation. The Bush deficit, the costs of the bailout, and the costs of the war, are all combining to make federal budgeting problems worse in the next five years than they are now. We can wait for a recovery, but a strong recovery isn't likely to happen in the next five years.

4. Things in Congress are different now.
Changes in party alignment have made it harder to accomplish important things now than it was in the past. For many years people talked about the parties as “big tents”. For most of the 20th Century both major parties tried to follow a big tent strategy, forming their parties out of ideological and regional coalitions. The Democratic Party included northeast liberals and southern racists; the Republican Party included western free-landers and northeast financial types who were not particularly committed to social issues.
This started to change with Nixon's Southern Strategy, a frank, and successful, appeal to southern racists; it continued through the 1980's under Ronald Reagan and Lee Atwater with continued appeals to racism and religious intolerance, and is essentially complete today. The defections of Jim Jeffords and Arlen Specter signaled the completion of the Republican purge of any but the most extreme conservatives.
This has not happened in the Democratic Party. Our party has always been more pluralistic, and has exercised less doctrinal discipline, than the Republicans, and the same is true today. The ideological range in the Democratic Party in 2010 is much broader than that of the Republicans, which means that it is easy for the Republican leadership to dictate the position of every member of the caucus, but it is not possible for the Democratic leadership to do the same thing.
An example from the past is instructive. The 1964 Civil Rights Act passed the Senate 73-27, and passed cloture 71-29 (at a time when 67 votes were needed to support cloture).
What is more interesting is the party breakdown. Democrats in the Senate supported the bill 46-21 and Republicans supported it 27-6. (This is what gives Republicans the support for their claim that it was the Republicans who actually passed the Civil Rights bill.) On both sides we see a tremendous amount of cross-party voting.

We don't see this today: the strongest wish for bipartisan support for this bill is that one or two Republicans, presumably one of the two senators from Maine, would support some form of health care reform. We now know that will never happen. It is unimaginable that we will ever see 27, or even 6, Republicans with the decency or political sense that they need to support something like reformed health care financing.

What does this mean? I suggest it means that we can't pass anything important without close to unanimous Democratic support. That also means that, as much as ever, if not more so, anything that comes out of Congress will have to be a huge compromise, and the negotiating or compromising parties are not the Democrats and the Republicans, because the Republicans are determined to block anything the Democrats, and particularly the Democratic President, want to accomplish. No, the compromise must be reached between the real Democrats and the right wing of the party.

That's what we have today.

I am not willing to say the bill should be killed because I don't see any chance of getting anything better than is before us now at any time in the next five, ten, or fifteen years. As my colleagues have pointed out, this is an extremely weak bill. Nevertheless, It's the best we're likely to see. It's our best chance to get something rather than nothing. It's only after we have something that we can start the equally important work of fixing it.

Oh yes–one other thing. I don't hold Reid responsible for not being able to get 100% of his nominal caucus to line up on health care. I do hold him responsible if he lets Lieberman keep his committee chairmanship and other positions of responsibility within the caucus.

The insurance companies are popping corks as they prepare to welcome millions of new policy holder, billions in premiums and quickly transfer middle class worker’s salary and tax subsidies . . . wait for it . . . INTO THEIR OWN POCKETS.

The Senate bill transfers money – mandates money – to the insurance industry. It does not provide access to health care.  It provides “health insurance,” which is the name of a product that becomes more and more unrelated to the concept of “access to health care” with each annual rise in premiums, with each annual new set of benefit exclusions, with each new annual removal of medications from coverage, with each new annual dis-allowance of covered treatment options and with every single guaranteed annual rise in co-pays, out-of-pocket requirements and general rationing of providers and treatment options.

The following comments are taken liberally from Jon Walker’s excellent analysis on this subject.

The sole defense of this massive corporate giveaway, formally known as the Senate health care reform bill, is that it would still do some “good,” helping millions of the uninsured.

This is false.

