Politico's Ben Smith posted a list of conservative House Democrats who will be targeted by a new RNC radio ad on healthcare. The list includes IA-03's Leonard Boswell.

Text of the ad:

Most Americans agree. It’s time to take action to reform our healthcare system. But the dangerous experiment President Obama and the Democrats in Congress want just can’t be the right answer. The question is what Congressman Boswell will do.

Look at their record. The stimulus package cost us hundreds of billions without creating new jobs. The national debt has more than doubled.

If Barack Obama and the Democrats get their way, the Federal Government will make the decisions about your health care. And, their plan costs a trillion dollars we don’t have. You have to pay a new tax to keep your private insurance. It’s too much, too fast.

Call Congressman Boswell at 202-225-3121, that’s 202-225-3121 and tell him to say no to this dangerous experiment.

Of course, the quote “Most Americans agree. It's time to take action to reform our healthcare system” is not followed by any Republican proposal or idea to actually fix healthcare. I hope Boswell doesn't cave on this, and it's heartening to know that he still supports a public option. Boswell's support is an apparent break with other members of the Blue Dog Coalition, whose opposition to a public option was deconstructed in this Paul Krugman article yesterday.

Paul Krugman, upcoming recipient for the Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote an interesting article in the NY Times carried by Common Dreams http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/02-1 yesterday.

The title of Mr. Krugman's article is “Bailouts for Bunglers”.  In this article, Mr. Krugman's major thesis is to ask the Obama administration to Nationalize the banks needing bailout capital, citing the “Lemon Socialism” rule.  In a nutshell, Lemon Socialism is where losses are socialized, profits are privatized.

I'm trying not to get personal here, but when they foreclosed on my friend's and family's businesses and homes, there was no safe”bailout” for them, they lost everything.  My oldest daughter is currently living in her car in Dallas, TX. One of my closest and oldest friends was forced to lay off half a dozen loyal employees into this economy with very little hope of finding another job as an auto mechanic.

No one rewarded any of my friends and family for the decisions they made which forced them into these circumstances, and I'm not asking anyone to reward these folks. It just seems criminal that those whose unbridled greed created the current market meltdown should receive compensatory bonuses for a “job well done”?

President Roosevelt saved capitalism for another 75 years when he initiated his plan of economic recovery.

Maybe President Obama should just let it go down in flames, I'm already paying to help out my kid, and I paid my friend more than it was worth to have him help me fix the brakes on my car recently (I could have done the job myself), I'll be damned if I'm willing to help foot the bill to pay some Wall Street banker a multi-million dollar salary for helping create this mess. 

Make the bankers give up their homes to the folks who lost theirs, I say.  Maybe if the financial wizards of Wall Street had to spend the winter living in THEIR cars they could come up with a solution all on their own. no help from the government.   

I’ve been consistently worried that Barack Obama would not set an ambitious domestic policy agenda if elected president. His post-partisan rhetoric has given me the impression that he would move toward compromising with the Republican position on various issues before negotiations with Congress have begun. Specifically on health care, I agreed with Paul Krugman of the New York Times that Obama’s proposal was not as good as the plans John Edwards and Hillary Clinton advocated during the primaries.

Obama hasn’t been sworn in yet, and the new Congress won’t meet for more than a month, but already there are signs of growing momentum for truly universal health care reform (and not just incremental progress toward that goal).

On Wednesday Senator Max Baucus of Montana, who chairs the Finance Committee, released a “white paper” on health reform. You can get the gist by reading this diary by TomP or this one by DemFromCT. Ezra “Momma said wonk you out” Klein dived into the details in a series of posts this week.

The key point is that Baucus embraced the concept of mandatory health insurance, but with a public plan any American could choose to join. So, if private insurers kept jacking up premiums while covering less and less medical care, people could “vote with their feet” by paying into a public plan that would work like Medicare (the patient chooses the doctor).

This story explains Baucus’ line of thinking:

Baucus, of Montana, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a health-care blueprint released today that only a mandate could ensure people didn’t wait until they were ill to buy health insurance, forcing up the price for everyone.

The 89-page proposal revives a debate from the Democratic presidential primaries about how to overhaul the U.S. health- care system. Obama supported requiring coverage only for children, saying adults would buy coverage voluntarily if it were affordable. Senator Hillary Clinton of New York said insurance must be mandated for everyone.

“Requiring all Americans to have health coverage will help end the shifting of costs of the uninsured to the insured,” Baucus said today in his plan. The requirement “would be enforced possibly through the U.S. tax system or some other point of contact between individuals and the government,” he said, without spelling out possible penalties. […]

Because of the urgency of health-care reform, Congress should move on legislation in the first half of next year, Baucus said at a press conference today in Washington.

