Salon: Get the smelling salts...A Republican voted for the House Dems health bill!
Free Thought Manifesto: One Nation, Under Illusion
The Political Carnival: The lying, self-absorbed little death panel-monger is at it again
Scott Horton: More on the Verdict in Milan
James Fallows: Unemployment and airplane crashes
Digital Life: Better the broken Windows than life with the Mac monks
What do you know? John King decided to almost act like a reporter today when trying to get John Boehner to explain what the Republicans' alternative the Democratic House health care bill was. King held up the two page summary which is what the Republicans have available now on their web site. Boehner said they have eight or nine ideas which they are going to combine and send to the CBO to have scored and present on the House floor for debate.
What the GOP currently has posted on their web site is vague at best, but John Boehner made sure everyone understood one thing it would not do; attempt to cover the 46 million Americans who do not have health insurance. If the Republicans are serious about offering an alternative bill to what the Democrats have proposed, why didn't they put it together months ago? Will they have it posted on line for a few weeks so everyone can read it once it's done? Of course John King didn't ask him for any of those questions for a follow up.
KING: Let's move on to health care and I know you brought something with you, and it's more than 1,900 pages, and that is the House Democratic health care bill. Before we get to that, I want to hold up something else. This is the text of your radio address. It's two pages. Now, this was an effort by the Republican Party to say we have alternatives. It's not a bill, I want to be fair to you, but it lays out a number of things you would like to do in the Republican Party.
What it does not do, and what that does, even though you don't like it, in 1,900 pages, it lays out what they would do. It says how much it would cost. The Congressional Budget Office has said in the end what percentage of people would be covered.
Where is the Republican proposal where you can say to the American people, we'll spend this much over 10 years, it will do this to the deficit, and when we're done, X percent of the American people will have health insurance?
BOEHNER: You can go to healthcare.gop.gov and see our eight or nine ideas about how to make our current health care system work better.
KING: But they're separate pieces of legislation right now...
BOEHNER: There are separate pieces...
KING: But will you have something to stack next to that?
BOEHNER: What I'm hopeful for is to take these eight or nine ideas and put them together in a bill that's being scored right now by the Congressional Budget Office and present it on the House floor during this debate. And I'm hopeful that Speaker Pelosi will allow us to offer an alternative.
But what we do is we try to make the current system work better. We take a step-by-step approach, by allowing people to buy insurance across state lines, allowing small businesses and other groups of individuals to group together for the purpose of buying health insurance at lower costs, like big businesses and unions can.
Rick Sanchez reports on another Republican sex scandal coming out of South Carolina. Gotta' love that party of "family values".
SANCHEZ: Hey, Roge, let's see how good a move we can make over to the Twitter board real quick, because a lot of people are commenting on this. There it is. Start from the bottom if we can.
Hug bug, "What is in the water in South Carolina?" Now, let's go just above that, where it says, "Another politician with a sex scandal, that is so common nowadays and they're supposed to be role models? Ha!"
We get what you're saying, folks
Let's talk about that. Just last week, I asked this question, what's up with South Carolina Republicans? Beginning with Mark Sanford, the famously wayward governor, why can't they seem to be staying out of trouble these days? There's Governor Sanford, there's Congressman Joe "Big Scream You Lie" Wilson. We just had two county chairmen who essentially said Jews are good with money.
And as if on cue now, we have Roland Corning. Who is Roland Corning, you ask? He's a former state legislator, and as of now, his latest performance, former assistant attorney general. Why?
Get this -- a police report obtained by the "Associated Press" is saying that Corning was questioned by an officer after speeding away from a cemetery with a stripper in his car, and with a bag of sex toys. And with some Viagra, Corning, I should tell you, is 66 years old. According to the police: the stripper, 18 years old. She works, by the way, at an establishment known as the Platinum Gentleman's Club.
According to the report, Assistant Attorney General Corning and the 18-year-old stripper gave conflicting accounts as to exactly what they were doing on Corning's lunch hour? In a cemetery? It states that Corning carried the sex toys, just in case.
Neither Corning nor the stripper was charged with anything. But after word reached his boss, Corning was stripped -- pardon the pun -- of the job he'd had since 2000. I mean assistant attorney general, stripper, sex toys, Viagra, cemetery, don't look good. South Carolina -- again?