The Senate Health Insurance Bill dramatically worsens the quality of current insurance coverage for tens of millions Americans, thanks to the new excise tax on insurance plans. The remaining “good,” what actually stays, does not outweigh the massive amount of harm. The remaining “good” is ultimately priced out the average patient’s ability to pay for it.

The “help” in the Senate bill is defined as giving insufficient subsides to Americans who are now forced to buy extremely expensive, poorly regulated, junk insurance.  Any purported “regulations” on policy holder payments above the cost of insurance are meaningless without banning annual limits and NO out-of-pocket caps/ (the “cap” language does not actually cap anything – it’s not even a loophole it’s a massive license to the exact opposite of what the alleged stated purpose – banning limits – actually is). The “Ban on Limits” law is a license cut off payments. Sounds like a limiting green light to me.  

As a result, mandated “coverage” does nothing to stop a family with a one-year major illness from being bankrupted by accumulated medical debt.

As a result, mandated “coverage” does nothing to stop a family from being bankrupted by a single family member with a chronic illness.  

As a result, mandated “coverage” does nothing to stop a family from being bankrupted if a single family member has a major injury that requires multiple treatments and surgeries over more than one calendar year.

Insurance that does not protect you from financial ruin if you get sick makes is a mockery of the entire concept health insurance.

Mandated “coverage” does nothing to stop a person or family from being bankrupted by health care costs.  All mandated coverage does is mandate coverage.  It does not mandate ACCESS to health care.

Mandated coverage and access to health care are unrelated subjects under the current private health insurance regime in the United States.

— Below — The harm of the Senate tax on middle class health care access is enormous.

The harm the excise tax on employer-provided insurance benefits will do is enormous. The health care bill is designed with the goal of making millions of middle class Americans’ health insurance coverage much worse. That is not a bug, it is a feature of the Senate version.

The excise tax is meant to force your employer to cut back your insurance benefits, reduce your coverage, and increase your co-pays and deductibles. This is a fact established by insurance company conduct, the structure of their plans and IT IS THE CONCLUSION OF THE NON-PARTISAN Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Congress’ own financial analysis found:

   [A]n estimated 19 percent of workers with employment-based coverage would be affected by the excise tax. . .  Those individuals who kept their high-premium policies would pay a higher premium than under current law, with the difference in premiums roughly equal to the amount of the tax. However, CBO and JCT estimate that most people would avoid the cost of the excise tax by enrolling in plans that had lower premiums; those reductions would result from choosing plans that either pay a smaller share of covered health care costs (which would reduce premiums directly as well as indirectly by leading to less use of covered medical services), manage benefits more tightly, or cover fewer services.

The CMS’s analysis showed that:

In reaction to the tax, many employers would reduce the scope of their health benefits. The resulting reductions in covered services and/or increases in employee cost-sharing requirements would induce workers to use fewer services. Because plan benefit values would generally increase faster than the threshold amounts for defining high-cost plans (which are indexed by the CPI plus 1 percent), over time additional plans would become subject to the excise tax, prompting those employers to scale back coverage.

To translate, the Senate middle class tax on health care coverage will effectively force employers to scale back the health insurance benefits they offer in order to avoid the excise tax. This can be done by reducing what benefits the plan covers and/or increasing cost sharing (i.e. higher co-pays, higher deductibles, higher out-of-pocket limits, and possibly lower annual limits). If you have a good employer provided health insurance plan, it will be dramatically scaled back. Contrary to Obama’s direct promise, you will not be able to keep the coverage you currently have, and that is by design of the Senate tax on middle class health care coverage.

One critical problem with this excise tax, which goes to what are misleadingly dubbed “Cadillac” plans, is that it is not indexed to health care inflation. After a short period, it will force employers to make the vast majority of employer-provided health insurance plans much worse. A decade after the coverage mandate and tax take hold, most Americans will have much worse health insurance coverage as a result.

Instead of paying for reform with a tax on the richest one percent of Americans, like the House bill, the Senate bill pays for reform by worsening the insurance coverage for the vast majority of Americans.

