Andrew’s argument here is the one that Obama loyalists generally are making:    yes, what Obama is doing might appear to be exactly the same as what Democrats have been doing since forever — the accommodationist embrace of the Right, the effort to establish centrist credentials by scorning the Left, running away from cultural issues for fear of being depicted as amoral radicals, surrounding oneself with establishment and conservative figures, etc. etc. (Bill Clinton also had a Republican Defense Secretary).  Yes, that may look exactly like what the capitulating Bush-era Democrats and the triangulating Bill “the Third Way!” Clinton spent years and years and years doing.

But this time, say Obama supporters, everything will be different.  This time, it’s all being done for different — for more noble — purposes.  When Obama does it, it’s not merely a cynical political calculation the way it was when Dick Morris in the 1990s and Rahm Emanuel this decade did it.  Instead, in Obama’s hands, it’s a master strategy for bringing the country together and transforming politics — all to enable Obama to fulfill his authentically-issued promises and achieve his progressive goals.

As I said, it’s certainly possible that will be true — like many people, I hope it is — but I would also hope, particularly in light of how familiar this strategizing seems, that people will demand some actual proof before believing in such lavish claims of transformative and transcendent change.  People are suspicious of this sort of Democratic maneuvering precisely because they’ve seen it so many times in the past and know how it ends.  It seems perfectly rational not to trust it until there is evidence that warrants that trust.

I, too, have some hope that what Obama seems to be intending to do is indeed going to be transformative, but until there’s actual proof, I remain cynical. In light of some of the incoming administration’s recent moves, various statements from the Senate Republicans, and the way the traditional media seems to want to turn the Blagojevich scandal into Obama’s very own Whitewater, I’m finding it hard to believe that it can work, no matter how hard Obama might like it to be otherwise.

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as “against people of faith” for blocking President Bush’s nominees.

Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day “Justice Sunday” and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading “the filibuster against people of faith,” it reads: “The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith.”

Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations.

What’s the message that they’re trying to get out?

The telecast also signals an escalation of the campaign for the rule change by Christian conservatives who see the current court battle as the climax of a 30-year culture war, a chance to reverse decades of legal decisions about abortion, religion in public life, gay rights and marriage.

“As the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left has been repudiated in almost every recent election, the courts have become the last great bastion for liberalism,” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the telecast, wrote in a message on the group’s Web site. “For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the A.C.L.U., have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms.”

Yes, an attempt to move himself into position to get the Republican nomination in 2008, Senator Frist has decided that he needs to side with the far-right wingnuts who want to make the U.S. into the theocracy they’ve always believed it should be. In other words, he’s getting into bed with these people [Salon day pass required]:

Having won control of two branches of the federal government, the activists of the religious right have come to see the courts as the intolerable obstacle thwarting their dream of a reborn Christian nation. They believe in a revisionist history, taught in Christian schools and spread through Christian media, which claims biblical law as the source of the Constitution. Thus any ruling that contradicts their theology seems to them to be de facto unconstitutional, and its enforcement tyrannical.

Some believe that the problem can be rectified by replacing liberal judges with conservative ones. Others, noting that even judges appointed by Republicans often rule against them, have become convinced that they must destroy the federal judiciary itself. Thus, ideas offered at the conference ranged from ending the filibuster and impeaching all but the most right-wing judges to abolishing all federal courts below the Supreme Court altogether. At least one panelist dropped coy hints about murder.

The only question is whether Frist actually believes this stuff, or whether he’s just willing to risk throwing the country down a hole so he can be President.

[via Atrios and others]

Finally, the U.S. health care system is wildly inefficient. Americans tend to believe that we have the best health care system in the world. (I’ve encountered members of the journalistic elite who flatly refuse to believe that France ranks much better on most measures of health care quality than the United States.) But it isn’t true. We spend far more per person on health care than any other country – 75 percent more than Canada or France – yet rank near the bottom among industrial countries in indicators from life expectancy to infant mortality.

This last point is, in a way, good news. In the long run, medical progress may force us to make a harsh choice: if we don’t want to become a society in which the rich get life-saving medical treatment and the rest of us don’t, we’ll have to pay much higher taxes. The vast waste in our current system means, however, that effective reform could both improve quality and cut costs, postponing the day of reckoning.

To get effective reform, however, we’ll need to shed some preconceptions – in particular, the ideologically driven belief that government is always the problem and market competition is always the solution.

The fact is that in health care, the private sector is often bloated and bureaucratic, while some government agencies – notably the Veterans Administration system – are lean and efficient. In health care, competition and personal choice can and do lead to higher costs and lower quality. The United States has the most privatized, competitive health system in the advanced world; it also has by far the highest costs, and close to the worst results.

Over the next few weeks I’ll back up these assertions, and talk about what a workable health care reform might look like, if we can get ideology out of the way.

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of what he has to say, even though, as he points out, in the current political climate it’s unlikely that anything will actually get done.

Over at Angry Bear, Kash adds some healthcare numbers of his own.

[via Atrios]

Edmund Sanders reports that the crowds in downtown Baghdad protesting the US troop presence in the country may have been as large as 300,000. If it were even half that, these would be the largest popular demonstrations in Iraq since 1958! To any extent that they show popular sentiment shifting in Shiite areas to Muqtada al-Sadr’s position on the American presence, they would indicate that he is winning politically even though the US defeated his militia militarily.

Christian conservatives and a core group of congressional supporters are launching a significant new push to restructure the federal judicial system to reflect a more explicitly biblical world view, in the hopes that these changes will pave the way for broader social and political changes, leaders of the movement said.

Apparently, activist judges are bad if they’re “liberal,” but good if they’re willing to put their religion first.

Glassy-eyed, no cognitive ability, persistent vegetative state. Poor Terri Schaivo–the unwitting personification of the Christian right. Except she’s not a disgusting hypocrite.

Go and read them all.

[via Atrios]

So why is the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of Shiite parties that can count on about 53% of the members of the Iraqi parliament to vote for it in the wake of the Jan. 30 elections, not able to form a government? If it were the Labor Party in the UK, which is the parliament described above, Ibrahim Jaafari would already be Prime Minister.

The US spiked the Iraqi parliamentary process by putting in a provision that a government has to be formed with a 2/3s majority. This provision is a neo-colonial imposition on Iraq. The Iraqi public was never asked about it. And, it is predictably producing gridlock, as the UIA is forced to try to accommodate a party that should be in the opposition in the British system, the Kurdistan Alliance.

Likewise, in France, a simple majority of the National Assembly can dismiss the cabinet. Likewise in India. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the 2/3s super-majority is characteristic of only one nation on earth, i.e. American Iraq. I fear it is functioning in an anti-democratic manner to thwart the will of the majority of Iraqis, who braved great danger to come out and vote.

It is all to the good if the Shiites and Kurds are forced to come to a set of hard compromises. But not everything can be decided at the beginning of the process. Some issues (Kirkuk is a good example) must be decided by a long-term negotiation. I perceive this latest Kurdish demarche to consist in a power play where they grab all sorts of concessions on a short-term basis, just because they are needed to form a government, even though no national consensus has emerged on these issues.

I think there is also a real chance that Iraqis will turn against the idea of democracy if it only produces insecurity, violence, and gridlock.

Is there ever going to be a point in this process where the U.S. is making things better instead of worse? Even if you believe that the overthrow of Saddam was worth the cost in Iraqi and American lives, there’s no excuse for the long, slow, painful transition that the Iraqi people are being forced to endure because of a combination of American incompetence and sheer stupidity.