Month: August 2009

Look, Over There

by digby

Sometimes I wonder if the administration decided to do health care this year just to keep us from focusing on this stuff:

The delinquency rate for mortgage loans on one-to-four-unit residential properties rose to a seasonally adjusted rate of 9.24 percent of all loans outstanding as of the end of the second quarter of 2009, up 12 basis points from the first quarter of 2009, and up 283 basis points from one year ago, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) National Delinquency Survey.
…
The delinquency rate breaks the record set last quarter. The records are based on MBA data dating back to 1972.

The delinquency rate includes loans that are at least one payment past due but does not include loans somewhere in the process of foreclosure. The percentage of loans in the foreclosure process at the end of the second quarter was 4.30 percent, an increase of 45 basis points from the first quarter of 2009 and 155 basis points from one year ago. The combined percentage of loans in foreclosure and at least one payment past due was 13.16 percent on a non-seasonally adjusted basis, the highest ever recorded in the MBA delinquency survey.
…
“While the rate of new foreclosures started was essentially unchanged from last quarter’s record high, there was a major drop in foreclosures on subprime ARM loans. The drop, however, was offset by increases in the foreclosure rates on the other types of loans, with prime fixed-rate loans having the biggest increase. As a sign that mortgage performance is once again being driven by unemployment, prime fixed-rate loans now account for one in three foreclosure starts. A year ago they accounted for one in five….” said Jay Brinkmann, MBA’s Chief Economist.

How in the hell is this economy going to rebound if the housing crisis just keeps on keeping on? It’s a vicious circle: the housing crisis creates unemployment which creates more housing crisis and on and on.

I’m totally engaged in the health care debate, and think it’s vitally important for the citizens of this country and the Democratic party as an institution. But really, none of that is going to matter if the economy doesn’t adequately turn around and financial reforms aren’t put in place to keep this from happening again, more often and with even more dire consequences. On some level we’re being played and I think most of us know it and don’t want to admit it.

But hey, at least Robert Rubin feels really terrible about everything, so that’s something.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program of chasing our tails.

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Sad Story

by digby

This economy is just terrible on so many people. The stories are just heart breaking, with people losing their life savings, their homes, their jobs, their health insurance, everything.

Thank the Good Lord for the NY Times or we wouldn’t hear about the absolute worst of the news. This one hurts so much:

Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall

[E]conomists say — and data is beginning to show — that a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer. Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon.

For every investment banker whose pay has recovered to its prerecession levels, there are several who have lost their jobs — as well as many wealthy investors who have lost millions. As a result, economists and other analysts say, a 30-year period in which the super-rich became both wealthier and more numerous may now be ending.

The individual stories will make you cry:

In one stark example, John McAfee, an entrepreneur who founded the antivirus software company that bears his name, is now worth about $4 million, from a peak of more than $100 million. Mr. McAfee will soon auction off his last big property because he needs cash to pay his bills after having been caught off guard by the simultaneous crash in real estate and stocks.

Auction his last big property? Down to his last four million? Dear God, where will it stop?

Can’t we do something to help these people? Oh, right. Well, something more, then?

Are we not our brother’s keepers?

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Professional Liar Called Out On Her Crap

by dday

Jon Stewart went easy on Betsy McCaughey. He eventually got around to the meat of the issue after letting her hang for a while (I particularly liked the part where he got her to admit that patients could request to be kept alive by any means necessary, too), but you can see how she gets away with this. She walks in with a big binder to try and connote authority, but it’s a prop… by the end she’s just flipping through it when asked for evidence, as if she’s never read it before. Stewart says “you should put Yellow Post-Its in there to mark your place,” which would never occur to McCaughey because people are just supposed to expect her to have possession of the facts. She cashes checks off nobody ever challenging her. And when Stewart finally does, it’s delicious to watch.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Betsy McCaughey Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

The tsunami of lies is too big, and a substantial part of the country on McCaughey’s side of the tribe would believe her over Stewart even after this embarrassing performance. But the antidote to most of this comes in two words – “Prove it.” And they never can.

…Extended interview here.