David Gregory asks his panel on Meet the Press about Alan Grayson's remarks on the House floor this past Tuesday and whether "there's a level of shrillness in the debate that is not helping America".
As Rachel Maddow points out, this type of rhetoric is so common with the GOP that it's hardly noticed, but when a Democrat does it everyone's suddenly paying attention to it.
David Brooks responds by trying to say it's all just a media circus and by doing his best to try to distance the Republican party from the likes of Beck, Limbaugh and Levin. Brooks is right about the media circus, but he's wrong about America being a "center-right" country and he's wrong about the influence of right wing talkers on the Republican Party. Just because a few of them are trying to distance themselves from Glenn Beck's madness doesn't mean they're not still dancing to their tune.
Transcript below the fold.
Like a lot of people, I get a certain amount of ‘junk mail’ in my email inbox, some of it wanted, like the various eclectic, innocuous but interesting things such as A Word A Day and The New Zealand Week and my second favourite aviation newsletter, AVWeb. I even – god help me – knowingly subscribe to a few of the more rabid rightwing websites just to keep myself informed about whatever the other side is foaming at the mouth over today. (Think I’ll just mention them in passing without giving any the benefit of a link, however). Sometimes I sign an on-line petition or make a donation and inevitably end up with endless newsletters soliciting more money and more signatures from me, like from BoldProgressive.org – which the other day sent me yet another plea, this time to help defeat Republican Olympia Snowe who opposes the public health insurance option.
So over my morning toast and coffee, I read BoldProgressives’ article on Nancy Randolph, who with her husband were a modestly well-off married couple from Maine, and had paid for what they had thought was excellent health insurance… until Mr. Randolph was diagnosed with cancer and the insurance company denied him coverage. He died, and the couple ended up in bankruptcy. Heartbreaking, gut-roiling stuff. And my heart truly does go out to Nancy Randolph, hers is a terrible tragedy made so much worse by knowing it was preventable. But there was one small point that bothered me...
Nancy Randolph voted for Republican Olympia Snowe.
In the clip, Nancy explains she voted for Snowe because she thought the senator would be ‘independent’. What, she didn’t notice the great big R beside the candidate’s name on the ballot? She didn’t notice how ‘independent’ a certain senator from a nearby New England state has been?
Far, far too many people in this country have either voted Republican, or worse, didn’t vote at all, because they didn’t think all those issues progressive have been so annoyingly vocal about for years would ever affect them. They’re hardworking middle class folks with decent jobs at good pay; why should they worry WalMart threatening their workers with violence if they dare to unionize? They’ve kept themselves in decent shape, watched their diet, exercised, stopped smoking, been responsible for their health and the worst medical problem they’ve had to deal with has been a bad cold or a sprained ankle, why should their hard-earned taxes go into paying for treating someone else’s kid with paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria… whatever the hell that is? They’ve been upstanding citizens responsible and financially prudent, just as the conservatives have always claimed they should be, been loyal employees for stable companies and managed their pensions and modest investments carefully, saved up to put their kids through college. So why should they care about other people who weren’t as sensible, why should they care about tuitions skyrocketing and universities cutting back on such rubbish as the arts or adult education? Why should they worry about companies that go under from mismanagement, why should the government imposing regulations on the banks and investment firms that have done such a good job of safeguarding their retirement? They’ve been conscientious about donating to proper charities, like their church or Girl Scouts or those little brown kids in far away countries, but resent one penny of their tax money being used to help deadbeats or drug addicts or criminals in prison or single mothers or high school dropouts – those people get what they deserve… don’t they?
It’s not even like Olympia Snowe is on the same level of revulsion and incompetence as is Mean Jean Schmidt or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin, either. Snowe has earned her respected reputation, rarely missing a vote. She and fellow Republican Maine Senator Susan Collins went against her own party to vote to acquit Clinton, adamant his perjury didn’t warrant his being hounded from office. She’s angered the GOP enough times for them to have accused her of being a RINO, and she has shown genuine bi-partisanship in the past. Her reluctant opposition to the current attempts at health care reform has not been as dogmatic and irresponsible as all too many of her colleagues’, either. As Republicans go, this country can and has done a hell of a lot worse than Olympia Snowe, some of them even being our own Blue Dogs… haven’t we? We can live with a compromise, better we get a little something rather than nothing at all… right? Right?
ginandtacos: 'Democrats-as-socialists' comments are particularly lame coming from someone like the CEO of Coca Cola. Dirt-cheap, subsidized corn sweeteners, anyone?
