Tag: GOP
Pass. The. Damned. Bill.
Today’s installment of What Paul Krugman Said:
A message to House Democrats: This is your moment of truth. You can do the right thing and pass the Senate health care bill. Or you can look for an easy way out, make excuses and fail the test of history.
Tuesday’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts special election means that Democrats can’t send a modified health care bill back to the Senate. That’s a shame because the bill that would have emerged from House-Senate negotiations would have been better than the bill the Senate has already passed. But the Senate bill is much, much better than nothing. And all that has to happen to make it law is for the House to pass the same bill, and send it to President Obama’s desk.
[…]
[S]ome Democrats want to just give up on the whole thing. That would be an act of utter political folly. It wouldn’t protect Democrats from charges that they voted for “socialist” health care – remember, both houses of Congress have already passed reform. All it would do is solidify the public perception of Democrats as hapless and ineffectual.
And, let me just add: this asinine idea that you can chop the bill up into component parts is both functionally impossible and utterly improbable. So: the GOP is suddenly going to agree to operate in the best interests of the public? Since when? Seriously, when was the last incident of the GOP acting as though it had any responsibility re: actually governing. Name it. I’d seriously like to know. You could offer them full revocation of all taxes, closure of the IRS, and immediate shuttering of 85% of all government offices outside military and interstate highways and they’d still say: Hells No. Even better, from their entirely predictable point of view: the chop-it-up approach then ties up all legislative action for MONTHS as you serially run the mini-bills out for failed vote after failed vote after failed vote. All of which, of course, end in giant collective failure and a total lack of action on the things people are hopping mad about: the banks, Wall Street reforms, and jobs initiatives. Which, not coincidentally, are precisely the issues the Democrat could utterly crucify the 41-vote GOP with for the next eight or so months, right up until the 2010 mid-terms.They are AGAINST all of those things. And will vote to prove it. Unfortunately, they won’t be given the chance.
What part of the months-long slow-roll of the “negotiations” that went on from August to December of last year have the Democrats suddenly forgotten? The GOP wanted no part of compromise or some mythical “centrist” option. They DO NOT WANT TO PASS HEALTH REFORM OF ANY KIND, no matter what its shape, size, composition, font, paper quality, or decorative binding may be. Repeat: THE GOP is FUNDAMENTALLY and COMPLETELY against ANY REFORM. Full fucking stop.
Democrats, you’ve got two choices:
- Pass the fucking thing. You ALREADY DID. Those votes counted, you know. Pass, fail or abandon, those votes will hang around your necks like so many albatrosses. Better to have a useful outcome to point to than, you know, more months of utterly feckless failures.
- Pass a substantial expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, with Medicare buy-in over, say 45 or 50, paid for by some version of the Cadillac Tax on the wealthy. You know, what Ezra said. This would represent a substantial step forward, and can, without a doubt, go through reconciliation and would be a major fucking achievement that could start the day the bill was signed and, more importantly, people would actually like.
That’s it. Those are your choices. Why this is so fucking hard to understand after the display across the last 10 or more years up there is well and truly beyond me.
Fuck this up and it’s over. Democrats will be functionally out of power in 2010, totally out in 2012; Obama recalled as little more than Carter2. I’d say the odds for this outcome are pretty much 80/20 in favor of exactly that happening. If only the Democrat had a powerful leader with charisma and a strong public following. Somebody like that could take charge of this cluster fuck, start giving legislative marching orders, and navigate the turbulent political waters. But that guy has Rahm fucking Emanuel whispering in his ear. Odds go to at least 85/15.
Merry Christmas.