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The Teabag Cult

by digby

Here’s an interesting article by Johann Hari on the cultlike qualities of the right wing. He perceptively highlights the continuum between what we all saw during the Bush years and today, something which I wish more media would do because it’s very clarifying:

This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy-world isn’t new; it’s only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear Saddam Hussein had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed, as one Republican congressman put it, that it was “the greatest hoax in human history”, and all the world’s climatologists were “liars”. The American media then presents itself as an umpire between “the rival sides”, as if they both had evidence behind them. It’s a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy — reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution — could be a useful corrective. But that’s not these what so-called “conservatives” are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy, that is only a thin skin covering raw economic interests and base prejudices. […]
Indeed, if you spend any time with American right-wingers — as I have, reporting undercover on events like the National Review cruise and the Christian Coalition Solidarity Tour of Israel — you soon find that your arguments don’t center on philosophy. You have to concentrate on correcting basic factual errors about the real world. They insist Europe has fallen to Islam, since Muslims immigrants are becoming a majority and are imposing sharia law. In reality, Muslims make up 3 percent of the population of Europe, and most of them oppose sharia law. They insist Franklin Roosevelt caused the Great Depression, and should have cut government spending. In reality, whenever he did cut spending — as he tried periodically throughout the 1930s — the economy began to tank. But explain this patiently — with a thousand sources — and they simply shriek that you are lying, and they know “in their heart” what is true. They insist gay marriage would cause the institution of the family to collapse. In reality, where it has already been introduced in Europe, heterosexual families continue just as before. On the list goes: evolution is a lie, a blastocyst is akin to a baby, torture produces actionable intelligence…

This fantasy/delusion is not a bug, it’s a feature, as Perlstein pointed out in his article this week-end. And those who think that it is something that can be appeased or dealt with in good faith are badly mistaken. After all, we have the primary Senate negotiator saying publicly that the health care reforms include euthanasia. If that has become something that’s “just part of the debate” even on theelite level.then we have gone even further into the looking glass than before.Hari continues:

Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has tried to conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has shamefully assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying that he “doesn’t want to kill Grandma.” Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them. His healthcare plan is weaker and harder to explain as a result. But this kind of mania can’t be co-opted: it can only by over-ruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people with the maddest fears. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, “It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It’s not how change happens.”

But you can’t ignore then either. They share this society with us, are relatives and neighbors and there’s no getting away from them even if we wanted to. This problem has to be dealt with.

I might suggest that one place to start would be with the media, who persist in seeing the left as the crazy ones even though they’re right and giving the right props for behaving like animals because “it works.” Just saying.

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Smart As A Whip

by digby

If you wonder why people are so unbelievably misinformed in this country here’s one good place to look:

LIMBAUGH: I love it when the global warmers — and I think they’re — you know, you people run around and you talk about the birthers and how irresponsible and off their rockers they are. The global warming believers are just as wacko as the birthers if you want to look at them as wacko. I mean, if there is a leftist equivalent of the birthers out there, it is the global warmers. And this story, they’re blaming the ocean for falling global temperatures. The sun warms the oceans, so any fluxuation comes from the sun! There is no other heat source for the ocean. At any rate, who in their right minds trusts Gore or Obama on this? The reason that we’re in a cooling period is sunspot activity — anybody knows this. The sun’s cooled a little bit and only a fool would be surprised that Earth’s temperatures have fallen as a result. I mean, for crying out loud, folks, the sun is in a solar minimum phase right now. And we’ve studied these, and we know when they’re in minimum phases, and they’re in one now. And it’s — it just makes common sense if you’re in a solar minimum phase that the temperatures are going to be lower here on Earth. I — have you ever just been as amazed as I am that the global warmers just discount the sun? It’s not a factor, as far as they’re concerned. And it’s the only factor! Without it, we wouldn’t be.

People listen to this kind of drivel all day long on talk radio and Fox News. Why should anyone be surprised that they think the government is going to be sending Death Agents to nursing homes to kill old people? Why are we startled to hear people claim that Obama isn’t an American citizen or that medicare isn’t a government program? They are being indoctrinated in idiocy by radical demagogues and for some reason everybody persists in thinking there is no harm in it.

These fatuous gasbags empower the teabaggers and swift boaters and I think we can see the result — ill-informed, know nothings holding the country hostage with total irrationality.

