Monthly Archives: March 2010

Expect Insanity

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First, everyone please call 1-888-876-6242. That’s the Families USA number that will route your pro-HCR phone call to your representative. Read about the right-wing threats against Families USA here.

Also, please note that the next several hours before tomorrow’s vote are going to be insane.

The anti-abortion block in the House remains the biggest threat. Steve Benen and Brian Beutler explain the contortions Nancy Pelosi is going through to get some of the Stupak gang on board. In a nutshell, the deal may be to allow for a separate vote on putting the Stupak amendment language back into the House bill.

Note that such a vote, if it happens, is extremely unlikely to pass, but that hasn’t stopped Jane Hamsher from using the issue to rally “progressives” against the bill.

Let us all reflect on how grand it is to have purity of principles when you’ve got plenty of money and insurance to pay for your cancer treatments.

Steve Benen writes that “There are still a few liberal Dems who voted for reform in November, including Massachusetts’ Stephen Lynch, who intend to vote with right-wing Republicans because they don’t see it as liberal enough.” If the more-progressive-than-thou types would stop grandstanding and get behind the bill, Pelosi wouldn’t need any of the Stupak votes. This is a wonderful example of how grandstanding is an indulgence progressives would be better off without most of the time.

If you aren’t disgusted enough yet, check out this Kate Pickert post at Time.com, which begins:

Marcelas Owens, a young boy who’s been appearing on TV and at press conferences with Democrats who are trying to sell their health care plan, is a new fascination for some right-wing pundits, who have been saying incredibly cruel things to and about the Owens’ family and tragic history. Owens’ mother died in 2007 of pulmonary hypertension – a rare condition that requires constant expensive medical care – after she lost her fast food restaurant job and her health insurance.

Pay special attention to the discussion in the comments on What Would Jesus Do about health care reform. My favorite:

Jesus wouldn’t go around forcing people to pay for someone else’s healthcare, either. Forced charity is theft, and it is not a Christian concept.

So who cares if a couple of talk-show hosts say something “mean” when the people they’re opposed to are committing evil?

In a just universe, the person who wrote that would spend eternity copying and re-copying the Beatitudes on parchment with a bad felt-tip pen.

Finally, Dana Milbank says a true thing — running on a promise to repeal health care reform is unlikely to be a successful strategy for Republicans.

Beyond that, it’s doubtful that opposition to the measure will ever again be as high as it is now. Fox News polling found that 45 percent of voters would favor repeal, while 47 percent say leave the reforms alone or add to them. With the big insurance subsidies years away, the initial changes stemming from the legislation would be relatively modest — and that should come as a surprise to an American public told by Republican foes of the legislation to expect a socialist takeover of the United States.

What Americans would see — or at least what Democratic ad makers say they’d put on Americans’ TV screens — are the benefits that would take effect this year: tax credits that encourage small businesses to offer health coverage; a $250 rebate to Medicare beneficiaries who hit the prescription-drug “donut hole” (the checks would start going out June 15); allowing young people up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ health policies; and, above all, a ban on refusing coverage to children with preexisting conditions.

There will certainly be ads this fall saying Republican Congressman X voted against tax breaks for small business and voted to deny Junior his life-saving treatments. These modest changes to the health system probably wouldn’t be widespread and noticeable enough to limit Democratic losses at a time of 10 percent unemployment. But, at the very least, voters would see nothing to justify the Republicans’ apocalyptic predictions.

I think that’s true, and I suspect enough of the troglodytes understand this is true, which is why they will stop at nothing to kill health care reform.

Update: I keep reading that there are something like 206 certain “yes” votes, and ten more are needed to pass. Wikipedia says there are 255 Dems in the House. If every Dem not in the Stupak gang would vote for the bill, then a compromise with Stupak would not be necessary to pass the bill. So why are people angry with Pelosi or Obama or me about Stupak? Why not get angry with the other holdouts?

Update update: It seems the Stupak attempt to use the HCR bill to further restrict abortion has been killed already. Everyone can stop hyperventilating.

