Tag: obama

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.

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.

Shit sandwich

Some on the Hill remain worried that Lieberman will discover new points of contention in the coming days, as they believe he had signaled that he wouldn’t filibuster the Medicare buy-in. They worry whether his word is good.

No reason to worry, Ezra. It is not good and never has been. The goalposts will move again. This time, my guess is “We’re moving too fast. The vote must wait until after Christmas.” Which would effectively kill the bill, so far as I can tell. So that’s what comes next from Joementum. Deep down I always knew I could count on Joe to submarine both the health insurance options of ~40 million people and the presidency of his least preferred option because he faced and lost a primary challenge. What a true patriot. Truly a model for us all.

Digby sums it up rather succinctly:

I think we have a way to go before this bill is bad enough for [Lieberman] and his cronies to allow the Democrats to commit political suicide with it.

Indeed we do. And indeed they are committing suicide. The only saving grace for 2010 is that the “you are now required to buy crummy insurance you cannot afford act of 2009” goes into effect after the 2010s, and but just in time to destroy Obama’s reelection bid. President Palin, here we come. (Naturally, she’ll abruptly quit after 90 days leaving us with President Beck. You heard it here first.)

Somewhere today, in the here and now, in the world as it is, a soldier sees he’s outgunned, but stands firm to keep the peace. Somewhere today, in this world, a young protestor awaits the brutality of her government, but has the courage to march on. Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty still takes the time to teach her child, scrapes together what few coins she has to send that child to school – because she believes that a cruel world still has a place for that child’s dreams.

Let us live by their example. We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace. We can do that – for that is the story of human progress; that’s the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth.

Barack Obama, accepting the Peace Prize

Obama and his Telepromter

squashed:

jgh writes,

Since when do politicians not read from Teleprompters? Obama has written many of his own speeches. I’m unsure of what this talking point is supposed to be about.

Can somebody help?

I think it’s mostly the logical paradox of a man who these folks a priori distrust and despise (for an assortment of reasons that are left as an exercise for the reader) being quite capable of delivering a speech, more or less on demand, that’s as good as anyone’s heard out of an American politician in quite some time. So he’s merely a speech reader, likely a secret illegal immigrant from Kenya, and etc… That he (on several occasions) largely wrote the speech, or when that devil the teleprompter is on occasion non-functional and said speech was delivered entirely from memory never seems to enter into these calculations. After all, these are the same people that think Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Obama’s books based on the joint use of “crazy” words like “ontological” or some-such.

What bothers me most, though, is that these same folks are the ones systematically referring to W. Bush as a tragically misunderstood genius…who, on teleprompter, mind you, gave us such quotes as:

put food on your family

vulcanize society

make the pie higher! make the pie higher!

just to name a few. So, if Bush presumably couldn’t reliably read a speech properly, and definitely couldn’t give a canned one “off the cuff” either, then exactly where on the intellect scale does he rank relative to Obama, the putative “reader”?

And, going beyond that, how do you square the “he’s only reading” canard with Obama’s own, oft-criticized press conferences (which the press finds soooooo boring, natch), in which he departs on a 30 minute disputation about policy concerns relevant to some sub-issue of the question? No teleprompting there. Secret earpiece, no doubt.That or an ancient form of Kenyan mind-control that makes us think he’s answering at length. Again, square this with Bush’s press conference performance which generally involved a chuckle, a reference to the nickname of the questioner, and the odd personal attack on a blind man for wearing sunglasses.

All this before you even begin to consider that running for President requires, absolutely requires the candidate to give innumerable speeches off-prompter, every day, with YouTube lurking in the wings 100% of the time. But we won’t consider that either, apparently.

End of Days

Rick Hertzberg and I agree on three out of four things:

1. The Beck-Limbaugh purification of the Republican Party will continue apace.

Populist nihilism—increasingly the default position within the G.O.P., especially on national level—still has a lot of energy left in it. As the party’s core shrinks (a process that will continue even if its share of the vote increases relative to the Democratic share), the resentful right’s stranglehold will grow stronger.

2. The Republicans will gain seats in next year’s midterm election.

The party holding the White House always loses seats in a new President’s first midterm, the only exception being the special case of 2002, the year of Bush-Rove post-9/11 electoral terrorism.

3. The right, and much of the commentariat, will discover a cause-and-effect relationship between No. 1, above, and No. 2.

They’ll figure it this way: post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Then we diverge. He offers:

4. President Obama will be reëlected.

He’ll be the safe choice. Having been elected on hope, change, and adventure, he’ll be reëlected on reassurance, stability, and … experience.

I think it’s more like:

4. If unemployment is below 10% nationally, Obama may be reelected, depending on opponent. If it’s below 8%, he will win in a landslide regardless of oponent.

It’s really as simple as that.

We’re back in agreement on the bonus Fifth Thing, which is presented more as a prayer:

5. The number of Americans who realize that more of our problems stem from structure (especially the Senate, and most especially the filibuster) than from politicians’ lack of moral fiber will reach the cusp of a tipping point.

Amen.

Bad for the Democrat

Alexander Ryking notes something that was seemingly lost amongst the shuffle as the Liberal Media rushed to declare the Democrat dead once and for all:

Bill Owens won NY-23 — beating a right-wing extremist and becoming the first non-right-wing candidate to win the district since 1871. Great job, Michael Steele; you couldn’t even hold a district that has voted for YOUR party for 138 years.

It would seem to me the titanic face-off between the far right and moderate wings of modern conservatism (in the form of the GOP and the Conservative Party vs. the Democrat), with the direct and heavy involvement of Palin and other “rising stars” of the conservative mediasphere that shall go unnamed, that actually has national implications in terms of its outcome (in that Owens now goes to Congress (as opposed to assuming a purely statewide job)), and that ultimately resulted in a historic upending of the normal voting order stretching back more than a century would be the key outcome of what is, even still, a backwater, off-off-year election of little national import. Instead, we get breathless reports on two races for governor with unpopular incumbents, one of whom actively distanced himself from Obama, and, in both cases exit polling definitively showed that this was in no way a referendum on the Democratic Party or Obama in particular:

majorities of voters in both states (56 percent in Virginia and 60 percent in New Jersey) said President Obama was not a factor in their vote today

But, by all means liberal media, don’t let the facts of one genuinely interesting story get in the way of the preferred storyline, whatever its particulars may be. And then wonder at your continued marginalization and failure at connecting with the larger public. For some reason (that is clearly unknowable): people just don’t trust the MSM any more.