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Poles

by digby

Noam Scheiber wrote yesterday that the dust up over the public option is good news for the Democrats because it shows that there is a countervailing force to the teabag freaskshow on the right:

We’ve now got a pole on the left to match the intensity of the pole on the right. (Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting a moral equivalence between the two. As far as I’m concerned, the critics on the left are basically right and the critics on the right are either insane or deeply cynical.) From a sheer tactical perspective, I think the White House and the Democratic leadership in Congress have dramatically improved their position.

The benefits arise both in the broader national debate and in the congressional negotiations. In the national debate, Obama now looks like the centrist voice of reason instead of an over-ambitious lefty (I’m caricaturing, of course, in the spirit of the cable-news coverage). Inside Congress, Obama may not get a public option, but if he doesn’t, he was never going to get it. And now he can extract a ton of concessions in return, because he can point to a left-wing of his party that’s ready to eat him alive for failing to deliver on it (whereas that left-wing outrage was largely hypothetical before now). That kind of leverage is extremely helpful.

Yes indeed. But it’s ironic that it’s Schrieber who’s saying this. Here’s a post of mine on the subject from more than three years ago called “Liberal Ballast” which shows how far the debate has moved. (Unfortunately, I can’t access Scheiber’s old post anymore, but you can get an idea from Yglesias’ post and mine as to what it said.):

The next time somebody asks you about what the blogosphere really means to politics, pull this out:

The great benefit of the blogosphere is that it isn’t really an “interest group”; it’s more like an old-style membership organization (or a series of such organizations) whose existence used to do something to check what’s now become the out-of-control influence of business groups over the policy process.

That’s from Matt Yglesias. He’s responding to a post from Noam Schieber examining whether the blogosphere is a good thing, on balance, as its influence starts to crowd out the influence of liberal interest groups. Yglesias nicely analyzes that notion and I tend to agree with some of what he says, although I think the Republican coalition offers some lessons in how interest groups and a strong partisan identity can work fairly comfortably together.

Scheiber’s post suggests that the problem with the netroots is that we are going to make the party more liberal and that means we will lose elections. That would be the conventional diagnosis of what is wrong with the Democrats generally and it’s been the conventional wisdom as long as I can remember, at least since 1968. Yet, somehow, the society itself has become much more liberal. It’s true that the politics of the day seem extremely conservative, but if you look back at the way people really thought and spoke 40 years ago, you’ll see that this country was unrecognizably intolerant and thatwhile the unions were much more powerful and the middle class was still growing, the workplace was inhospitable to at least half the population.

Yglesias explains it this way, and I think it’s very astute:

I generally doubt that systemic social change will radically alter election outcomes since I tend to believe that the parties will more or less alternate in power — the important issue is the terms of debate between the two parties, and I think that insofar as the netroots become more influential (which I think is a fairly open question) the aggregate impact will be positive.

This is where the modern conservative movement has had its great impact: the terms of the debate. Progress marches on — or, at least, it has so far. Despite the most conservative political era in a century (maybe ever) the basic idea of extending rights to all, of opening the work force to all comers, to liberalizing society in general has continued, at least in fits and starts. But as an example of the terms of the political debate changing, where once it was considered natural to tax the rich more for the common good, the conservatives have managed to convince a good number of people that the common good is served by rich people keeping as much money as possible so they can “create jobs.”

Democrats have spent the last two decades trying to adapt to that change in the debate, sometimes out of a sincere desire to experiment with new ways of doing things, which is a liberal trait. But it was often a failure of imagination and fundamental commitment, as well. And in the end the DLC experiment failed liberalism. Trying to solely use capitalistic methods and modern business techniques to supplant government functions to solve problems has resulted in corrupt politics, inefficient government and huge income inequality. (Let’s not pretend that the plan wasn’t terribly tempting because of the vast sums of money that would flow from tapping into business and industry.)As Yglesias points out, the Netroots may just provide a needed counter weight to that system by challenging some of the plainly illiberal policies that have become so ingrained in the establishment that politicians today seem stunned that their constituents are objecting. (The bankruptcy bill comes to mind.)

But there is more to it, I think, than just counterweight against the influence of business, although I think that’s vastly important. I have described this current political stalemate before as a tug of war rather than a pendulum. Liberals let go of the rope for a while and failed to pull their weight in the debate. Without them — us — being there, helping to shape the debate (which sometimes means we are here to be triangulated against, btw) politics and society become out of wack as they clearly are now.