Lies Lies Lies Lies Lies Lies Lies

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You probably heard about the hoax memo the GOP circulated to scare people about Democratic intentions.

Here’s another example of gross dishonesty — at Weekly Standard, a column by John McCormack titled “Read the Bill: Senate Plan Would Pay for Abortions at Community Health Centers.” So I waded into this thing expecting McCormack to explain where he found this in the bill, since he wants us to read the bill. But he doesn’t source the bill. He sources two memos, one from United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the other from National Right to Life.

In fact, federal dollars can’t be used to pay for elective abortions now, and there is all kinds of language in the bill that makes it crystal clear federal policy on funding abortion will not be changed by the bill. And I can prove it — read the bill. Here’s the Senate bill; the section regarding abortion begins on page 2077.

Instead of reading the bill, McCormack cites propaganda screeds about the bill so that he can lie about what’s in the bill. Classy. You can read the memos he sites, but the arguments in them are refuted by the bill itself. For that matter, most of the arguments in the memos are refuted by the National Catholic Reporter. See also Timothy Noah.

No one at National Right to Life has ever been the least bit squeamish about making up nonsense to support the cause, but I want to make special note of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. At a time when sexual predation by Catholic clergy has become an international scandal, and when it’s become public that the institutional church has been covering it up and allowing it to continue for decades, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has some cojones producing a deceitful memo to attempt to insert their influence over U.S. health care law.

I’m saying that if the lot of them had a shred of conscience, they’d be very quietly doing penance someplace, not brazenly bearing false witness in order to control the sexual behavior of American women. It’s good to see American nuns and other Catholic organizations coming forward to say the Bishops don’t speak for all Catholics.

Dissing America, IOKIYAR Edition

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Glenn Greenwald picked up this gem from Instapundit Glenn Reynolds:

If I were the Israelis, not only would I bomb Iran, but I’d do so in such a way as to create as much trouble for China, Russia, Europe and the United States as possible.

You know that if any Democrat or progressive were to say “If I were [some foreign country] I would do whatever it took to create as much trouble for the United States as possible” none of us would ever hear the end of it. It would be thrown up in our faces every time we said we were just as patriotic as they were.

But if a righties says it, IOKIYAR. Especially when the foreign country is Israel.

Recently the Obama Administration has been clearly and solidly opposed to more Israeli settlements in east Jerusalem, and this has put many a rightie’s panties in a twist. (Worthy of note: A majority of Israelis think President Obama’s treatment of their country is “friendly and fair.”)

I honestly don’t understand the thing with Israel and U.S. righties. I get that there’s a fundamentalist Christian connection and a powerful Israel lobby that owns a lot of U.S. lawmakers. But even rank-and-file righties who aren’t overly religious and who aren’t being paid under the table think knee-jerk loyalty to the government of Israel is part and parcel of what it takes to be a patriotic American. They’ve come to believe that America’s and Israel’s interests are identical, and if they aren’t it’s America that’s in the wrong. I can only assume their hatred of Palestinians overrides their love of country.

Back in 2002 then congressman Dick Armey said, “My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel,” and nobody blinked. I remember watching and hearing him say this on television, on one of the political talk shows (Chris Matthews, I think, but I can’t swear to that), and I sat and waited for the more-than-obvious follow-up question — isn’t our no.1 priority to protect the United States? — and it was not asked. Nor was there even a trickle of WTF? commentary after. Weird.

Presidential Interviews, IOKIYAR Edition

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The Right is crowing about Bret Baier’s interview of President Obama on Fox News. It was contentious to the point of being hostile, according to most accounts. Baier repeatedly interrupted the President, John Perr writes at Crooks and Liars. But earlier in his “career” Baier compared George W. Bush to Abraham Lincoln and declared that “The country essentially hated him [Lincoln] when he was leaving office.” Um, no.

Some of you might remember that the Lincoln-like Mr. Bush in 2007 was interviewed by an Irish reporter, Carole Coleman, and was so enraged that Coleman pushed him for more complete answers that he complained to the Irish government and managed to ban the interview from U.S. television. The White House also canceled another interview that had been scheduled between Coleman and First Lady Laura Bush.