“There is no way to solve America’s economic problems without solving health care,” he said. The $2.2 trillion health-care system “sucks up 16 percent of our economy and is still growing,” Baucus said.

It’s hard to exaggerate the significance of this development. First, as many others have noted, if Baucus runs health care reform through the Finance Committee there is a good chance it will be the kind of bill not subject to a filibuster. That means the Democrats would need only 50 votes (not 60) to pass it in the Senate.

Second, Baucus is among the more conservative members of the Senate Democratic caucus (check out his Progressive Punch ratings here). If he is ready for big, bold health care reform, the ground has shifted.

Third, this development could be very discouraging for Iowa’s own Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee. Traditionally, Grassley and Baucus have had a close working relationship. But this past summer Grassley was annoyed when Democrats rejected a deal he thought he had cut with Baucus on a Medicare bill, and Baucus denied having reached any prior agreement with Grassley.

This report from Wednesday quotes Grassley expressing skepticism about finding the money to pay for a big health care initiative.

If Baucus moves away from the habit of compromising with Grassley now that the Democrats will have a solid Senate majority, could Iowa’s senior senator decide to step down in 2010? We all know that Grassley’s seat is safe for Republicans unless he retires. He seems to like his job, but perhaps facing defeat after defeat in a Democratic-controlled Congress would diminish his desire to hang around for another six years.  

who just won the Nobel Prize for economics:

“What are the effects of free trade and globalization? What are the driving forces behind worldwide urbanization? Paul Krugman has formulated a new theory to answer these questions,” the [Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences] said in its citation.

“He has thereby integrated the previously disparate research fields of international trade and economic geography,” it said.

Although Krugman wasn’t honored for his op-ed pieces in the New York Times, I will always be grateful that he remained unafraid to criticize George Bush and his policies, even at the height of Bush’s popularity in late 2001 and 2002.

In case you weren’t aware, Krugman has a good blog too.

Though you wouldn’t know it from reading various blogs that support Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee was barely distinguishable from Hillary Clinton on most issues.

TomP reminded me of this in his diary yesterday about Obama choosing “centrist economist Jason Furman as the top economic advisor for the campaign.”

Click the link to learn why labor unions and many progressive organizations, such as Wake Up Wal-Mart and Public Citizen, are “seething” over Obama’s selection of Furman. Among other things, Furman has defended Wal-Mart’s business model and published a 2005 paper labeling Wal-Mart “A Progressive Success Story.”

The Steelworkers’ Union and AFL-CIO are not happy either about Furman’s support for global trade agreements and other writings as head of the Hamilton Project (a centrist economic group started by Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin).

Some Obama supporters say choosing Hillary Clinton as his running mate would undercut his whole message of getting beyond the 1990s.

Until Obama demonstrates that he is committed to getting beyond Clintonomics, that argument won’t be very convincing.

Obama talked a good game in his speech last week to the Service Employees International Union, but actions speak louder than words. Wall Street and other corporate interests have too much power in the Democratic Party already. Putting Furman in charge of Obama’s economic policy team is a very worrying sign.

By the way, Colin Kahl is still the chairman of Obama’s advisory task force on Iraq:

Kahl is one of the authors of [the Center for a New American Security’s] new report, “Shaping the Iraq Inheritance,” which proposes a policy called “conditional engagement” for Iraq that would leave a large contingent of American forces in Iraq for several years, and which would make America’s presence in Iraq contingent on political progress in Iraq toward reconciliation among the country’s ethnic and sectarian groups and parties.

It’s been two months since reports emerged about Kahl’s support for leaving 60,000 to 80,000 U.S. troops in Iraq at least through the end of 2010. Why won’t Obama fire this guy?

Since the days of Reagan, America has been chasing a Theory.

Since the Clinton era, and the rise of NAFTA and Global Free Trade, our “Corporate Leaders” have been conducting an unprecedented Social Experiment.

The Experiment: Economic Darwinism

The Test Subjects in this Experiment: none other than American Workers and our “more competitive” counterparts, overseas.

Supply-siders have argued that Economic Growth comes from empowering Corporate Interests to become “More Productive”, by whatever means necessary. Be it “Tax-Give-aways to the Wealthy”, or “Job-Give-aways to Poor Foreigners”, well that's just fine with them, long is it results in Corporate Growth.

Supply-siders are happy to trade away American Dignity for the sake of short-term Profits: “American Workers just need some retraining. They just need to apply themselves.”

“We just need to learn to Adapt” … (to Global Markets?)

That's the Theory, that's the Spin.  What are the Results of this on-going plan to outsource the American Dream?