[The public option is a] major step toward universal health care coverage.”
With 40 grandchildren of his own, he said, he does not want the country to go in that direction.
Glenn Beck wants to have a national day of prayer and fasting, and points to Thomas Jefferson as someone who was all for that sort of thing. Fortunately, Thomas Jefferson weighed in on just exactly this sort of issue:
First, on the issue of prescribing such observances:
I consider the government of the U S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise, of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the U.S. Certainly no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government. It must then rest with the states, as far as it can be in any human authority.
That one actually seems crystal clear without recourse to old TJ, but, in this day and age, it pays to be thorough. But hows-about the more sly, more thoroughly “modern” version of said observances in which the President (or a similar authority) simply encourages folks to pray or fast or what-have-you:
But it is only proposed that I should recommend, not prescribe a day of fasting & prayer. That is, that I should indirectly assume to the U.S. an authority over religious exercises which the Constitution has directly precluded them from. It must be meant too that this recommendation is to carry some authority, and to be sanctioned by some penalty on those who disregard it; not indeed of fine and imprisonment, but of some degree of proscription perhaps in public opinion. And does the change in the nature of the penalty make the recommendation the less a law of conduct for those to whom it is directed? I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrines; nor of the religious societies that the general government should be invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them. Fasting & prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, & the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the constitution has deposited it.
Exactly right. Why, it’s almost as if this country was founded by deists who were looking to completely separate the respective functions of church and state. Just don’t tell Glenn Beck; such facts get in the way of his preferred narratives.
So, which recent or current President would Jefferson judge as more dangerous to the Republic? And exactly which part of Glenn Beck’s daily spew would Jefferson recognize as even American, much less the work of a self-proclaimed “Constitutional Scholar”?
The president, like me, didn’t seem to be in love with any of the available options. He always believed Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee. “Wait till her fat [ass] is sitting at this desk,” he once said […] He didn’t think much of Barack Obama. After one of Obama’s blistering speeches against the administration, the president had a very human reaction: He was ticked off. He came in one day to rehearse a speech, fuming. “This is a dangerous world,” he said for no apparent reason, “and this cat isn’t remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you.” He wound himself up even more. “You think I wasn’t qualified?” he said to no one in particular. “I was qualified.”
Total spending on health care, per person, 2007:
United States: $7290
United Kingdom: $2992
Italy: $2686
Spain: $2671
We must be getting the best outcomes, right? Think of all our technology!?! Think again:
As of the 2006 data (the most recent I can find), we ranked 27th in infant mortality, just behind the Slovak Republic, with Mexico nipping at our heels. Life expectancy at 65 for females (compared among the relatively wealthy nations) ranks 14th, males 18th. We perform similarly poorly in almost all metrics you look at, perennially trailing countries that spend 4 or 5 times less per person than we do; hell, we trail countries that people would otherwise routinely mock as sadly “backward” or “economically stunted.” Dread France beats us on costs and outcomes. Repeatedly. (This data and much more available here. Use it. Please.) So, just to summarize in the simplest, clearest terms possible:
we pay 2.4 times more per person on healthcare than our next nearest competitor and get substantially worse outcomes than countries spending even less than that.
But, by all means, GOP: don’t mess with such a powerhouse of efficiency. Well, beyond your proposed “solutions” of blowing up the existing employer-based system and putting everybody out on the streets to fend for themselves.
Today’s GOP can effectively be summed up by the phrase “Go Die in the Streets.” Seriously, it applies to every position they have. Clearly, they’re working backwards from it to form whatever passes for policy in their lairs.
Just to review, I give you the 2010 GOP Platform:
Social Security: Go Die in the (Wall) Streets
Welfare: Go Die in the Streets
Immigration: Go Die in the Streets (preferably of your home country, but we’re not picky)
Healthcare: Go Die in the Streets
Military Spending: Go into the Streets so you can Die
Firearms/Gun Control: Go Die in the Streets
Abortion: Go Die in the (back) Streets
Prove me wrong, children. Prove me wrong.
There is no serious dialogue between the Democrats and the GOP. How can you possibly form any governing coalition between groups when one half of those groups refuses to accept empirical reality?