By contrast, the Baier interview of Obama has been described as an “interrupt-a-thon.” Katie Connolly wrote,

Baier focused his questions on process, hardly a surprise given that’s what the public debate is largely over right now. Obama did his best to circumvent and focus on policy—which, after all, is the point of the bill. That dynamic wasn’t unexpected. What was unusual—and at times downright jarring—was Baier’s repeated interruptions. He tried time and again to pin the president down, but Obama was having none of it. “I think this conversation ends up being a little frustrating … because the focus entirely is on Washington process. And yes, I have said it, that is an ugly process. It was ugly when Republicans were in charge, it was ugly when Democrats were in charge,” he told Baier.

Scroll down to see just a snip of the Baier interview of Obama. Baier clearly was belligerent; Coleman was politeness itself in comparison (see below).

The CBO Numbers Are In

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The HCR vote has been hung up waiting for numbers from the Congressional Budget Office, and now they’re in. And they are very, very good. Ezra writes,

According to a Democratic source, CBO has finished its work and will release the official preliminary score later today. But here are the basic numbers: The bill will cost $940 billion over the first 10 years and reduce the deficit by $130 billion during that period. In the second 10 years — so, 2020 to 2029 — it will reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion. The legislation will cover 32 million Americans, or 95 percent of the legal population.

Righties are already nay-saying this by saying the report is not official and Dems are “spinning” what is not yet the official report, and how dare they? We must wait for the “official” report, and not hastily jump to conclusions. Note that these are the same folks who yesterday misidentified a promotion by a physician recruitment company as a survey conducted by the New England Journal of Medicine and reported false information all over Media World.

The HCR vote is scheduled for Sunday.

Stay Classy, Tea Baggers

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Some Ohio anti-health care reform demonstrators berate a pro-HCR demonstrator whose sign says he has Parkinson’s.

You can see the expanded cut of the video at Think Progress. At one point, a tea bagger is caught on camera yelling No health care! No health care! Wow, heaven forbid that anyone would get health care!

In other wingnut news — the attorney general of Virginia declared that Virginia will file suit against the federal government if health care reform passes. The last time I know of that a state tried to nullify a federal law, Andy Jackson sent a man-of-war to one of its seaports.

Yesterday a portion of wingnut media, including Fox News, seized on a “survey” attributed to the New England Journal of Medicine that claimed 46 percent of primary care physicians would leave medicine if health care reform passes. It turns out that the New England Journal of Medicine had nothing to do with this. The “survey” was concocted by a physician recruiting firm as a promotional gimmick. The wingnuts have yet to acknowledge they were snookered.

Pigs Are Flying

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Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said this:

Any veteran observer of Congress is used to the rampant hypocrisy over the use of parliamentary procedures that shifts totally from one side to the other as a majority moves to minority status, and vice versa. But I can’t recall a level of feigned indignation nearly as great as what we are seeing now from congressional Republicans and their acolytes at the Wall Street Journal, and on blogs, talk radio, and cable news. It reached a ridiculous level of misinformation and disinformation over the use of reconciliation, and now threatens to top that level over the projected use of a self-executing rule by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the last Congress that Republicans controlled, from 2005 to 2006, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier used the self-executing rule more than 35 times, and was no stranger to the concept of “deem and pass.” That strategy, then decried by the House Democrats who are now using it, and now being called unconstitutional by WSJ editorialists, was defended by House Republicans in court (and upheld). Dreier used it for a $40 billion deficit reduction package so that his fellow GOPers could avoid an embarrassing vote on immigration. I don’t like self-executing rules by either party—I prefer the “regular order”—so I am not going to say this is a great idea by the Democrats. But even so—is there no shame anymore?

The difference is that when Dems do it, Republicans hit news media screaming about “Slaughter House Rules” (named after Rep. Louise Slaughter, chair of the Rules Committee). When Republicans did it, Dems were not all over media screaming about the “Dreier Dodge,” or whatever.

And mass media repeats whatever Republicans say.

