Both of these programs are so overwhelmingly popular that even Republicans voted for them, the vote was 395-to-34.
Category: Healthcare
Here is the Video of Howard Dean Disavowing the Senate Bill
I want him to be my president
Courtesy of the Big Orange Borg.
He makes it very clear: this is a tax on the American people that will be transferred to insurance companies.
He says that it’s not healthcare reform, or even that it’s not even insurance reform. He’s right.
He notes that reconciliation should have been used from the start, and he also notes that this bill will cause the Democrats to lose seats.
He also notes that this is about Joe Lieberman preening for attention.
The Washington press corps went after him hammer and tongs because, hell I don’t know why, in 2004, and he is so much better than anyone else on this it’s not funny.
VPR Audio: VPR News: Dean On Health Care: “Kill The Senate Bill”
The Plum Line is breaking the story that Howard Dean is calling for the Senate bill to be scrapped, and for the house to push through reform via reconciliation, which only requires 50 Senators (+ Joe Biden) to pass.
VPR has a transcript of the interview:
This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate. And, honestly, the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill and go back to the House and start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill.
Yeah, but Republicans will call it a “Nuclear Option,” and say bad things about Barack….You know?
Great googly moogly.
Lieberman and Obama, and the Shark that They Jumped
Click for full size
This is one big shark that he jumped.
With Frikken Lasers!
It appears that the excessive wankerage of Joseph Lieberman on healthcare has even gotten the Villagers, specifically nepotism affirmative action hire Luke Russert (video at link), and wannabe villager Ezra Klein to admit that perhaps, just perhaps, Joseph Lieberman is not acting out of moral conviction, but instead is acting out of a need for revenge.
When you have guys like this calling Joe Lieberman small and petty, and, well basically evil, Holy Joe has done more than jump a shark, he’s jumped the shark, specifically, he’s jumping C. Megalodon*.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that Obama and His Stupid Minions™ are getting a clue on this, or that they understand that Joe just wants to turn the knife, and will keep pulling the football away, because his goal is to punish liberals for not recognizing his brilliance and moral superiority over the past 9 years.
Harry Reid, no doubt wanting to avoid Chris Dodd’s fate, where Dodd was hung out to dry by the administration for doing Geithner’s bidding and putting in a loophole on banker salaries, is now leaking like a seive, with sources who are clearly from his office saying that, Rahm Emanuel personally pressured Reid give in to Lieberman’s extortion. (See also here and here here)
As a result of this, 81% Of Dememocrats want Lieberman’s chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee pulled, which to my mind, would be a good thing, because the Senate Democrats would have to start learning to live with 50+ the Vice President to pass a bill, and people like Lieberman (and Lincoln and Baucus) would be told to go pound sand.
If you want any more evidence of bad faith, Lieberman admits that he’s flipped on the Medicare option because liberals like it:
And he said he was particularly troubled by the overly enthusiastic reaction to the proposal by some liberals, including Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, who champions a fully government-run health care system.
(emphasis mine)
You see, it’s all about pissing off liberals. It does not matter if hundreds of thousands of people die every year because of lack of insurance, Lieberman wants to punish liberals.
Joe Lieberman is a venal sociopath.
*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). So in jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.
The Senate Healthcare Bill Is Worse Than You Thought
If you follow the news, you are no doubt aware that the Senate proposed a medicare buy-in for people between 55 and 65 as an alternative to the public option.
As I noted at the time, it was very restrictive, the people had to be without insurance already, and they had to be near poverty.
Well, it just gets worse: It turns out that this is not an buy-in to actual medicare, because the program, which could likely cover fewer than 1½ million nation wide, would not be able to use the rates that Medicare has negotiated, instead, it would have to negotiate it on their own, and with those numbers, they won’t get anything close to the cost savings that Medicare has generated.
So the fob the program off on the poor, meaning that it will suck, and the strip it of the 40+ years of cost containment, and they call it “Medicare”.
Harry Reid, tell Senators Baucus, Lieberman, and Lincoln to go Cheney themselves, and pass it with the budget.
A Real Innovation
I went to the dentist, and got my teeth cleaned.
At some point in the not too distant past, they upgraded their office, not a surprise, since the office the floor above flooded theirs, and they need to do reparis about a year a go.
One of the upgrades is that the new dental chairs are massaging dental chairs, much like the ones that you find at Sharper Image® store in the mall.
Sweet.
Barack Obama Pimps for Big Pharma
It looks like debate on healthcare reform is foundering on White House opposition to an amendment to allow the reimportation of drugs from Canada
The White House, aided by Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), is working hard to crush an amendment being pushed by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) to allow for the reimportation of pharmaceutical drugs from Canada, Senate sources tell the Huffington Post.