This is a post about Joe Wilson, but not about him specifically. But let’s start there. He’s the one who lied when he called out “You Lie!” in reference to coverage of illegal aliens. Facts are troublesome things to the modern GOP; one need not read any further than the name of the appropriate subsection to see what’s what, but Politifact goes one further:
…health reform leaves in place the status quo on illegal immigration, and certainly does not provide any new benefits particularly for illegal immigrants
If this outburst were limited only to the sad fucktard that is Joe Wilson, that’d be one thing. But Dana Milbank lays out the entire sad situation:
Wilson was only the most flagrant. There was booing from House Republicans when the president caricatured a conservative argument by saying they would “leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.” They hissed when he protested their “scare tactics.” They grumbled as they do in Britain’s House of Commons when Obama spoke of the “blizzard of charges and countercharges.”
When he asserted that “nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have,” there was scoffing and outright laughter on the GOP side. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) shook his head in disbelief. Several Republicans shouted “What plan?” and Rep. Louis Gohmert (Tex.) waved at Obama a handwritten poster he made on a letter-size piece of paper: “WHAT PLAN?” Gohmert then took that down and replaced it with another handmade poster that said “WHAT BILL?”
The essential outcome of all this is something the media seems to forget on a daily basis: There is no GOP anymore as a functional political party interested in governance. Full stop. All policy debate, healthcare or otherwise is being conducted by Democrats: liberal and conservative. They then have to pass said policy through a perfectly mysterious 60-vote supra-majority in the Senate that the media can never see fit to explain either. Just why is it that the Senate cannot move on 51-vote majorities? Why is that anti-democratic policy in place and ruling our worlds? Easier to repeat whatever it is Drudge is peddling, I suppose. But consulting the MSM, you will never, ever find out what’s behind those mysterious 60-vote requirements. But, rest assured, there is no dialogue, because there is no (functional) GOP. It seems more and more likely that the ultimate outcome of the current situation is a new third party that, over time, first relegates the GOP into a regional, state-level party, and then into Whig-town.
And but Obama is exactly right, though probably a few decades late, in issuing this warning:
[When] we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter, we don’t merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.
One might add that we also lose the ability to govern the country at all.
You’d hope that the powers-that-be in the GOP (or the public at large) will see this sequence as a tipping point, and Joe Wilson will become the Joe McCarthy of his era (though, in his case, managing to be his own Joe Welch). Based on the various FOXnews reactions last night, I seriously doubt it. Things will only get much, much worse as Joe Wilson is held out as some sort of conquering hero and sets about creating a whole crew cast in the vapid image of Sarah Palin.
Your Liberal Media hard at work again. But one example from the link:
Politico’s Glenn Thrush hailed Wilson’s heckling as the night’s “defining moment” in a piece headlined, “Wilson’s rallying cry.” But was Wilson’s boorish accusation true? Did Obama “lie” when he claimed Democratic health care reforms would no offer up free care to illegal immigrants? On that count Politico remains politely silent.
Krugman, writing in a blog post, notes the same utterly detached form of group insanity that Joe Klein observed at a recent Arkansas town hall:
The point is that whatever is driving all this doesn’t have anything to do with the realities of what I, or, much more important of course, Obama say or do. Obama could have come in proposing to pursue an agenda identical to Bush, and he would still be a socialist/Commie/fascist, with those of us who don’t see it that way lying Nazis ourselves.
Something is going very wrong in the heads of a substantial number of Americans.
At least on the point of the communist nonsense (and, if you haven’t been following the output of the nuthatch: Obama is secretly larding his White House with Marxists), I think we can parse the madness pretty damned easily. The first signs of it emerged from the fact that various high-level advisors who report only to the President are commonly referred to in the popular media as “Czars.” That must refer to some kind of a Marxist, right? Why, there are more “Czars” in the Obama administration than in Old Russia! Where there was one… and the more frequent english spelling there is actually, uh, “Tsar.” But let’s take it at fully idiotic face value: never mentioned or grasped is the seemingly equally critical fact that Obama’s is the first administration since Reagan (whose team seemingly popularized, but didn’t invent, the term “Czar” in its modern US political usage) that has actually stopped using the term at all. Early on during the transition period, the administration went out of its way to put a stop to the common usage, going so far as getting out there and providing quotes that made it into various stories, such as this one in Politico, which specifically note that:
“Obama aides say that Browner will not be called a “czar,” a term they dislike. They say she will simply focus like a laser beam on energy-reform issues, which the president-elect has named as a top priority and one of the linchpins of his economic recovery plan.”
