Month: December 2009

The Obama-Biden plan provides new affordable health insurance options by: (1) guaranteeing eligibility for all health insurance plans; (2) creating a National Health Insurance Exchange to help Americans and businesses purchase private health insurance; (3) providing new tax credits to families who can’t afford health insurance and to small businesses with a new Small Business Health Tax Credit; (4) requiring all large employers to contribute towards health coverage for their employees or towards the cost of the public plan; (5) requiring all children have health care coverage; (5) expanding eligibility for the Medicaid and SCHIP programs; and (6) allowing flexibility for state health reform plans.

The Obama-Biden campaign decidedly not promising single payer. Compare and contrast with the Senate bill. Shocking dishonesty, I know. Had Bush been allowed a third term, we’d be looking at this same kind of thing right now: 40 million people getting access to insurance.

This needs to stop

ryking:

“In 2003, a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama told an AFL-CIO meeting, “I am a proponent of a single-payer universal healthcare program…” There was only one thing standing in the way, Obama said six years ago: “All of you know we might not get there immediately because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate and we have to take back the House.”

This sort of gotcha line, utterly excerpted from its context is flatly ridiculous and, frankly, right out of the GOP playbook. Certainly has the ring of straight up PUMA-style astroturfing. Either way, it’s the typical, feckless DCCC circular firing squad stuff that the very same people screaming about it all claim to hate so much.

But wasn’t this Obama’s position? Didn’t he say it? Yes he did. Frequently. But it also matters what he always said next:

‘If you’re starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.’

He’s always said it that way during the campaign and after winning the election. I’ve never once heard him say it otherwise, or even with a particularly different wording. I’m quite sure if I could dig up the full text of the specific speech above, he said something like it then too. At any rate, here’s Obama directly addressing this quote back during the campaign. Notice what he says?

I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out.

Hey, what do you know. That’s pretty much the way things are going. Start somewhere. Make improvements for 40 million uninsured in this country. Come back and fix the rest later. Move forward on the main substance.

It’s almost as if Obama campaigned on several issues, like focusing on the war in Afghanistan, improving health insurance, and, in sharp contrast to the Bush administration, actually bothering to hunt for bin Laden and shut down the various operational al Qaeda training facilities in various far-flung corners of the world (yes, even if that means putting a missile into Yemen). Now that he’s actually, you know, doing those things, various segments of the democratic party are shocked, shocked, and retiring to the nearest fainting couch or agitating that these things be undone. If you really feel this way, methinks you thought you were voting for Kucinich. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but, honestly. What did you expect?

By all means, keep parroting the right-wing’s nonsense. Keep acting like poorly informed reactionaries. Just what they’re hoping for.

Verizon is the perfect corporate partner for Apple. This is precisely how Steve Jobs himself would deal with a balky battery door. With a branded sticker. Accept no cheap substitutes; only Verizon-brand stickers give you the confidence today’s multitaskers demand.

67*

“Meaningful” agreement reportedly reached in Copenhagen. Which, apparently, means it is an agreement of some fundamental semantic meaning of that word based on other words that do mean things in a strict, lexicographical sense. Erm: Victory!

But, really, it matters not. No agreement, however large or small, meaningful or symbolic it might be is going anywhere in terms of being ratified by these United States. You think 60 votes on some minor insurance reforms is a high hurdle? Try finding 67 when in the neighborhood of 40 members of the Senate seem to agree with Inhofe and generally feel he’s a little too soft on the issue. Just saying.

And, just like with insurance reform, the Democrats have ceded the entire messaging operation to the GOP for at least the last decade or so. So good luck with applying public pressure on this or any other difficult issue. Most of the country thinks, like Inhofe, that the UN and its jack-booted thugs cooked the whole thing up in a black helicopter to please their Hollywood paymasters.

You’re ridiculous

This is what we need more of from the MSM here in America; Jim Inhofe parachutes into the global climate meetings, finds no one around, rustles up what reporters he can find, and is promptly notified of his own foolishness:

The senator didn’t have any meetings scheduled in Copenhagen, and he did not see chief U.S. negotiator Todd Stern or the members of the House delegation, who were not scheduled to fly in until later in the afternoon.

But Inhofe’s aides eventually rustled up a group of reporters […]

“We in the United States owe it to the 191 countries to be well-informed and know what the intentions of the United States are. The United States is not going to pass a cap and trade,” he said. “It’s just not going to happen.”

A reporter asked: “If there’s a hoax, then who’s putting on this hoax, and what’s the motive?”

“It started in the United Nations,” Inhofe said, “and the ones in the United States who really grab ahold of this is the Hollywood elite.”

One reporter asked Inhofe if he was referring to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another reporter — this one from Der Spiegel — told the senator: “You’re ridiculous.”

Indeed he is. He just never gets to hear it from anyone in the MSM over here. Wouldn’t be polite.

Enjoy it for a second. Then remember that you and I, the American taxpayer, underwrote this whole nonsensical journey. And that, because he denies global warming, our MSM won’t question the carbon footprint of his idiotic, wasted journey. They’re too busy speaking truth to power by asking the conference attendees about that, repeatedly, and then glossing over the actual events of the meeting as “too complicated.” That it never once occurs to them that spending 1/1000th of the time they devoted to the carbon footprint canard would allow them to cover the conference at length and to a high degree of detail never occurs to them is a huge part of the reason why this country is disintegrating into an ungovernable morass.

The Tubes of Retribution

Never mess with the internet. It may be a bunch of clogged tubes, but the truth will out.

Now:

McCAIN: I’ve been around here 20-some years. First time I’ve ever seen a member denied an extra minute or two to finish his remarks. … I just haven’t seen it before myself. And I don’t like it. And I think it harms the comity of the Senate not to allow one of our members at least a minute. I’m sure that time is urgent here, but I doubt that it would be that urgent.

Then:

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator’s time has expired.
Mr. DAYTON. I ask for unanimous consent that I have 30 seconds more to finish my remarks.
Mr. McCAIN. I object.

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy. Declare that you’re disappointed in and/or disgusted with President Obama. Demand a change in Senate rules that, combined with the Republican strategy of total obstructionism, are in the process of making America ungovernable.

But meanwhile, pass the health care bill.

Paul Krugman

No. I don’t want health care.

Senator Sam Bareback, er, Brownback, Republican of Kansas
Then why don’t we take it away from him? I’ve been agitating all along for a healthcare sunset provision on all Congressional insurance and/or Medicare coverage. If they love the market so much, let them go out and use it. We’d suddenly have a lot of focus on the issue once all those Viagra and Cialis prescriptions were getting paid for in full.

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Wall Street Journal: Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones; I love how the Journal (and/or their military contact) works Iran into this. Indeed, only Iran could have the wherewithal to back an effort of this expense and complexity…