As a result, the Senate health care debate has come to a standstill: Carper has placed a “hold” on Dorgan’s amendment and in response, Dorgan tells HuffPost, he’ll object to any other amendments being considered before he gets a vote on his.
Note, though that this is not a bid at bipartisanship, as Dorgan’s amendment has a Republican co-sponsor, Olympia Snowe (R-ME),and significant ‘Phant support, John McCain (R-AZ), Charles Grassley (R-IA), John Thune (R-SD) and David Vitter (R-LA).
It appears that the Obama administration is afraid that Big Pharma will oppose the bill, but I don’t recall them actually having anyone electing Big Pharma president…..As we all know, the President of the United States is Olympia Snowe.
The European Human Rights Court to Review Irish Abortion Ban
It looks like the Irish ban on abortion will have to defend itself before 17 justices at the European HCR:
Ireland’s almost complete ban on abortion was challenged before 17 European judges yesterday as a violation of fundamental human rights.
Three women, named only as A, B and C, brought a landmark case before the European Human Rights court in Strasbourg, the outcome of which could force Ireland to weaken its strict laws against abortion for the first time in 17 years.
The three plaintiffs – two Irish women and a Lithuanian – say that their own rights to health and life were threatened by pregnancies which they could not terminate legally in Ireland the only EU state other than Malta, with a near outright ban on the procedure. Like an estimated 7,000 Irish women a year, the three women travelled to the UK to obtain legal abortions in Britain.
The case is, in theory, not a frontal assault on a ban which has been enshrined in Irish law for more than a hundred years and reinforced in the Irish constitution since 1983. It is an attempt to clarify and widen the exception, approved in 1992, which permits a pregnancy to be terminated when a woman’s life is threatened. Nonetheless, the Irish government fears, and pro-abortion campaigners hope, that a court ruling in the women’s favour could lead to a de facto unravelling of Irish abortion law.
The Irish law is particularly egregious, since, “If an abortion was later judged to be unnecessary, an Irish doctor could be struck off [have his license pulled] or imprisoned for life. As a result, she said, no statistics existed to say whether any ‘legal’ abortions had ever taken place in Ireland.”
One hopes that the Europeans look at the United States, and realize that pandering the Neanderthals only makes them ask for more.
I Am Glad that I Pulled My Email(s) from the OFA Mailing List
Because I don’t get the sort of blatantly dishonest fundraising pitches that Kos gets:
We will not back down
From: President Barack Obama to Markos
Markos —
As we head into the final stretch on health reform, big insurance company lobbyists and their partisan allies hope that their relentless attacks and millions of dollars can intimidate us into accepting the status quo.
So I have a message for them, from all of us: Not this time. We have come too far. We will not turn back. We will not back down.
But do not doubt — the opponents of reform will not rest. So I need you to fight alongside me.
We must continue to build out our campaign — to spread the facts on the air and on the ground, and to bring in more volunteers and train them to join the fight. I urgently need your help to keep this 50-state movement for reform going strong.
Please donate $5 or whatever you can afford today:
http://my.democrats.org/…
Let’s win this together,
President Barack Obama
I agree with Markos Moulitsas:
This is so freakin‘ obnoxious I can hardly stand it. We are about to get a turd of a “reform” package, potentially worse than the status quo. We have the insurance industry declaring victory, Republicans cackling with glee, and the administration is using that piece of sh$% to raise money?
($% mine)
I can think of no better way to demoralize the base than for Obama and His Stupid Minions™ to keep acting this way.
It’s enough to make me wonder if he is a Manchurian candidate, only it’s not bin Laden who’s backing him, it’s Dick Cheney….
And then the drugs kick in, and I feel much better…
Senate Dems Cave on Public Option
It’s not like Harry Reid and Barack “Status Quo O” Obama were ever really interested in change, so the Senate killing the public option is hardly a surprise, though it is a bummer.
What did they get in response? Well it appears that they got the ability for people aged 55-65 to who are making not more than 150% of poverty buy into Medicare, at an cost per individual around $625/month.
That’s pretty weak tea.
Well, at least the Dems told Ben Nelson to pound sand on his abortion restrictions, and killed his amendment.
My expectation is that this will get a lot worse as time goes on, and it will get a lot worse in conference committee, and Barack Obama will be able to sign his piece of toilet paper.
Sellout
I think that what is more interesting is not what he said, but what he did not say:
“Well, he didn’t mention either abortion or the public option,” said Harkin, a strong backer of the public option and a chairman of the health committee. “He just laid out in very stark terms for us what the future would be if we didn’t pass [health care reform]. I think he’s right. I think it would be devastating. Not just for us as a party, I think for the hope that people have that we’re going to actually make these changes. To fail at this would just again be another one of those things where people say, ‘See, Washington doesn’t work. Washington can’t get anything done. We gave the Democrats all that power and nothing happens.’ And it would be depressing to people. We want to be more hopeful, we want to give people hope. So I thought his message on that was right on target.“
I think that the idea of relying on Barack Obama for meaningful healthcare, or for that matter support of abortion strong abortion rights, is a losing proposition.
