Obamacare as we know is the crown jewel of socialism. It is socialized medicine. The American people spoke soundly and clearly at the ballot box in November and they said to us, Mr. Speaker, in no uncertain terms, repeal this bill. So today, this body will cast a vote to repeal Obamacare and to those across the United States who think this may be a symbolic act, we have a message for them.
[…]
This is not symbolic, this is why we were sent here and we will not stop until we repeal a president and put a president in the position of the White House who will repeal this bill, until we repeal the current Senate, put in a Senate that will listen to the American people and repeal this bill.

Michelle Bachman (R, MN), seemingly pushing yet another Constitutional amendment, this time to “repeal” the Senate. Say what you will about her, but that’s some strict original intent right there.
The sentence containing “president in the position of the White House” is left as an exercise for the student.

Ezra Klein points out what should be obvious, that all the folks screaming about deficit implications and the Affordable Care Act are, in fact, screaming about positive deficit implications (see: PPACA and red column) and, even if we simply take it on costs alone (as separate from any deficit impact), the ACA amounts to a rounding error when compared to the GOP’s tax proposals.

But it is best not speak of any of this. Ever.

Those Liberals at the AP

The far-left journalists over at the AP make the hard calls and reports that there is trouble at the mill, everyone:

LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday waded into waters in which past British governments have foundered, promising fundamental changes to the country’s expensive and over-stressed public health care system.

I see. Crazy expensive socialist medical care. Only Lord Jesus can Know how much that stuff costs. Or, you can throw your lot in with pointy-headed statisticians and find out that it costs about $2317 per capita for the UK to provide universal, essentially free care to everyone (free as in beer, it is obviously paid for through various taxes and etc…). The US? We pay $5711 per capita. More than twice as much.
Now, of course, that would all change if we look at percent GDP, right? The US is such a giant economy and all. Actually, no. The US spends ~15% of GDP on healthcare, UK: ~8%. So it’s roughly half as expensive, whether considered as a function of the overall economy or strictly in terms of what’s spent per individual. And but so they all get access to healthcare. In the US, well, the GOP assures us that the market will take care of that any minute now.

Now we come to “over-stressed,” which must mean that outcomes are terrible in Britain when compared to the US, which (as we’re told repeatedly) has the finest care anywhere. They must be choking the streets with bodies over there if they spend half as much and then funnel that through some socialistic nightmare of a healthcare bureaucracy. Not so much: turns out they live longer, have lower infant mortality, and, of course, have universal access to free-as-in-beer healthcare 24/7, all without having to use the ER as their primary care physician or being told to just go die in the streets already. In fact, we typically rank in the low end of developed nations, not even within spitting distance of dread France, and always well behind the UK.

So, AP wrong on “expensive,” wrong on “over-stressed.” But they did get the current PM’s name right (though notably not his party affiliation; can’t go around limning the word “conservative” with “fundamental changes” and “foundered,” now can we?). So there’s that.

One slicker and a pair of rain boots

Michael Chabon considers the President’s speech:

Having struggled all the way through to make my own sense of sorrow and confusion congruent with what I saw happening in Tucson, having found that point of tangency at the rueful and admonitory heart, the father’s heart, of the speech, I fell all the way out again, right at the end. “If there are rain puddles in heaven,” the president said, evoking the words of an unnamed contributor to an album of photos of babies born on 9/11, “Christina is jumping in them today.”

I tried to imagine how I would feel if, having, God forbid, lost my precious daughter, born three months and ten days before Christina Taylor-Green, somebody offered this charming, tidy, corny vignette to me by way of consolation. I mean, come on! There is no heaven, man. The brunt, the ache and the truth of a child’s death is that he or she will never jump in rain puddles again. That joy was taken from her, and along with it ours in the pleasure of all that splashing. Heaven is pure wishfulness, an imaginary solution to the insoluble problem of the contingency and injustice of life.

But I’ve been chewing these words over since last night, and I’ve decided that, in fact, they were appropriate to a memorial for a child, far more appropriate, certainly, than all that rude hallooing. A literal belief in heaven is not required to grasp the power of that corny wish, to feel the way the idea of heaven inverts in order to express all the more plainly everything—wishes, hopes and happiness—that the grieving parents must now put away, along with one slicker and a pair of rain boots.

One slicker and a pair of rain boots

The Unfollow Button

correlationstonone:

kateoplis:

“I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.”

I think there’s more then a few dead kids lately that prove you wrong. Goddamn Pollyanna platitude-spouting optimists. You know what the best part of America’s collapse is? Watching hope founded on nothing fade into the sadness of reality.

Uh, did you even bother to take a look at the whole speech?

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, “when I looked for light, then came darkness.” Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.

You are free to carp about Presidential use of scripture in this day and age, but there is very little Pollyanna in there. In fact, I’d say that’s the strength of the piece. But feel free to go on living in your sad little world in which everything is a magically irrefutable sign of decay, collapse, and entropy. Some would even call that “simple explanations in the aftermath.” Others would call it the worst brand of faux intellectualism in which all news must be greeted with a world-weary chin rub, an “I seen that one coming,” followed by a “and that’s why I never vote.”

In which case: well played.

Prediction: Obama’s performance tonight is strong, so [conservative pundits] will pivot to attacking the crowd.

Adam Serwer, tweeting a hole right through the fabric of time and space. There really is nothing that will fail to aggrieve the pundocrats ruling our world.

Arguing Tucson

George Packer continues the good fight, incinerating false equivalencies as quickly as he can type:

In fact, there is no balance—none whatsoever. Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats. Only one side’s activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods. Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can’t stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous.

I’d argue that this last point is why the Palin team was so furiously scrubbing her various feeds within seconds of the news breaking: the clarity of the situation crystallized immediately and pervasively. And I suspect that no amount of “oh, both sides do it” is really going to take over the long haul.

Well, that and this continuing meme that incoherent, rage-filled political statements somehow make this case distinct from typical Tea Klan output.

Arguing Tucson