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Month: October 2013

“Welcome stupid people!”

“Welcome stupid people!”

by digby

I understand why people might not understand the ACA. It’s ridiculously complicated and the messaging on it with all the talk about exchanges and cost curves and the rest hasn’t made it any easier to understand. But this doesn’t indicate confusion about health care reform. These people all think they know something and they clearly don’t. And what they are revealing is their tribal identity and maybe some sense of what they think the CW is on the subject. And that is, needless to say, revealing.

Still you have to wonder why they don’t ask what the difference between the two plans is and instead act as if they know all about it. In their quest not to look stupid, they really look stupid….

Day 1: Covered California up and running

Covered California up and running

by digby

A tale from the Obamacare LA trenches:

It took three hours, but Andrew Stryker managed to be among the first people to purchase health insurance through Obamacare’s new insurance markets.

Stryker is 34 years old and lives in Los Angeles, where he now does freelance work. He pays a monthly premium around $600 to stay on the COBRA plan from a job he left four years ago. He has high blood pressure and says insurance companies have previously denied his applications for coverage on the individual market.

“I figured this might cut my premiums in half and I’d be getting better service for half the price,” he says.

Stryker first logged into California’s marketplace, Covered California, at midnight last night. He couldn’t get the site to load, so he tried again around 8 a.m. today.

“It let me access the page and start signing up,” Stryker says. It was not, as some have predicted, as simple as buying a plane ticket. “I would equate it to filling out a credit card application. The format was pretty clear. It wasn’t too complicated.”
[…]
“It’s a silver level PPO,” he says. “I did the research probably about a month ago, went through all the plans and compared them to my current one. I found one that I liked, so I signed up for that today.”

See? People who are already in the private health insurance market are pretty savvy about all this because we’ve been forced to deal with insurance company hell for quite some time. Signing up for us isn’t that big of a deal. I figured I’d wait a day or two before jumping in. I’d imagine a lot of other people are doing that as well. The people the government needs to reach are the currently uninsured who haven’t jumped through these hoops before.

It must be remembered, however, that this isn’t going to be a big improvement for everyone. Some people make too much money for subsidies and their premiums are going to go up. A lot. I know the screams from the Westside of LA are going to be deafening. But for the struggling middle class folks like us who’ve been priced out of good insurance and are basically stuck with an expensive catastrophic plan at a time in our lives when we really need something better, this is going to be an improvement. A substantial one.

Update: An acquaintance of mine in another state who is working for the exchange tells me that people with pre-existing conditions were calling in droves today.

Of course they are. These poor people are desperate to get get some insurance and any society that would just let them hang out there in the wind is barbaric. If nothing else works in Obamacare, the fact that people who are already sick (or just have some kind of diagnosis) will be able to access affordable health care makes it a success.

What a relief it must be for these folks to be covered. I sure hope that not even one of them or any member of their family will ever vote for Republicans again. They literally wanted them to just … well … die.

*She also says that people are really shocked to find out that these plans are high quality because of the 10 essential benefits, especially the chronic disease management and no monetary caps. People who’ve been round the private insurance block know exactly what a godsend that is.

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They should have thought of that before they got cancer

They should have thought of that before they got cancer

by digby

The WSJ reports, via The Atlantic which calls it the saddest paragraph you will read all day:

At the National Institutes of Health, nearly three-quarters of the staff was furloughed. One result: director Francis Collins said about 200 patients who otherwise would be admitted to the NIH Clinical Center into clinical trials each week will be turned away. This includes about 30 children, most of them cancer patients, he said.

Of course, these same Republicans want to permanently dismantle the NIH, so this is just an incremental step toward their final goal. After all, this whole mess has come about because a bunch of psychos losing their minds over the idea that people will get health insurance.

But not to worry, these cancer patients have plenty of time to wait. No biggie.

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Dreaming of macho superheroes who don’t exist (The “knocking heads together” fantasy)

Dreaming of macho superheroes who don’t exist


by digby

Why is it that so many macho assholes think that all it takes to get to an agreement is some guy with a big swinging … ego knocking some heads together until they do what he wants? Here’s the latest example, via Susie at C&L:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Monday blamed President Barack Obama for “not bringing people together” during the government shutdown debate and said the president would be ultimately responsible for a funding stoppage.

“My approach would be, as the executive, is to call in the leaders of the Congress, the legislature, whatever you’re dealing with, and say, ‘We’re not leaving this room until we fix this problem, because I’m the boss, I’m in charge,” Christie said.

“When you’re the executive, if you’re waiting for leadership from the legislative branch of government, whether you’re the governor, or whether you’re the president or you’re mayor, you are going to be waiting forever, forever because they’re not built to lead and take risk.”