Ruining the coverage of most working class Americans to get the money for a huge corporate boondoggle that will only enrich the insurance companies while not stopping medical bankruptcy in this country does not sound like a good trade.

Looks like its a done deal. Ben Nelson has agreed to a deal on restricting abortion access for women, and a deal whereby the feds cover medicaid spending in his state in perpetuity.

The other maybe-kinda-sorta-not-really holdout was our own Bernie Sanders, who was b(r)ought into the deal for the inclusion of a Patrick Leahy-promoted provision to increase Vermont's medicaid payments by a cool $250 million over the next six years. Breaks out, if divided evenly, to about $42 million a year. Given the looming budget hole, which could be $90 to $110 million, that's a big, big boost 

But given how scary this bill has the potential to be, is that a good deal for Vermont, or does it amount to thirty pieces of silver? And please don't try and tell me its getting any better in conference. Not with the White House pushing so hard for this very result.

I'll be the first to admit, my own reaction against the bill assumes some worst-case-scenario projections based on what the bill does – and doesn't – do. But given that the feds take virtually no responsibility for cost control and throws open the regulatory doors, its the insurance and pharmaceutical industries that are solely responsible for delivering the health care scenario, worst-case or otherwise.

You see my hesitation. This could all amount to one seriously ugly “I told you so” from the left. 

What do you folks think? 

ALSO: A big priority of Bernie's – increased investment in Community Health Centers – stayed ultmately intact. His website reports “$10 billion investment in community health centers, expected to go to $14 billion when Congress completes work on health care reform legislation, was included in a final series of changes to the Senate bill.” 

According to Thursday's Free Press,  there has now been a 90% die-off of the cave-dwelling bat population in the northeast due to a still unidentified pathogen associated with the fungal condition known as “white nose syndrome.”

Coupled with the massive  collapses occurring among bee colonies, this is not just a sad scenario, but an extremely alarming one with regard to our food security.   These creatures play a vital role in natural insect control for fruit and vegetable crops.  What is happening to our future chances for survival on a purely subsistence level while all of our energy and resources are directed toward “growing” an already enormous and dysfunctional consumer economy and waging an irrational war on the other side of the globe?  We have surrendered much of our investigative science capacity to corporate agendas, and what remains in the way of publicly funded efforts is  frequently targeted by the right, either as a waste of money or a moral menace.  Ignorance and hubris threaten our very survival, but as we are witnessing in Copenhagen, the industrialized giants seem to be locked in a paralytic state of denial.  This will end badly.

As negotiations over what, exactly the real Senate health care bill will look like (as opposed to the actual bill that's being debated on the floor… this is all a bit surreal, really), Bernie Sanders' ambiguous television announcement that he would not vote for the bill in the form it has taken made absolutely no waves outside the blogosphere. 

Turn off MSNBC. Tune out Howard Dean and Keith Olbermann. The White House has its liberal wing in hand on health care, says White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

“There are no liberals left to get” in the Senate, Emanuel said in an interview, shrugging off some noise from the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) that a few liberals might bolt over the compromises made with conservative Democrats.

Although he was apparently referring to cloture ("My colleagues may have forged a compromise bill that can achieve the 60 votes that will be needed for it to pass," he said. "But until this bill addresses cost, competition and accountability in a meaningful way, it will not win mine." ), his statement was apparently dismissed with some reason, as it is, at this point, no longer operative. The only official word I got from his office was:

The senator is working to improve the bill to make it something he can vote for.  We have not seen the final package and he hopes it will be something he can support and he's in frequent contact with the leadership and White House to make this a better bill.

Interesting that Bernie's office says he's still working with the leadership and the White House. Doesn't sound to me like Rahm Emanuel thinks the leadership and the White House is working with Bernie.

And where exactly is Leahy during all this?