Scott Horton: Republican Gomorrah - Six Questions for Max Blumenthal
Pacific Views: Act in haste, repent at leisure
Danger Room: Inside Bob Gates' Overhaul of the Pentagon
Eschaton: Atrios has news...
Consortiumblog: Neocon judge's history of coverups
Remember Howdy Jindal's abysmal response to President Obama? Well, he's back with more hackery.
You thought Bobby Jindal would have given the ACORN bashing a little more thought, but you see, he's a Stepford Republican, so they all are programmed to give similar responses to conservative stimuli.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) is trying to shore up his anti-ACORN bona fides. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports today that Jindal issued an executive order barring state funds from going to the community organizing group. However, there’s one small kink in Jindal’s plan:
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal issued an executive order to keep any state money from going to the controversy-wracked Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has its national headquarters in New Orleans.
According to the state’s Division of Administration, no state agencies have existing contracts with ACORN.
Wonkette: Bobby Jindal Also Cuts Off Non-Existent Funding To Those ACORN Blacks
Right wing websites respond in kind. Bobby Jindal Halts Funding Of ACORN
UPDATE: Chad Bower of WWLTV.com contacted me earlier and said that two contracts were just discovered that allegedly would pay state funds to ACORN:
The Department of Social Services has identified two contracts that would allegedly have given ACORN federal and state funds under a tax assistance program, and the Governor's Office has told the department to halt that funding.
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The two contracts – one for Southeast Louisiana, lead by Total Community Action, Inc., and the other for Southwest Louisiana, lead by the United Way of Southwest Louisiana – included ACORN as a part of the two groups proposals for the 2009 – 2010 tax season, said Frank Collins, a spokesman with the Governo's Office.Collins said the proposals included ACORN in the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program, and the group would have received federal funds under the program. Because the contract states that state funds would match the federal funds under the program, the program was in violation of Jindal’s recent executive order.
Collins said the DSS will contact the two coalitions Tuesday and tell them that funding would have to be severed to ACORN because of Jindal’s recent executive order.
I want to thank Chad for emailing me so I could update the story. My post was based on the information that was available at the time and since new news has surfaced I've updated the post. He's still not a bright bulb.
From NBC--Update Thursday: Part 1
Featuring the Republican Meeting Open and James Carville.
I thought the president was very good Wednesday night and his speech has seemed to change the media's dynamic on health care as well as start to bring people back to reality on this issue. He was more forceful combating Republican lies than ever been before and that was much appreciated.
It did freak Karl Rove out a little bit on FOX. On The Factor, he was upset that the president debunked the phony "death panel" lies that conservatives and teabaggers have been yelling about every since they discovered Isakson's amendment. (Isakson is a Republican, I might add.) Karl said that conserva-teabaggers were only upset about the living will option and never brought up death panels, so he tried to call Obama a liar, but that's the lie.
Rove conveniently forgot Sen. Charles Grassley talking about "death panels," or Betsy McCaughey doing same. And of course there's the wacky Sarah Palin Facebook post that was promoting the idea that Obama wants to kill grandma. Rove basically lied by pretending that conservatives were only upset about Isakson's language.
Still, I thought Obama was too nice to the Republicans all night. I know it was more theater than reality because he still wants America to believe that there's hope for bipartisanship, but it bothers me. All they have done is spread lies about health-care reform the entire time, but the president just isn't going to be as partisan as I'd like him to be. I have to accept it.
I actually didn't think he would mention the public option at all since the Queen, Olympia Snowe, asked him not to, but he had to because of us. We can still battle to have it included because he's still talking about it and has campaigned on it.