Of course, the media positively loves the term. And continued to use it. Even when specifically corrected:
Reporter: On Ken Feinberg, I think that he’s maybe the 20th czar-type position you’ve named.
Gibbs: No, I think the title is “special master.”
And now fans the flames of this nonsense by failing to mention any of this, ever. And act as though this is the first administration EVAR to have such positions and to call them something like “Czars”, and it is all so much more evidence of secret Marxism in the Obama administration.
Secondly, that “Something” of Krugman’s post is largely personified in the form of one Glenn Beck. Who holds particular disdain for one Van Jones, Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). See, absolutely no mention of “Czar” in there anywhere. Why, that gets us one closer to the number of Tsars around in the time of the Romanovs. In fact, I think we can all probably agree that Jones is a secret Marxist because Color of Change, an organization he co-founded has, as of this moment, successfully peeled off no fewer than 57 advertisers from Beck’s show. Clearly, only a secret Marxist would do such a thing, and a grateful nation owes Glenn Beck much for so selflessly pursuing this issue… That most of those advertisers still have contracts with FOXnews is troubling, but at least it’s a start. One might think that there’s a good MSM article in there somewhere, tracking the various personal vendettas that the right-wing echo chamber turns into grist for the mill. But, no, not interested. It’s just a “strange thing we’re observing on our various excursions flying across the hinterlands. Wonder what that’s all about?” Or, more succinctly:
“Sometimes in life you want to just keep walking… Sometimes, I think, just keep walking…. Some of life just has to be mysterious.”
God help us if we ever get a functional media class. People might actually learn something. Starting with those people in the newly functional media class.
David Broder: If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?
Lemkin: Yes.
David Broder: The wheels are turning, but they can still be halted before irreparable damage is done.
Lemkin: My, it’s amazing you think the damage has yet to be done. Why are you employed by a major media corporation, and upon which planet do you spend most of your time?
David Broder: …
Back in July, John Kyl wished all stimulus spending would come to an end. Eric Cantor has come out today in the same vein. Why would they say such a thing?
I’d wager it’s because of the undercurrents of recovery that lead to this Wall Street Journal Headline:
You see, the real issue is that (from the GOP’s point of view) the stimulus must be seen to fail. And miserably. For the stimulus to be regarded as an unqualified (or even a marginal) success is to destroy everything the GOP has been working for. In fact, for it to be successful even in light of being rather randomly pared down to meet arbitrary “centrist” specifications would be an unmitigated disaster for the GOP heading as it is into the 2010 election cycle. Because, you see, they realize that only a fraction of the stimulus has yet become active. Indeed, witness this paragraph from the above linked WSJ:
Much of the stimulus spending is just beginning to trickle through the economy, with spending expected to peak sometime later this year or in early 2010. The government has funneled about $60 billion of the $288 billion in promised tax cuts to U.S. households, while about $84 billion of the $499 billion in spending has been paid. About $200 billion has been promised to certain projects, such as infrastructure and energy projects.
[…]
For the third quarter, economists at Goldman Sachs & Co. predict the U.S. economy will grow by 3.3%. “Without that extra stimulus, we would be somewhere around zero,” said Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist for Goldman.
Thus the logic for the GOP is rather simple. The stimulus is working; the stimulus Must Be Stopped. It’s the only patriotic position possible. The GOP needs that growth to be “somewhere around zero” for their 2010 campaign ads, after all.
Worth noting that the beloved “Up or Down Vote!” of GOP majorities past, a.k.a.: a 51-yea-vote democratic majority in the Senate, is now “The NUCLEAR OPTION.”
Seriously, what is wrong with these people?
Lemkin 