Meanwhile, that other Vermonter, Howard Dean – who has become the most clear-spoken voice on the real dangers of this bill (namely the fact that its not "better than nothing" as so many weary congressional Dems from the Party's left  want to believe, that it will, in fact, make things worse and increase health care burdens of many working and middle class families), has way out-progressived Bernie Sanders. How's that for a shocker?

After the flip: A few more details on just how dangerous a bill with no regulation and cost controls would be when combined with the individual mandate…

First of all, we hear a lot about how "community rating" is included in this bill. Community rating is, of course, a good thing. It was a fundamental part of Vermont's health care improvements in the 90s and requires that insurance companies set rates based on community-wide metrics, rather than purely individual ones.But under the Senate bill's version, elderly can be charged up to 3 times the standard premiums for their plans (plans, again, that you will be required to buy if you are uninsured). In Vermont, those premiums for the elderly can only be an additional 20%.In Massachusettes under their comparable-to-the-national-bill plan, the increase isn't 3x, but 2x – and even that has created a situation whereby seniors are having a hard time finding affordable insurance.

And Vermont's superior regulations on such things? Forget it. Under language that conservative holdout Mary Landrieu got into the bill during the compromise-on-the-compromise-on-the-compromise, companies that sell across state lines can be held to their home state regulations, rather than the states in which they operate. Slick, huh?

Much has been said about cost control. That was one of the prime functions of the public option. There are some interesting ideas for cost controls in the latest version under discussion, but they are systemically prevented from being implemented on a large scale unless unprecedented market conditions are met, or unless Congress specifically authorizes it (which would give us the same roadblock we have now). There simply is NO cost controlling mechanism in this "compromise." Let's be clear – every single thing the industry wanted, they seem to have gotten. If this new version gets adopted as some sort of strike-all amendment, you will see any and all industry resistance stop cold.

It. sucks. It consolidates more control of our health care system in the hands of the industry. These are not theoretical concerns from high minded liberal elite, as the administration’s allies are trying to pass them off as, these are practical realities that will hit everyone and will hand control of our government right back to the Republicans in the quite understandable political backlash.The reality is, of course, staring everyone in the face:

Men prefer the public option, women prefer the public option, independents prefer the public option.

And look at Democrats. 88 freaking percent.

The public option is not a fringe position. It's not even the "liberal" or "progressive" position.

It is the mainstream, Democratic Party position. It is practically a consensus.

Nelson, Lieberman, Landreau, Lincoln – it is they who are on the fringe. And they have been joined there by Reid and Obama (or were they always there?). Who are the real Democrats here?

The numbers don't lie. Senator Sanders, time to show Vermonters you're at least as progressive as the Democrats…

“Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys,” says sci-fi author Emma Bull. About a week ago, Gov. Douglas began chanting the benefits of VY as an employer. Due to the lack of a long-term power price agreement, Douglas (I assumed) looked around for another boiler plate argument for keeping Yankee grinding away until 2032. So he started hitting on the employment aspect of the plant, prior to the announced statewide media blitz by Entergy’s Vermont Yankee.

Those opposed to keeping VY running past the 2012 date would be wise to start publicly considering the fate of the 650 employees as they are really the ones on the front line. Retraining, pension guarantees or extended benefits should be explored for after 2012 shutdown.    

But consider the coincidence that several days before the blitz; Douglas intuits almost a mirror image of the tone of the ad campaign. A suspicious person might almost think he was pandering to Entergy Corp.

Without citing any evidence for it,

Douglas said a week ago, his concerns about the plant are resolved. "I think it's an asset to our state," he said. Noting the plant employs 640 workers, he said, if the state knew of an employer of that size looking to move in, "We'd be tripping over ourselves to find and recruit that employer."

Yesterday Vermont Yankee announced …A series of print and television ads featuring Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant employees will begin running in state-wide media outlets this week. In the ads, VY employees discuss the safety of the nuclear plant, and the need in Vermont for the jobs and the economic benefits that the electricity generated at VY provides the state of Vermont. Our employees are our greatest asset for continued safe, reliable generation in the state and they admirably serve their communities.