He wasn't as forceful about it as I wanted, but he's talking to many people that have been lied to for months by Republicans, so I kind of understand his phrasing of it. He did open up the possibility of other options which made me shudder, but we'll keep pushing. We're his base and the base will help save him in the long run.
Sen. Tom Harkin had another take on it today on MSNBC. He said that because Obama said the public option was only a small part of the solution for health care then that would force many others to vote for the bill even if a public option is included. By downplaying its significance he believes it strengthens the chances that it gets passed. I hadn't looked at it that way before, but with Rahm and his Blue Dogs trying to undo the public option I don't have as much faith in his premise. There's still a long way to go and we'll keep fighting.
One of the best writers on health care has been Jonathan Cohn of TNR, and he writes:
Looks like there's some news in the speech after all. Quite a bit.
On the policy front, President Obama tonight endorses, clearly and unambiguously, a requirement that everybody obtain insurance--that is, an individual mandate. He has not done that before, not this explicitly.
He also says employers will have to provide insurance or bear some of the costs. That's not news exactly; he's said that before. But it's part of the same package.
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Also of interest: A promise to provide low-cost, bare-bones policies right away--merely as a stopgap, until full reforms kick in. (This is an effort to make sure Americans see at least some benefits right away.) Elsewhere, Obama talks about malpractice reform--again, more explicitly than he has before, presenting it as an effort to reach across the aisle.
And the public plan? He gives a lengthy, strong defense of the idea. It could have come straight out of the literature of groups like Health Care for America Now -- or the writings of Jacob Hacker. But he also makes clear, to left as well as right, that he's open to compromise.
Those seem like the major developments on the policy front. The tone is pretty striking, too. Obama reaches out to Republicans in several places. But he also comes down hard--very hard--on opponents who are merely out to defeat reform.
And I wish he would have mentioned more liberals to the nation that have been working hard to reform health care instead of praising John McCain, but he did close with a nice ode to Ted Kennedy.
The Kennedy passage was beautiful. He even used the dreaded "L" word, which I haven't heard in that setting without a sneer for ... well, ever. I don't know how many people can hear that plea for empathy and community, but I hope some did.
By the way, FOX had their news scroll running during the entire speech and it highlighted as many crazy stories as it could. And then the first ad they broadcast after the speech was one where a Canadian woman said Canada's government-run health care almost killed her. That was timed just right for the teabagger audience.
Some things never change.
You know just how crazy Ann Coulter's worldview is getting when Bill O'Reilly serves as an honest-to-God voice of sanity in dealing with her proposals for how to reform health care, as she laid them out on The O'Reilly Factor on Thursday.
Coulter, who's evidently just wrapped up another genuflecting session before the altar of Ayn Rand, thinks the whole problem could be solved just by doing away with state regulations and "opening up competition," at which point "every problem would go away":
O'Reilly: But every problem wouldn't go away. The one thing that I would like to see the federal government do is strict oversight on the insurance companies when they hose people. I mean, I don't think they should be throwing you, Ann Coulter, off the rolls if, God forbid, you get MS or something.
Coulter: That will not happen. But Bill, that will not happen under competition. Look -- [Crosstalk] -- no, no, let me make this point. No it will not. The government was regulating, the SEC was closely watching Bernie Madoff. Government regulation doesn't stop that sort of thing. What stops it is, people knowing you're investing with this guy at your own risk, and then all these private organization develop. Competition is what enforces that.
O'Reilly: Yeah, well, I don't believe that. I think competition can drive the prices down, but it cannot make an insurance company honest. Only a federal oversight committee that says if you don't do it, we fine you.
Coulter: Yes it can. Yes it can. Otherwise, what about the SEC with Bernie Madoff?
O'Reilly: No, Bernie Madoff got away with it because the SEC, under a Republican, Christopher Cox, simply wouldn't investigate him. That's why he got away with it.
Coulter: That's the government regulation! Why do you keep thinking a different regulator will be better? Government regulation does not solve these problems, competition does.
Because if I belonged to a health-insurance company that threw me off when I got sick, people would hear about it. There would be magazine articles. And I don't mean to be me, I mean people --
She's really been drinking the Randian capitalist kool-aid, hasn't she? Hell, people get thrown off their insurance when they get sick all the freaking time and there sure as hell aren't magazine articles about it.
