Tag: GOP

Smaller government: Federal employment grew by 61,000 during Reagan’s presidency—in part because Reagan created a whole new cabinet department, the department of veterans affairs. (Under Bill Clinton, by contrast, federal employment dropped by 373,000).
Smaller deficits and debt: Both nearly tripled on Reagan’s watch.
Lower taxes: Although Reagan muscled through a major tax cut in 1981, he followed up by raising taxes in 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1986. In 1983, in fact, he not only raised payroll taxes; he raised them to pay for Social Security and Medicare. Let’s put this in language today’s tea-baggers can understand: Reagan raised taxes to pay for government-run health care.
Then there’s plank number five: Reaganite candidates must “oppos[e] amnesty for illegal immigrants.” Really? Because if you look up the word “amnesty” in Black’s Law Dictionary, you’ll find a reference to the 1986 bill that Reagan signed, which ended up granting amnesty to 2.7 million illegal immigrants.
Then there’s foreign policy. Plank number six demands that candidates back the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what did Reagan do in his biggest confrontation with jihadist terror? When Hezbollah murdered 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut in 1983, the Gipper didn’t surge; he withdrew the remaining American troops, and fast.
Plank number 7 calls for “effective [read military] action to eliminate” Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs. But Reagan condemned Israel’s 1981 preventive strike against an Iraqi nuclear reactor.
And plank number nine requires steadfast opposition to abortion. Yet two of Reagan’s three Supreme Court nominees voted to uphold Roe v. Wade.

Peter Beinart on the “Reaganite” purity test modern fucktards so desire.

We know, we know—it’s hard to believe that the path to impeachment could have been paved at a 1993 dinner party. […] But Establishment Washington—aka, The Village—has operated by very strange rules over the course of the past several decades. And now, years later, along comes Quinn—and she points to that very same dinner.

Bob Somerby, discussing this. Truly beyond belief; not-coincidentally also the rotting core of our dangerously dysfunctional system and the essence of the environment that makes the GOP noise machine possible.

And if you look at the policies that we’ve seen over the course of this year from the administration and his Democratic colleagues in Congress, they’re all these leftist proposals.

John Boehner ®, House minority leader, who clearly took to heart the President’s words about corrosive and nonsensical framing of Obama’s center-right legislative record as some sort of “Bolshevik plot.”

Noises Off

Kevin Drum reacts to the 1.5-hour systematic refutation of GOP talking points by one Barack Obama today during the GOP caucus meeting (which you can see and read for yourself; Obama is particularly ferocious on healthcare and the preposterous rhetoric surrounding same. Also economic proposals. Worth your time.):

Right now Republicans have a built-in advantage when it comes to attack politics and they’d be fools to give it up. A format like this, which puts the president front and center, allows him to directly call out distortions and lies, and rewards conversation rather than machine-gun style talking points, is something Republicans should justifiably be very afraid of. Unless they’re suicidal — or somehow figure out a way to take better advantage of the format — they’ll never allow this to happen again. Without the noise machine, they’re lost.

I think this overlooks the fact that Obama can simply host the meeting anyway. TV cameras will be there. If the GOP refuses to show up, or won’t let him in the door, it makes for a powerful object lesson. Either they’re a) afraid to face him -or- b) have no valid response and know it. If they let him in but close it to cameras, that’s equally powerful in its own way. Any of these outcomes can then become the message for the next several days. You could even have count-up calendars: 64 days since the GOP last agreed to meet with the President. Will they turn up on Thursday? It’s the sort of simple, powerful concept that the American people will instantly and viscerally understand. And it will piss them off.

The Democrats need to focus all efforts at messaging. Most of the country is utterly unaware of just how pervasive GOP obstruction is, and will never find out on FOXnews. So you have to make it sufficiently unavoidable. Everyone must see it first hand, or hear about it at the water cooler, or see the particularly defenestrating YouTube clip, or what-have-you. Every day. Every week. Now until the mid-terms.

Still in Charge

Print out and laminate, [annotated and extended for you convenience]:

  1. [The Democrats in Congress] need to remember that they’re still in charge. Democrats have the White House and large majorities in both houses of Congress. They get to set the agenda.
  2. Democrats have to understand is that they already passed health care; they own the legislation. [As such, they will be campaigning on this issue whether it is signed by Obama or not. No matter what happens between now and the mid-terms. Better to have distinct policy issues to point to, as opposed to a miserable failure to act that they have to paper over.]
  3. If Democrats get the urge to reach out to their colleagues across the aisle, they need to remind themselves that Republicans have no incentive – or desire – to do anything other than obstruct any and all legislation the Democrats might seek to pass. [Furthermore, they need to tee up some popular, populist-leaning policies that they know the GOP will obstruct. And then crucify them.]
  4. Republicans will cry “big government!” at any proposal that doesn’t involve tax cuts for the purchase of monocles and yachting accessories, but Democrats should ignore them. [Furthermore, Democrats should repeatedly excoriate the GOP for their views. When asked to apologize, raise the temperature of the rhetoric. When asked to apologize for that, raise it again.]
  5. If [Democrats] want to avoid catastrophe, they’ll have to go against all their instincts and show the American people that they have some spine. The last thing they want to be saying to the public is, “Re-elect us, even though we are obviously incapable of getting anything done.”

