Todd Akin's Senate soul mate

Imagine if the G.O.P.’s position on debt was set by Senator Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who has challenged the no-tax lunacy of Grover Norquist and served on the Simpson-Bowles commission and voted for its final plan (unlike Ryan). That plan included both increased tax revenues and spending cuts as the only way to fix our long-term fiscal imbalances. Give me a Republican Party that says we have to put real tax revenues and spending cuts on the table to solve this problem, and you’ll get a deal with Obama, who has already offered both, although not at the scale we need.

Klein: To go back to Krugman, if he were sitting here, he’d say in this crisis there’s been no evidence anywhere that cutting deficits leads to growth. We’ve not seen it in the euro zone or the UK. And he’d say the Reinhart/Rogoff story is a correlation story. It doesn’t prove that high debt always and everywhere hurts growth.

COBURN: Go look at Sweden. Here’s what Sweden did. They cut their spending and their taxes. They have the best growth rate in Europe. They had a surplus this year. They had growth at six-plus percent. They actually did a Reagan style approach to their problem by cutting spending and cutting taxes. And they’re the fastest growing with a decline in their debt-to-GDP ratio.

Klein: But correct me if I’m wrong, but if I recall, Sweden’s monetary policy went towards a very sharp devaluation, they’ve been driven by export growth, and alongside Israel, they’ve been more aggressive than any other central bank in the world. They’ve done stuff that if we did it here, people would lose their minds.

COBURN: I think there are monetary parts to that. But their finance minister put in place tough stuff. They had people who left Sweden because of the tax ratio. Now they’ve moved back. And it’s not a perfect example, but it’s an exception to the Krugman story.

Influential Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) "decided to take a break" from the bipartisan "Gang of Six" budget negotiating team Tuesday, citing an impasse in the effort to agree on substantial spending cuts...

The aide said that Coburn had been extremely close to agreeing to a deal before a recent two-week recess, but returned with five new demands that hadn't been discussed before. On Monday, the aide said, Coburn asked for an immediate $130 billion in cuts to Medicare, on top of the $400 billion that had already been agreed to. Democrats refused and Coburn left the talks as a result, said the aide.

"Show me where in the Constitution the federal government is responsible for your health care?" Coburn said.

He went on to say that government programs such as Medicare are primarily responsible for rapidly rising health-care costs, and that Medicare has made the medical system worse.

"You can't tell me the system is better now than it was before Medicare," he said.

Coburn agreed that some people received poor care - or no care - before Medicare was enacted in the 1960s, but said communities worked together to make sure most people received needed medical attention.

He also conceded that doctors and hospitals often went unpaid for their efforts, or accepted baked goods or chickens in partial payment.

Earlier, in Langley, Coburn partially deflected criticism of President Barack Obama - and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke - by blaming the country's financial woes on Congress. He described his colleagues as "a class of career elitists" and "cowards," and at one point, talking about his frustrations, said, "It's just a good thing I can't pack a gun on the Senate floor."

But Coburn also said most members of Congress are good people with good intentions.

Responding to a man in Langley who asked if Obama "wants to destroy America," Coburn said the president is "very bright" and loves his country but has a political philosophy that is "goofy and wrong."

Obama's "intent is not to destroy, his intent is to create dependency because it worked so well for him," he said.

"As an African-American male," Coburn said, Obama received "tremendous advantage from a lot of these programs."

You know, Josh Burkeen is our rep down here in the southeast area. He lives in Colgate and travels out of Atoka. He was telling me lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that's happened to us?"
Tom Coburn, 8/31/04

In 1999, social conservatives in Congress initiated a new strategy to further their moral agenda of promoting abstinence outside of marriage as official government policy—claiming that condoms do not protect against sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Led by then-Rep. Tom Coburn (R-OK), a physician and staunch proabstinence opponent of government-funded family planning programs, they were successful in attaching an amendment to the House version of the Breast and Cervical Cancer Treatment Act mandating that condom packages carry a cigarette-type warning that condoms offer "little or no protection" against an extremely common STD, human papillomavirus (HPV), some strains of which cause cervical cancer. Although this directive was removed before the bill was enacted, Coburn and his allies were able to secure a requirement that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reexamine condom labels to determine whether they are medically accurate with respect to condoms' "effectiveness or lack of effectiveness" in STD prevention. They also were instrumental in convincing the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—along with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—to convene a workshop in June 2000 to evaluate published evidence on condom effectiveness.

At the time, Coburn's anticondom views were widely considered extreme. Certainly, they were, and continue to be, out of step with mainstream public health prevention efforts. But in the intervening few years, the political landscape has changed radically. Coburn and like-minded colleagues are now ensconced within the Bush administration, and with the imprimatur of government and the report of an NIH workshop on condom effectiveness to cite, a campaign to disparage the value of condom use is in full swing, itself the cornerstone of an effort to undermine the very notion of sexual risk-reduction, or "safer sex."