Steve Benen:

Indeed, hearing Republicans whine incessantly yesterday about the need for an “up-or-down vote” on the Senate bill was especially amusing yesterday. If GOP lawmakers wouldPer allow both chambers to vote up or down on important legislation, procedural alternatives wouldn’t be necessary in the first place.

Per Greg Sargent, way back when the public was divided over Medicare about the same way it is divided now over HCR. But once it went into effect, people liked it.

Also: Nearly 1 in 4 Californians under age 65 had no health insurance last year. If you look at people aged 18 to 65, nearly 1 in 3 had no insurance last year.

Hysteria du Jour

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Today’s hysteria is that Nancy Pelosi is planning to get health care out of the way through a process called “deem and pass,” which Republicans are now screaming is unconstitutional even though it wasn’t when they used to use it. For further explanation, see Steve Benen, “The IOKIYAR Rule, Procedural Edition,” and Ezra Klein, “The Arms Race of Rules.”

In brief, “deem and pass,” also called the “self-executing rule,” would allow the House to “deem” the Senate bill passed and then the House would vote only on the “fixes” to it. As Steve Benen explains, this used to be a rare procedures until 15 years ago, when the Newt Gingrich-led Republican majority in the House discovered it and began using it to pass all sorts of bills.

In 2005 the group Public Citizen challenged the constitutionality of deem and pass in federal court. At the time Nancy Pelosi, Louise Slaughter, and Henry Waxman filed amicus briefs supporting this move. And now that the majority shoe is on the other foot, Pelosi is resorting to the dreaded rule and Republicans dredged up Public Citizen’s old arguments against it.

According to some of them, the rule was “devised” by Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter — they’re calling it the “Slaughter House Rule” — because she is chair of the Rules Committee. But she didn’t “devise” it. It’s been around since before she was in Congress.

As Steve B. says, “It’s a familiar pattern — Republicans open doors, and then whine incessantly when Democrats walk through them.”

Weirdly, many of the wingnuts are screaming about the hypocrisy of Pelosi and Slaughter, but I’m not seeing much mention of Waxman. Gynophobia, much?

Anyway, a U.S. District Court ruled against Public Citizen and decided “deem and pass” is constitutional. And what I think is that once they’ve got health care done, both the House and the Senate should engage in a major rule overhaul.

I agree with Steve M. that the Right will not let go of this and will use it to tar Democrats as arrogant, anti-democratic weasels, and health care reform will be called illegitimate if it’s signed into law. There is a class of people who simply will not let go of a perceived grievance, and wingnuts are it.

I have met people who still insist that West Virginia is not a real state because it was carved out of the confederate Virginia during the Civil War and admitted to the Union while most Virginia menfolk were traipsing around with Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. And when I say they “insist,” I mean they are passionate about it.

But guess what? West Virginia is still a state. And the enormous majority of Americans consider anyone who thinks otherwise to be demented.

And while I’d rather they pass health care reform some other way, if that’s the only way they can do it, they should go ahead. Not to do so is letting the bullies win. I think most Americans will like the HCR bill once they come to understand what is actually in it.

About a Bill

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Bill the BillAccording to Jonathan Cohn, the House Budget Committee will convene this afternoon to hold a hearing and write reconciliation instructions so the HCR bill doesn’t need a 60-vote majority when it goes back to the Senate. Also, the House Rules Committee has to finalize amendments, and the House probably won’t act on the bill until it is sure the Senate will pass the amendments, and that won’t happen until Harry Reid presents the reconciliation package to his caucus.

When the House acts, there’s no certainty there will be enough votes in the Hous. Smart people are saying there will be, but that it will be close.

The House Budget Committee has posted a bill online that Ezra Klein says is the bill that will become the reconciliation bill.

The original reconciliation instructions require Democrats to use a bill written before 10/15/09, and this bill fits, well, the bill. What’ll happen next is that the legislation will head to the Rules Committee, who’ll erase what’s currently on the page and replace it with the real reconciliation package. It’s a bit like how painters will reuse a canvas they’ve already painted on, though they’re doing it to save money and the House and Senate do it because their rulebooks are confusing.

OK.

The White House is pushing for the health care effort to finish this week.