He is more interested in signing something (keep him away from toilet paper) with the mane “healthcare reform” on it.
On the matter of abortion, as I noted 2 years ago, he is not willing to lend anything more than lip service to defending abortion rights.
He will do the right thing only if the pressure from his own party leaves him no other alternative.
I Love Arlen Specter Since He’s Turned Democrat
Or, more accurately, I like him since he’s had a primary challenger, thank you Joe Sestak.
It means that we’ll get 18 months of him being a loyal party player….Unfortunately, for the other 54 months of his Senate term, he’s still a contemptible grandstanding untrustworthy jerk.
Case in point, now that he’s running ferociously to the left in order to out-flank Representative Sestak, he dissed Senators Lieberman and Snow regarding their misrepresentations of the public option at a mutual press conference:
“I do not support…a government owned, government run insurance company,” Collins said.
“I have only to look at the experience of my own state in establishing a government run plan to see the problems that arise.”
Collins was referring to the Dirigo health agency, which provides subsidized insurance to poor people in Maine who don’t quite qualify for Medicaid.
“I think we have learned a lot from the Maine plan,” Specter retorted. “We know what not to do. We’re not going to adopt a Maine plan. That experience will stand us in good stead. We won’t make the same mistake.”
Specter went on: “And when Senator Lieberman talks about single payer, I think he’s putting his finger on the pulse of it. That’s what people have concluded [but] the public option isn’t single payer, and it is not going to add to the deficit, it’s going to be a level playing field. So I would like everyone to read the fine print and [for my colleagues] to re-read the fine print.”
(emphasis mine)
By the standards of the Senate, this is actually a pretty nasty slam.
Yet me note that this is not an endorsement of him. When you get 12-18 months of non wankertude out of a 6-year term, and so it’s not really worth it pulling the lever for him.
What a F$#@ing Tool
Greg Mankiw, who argues that healthcare reform will be less efficient than the free market because poor people will get a better deal.
Seriously, even though the US spends more per capita, and more as a percentage of GDP than any other nation on earth, and even though the outcomes are worse than the developed worlds, and efficiency is results divided by resources, healthcare reform will make us less efficient.
He argues that higher marginal tax rates shrink the economic pie, even though the historical numbers belie that.
You see, he thinks that “fairness” means “reduced work incentives”, which, I guess is why we have to pay bankers hundreds of millions of dollars to screw up our economy.
At the end, he suggests that improving healthcare will result in, “future generations of Americans will likely spend more time enjoying leisure.”
What is going on, of course, is that people are terrified of losing a job and healthcare, and, you know, dying, and so are less likely to take part-time jobs and/or tell their employer to go Cheney himself.
We already know that our healthcare system is deterring people from becoming entrepreneurs, but people like Mankiw just want wage slave drones.
You know, with ideas like this, you’d think that he would have been a part of Bush’s Evil Minions™….Oh…Right…He was.
He was head of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors.
Dean 1: The Dean 0
He should be president
So, David Broder, the, “Dean of the Washington press corps”, goes after Harry Reid for having the temerity to challenge his august pronouncements on healthcare reform, and Howard Dean slams him, calling him a sanctimonious “gossip columnist.”
There was an inside the beltway columnist whose head explodes, and Dean handed him his head too, when the guy lies about the CBO iumbers.
Damn, I really that Howard Dean were in his 2nd term right not, rather than Barack Obama being in his 1st term.
The Excessively Employed
While I am not a fan of Mary Landrieu, and some days actually hope that the Southern squish Dems lose their battles for reelection so that the Senate is forced to play hardball (i.e. reconciliation).
I am even less enthused about Mary Landrieu’s ongoing act Hamlet act on healthcare reform, which seems to largely involve the desire to increase Medicare subsidies to Louisiana.
That being said, Mark Halperin’s most substantive writing on this issue, and Landrieu’s position on HCR is to post this photoshop job, which has since been removed by a journalist who has secretly infiltrated the corporate offices of Time.
It is, of course a reference to the unfortunate confusion between hair gel and semen made by Carmen Diaz in the movie There’s Something about Mary.
As many of you know, Mark Halperin is this babbling idiot whom Time magazine hired to cobble together this insipid web product called “The Page,” which is designed to scam people looking for trenchant, up-to-the-minute political news into giving Time many, many unnecessary ad impressions as you follow Halperin’s teasing links to his content. That content tends to be a really dumb listicle, or a one sentence piece of pure and unadulterated banality, or, if you are really lucky, a paragraph or two of analysis that’s either so conventional as to appear slam-dunk, or so witless that it’s completely laughable and wrong.