Conservatives benefit from their appeals to fear. It’s actually the very essence of conservatism — fear of change. And that is their weakness because in a democratic, capitalistic society optimism and a willingness and ability to risk are necessary for the society to thrive. Liberals’ job is to articulate that optimism, that belief that problems can be solved, that democratic government of the people is a positive force that provides the necessary structure for individuals and businesses to thrive and grow. It is that general sense of liberalism that the netroots, as a loosly affiliated organization of activists, thinkers, businesspeople, gadflys and interested observers might also bring back into the public debate.

We could potentially provide the ballast to the conservative political machine that has pulled the debate too far over to its side and created this nauseating sense of political instability. I think the country would welcome a little equilibrium (and by that I don’t mean a continuation of the 50/50 political stalemate.) We function better when society and politics are more in synch than they are now. And since progress is marching on as always, liberal politics are what’s necessary to end the cognitive dissonance.

Yesterday, Schrieber says that the huge dust up over the public option is an unalloyed good thing because it altered the terms of the debate. How far we’ve come. And the liberal interest groups involved in health care are surprisingly in line with the liberal blogosphere, the netroots and the grassroots activists. The only constituency within the Democratic coalition for compromise that I can see is in the political establishment itself. And as I wrote yesterday, they are playing with fire if they fail to lead and simply allow the teabaggers and the swift boaters to define the issue and tank reform. There are consequences to always selling out your base whether they know it or not.

Meanwhile, check it out:

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“Now, I Hate The Left, Believe Me, But….”

by dday

I just listened to a good bit of Barack Obama’s OFA session, and I think I can now pinpoint what has been irking me lately. He got up there and tried to rebut all the misinformation about what the bill would do. In fact, he said exactly what Matt Yglesias pre-butted this morning:

I think that if someone gets sick in the United States, that person ought to be treated without being subject to a citizenship test. I think that abortion is a legitimate medical procedure. And ultimately I think health insurance should be directly provided by the government. Interestingly, the one thing that doesn’t get a majority is the thing that’s actually a bad idea—killing grandma.

This reminds me of something that’s bothered me throughout the health care debate. The president’s only real allies and advocates are, you know, serious liberals. People who think that people born in Mexico are human beings but fetuses are not. And most of all, people who believe in government-provided health insurance. But when we man the barricades for the president’s plan, we’re in a weird situation. Obama gets accused of wanting a single-payer system. Then I have to say “no! no! he doesn’t! that’s a slander . . . not there’s anything wrong with single-payer.” It’s a damn dirty lie to say that the government will fund abortion services, but really the government should fund abortion services.

This just deflates a lot of people, the same people who could be counted on to rally for a policy they support. We knew all along that the right would fearmonger and scare people and make up whatever lies served their purpose regardless of the reality. Pre-compromising bills to shield oneself from those charges makes absolutely no sense.

There’s this inherent, reflexive self-loathing among establishment “liberals” that turns off people who unabashedly call themselves liberal. Take a look at this article by Joe Klein, an article whose subject is that Republicans have become a nihilist party, and how long he takes punching hippies before getting to his point:

Given the heinous dust that’s been raised, it seems likely that end-of-life counseling will be dropped from the health-reform legislation. But that’s a small point, compared with the larger issue that has clouded this summer: How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?

I’m not going to try. I’ve written countless “Democrats in Disarray” stories over the years and been critical of the left on numerous issues in the past. This year, the liberal insistence on a marginally relevant public option has been a tactical mistake that has enabled the right’s “government takeover” disinformation jihad. There have been times when Democrats have run demagogic scare campaigns on issues like Social Security and Medicare. There are more than a few Democrats who believe, in practice, that government should be run for the benefit of government employees’ unions. There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection. There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances. But these are policy differences, matters of substance. The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don’t retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.

It is a very different story among Republicans.

He goes on, of course, but Klein clearly felt he could not get away with a strident article about Republican insanity without saying “Hey, look, I think liberals are the scum of the earth too, don’t get me wrong, but…” It’s like a facial tic.