I have enough faith in my fellow creatures in [the United States] to believe that when they have got over the delirium of the television, when they realize that their new homes that they have been put into are mortgaged to the hilt, when they realize that the moneylender has been elevated to the highest position in the land, when they realize that the refinements for which they should look are not there, that it is a vulgar society of which no decent person could be proud, when they realize all those things, when the years go by and they see the challenge of modern society not being met by the [Republicans] who can consolidate their political powers only on the basis of national mediocrity, who are unable to exploit the resources of their scientists because they are prevented by the greed of their capitalism from doing so, when they realize that the flower of our youth goes abroad today because they are not being given opportunities of using their skill and their knowledge properly at home, when they realize that all the tides of history are flowing in our direction, that we are not beaten, that we represent the future: then, when we say it and mean it, then we shall lead our people to where they deserve to be led!
Aneurin Bevan [lightly edited to contextualize], to the British Labour Party in 1959, following their general election defeat. Wow.
Re-conciliation
File under “Great Fucking Idea” from Ezra Klein:
Democrats could scrap the legislation and start over in the reconciliation process. But not to re-create the whole bill. If you go that route, you admit the whole thing seemed too opaque and complex and compromised. You also admit the limitations of the reconciliation process. So you make it real simple: Medicare buy-in between 50 and 65. Medicaid expands up to 200 percent of poverty with the federal government funding the whole of the expansion. Revenue comes from a surtax on the wealthy.
[…]
If health-care reform that preserves the private market is too complex and requires too many dirty deals with the existing industries, then cut both out. But get it done. Democrats have a couple of different options for passing health-care reform this year. But not passing health-care reform should not be seen as one of them.
And that’s it. Harry Reid walks out to the podium (with Nancy Pelosi maintaining a stately distance, naturally) and says: Fuck all y’all below the age of 50. Move to Massachusetts if you’re so fucking concerned with your fucking lack of health coverage. Go die in the streets and see if we fucking care. Rest assured: we do not fucking care. Not anymore. Coverage is for closers only. It’s the American Dream!
Instead, the Democrat will most likely commence to explaining why 50 votes can’t even be mustered even for this little change and the Democrat should sit quietly in a corner somewhere, execute only GOP-sourced initiatives discussed only using GOP talking-points and rhetorical frames, and otherwise do absolutely nothing between now and the 2010 midterms. Whatever you do, don’t rock the boat.
Don’t, under any circumstances, swing for the fences on bank and Wall Street reforms, jobs packages, and other such heady initiatives that force would the GOP to go along or (the vastly more likely possibility) just shut the whole government down for the next 8 months giving you, the Democrat, 24/7 talking points about how the GOP just loves them some Banksters and hates, hates, hates the common man and his/her ability to get a job. Whatever you do, don’t allow a Medicare buy-in such as the quoted paragraph suggests, because then you might have to repeatedly pummel your GOP opponents with why, exactly, are they so afraid of adding a little competition into the market. Why, exactly, they are so beholden to the concept of care costing 4-5x what it would cost in any other Western nation while delivering a fraction of the benefit with regard to outcome, as measured almost any way you want to look. Whatever you do, 59 vote majority, don’t start doing things. That way lies destruction.
I don’t think Osama bin Laden sent those planes to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel, our ties with the Saudi family and our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? Because that’s what he fucking said! Are we a nation of 6-year-olds? Answer: yes.
David Cross
(via alex ryking)
(via alex ryking)
45 Seconds
Rachel Maddow touches on something critically important while discussing the GOP’s latest complaint: that Obama simply doesn’t use the word “terrorism” enough:
[Republicans are] lying in a way that can be obviously, demonstrably, embarrassingly proven by anyone who has a spare 45 seconds and the Google. When the people in the Republican Party who have the highest profile on national security say things that are easily, provably, flagrantly false, that’s a mistake. That makes it look like the party doesn’t know what it’s talking about a national security issues…. You guys, when you say President Obama doesn’t use the word terrorism, try to remember that when you say that, people are laughing at you.