I don’t know what New Jersey’s system of government is but somebody needs to remind Christie of his 7th grade civics lessons on the U.S. constitution before he launches his campaign. The president is not “the boss” of the congress and he isn’t “in charge.” And even if it were, I don’t think even Christie would be able to throw his weight around in these sorts of negotiations as effectively as when he’s intimidating his poor constituents.

But he’s not the only one who maintains this fiction. Macho flyboy John McCain famously said this when he was running for president:

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’” said Mr. McCain.

He apparently really believed this was what governing was all about:

The way I would fix Social Security is to sit down with Republicans and Democrats together at a table, voicing my opposition to tax increases, and sitting down and negotiating a fix to Social Security, which is the only way that Social Security is going to be fixed. That’s my solution to the Social Security system.

And how about this idiotic international celebrity bozo, Piers Morgan, instructing the American people last night on what should be done:

MORGAN: … Debbie Wasserman Schultz here, I come back to the main problem again. Is that, it doesn’t appear to be a sensible grown up, ongoing dialog, between the two people who matter most, Speaker Beohner and President Obama. And I — you know them both well. You know the President very well. What is wrong with the President that he can’t just pick up a phone or and go see Speaker Boehnor, or get him to come and see him on a daily basis until they thrash out a deal. Isn’t not the way any business gets done?

You two sound like you can talk to each other … bang their heads together, get Speaker Boehner and President Obama in a room tonight. Get it done for the American people.

I guess somebody forgot to brief him on the fact that Boehner’s caucus won’t do what he wants them to do! He can’t make a deal they don’t want him to make unless he’s willing to commit hara-kiri and pass a clean CR with Democratic votes. Does he think Obama will agree to defund Obamacare? What’s he smoking?

This Hollywood version of American political leadership persists throughout our culture and it’s either an ugly royalist version of government or one based on Tony Soprano. Either way, it’s stupid. We may be screwed up but this is a democracy and these politicians are responding to their constituents. The problem is that some of them have crazy constituents with propaganda funded by crazy billionaires. That won’t be solved by putting the leadership and the president in a room and “knocking some heads together” any more than McCain could solve the problems in the middle east by putting the Sunni and Sh’ia in a room and telling them to “stop the bullshit.” This is a pathetic macho fantasy.

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“Look, calm down. I got this”

“Look, calm down. I got this”


by digby

I really hope this Chris Matthews anecdote is something he hallucinated because if it isn’t, then my criticism of the president for “believing his own hype” is literally true:

… After the first debate [in which Matthews harshly criticized Obama’s performance], I saw the president at the Al Smith dinner, and he told me, I mention you in my speech. And he had that line about “First I caused him a thrill up his leg, and then I caused him a stroke,” which was very funny. And then he comes over afterward, and he says to me, “Look, calm down. I got this.”

Yikes. I wonder if that’s what he told his staff every time he got rolled by the Republicans over the past five years?  (But then this is being recounted by Chris Matthews who added, “and I thought: What? What does that mean? Does he mean he knows what the numbers are? He’s going to win?” so who knows?)

Read the whole interview. It’s with Joan Walsh and it’s very entertaining. He’s written a book called Tip and the Gipper  in which he portrays Reagan as a good chap and evidently forgets to mention his racist campaign tactics. (Hey, nobody’s perfect.) It’s a perfectly timed reminder of everything that’s been wrong with the Democratic political establishment of the past quarter century.  We didn’t get here by GOP lunacy alone — there’s been a whole lot of enabling going on.

I hope Rick Perlstein is called upon to review Matthews’ new book for us. He’s working on his Reagan opus as we speak …

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Crazy like foxes: even Paul Ryan’s dystopian budget is no longer enough

Crazy like foxes

by digby

I think one of the major misunderstandings (willful, in many cases) of this budget mess is that it’s about Republicans just running around willy-nilly screaming “nonononono” like toddlers having a temper tantrum. I know it looks that way, but that’s not what’s happening. This is a strategy. And it’s one they’ve even written down.

Jonathan Chait wrote about this in a widely read piece yesterday in which he explains what  they’ve been up to:

In January, demoralized House Republicans retreated to Williamsburg, Virginia, to plot out their legislative strategy for President Obama’s second term. Conservatives were angry that their leaders had been unable to stop the expiration of the Bush tax cuts on high incomes, and sought assurances from their leaders that no further compromises would be forthcoming. The agreement that followed, which Republicans called “The Williamsburg Accord,” received obsessive coverage in the conservative media but scant attention in the mainstream press. (The phrase “Williamsburg Accord” has appeared once in the Washington Post and not at all in the New York Times.) But the decision House Republicans made in January has set the party on the course it has followed since.

