Category: Deep political thought

A sickening health-care bill?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment

I forgot to add AlterNet to my bookmarks when I shifted operations to the new iMac, and so only stumbled across this post today. It’s a Dec. 21 transcript of a “Bill Moyers Journal” show featuring Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi and The American Prospect‘s Robert Kuttner discussing health-care reform and President Obama’s role in same.

Both Taibbi and Kuttner are deeply critical of Obama’s performance in the passage of what Kuttner calls “a very feeble bill.” Yet Kuttner would vote for it, if only to bitch-slap the GOP and pray that the win helps the prez grow a pair. Taibbi would not. And Kuttner warns that Obama had better start acting like the champion of the people against the special interests if he wants to catch the social-movement tsunami he sees on the horizon:

“One way or another, there is going to be a social movement. Because so many people are hurting, and so many people are feeling correctly that Wall Street is getting too much and Main Street is getting too little. And if it’s not a progressive social movement that articulates the frustration and the reform program, you know that the right wing is going to do it. And that, I think, is what ought to be scaring us silly.”

• Extra Credit Reading: Kevin Drum and Paul Krugman beg to differ.

Pass the bill, change the rules

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Over at The New York Times, Paul Krugman is saying, “Pass the health-care bill awready, jeez.” But with more elegance, of course. Like Kevin Drum, he says the measure is flawed, but better than nothing, which is what history shows we will have for the better part of quite some time if this latest attempt at reform goes down in flames:

“Whereas flawed social insurance programs have tended to get better over time, the story of health reform suggests that rejecting an imperfect deal in the hope of eventually getting something better is a recipe for getting nothing at all.”

I’m not nearly as smart as Krugman — you may not be, either — but it’s clear to even a dummy like me that our present system is unsustainable. Health insurance constitutes the second biggest bill we pay here at the DogHaus, right behind the mortgage, and we’re just two people who are reasonably healthy when not falling off our bikes. And nearly every experience we’ve had with an insurer has involved a monumental clusterfuck of some kind, including botched billings, unintelligible paperwork and exorbitant premium increases that make a mob loan shark seem positively angelic by comparison.

Some of this has to do with the employer-based structure of U.S. health insurance. I don’t have an employer, so I can either cut a deal on my own — the last time we did that it involved a monumental deductible and paying full retail at the sawbones and pharmacy — or piggyback on Herself’s policy, which at various times and places has looked not unlike robbery with violence, with one plan for single people and another for families, but no mid-priced offering for a man and wife unencumbered by offspring.

Drum concedes that the Senate plan kowtows to powerful interests like the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, adding, “But that’s why they’re called powerful interests: because they can kill your legislative priorities if you don’t assuage them.” In return, he continues:

“(T)he Senate bill brings down insurance rates, expands Medicaid, offers the prospect of moderately priced insurance to tens of millions of the uninsured, forces insurers to take you on even if you have a chronic pre-existing condition, mandates minimum levels of coverage, and takes several small but important steps toward reducing the future growth of healthcare costs.  That’s an enormous advance for the progressive agenda.”

We’ll see. Or maybe not. It’s far from a done deal. But if the sausage gets made, Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson should be next to go into the grinder. And let’s toss the filibuster in there with the sonsabitches. Krugman again:

“The filibuster, and the need for 60 votes to end debate, aren’t in the Constitution. They’re a Senate tradition, and that same tradition said that the threat of filibusters should be used sparingly. Well, Republicans have already trashed the second part of the tradition: look at a list of cloture motions over time, and you’ll see that since the G.O.P. lost control of Congress it has pursued obstructionism on a literally unprecedented scale. So it’s time to revise the rules.”

Can the Donks play that kind of hardball? Stay tuned.

The forever war?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Well, there you have it: More meat for the grinder, says the prez (video here). Can’t say I’m happy about it, especially the caveat about withdrawals beginning in July 2001 to be dependent upon “conditions on the ground,” the ground in that part of the world being unstable in more ways than one (earthquakes and crazy mean bastards). Here’s the CIA World FactBook rundown on the joint for those of you who, like me, have never been there.

I like the idea of a deadline: “You have this long to help us kick the bad guys’ ass or you can fight them by yourselves.” Ditto the diversion of American money from the mayor of Kabul — a.k.a. President Hamid Karzai, a gent who by all accounts is so crooked that he can meet himself coming around a corner — to local officials in the boondocks.

I also like the long-overdue recognition of the financial toll here at home: “Um, yes, wars cost money, just like everything else, only more so. This one will be in the budget; we don’t care how the last guy did it. Will there be anything else? May I interest you in some health care, environmental action and jobs, perhaps?”

The fact that the Repuglicans are lining up against the prez should be encouraging, but is not, given their behavior to date. It’s not hard to get a dumb dog to bark.

Dexter Filkins, author of “The Forever War,” appears to have his doubts. So do I. I just don’t articulate them as well.

• Late update: Looks like Steve Benen at Political Animal shares my skepticism.

California roll

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

I’ve lived in Bibleburg off and on since 1967, so I’m rarely surprised when one of our wingnut asshats takes his clown act to the national stage. Everyone’s familiar with our most recent Three Stooges revival — Ted Haggard, Jimmy Dobson and Doug Bruce — but I can remember when there was a John Birch Society bookstore downtown, right about where Tony’s is now. And when the Ku Klux Klan attempted a comeback here in the Seventies, I interviewed the local hood-and-sheet club as well as national Kluxer David Duke for the Bibleburg Gaslight.

So color me unsurprised that state Sen. David Schultheis (R-Hyperbole) has used his Twitter account to fart higher than his ass. According to Talking Points Memo, citing Colorado Pols, Schultheis tweeted thusly:

“Don’t for a second, think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. Plane right into the ground at full speed. Let’s Roll.”

As TPM notes, “Let’s roll” were the final words of Todd Beamer, a passenger aboard United Airlines Flight 93, one of four aircraft hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001. It crashed before reaching its intended target after a passenger rebellion.

What I don’t understand is, why do we have to import nitwits like this? Schultheis is a transplant from California who didn’t start fucking up in my back yard until 1992. Don’t we have enough of our own homegrown fools to fill key positions in the state Legislature? Where are the Minutemen when we need them?

What Bibleburg needs is immigration reform, the sooner the better. Let’s save these high-paying jobs for our own dummies.

• Late update: The Denver Post has noted Schultheis’ chirpy churlishness, but as of wine-thirty, the Gaslight has not. Another non-surprise.

• Even later update: Racist fool and Birther Lou Dobbs is out at CNN. This does not mean that CNN has suddenly stopped sucking. It only means that henceforth, it will suck a little less.