I saw the President today call those who believe government should not be involved in anything at all “reasonable people” with whom we could have a principled argument. Unless we’re arguing about whether or not they should use roads, police, fire departments, libraries, and the judicial system, then no, that is not a reasonable line of argument. Here’s a reasonable line of argument, from Jesse Jackson Jr., and it’s so bitterly partisan, I know, but in the absence of this argument you have the President of the United States giving anti-government cranks a legitimacy they simply don’t deserve.

Reverend Jackson and I were talking this morning about health insurance reform. He said ‘“Jesse, sum up this public option thing for me.’ I heard the President give an analysis that I think appropriate: Federal Express, UPS, DHL, the private option. The public option: email, the post office. If you want to pay your bill, sending it overnight for $30, choose the private option. But if you want to mail your mail like most of us do, WITH A STAMP (applause and laughter) use the public option…. The post office offers competitive overnight mail options. And those of us who are not interested in overnight mail can go the slow route, 2-3 days. That’s just fine for me. The post office is universal. It reaches the rural areas. It reaches the urban areas. It reaches where DHL, and UPS, and Fedex will not go. And so in the barrios and the ghettos and the trailor parks of our nation, for the uninsured in our nation, in order for us to save our health care system, we need a legitimate, real public option! (Cheering and applause.)

Instead of this message, we have a President talking about working constructively with people who have said out loud they want to deny any health care bill.

Now some would say that the nation as a whole is not all that liberal, and we have to find common ground because legislation is the art of the compromise, etc., etc. ad nauseum. What never gets discussed is the role of long-term messaging. People are falling for right-wing lies about government-run health care because they’re been told for decades that government is evil, with no countervailing message from the other side. Those who resist these lies, the most strident supporters of a health care overhaul in the abstract, are being told to accept half a loaf, that doing reasonable things, like allowing a public option to provide the same medical services that 90% of all private insurance companies provide, is a damn dirty lie, are told to compromise and compromise, are actually told that we cannot have a government insurance option because it would be too popular. You really don’t have to get very far from that to a statement like “You don’t matter, go away, we don’t want you.” It’s happened before.

And don’t you dare, ever, add anything like morality into the individual actions of lawmakers.

It would be, for instance, very uncouth to say that a coal-state senator who opposed climate change legislation was literally consigning thousands of people to death in order to protect hometown interests. That’s a very mean thing to say. Senator so-and-so doesn’t want to kill people, he just wants to be reelected. But that’s what he’s doing. He has constituents and polls and pressures. Similarly, a lot of the congressmen who are opposing health-care reform are, again, ensuring that tens of thousands of people will die from inadequate access to health care. But you’re not supposed to say that […]

…no one ever has to make those arguments directly because these debates take place at a high level of abstraction. That’s how you get weird situations wherein a congressman who has spent two decades enriching industry and voting to cut Medicaid and welfare can be run out of office because he crossed an ethical line and had an affair or took a kickback. The moral dimension is entirely absent in discussions of policy, as if we’ve all signed some agreement admitting that the cost to civility would be too great if we took the implications of each vote seriously.

Apparently Obama made something of a moral argument yesterday, calling health care “a a core ethical and moral obligation,” saying that “These struggles always boil down to a contest between hope and fear,” and likening back to when FDR was called a socialist, and JFK and LBJ the same for trying to pass Medicare. But that’s coming a bit late, and little of that was on display today.

The bottom line is that, until progressives rallied behind the public option this week, the air was out of the balloon. The base of supporters are energizing this debate, and they will reward any lawmaker that reflects their values and actually seeks to follow through on their promises. They now represent the last, best hope for real health care reform. And they won’t cotton to being kicked around, dragged through the mud, or played as pawns any longer. 2012 lies in the balance.

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Move On Moves In

by digby

Move On joined the Blue America fundraiser for progressives who are standing firm for the public plan today. And guess what?

If you haven’tthanked those who have stood up today’s the day. Let’s get to $350,000.

The DFH’s are making themselves heard.

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The Limits Of Comity

by dday

Even a “split-the-bill” strategy would require 60 votes for cloture on the more non-controversial items of health care reform. And as Digby noted, Republicans like Jon Kyl are objectively pro-discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions. Furthermore, expecting GOPers to go along with certain health insurance reform items after getting cut out of other elements of the bill is a fantasy. So those 60 votes will have to come from Democrats.