Read the whole thing.

Free to vote

Democratic leaders in the Senate are asking colleagues who are reluctant to support Bernanke’s nomination for a second term as Federal Reserve chairman to nevertheless vote with them to end a filibuster and allow a vote on the actual nomination. The reluctant members would then be free to vote no to express their displeasure.

Of course, for everything else, a vote for/against cloture is somehow magically indistinguishable from a vote for/against final passage. Un-fucking-believable. And you can bet that every last motherfucker on the yes-cloture no-confirmation list is somebody who’s come out all “there’s no difference between cloture and final passage” before. And will expect (and experience) no blow-back from this sort of utter hypocrisy.

And we wonder why these fucktards fail. As Krugman notes: “I can hardly think of anything more calculated to solidify the view that Wall Street doesn’t have to play by the rules that apply to everyone else.” Yep.

The Democrat as currently constituted is utterly and completely unfit to govern. At least they won’t have to worry about it anymore come 2010/2012. Then they can go back to going along with whatever the GOP says to do, all in the name of comity.

I say again: any Democrat, or fucking execrable fucktard that is allowed to caucus with them, that votes against cloture on a key issue or critical Democratic initiative should promptly find themselves so far down the seniority tree that they are often unable to purchase bean salad at the Senate cafeteria. Period. Until that happens, you’ll end up with the shit-sandwich we’ve been eating since they took over in record fashion.

In the same vein: You want to start over on insurance reform, GOP? Fine, as a first step towards that exciting new future, let’s pass a revocation of all health care provisions, including Medicare, for all serving members of Congress and their families, effective immediately; furthermore, we will tie any and all future health plans for same to the costliest option offered under any new legislation. Put your fucking market money where your fucking market mouth is, motherfuckers.

Is this all so very complicated?

A Very Simple Question

There is no proof that Scott Brown is a light skinned Cuban national that underwent cosmetic surgery and years of voice training to “pass” as an American?  Yet. As of this writing, there is no proof that he is a deep cover Russian agent sent to infiltrate the US Senate from the inside? Is Scott Brown actually Canadian? We don’t know. We have not seen his long form birth certificate.

A Very Simple Question

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said Monday that he would oppose any health care reform bill with a national insurance exchange, which he described as a dealbreaker.

“The national exchange is unnecessary and I wouldn’t support something that would start us down the road of federal regulation of insurance and a single-payer plan,” Nelson told reporters Monday.

If Senate Democrats still had 60 votes, this would matter a lot.

Carrie Budoff Brown
Just for the record, it didn’t matter then, either. Just a lot of people convincing themselves it mattered. 59=clarity.

Death Spiral

It occurs to me that:

  1. The GOP categorically cannot resist getting behind bad policy with economically destructive end results, especially if and when they also increase suffering in the interim. It’s like their catnip.
  2. The Democrat wants to crawl out from under insurance reform with “popular” sub-measures, the community rating being among the very most popular.
  3. It is widely accepted that forcing a community rating in the absence of the individual mandate will extinguish health insurance as a profitable concern in this or any country

So here’s the plan. Figure out a way to pass the community rating. Fuck yeah, health insurance reform! Nobody can be denied coverage, 4EVA!!!!

Then: Healthy people stay out of insurance pools until they are genuinely sick, the insurance companies soon enough find they cannot continue to make money at that, prices and premiums spasmodically but systematically rise. Lather, rinse, repeat for 5-10 years. And then: BOOM. The system finally collapses utterly. President Palin is forced to do, uh, somethin’ or ‘nuther, doncha know? About all that health stuff and whatnot?

The GOP will have ushered in single payer.

And, no, I’ve not gone around the bend. Various conservatives are already making the connection:

the country will face a choice: allow the numbers of uninsured to continue shooting up, or enroll more and more people directly in taxpayer-funded government insurance plans.

I say, if nothing else, Democrats should be doing whatever possible to accelerate the arrival of that day. Think of it as the reverse Grover Norquist. And, rest assured, given the rampant fucktardia emanating from DC Democrats over the last few days, I think they are, uh, going as fast as they possibly can on this plan.