That’s wonderful. Except that it’s easily, provably, and flagrantly false. First: The Conservative Media (and their beloved right-wing noise machine) still, still hews to the notion that the GOP is automatically and always the National Security Party. Cokie Roberts said so just the other day on that “liberal” bastion NPR. Everyone on-air agreed with her. Her comments and those of several others are what led to the creation of this handy guide. Second: The fundamental constituent for this sort of unsupported-by-facts nonsense is not someone who knows what “a Google” is, may think “the internet” is that Explorer shortcut on their desktop, and frequently worries that this time they’ve really missed their chance at riches from a mysterious Nigerian businessman who wanted to send all his money their way, just for a few days.
People are not laughing at the GOP, Rachel. You and I are. Unfortunately, we don’t really matter. The GOPers peddling this nonsense never had our vote to begin with. Low information voters, hell, no information voters are bathed daily in information- and context-free nonsense from Rush, FOXnews, Glenn Beck, talk radio, and 50 other sources. To them, these claims sound not only supportable but utterly reasonable and serious-minded. Google, if they even know what it is, doesn’t enter into the equation. Until Democrats internalize this and message accordingly, nothing will change. Until the media at large internalizes this and begins to challenge, immediately and on the spot, and embarrass into silence these asshats the instant this sort of statement emits from their fetid pie-hole, nothing will change.
This is what Karl Rove fundamentally understood: in the modern media environment, the truth doesn’t matter. The initial lie, no matter how quickly or decisively defenestrated it may be, is out there. And, just like Cokie’s Law states: if it’s “out there” we have to treat it as fact and discuss it. Repeatedly and without recourse to anything approaching helpful context. That’s what we call good, hard-nosed journalism.
I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say, evolution is hooey. […] The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation, but we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principals. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.
Don McLeroy, one of the conservatives rewriting history and science textbooks in Texas. Which, because Texas is a powerful market force, means your textbooks too. Reasoning and critical thinking are doomed in this country. It will already take 100 years to correct the damage these fucktards are doing to the country, and they respond by accelerating the descent.
I’m left fearing the future of America’s leadership on the world stage of science and technology.
This leadership, as any historian will tell you, drives the economic strength and security of nations. The fall is not from a cliff. More like a slow, downward slide – almost imperceptible from day to day. But as the years pass America will have descended from leaders to players to merely followers as we fade to insignificance, at best hitching a ride on the innovations of others.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History. This is indeed what the far right know-nothings are toying with every time they make temporary political hay on their various anti-intellectual screeds; sadly, Tyson points to an outcome as predictable as it is inevitable. The wages of this sort of systematic denialism of empirical reality are secondary and tertiary status in research and, by extension, our national economic output and potential. Please do check the trend lines of global academic citations of North American science vs. Western European if you doubt me.
Ladies and Gentlemen: your GOP. Dangerous people, of course, can be told by their names. Which are Abdul or Ahmed or Mohammed. They will have their own line. For scrutiny. Everyone else: come on aboard!
Worth noting that disgraced former Speaker Newt has been the most frequent guest featured on Meet the Press this year. Number of times Nancy Pelosi, sitting Speaker of the House, third in line for the Presidency, and senior member of majority caucus in Congress has been on? Zero. Your Liberal Media at work again.
Hold them to it
If we didn’t have a feckless Democratic majority, they might be in front of microphones just about now giving a preferably rhyming, two sentence version of this information for the evening news and cablers:
An attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration – if there were one.
Instead, the post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has held up President Barack Obama’s nominee in an effort to prevent TSA workers from joining a labor union.
and, while they’re at it, they could see fit to mention that (emphasis added):
Republicans have cast votes against the key TSA funding measure that the 2010 appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security contained, which included funding for the TSA, including for explosives detection systems and other aviation security measures. In the June 24 vote in the House, leading Republicans including John Boehner, Pete Hoekstra, Mike Pence and Paul Ryan voted against the bill, […] A full 108 Republicans voted against the conference version, including Boehner, Hoekstra, Pence, Michelle Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn, Darrell Issa and Joe Wilson.
I guess pointing out this sort of brazen hypocrisy from our National Security Party, the GOP, just wouldn’t be polite, and would undermine the extreme and ongoing displays of real comity we’ve seen thus far.
Lemkin 