If you want to grasp why Republicans are careening toward a potential federal government shutdown, and possibly toward provoking a sovereign debt crisis after that, you need to understand that this is the inevitable product of a conscious party strategy. Just as Republicans responded to their 2008 defeat by moving farther right, they responded to the 2012 defeat by moving right yet again. Since they had begun from a position of total opposition to the entire Obama agenda, the newer rightward lurch took the form of trying to wrest concessions from Obama by provoking a series of crises.

And certain institutional players got in on the act and put the heat on MOC’s big time. Here’s a letter from Heritage action to the GOP caucus from last May:

Dear Congressman,

In the coming months, you will face tremendous pressure to accept a deal to raise our nation’s debt ceiling. Conservatives around the country will insist the debt ceiling not be raised unless our nation gets on a path to a balanced budget within 10 years and stays balanced. This is not an arbitrary marker; rather, it is the marker laid out by the entire House Republican Conference in what has become known as the Williamsburg Accord.

Conservatives cannot enter into the debt ceiling debate without understanding the promise of the Williamsburg Accord.

On January 18, four current and former chairmen of the Republican Study Committee announced an agreement to re-sequence the 2013 fiscal fights. In exchange for holding the line on the sequester and producing a budget that balanced in ten years, conservatives agreed to postpone the debt ceiling debate for several months. In turn, the debate on the debt ceiling would revolve around enacting the policies that put the federal budget on the path to 10-year balance.

A few days later, Speaker Boehner declared, “It’s time for us to come to a plan that will in fact balance the budget over the next 10 years.” He said it was the GOP’s “commitment to the American people.”

As the proverbial ink dried on the Williamsburg Accord, the House Republican Conference marched in unison. Lawmakers focused on laying the groundwork to enact the policies necessary to achieve a 10-year balance, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, and attach them to any future increases in the debt ceiling.

At the same time, the National Republican Congressional Committee quietly poll-tested the message in key districts. Balancing the budget was a winning political argument in swing districts. The NRCC poll found that 45 percent of Democrats, 61 percent of Independents and 76 percent of Republicans thought balancing the federal budget would “significantly increase economic growth and create millions of American jobs.”

Good policy is good politics, and we know from recent history a coherent, principled message on the debt ceiling can shift public opinion. Before landing on the Budget Control Act in August 2011, Republicans consistently said America had a spending problem and spending reductions must accompany any increase in the debt ceiling.

Not surprisingly, the accepted narrative of that showdown is wrong. Many forget Republicans were winning the generic congressional vote the entire month of July. President Obama’s disapproval rating stood at 52% by the end of August. In September, Mitt Romney was leading in head-to-head polling.

The path to balance is the path to victory.

Conservatives should not raise our nation’s statutory debt limit unless Congress passes and the President signs into law real reforms and immediate spending reductions that place America on a path to balance within 10 years without raising taxes and keeping the budget in balance.

What they were talking about was Paul Ryan’s budget. And guess what? They got it:

The Democrat-controlled Senate passed a continuing resolution, or CR—a temporary funding measure meant to keep the government operating—that would set the relevant funding levels at an annualized total of $986 billion. That’s about $70 billion less than what the Senate endorsed as part of its comprehensive budget plan back in April. But that actually understates the extent of the compromise.

When President Barack Obama first took office in 2009, his budget proposed $1.203 trillion in discretionary spending for FY 2014. The Senate CR is about $216 billion, or nearly 18 percent, lower than that. Actual enacted funding levels for FY 2010, when the Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, totaled $1.185 trillion in 2014 dollars. The Senate CR is about $200 billion below that, a cut of nearly 17 percent.

After the 2010 midterm elections, the Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives and offered a budget plan that proposed dramatic spending reductions. That plan, authored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), envisioned FY 2014 funding levels at $1.095 trillion. Note that the funding in the current Senate-passed CR is about 10 percent less than the levels in the original Ryan budget.

Finally, in August 2011, after a prolonged standoff over the debt limit, President Obama and Congress agreed to cut even more spending than the original Ryan budget demanded. The original spending caps in the 2011 debt limit deal limited funding to $1.066 trillion in FY 2014. The Senate CR accepts a cut of an additional $80 billion, or nearly 8 percent, from that compromise level.