The post about Landrieu was titled, “There’s Still Something About Mary,” for the brain dead readers of “The Page” who would not otherwise get it.
Yes, this should be a firing offense, particularly after both Beck and Limbaugh literally called her a “prostitute,” but since it’s at the expense of a woman, I’m sure that the old boy’s club of journalism will just chuckle
Time to Call In the IRS
The Bishop of Providence Rhode Island has banned Patrick Kennedy from taking communion in his diocese. Suzie Madrak has the scoop at Crooks and Liars (also, you can find it at CNN):
PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin has banned Rep. Patrick Kennedy from receiving Communion, the central sacrament of the church, in Rhode Island because of the congressman’s support for abortion rights, Kennedy said in a newspaper interview published Sunday.
The decision by the outspoken prelate, reported on The Providence Journal’s Web site, significantly escalates a bitter dispute between Tobin, an ultra orthodox bishop, and Kennedy, a son of the nation’s most famous Roman Catholic family.
“The bishop instructed me not to take Communion and said that he has instructed the diocesan priests not to give me Communion,” Kennedy told the paper in an interview conducted Friday.
Kennedy said the bishop had explained the penalty by telling him “that I am not a good practicing Catholic because of the positions that I’ve taken as a public official,” particularly on abortion.
(emphasis original)
Seriously, if the Church wants to be this captured by the Republican party, perhaps the IRS should look at improper electioneering.
I would also note that the Republican party has been captured by nativist bigots, people who hate Hispanics, who are now over 2/3 of the Catholic Church, then perhaps Catholics of good conscience should find those few Bishops and Cardinals of good faith who spend their time on serving their flock, and leave those who spend their time on than lobbying on abortion and covering up for pedophile priests to their own devices.
Apologies for the poor audio quality of the vid, it’s from the Christo-Fascist CNSNews.
Portrait of a Pandering or Courage?
Nice that he changed his position, but it smacks of opportunism.
I’m calling pandering.
Michael Bennet faces a very strong challenge from the Andrew Romanoff, who is coming at him from the left, so Bennet’s statement that he would vote for healthcare reform even if it meant him losing the election is an easy one to make. (see vid)
The reality is that he was saying he might not vote for HCR for a long time, and now that he has a strong primary challenger, and he would be dead in the primary if he voted against it, suddenly he’s willing to bet his career on it.
Chicken Sh$#
Said piece of poultry excrement is William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States of America, who has backed out of making an appearance at free medical clinic in Arkansas, because Keith Olbermann supported and raised funds for them:
Bill Clinton told FDL’s Eve Gittelson that it would be problematic for him to attend a free medical clinic being held in Little Rock, Arkansas [held Saturday] because MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann had “politicized” the event.” He indicated that some were turning the event into a primary kickoff against Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln.
Eve ran into Clinton Thursday in the gift shop of the Clinton Library. She’s in Arkansas covering the Keith Olbermann’s free clinic event, organized by the National Association of Free Clinics. The former President is in town for the 5th anniversary of the Clinton Library.
Seriously, this is some major level of chicken sh#@, and it is typical of his time as a politician on the national scene.
Unfortunately, as indicated by retreats on torture prosecutions, the rule of law on terrorism cases, healthcare reform, financial reform, etc. it appears that Barack Obama has brought the Chicken sh$# brigade from Clinton’s terms, and put them in charge of policy.
Healthcare, The 1st Cloture Motion Passes, 60-39
FDL has the liveblog.
That and £3.00 will get you a Starbucks.
Some notes:
- It now requires 60 votes to accept an amendment to strip out the public option.
- This was just a vote to go to debate so there will be more cloture votes.
- The bill is pretty sucky.
Harry Reid Disses David Broder
So it appears that Harry Reid is telling the “Dean of the Washington Press Corps” to go Cheney Himself:
“In tomorrow’s Washington Post, David Broder, their distinguished senior columnist, certainly not a political conservative, expresses his reservation as a citizen about the steps that we could be about to take,” McConnell said.
Reid couldn’t have been less impressed. “To focus on a man who has been retired for many years and writes a column once in a while is not where we should be.”
(emphasis mine)
David Broder has been highly respected for his writing columns calling liberals DFHs* and giving a tongue bath to the conservative establishment since the 1960s.
Actually, it’s been the same article, written over and over again.
Nice to see that Harry Reid is calling him irrelevant. One wishes that this statement had been made decades ago by hundreds of more people.
Of course Broder is a conservative. He has been a spokesman for the status quo for over 40 years, though his real constituency is the Washington, DC cocktail party circuit.
*Dirty F$#@ing Hippies.