And all Democrats ought to stick with the wishes of their party rather than join a Republican filibuster. But there’s one very sad detail – Ted Kennedy is fighting cancer. He’s very sick. He didn’t attend his sister’s funeral. And while I believe he’d get wheeled in on a gurney if it meant the passage of his life’s work, this letter shows that he’s preparing for every eventuality. And here he runs up against Massachusetts state law.

A cancer-stricken Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has asked Massachusetts leaders to change state law to allow a speedy replacement of him in the Senate, fearing a months-long open seat will deny Democrats a crucial vote on President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

In a note to Gov. Deval Patrick and other state leaders, Kennedy wrote “it is vital for this commonwealth to have two voices speaking for the needs of its citizens and two votes in the Senate during the approximately five months between a vacancy and an election.” […]

Kennedy’s letter acknowledges the state changed its succession law in 2004 to require a special election within five months to fill any vacancy. At the time, legislative Democrats — with a wide majority in both chambers — were concerned because then-Republican Gov. Mitt Romney had the power to directly fill any vacancy created as Democratic Sen. John Kerry ran for president.

I’m a bit all over the map on this. I actually think the Senate appointment process for vacancies is anti-democratic and wrong. But a five-month open seat does not serve the interests of Massachusetts residents either. Also, Kennedy, mindful of his cancer fight, could have resigned months ago. It’s very sad that such choices have to be made given the process we have.

The real problem, of course, is that we have a system where everybody knows Ted Kennedy’s position on health care – his committee staff helped write the Senate HELP bill – and he could easily indicate his position on elements of the bill from a hospital bed or through a staffer, but his specific presence on the Senate floor is required. The Senate is supposed to be about “relationships” and “comity” but the members cannot allow a colleague of 40-plus years the ability to make his preferences known given his medical condition. Ezra Klein adds:

That is to say, where Kennedy’s great friend Orrin Hatch would have voted to uphold a filibuster, now he will vote to shut it down, as that’s how the vote would have gone if Ted Kennedy were still alive, and it is neither decent nor small-d democratic to doom health care because the bill’s greatest advocate contracted incurable brain cancer.

Such a trade would not only be a grand show of respect for Kennedy’s life work, but it would uphold the outcome that Americans chose when they voted 60 Democrats into office in 2008. Conversely, if not one Republican can be found who feels enough loyalty to Kennedy to make sure that his death doesn’t kill the work of his life, then what are all those personal relationships and all that gentility really worth?

But Hatch was specifically asked this last night, and he ignored the question, saying that “The Democrats should be able to pass it. They have overwhelming majorities in the House, and they have 60 solid votes in the Senate.” But they don’t. Ted Kennedy is sick. He’s barred from voting. And Orrin Hatch, supposedly this great friend of his, plays dumb about it. I guess blood – or the bloody shirt of partisanship – is thicker than water.

It shouldn’t come to this at all – the filibuster was not designed to automatically require 60 votes on every piece of legislation, that’s a recent development. But the next time you hear some member of the Senate club go on and on about “the great civility of this chamber” and “working with my esteemed colleagues on the other side,” keep in mind that it’s all a bunch of horseshit.

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Bipartisanship

by digby

Compassionate conservatism in action:

The distance between the parties’ leaders on health care was made clear on Tuesday when the No. 2 Republican in the Senate held a conference call with reporters. Asked by ABC News about a package of insurance market reforms that have been endorsed not only by President Obama but also by the insurance industry, Sen. Jon Kyl came out against all three proposals. In particular, the Arizona Republican signaled that he opposes requiring insurance companies nationwide to provide coverage without regard to pre-existing conditions; requiring them to charge everyone the same rate regardless of health status; and requiring all Americans to carry health insurance.

The Republicans are actually in favor of discriminating against sick people. They have come right out and said it. I don’t know why anyone is even pretending to care what they think anymore.
Seriously, if they can’t support those reforms, which are even supported by the insurance companies themselves, then regulation will never be enough to keep the system honest. A public plan will be impossible to dismantle once it’s in place and will not discriminate against sick people. If they keep premiums low enough to attract some healthy people as well, it will provide enough competition to keep these insurance company greedheads and psycho Republicans from doing their worst. It’s a necessity.
I love how it’s the reformers who everyone believes are trying to kill people when it’s these defenders of the status quo who actually are.
h/t to bb.