Progressives have repeatedly made significant concessions in order to protect the economy from a series of manufactured crises. Today’s manufactured crisis is no different. The Senate-passed legislation to keep the government open sets funding levels that are even lower than previous compromises. If the Tea Party shuts the government down anyway, it will not be because progressives were inflexible. Just ask House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH)—the compromise incorporated in the Senate CR was originally his idea.

Last night Steny Hoyer shouted this on floor during one of the debates:

This is not a negotiation — we’re taking their number, and we would hope that they could also take their number so we can keep the government open.

You see? The Democrats already folded. Sequestration is now the ongoing law of the land and Paul Ryan’s budget wet dream is considered the “clean” continuing resolution. Huzzah.

And yet, they were not satisfied. (You’ve heard the old saw “give ’em and inch and they’ll take a mile,” right?) Here’s one view of the “Willimsburg Accord” from the more radical (yes, more radical even than Heritage Action) Madison Society from a few months back:

Back in January, a number of conservatives rendered themselves irrelevant in the fight for liberty by signing onto an incomprehensible agreement with leadership, known on Capitol Hill as the ‘Williamsburg Accord’ (yes, everything in Washington has to have a silly name). That agreement was aptly hatched at the GOP Retreat in Williamsburg. They agreed to suspend the debt ceiling law for 4 months and vote for a CR that funds Obamacare on condition that leadership keep the sequester and pass a 10-year balanced budget. The idea was to pass an amazing budget blueprint for everyone to support, and fight for it in return for lifting the new debt ceiling in May or June.

Let’s ignore the fact that the sequester was already a fait accompli, as Republicans would have been forced to succumb to tax increases in order to overturn it. Let’s ignore the fact that leadership forced the Democrat Violence Against Women Act down their throats with Democrat support. Let’s ignore the fact that there was nothing new in this year’s Ryan budget to improve upon last year’s budget other than $3.3 trillion in new tax revenue.

Let’s look ahead to the future. We’ve been playing this game for two years. If Boehner is going to buy into the notion that the debt ceiling is off limits, why in the world would the Democrats feel the need to agree to any aspect of the Ryan budget, much less defunding Obamacare? How could Boehner make this comment while he is concurrently telling his conference that he will demand dollar-for-dollar cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling – whatever that means?

Hence, the conservatives who signed onto this deal were punked – unless they also buy into leadership’s claim about default. If Republicans were really serious about dealing with this issue, they would pass Tom McClintock’s Full Faith and Credit Act (H.R. 807), which prioritizes payments for interest on debt. All of those conservatives who agreed to the Williamsburg Accord are co-sponsors of this bill? Why don’t they force leadership to vote on their bill ahead of the May 18 debt ceiling deadline?

It’s clear now that the vote to suspend the debt ceiling for 4 months had nothing to do with their desire to push for a balanced budget, rather it was an expression of fear – the same expression they are evincing to Obama ahead of the new debt ceiling deadline.

We are looking for new candidates who will not be possessed by this incorrigible fear during a time that calls for intrepid courage on the part of conservatives. I’ve already found several promising candidates, and will not rest until we find an army of new savvy contenders who plan to play by a different set of rules. The way we approach elections is not working. The movement is not doing enough to change the face of the Republican Party. And by voting to suspend the debt limit and funding for Obamacare in the CR, conservatives are making it harder for us to run against the moderates, obviating our ability to send them reinforcements. As we’ve explained this week with regards to taking down the rule on bad bills, we have failed to even match the passion and commitment of the ’94-era Republicans.

This must change.

Over the next few weeks, at the Madison Project, we will be updating our index scores for the 112th Congress and our hall of shame, which is comprised of liberal members in conservative districts. Sadly, it’s a long list. You can email me with suggestions of new candidates at Daniel@madisonproject.com. We can either complain or we can take action.

That is the alternate universe in which these grassroots/teaparty/lunatics dwell.

And yet this fact is all too real: they’ve got the Ryan budget already. And they’ve already moved on to the debt ceiling, which all the Fox freaks were going on about last night.  Krauthammer suggested they could get Obamacare defunded if they are willing to hold out. They all believe the consequences of a default are phony concerns made up to force them to back down and they are having none of it. That threat to back primary challenges in those gerrymandered districts against those who deviate from this dangerous delusion is quite real (or these members of congress believe it is, anyway.) So, they are going to play this all the way out.

But why wouldn’t they? With the exception of some chump change from millionaires in the last round, the Democrats have been losing on policy every step of the way since these budget battles began, even as they seem to be winning the politics. What could be more telling than the fact that the numbers in Paul Ryan’s budget are now considered the starting point in any new negotiations to end the shutdown.

Who’s being played here?