But the Madoff analogy really takes the cake. O'Reilly, as we noted, is sensible about this: The SEC failed in its regulatory capacity precisely because it was under the guidance of a Republican who didn't believe in regulatory oversight!
Coulter subscribes to a philosophy which argues that less government regulation makes for better competition which in turn enforces honesty and ethical behavior. But when in fact it's demonstrated that such governance produces outrageously (not to mention criminally) dishonest behavior, she blames not the practitioners who gutted that oversight for its then-predictable failures, but rather the entire concept of oversight itself.
It's a classic tautology: Let's gut government oversight so that when it fails, we can blame it, thereby creating an excuse to do away with it altogether.
It's also, of course, the kind of completely insane thinking that has dominated movement conservatism in recent years. And a large part of the reason we have Bernie Madoffs and AIGs in the first damned place.
September 09, 2009 CNN
L. KING: Joining us now on Capitol Hill from the Russell Rotunda, our friend, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. He was the standard-bearer of his party last year and a member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
First, your overall impression.
How was the speech?
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: Well, I thought the president is eloquent. I thought he had a lot of passion. I think it was more partisan than -- than I had expected, but -- and -- and there's a lot of questions that remain unanswered, I think. But he did give some more specific aspects of his -- of his overall proposal.
But a small example is that he says if you like your health insurance policy, you'll be able to keep it. The Congressional Budget Office says that if your employer goes to the health option and the employer -- the health policy that the government is providing and then you're going to lose the policy that you have with your employer. That's 10 million Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Certainly, there are questions about how you're going to pay for this, as well, that will be explored in days to come.
L. KING: The president cited one of your proposals, Senator, tonight, as he made up -- as he made his case.
Watch. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA: For those Americans who can't get insurance today because they have pre-existing medical conditions, we will immediately offer low cost coverage that will protect you against financial ruin if you become seriously ill. This was a good idea when Senator John McCain proposed it in the campaign, it's a good idea now and we should all embrace it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
L. KING: That had to move you, did it not?
MCCAIN: Yes. And I do believe that it's an important aspect, obviously. We've got to provide healthy -- available and affordable health care to all Americans. And one of the biggest problems is those that have the "pre-existing conditions." And this is, I think, obviously, a viable way to address that issue. I'm glad the president mentioned it.
And there are a lot of things we can agree on, Larry. There's many things that we can agree on and work together. Republicans want reform. We know that the system is broken, particularly Medicare. But we are very concerned about the cost. We're very concerned about this "public option." Frankly, some tests on medical malpractice reform doesn't get it. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted in defensive medicine and medical malpractice reform, the requirement for it.
Update: Michael Duvall has resigned. h/t commenter vorhese.
I've said for years that most politicians are in bed with lobbyists, but in the case of California Republican Michael Duvall, he's actually getting his freak on with one. Duvall gets the Jesse Jackson treatment, getting caught with an open microphone, bragging about making love and spanking his much younger mistress:
"And we had made love Wednesday. A lot."
"So I am getting into spanking her...yeah, I like it."
"I like spanking her. She goes, I know you like spanking me."
This bit of gotcha journalism wouldn't interest me much, but for the fact that Duvall considers himself to be one of those family values Republicans -- who just happens to be having kinky sex outside of his marriage.
While discussing with Ed Schultz whether there is going to be a public option in the final health care bill once everything is said and done, Shultz reads off John Boehner's response from the Republicans saying that the Democrat's plan is a "government takeover" of health care. Schakowsky points out that Boehner's statement is of course complete bunk since no one is proposing single payer (sadly IMO) and they've already compromised with Republicans, so they've already got a bipartisan bill. She goes on to make one more really great point on the media's lousy coverage of this debate.
Schakowsky: Let me just say one other thing Ed about the news media. When myths are, or lies are told, it is not just he said she said. I like what you said. It is not true. It is simply a lie that this is a government takeover and I think that it really ought to be up to the media too, not to just report well this is what the Republican said then this is what the Democrat said and this is what the President said. They're telling lies! And I think they need to be called on it.
Amen sister.
August 20, 2009 MSNBC Keith Olbermann