Update: Important to note that while the total numbers nearly match Ryan’s budget, the composition of the two budgets is different. Ryan put back the Pentagon funding in full and slashed other discretionary spending to make up for it while the Democrats did not. So Ryan’s dystopian hellscape budget remains slightly more dystopian. I’m sure he’s relieved to know that. The massive cuts in government spending in a fragile economy will stay either way.

False Equivalence Watch by tristero

False Equivalence Watch

by tristero

Yesterday, Bill Keller compared Senator Ted Cruz to Abbie Hoffman. Oh?

Hoffman and all the rest of the New Left never gained serious national political power.* By contrast, Cruz is one of the most  powerful people on the planet and in a position to do genuinely serious harm – like, you know, shut down the government.

And today, here’s Joe Nocera:

A party controlled by its most extreme faction will ultimately be forced back to the center. The Democrats learned that when Walter Mondale was losing to Ronald Reagan, and Michael Dukakis to George H.W. Bush.

Huh? Does Nocera seriously believe that Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis were backed by nut jobs on the level of Cruz’s and Rubio’s constituents? And what’s this about Reagan? Nocera seems to think that Reagan represented a centrist position in American politics and that Reagan’s “moderation” – not his rhetorical cunning and training – was the reason he trounced an “extremist-backed” leftist like Mondale.

Say it ain’t so, Joe. You’re just kidding, right? Right???

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*And not because many chose not to, as Gitlin implies in the Keller article, but because, for a variety of reasons, the left couldn’t get elected. The nearest that the politically ambtitious  SDS-er Tom Hayden came to the US Senate was a close second in 1976. That’s like saying “I almost opened for the Stones.”

By contrast Cruz won. Some would call that a distinction with a difference.

They did it for them. They liked it. It made them feel alive.

They did it for them. They liked it. It made them feel alive.

by digby

Incoherent and absurd:

“We’re very excited,” said Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). “It’s exactly what we wanted, and we got it.”[…] 

“It’s wonderful,” said Rep. John Abney Culberson (R-Tex.), clapping his hands to emphasize the point. “We’re 100 percent united! Ulysses S. Grant said, ‘Quit worrying about what Bobby Lee’s doing and let’s focus on what we are doing. We are focusing on what we need to do and not worrying about what the other guy is going to do. . . . That’s how Ulysses S. Grant won the war.”[…] 

During their own public events, Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.) said he and his colleagues “saw the pain and the hurt and the fear, the concern about what would happen as a result of this law. And that created a renewed resolve not only in myself but in others after we got back from the August recess.”[…] 

“I just think you saw members who said, ‘Look, let’s just do what we all know needs to be done and frankly what the American people want to see done,’ ” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who worked closely with Graves on the plan and helped persuade House leaders to accept it.

“Sometimes I go back to basic civics: We’re the House of Representatives. We’re the body that’s supposed to be closer to the people,” Jordan added. “That’s why the Founders gave a chance for the people to throw us out every two years. That’s why when you go home for five weeks and you hear from people that this law is not ready, that has an impact.”[…]

On Saturday, Huelskamp said the latest spending fight “is a culmination of doing what we said we were going to do.”

“Mark Twain once said, do the right thing and it will gratify some people and astonish the rest,” he said. “America’s been a little astonished by us doing the right thing in the last few days here in the House.”

On Saturday, Huelskamp said the latest spending fight “is a culmination of doing what we said we were going to do.”

“Mark Twain once said, do the right thing and it will gratify some people and astonish the rest,” he said. “America’s been a little astonished by us doing the right thing in the last few days here in the House.”

Huelskamp said Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) had talked to his GOP colleagues about the political damage Republicans suffered during similar shutdowns in the mid-1990s.

“He has an opinion,” he said. “It’s an opinion based on experience in the last century.”

Oh Snap!

Notice they all seem to think they’re doing what “the American people” want. Well:

And …

[A] new survey of 1,976 registered voters finds that only 33 percent believe that the health law should be repealed, delayed, or defunded. 29 percent believe that “Congress should make changes to improve the law,” 26 percent believe that “Congress should let the law take effect” and see what happens, and 12 percent believe that the law should be expanded. The bottom line? Voters are skeptical that Obamacare will live up to Democrats’ hype. But they also believe that it should be given a chance to succeed.

The new poll was conducted by the Morning Consult, a healthcare media company founded by Michael Ramlet. Ramlet, in evaluating the results of his survey, finds that voters are “unmoved by three months of the defund argument,” and that a majority would “blame congressional Republicans a lot for a government shutdown.”

But if you watch FOX all day and listen to Rush you’d think the American people were marching in the streets demanding that the House shut ‘er down.

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