;)
Sunday
Sep292013
The Commentariat -- Sept. 30, 2013
NEW. Paul Kane, et al., of the Washington Post: "The Senate rejected House amendments to a short-term spending bill Monday, killing a provision that would delay President Obama's health-care law.... The 54 to 46 party-line vote made good on a vow by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) to reject a funding bill approved by the House early Sunday because it would delay Obama's signature 2010 health-care law for one year and repeal a tax on medical devices." ...
... NEW. Burgess Everett & Manu Raju of Politico: "Faced with a politically damaging government shutdown at midnight, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is gauging whether there is enough support to pass a measure to keep the government afloat for one more week." ...
... NEW. President Obama, today:
... NEW. Nathaniel Popper of the New York Times: "Stock markets fell worldwide on Monday as political disagreements in Washington made a shutdown on Monday night increasingly likely." ...
... Hey, Mark Halperin said on "Morning Joe" that there's no chance for a clean CR. Since Halperin is wrong on everything, maybe there's hope. ...
... Kidnappers Signal They May Accept Reduced Ransom. Brian Knowlton & Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "House Republican leaders said on Sunday that they still believed a government shutdown beginning on Tuesday could be averted if Democrats would accept at least some of their demands to scale back President Obama's health care law." ...
... Jonathan Strong of the National Review: "House GOP whip Kevin McCarthy said the House will send a third government-funding bill with 'a few other options' if the Democratic-controlled Senate rejects the bill passed in the House last night, as expected."...
... Manu Raju & Burgess Everett of Politico: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been the most ardent proponent of President Barack Obama taking a hard line with House Republicans in the latest fiscal crisis engulfing Washington. And so far, Reid is getting his way. When the president considered sitting down with the four congressional leaders in the White House ahead of the deadline to avert a government shutdown, Reid privately urged Obama to call off the meeting.... Reid believed that it would amount to nothing more than a photo-op that would give the false impression that a serious negotiation was occurring, even warning he wouldn't attend such a session. Obama scrapped it." ...
... Alex Pappas of the Daily Caller: "Speaker of the House John Boehner accused Harry Reid and other Senate Democrats of 'breathtaking arrogance' for intentionally not convening a Sunday session to deal with compromise legislation to stop a government shutdown." ...
... Jake Sherman & John Bresnahan of Politico: "As of late Sunday, there were no negotiations occurring between [House Speaker John] Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Obama. The Senate wasn't even in session, and House GOP leaders weren't holding emergency discussions internally. Both sides seem prepared to let the government shutdown happen and then squabble over who is to blame. The House will reconvene Monday at 10 a.m., but Republicans will just wait. The Senate is scheduled to return Monday afternoon, and Reid says Senate Democrats will move quickly then to reject two House amendments to the government funding bill. That would leave just hours before a government shutdown." ...
... Evidently that seems fair to the Editors of the Washington Post, who win the Both-Sides-Do-It Raspberry: Speaker "Boehner, his counterpart in the Senate, Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), minority leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the president. Both sides are inordinately concerned with making sure that, if catastrophe comes, the other side takes the political hit. In truth, none of their reputations stands to benefit." Congratulations, you yahoos, for effectively endorsing the notion that refusing to fund legally-established social programs is a legitimate "bargaining chip." ...
... CW: The Post editors should read their own blogger Greg Sargent, who explains to the ignorant, "... both sides agree that a government shutdown should be avoided. Asking for only some of the undermining of Obamacare you want in exchange for doing what you agree must happen for the good of the country, rather than all of it, is not a concession and doesn't demonstrate a willingness to compromise. After all, what Republicans want is to fund the government at sequester levels (which is already a win for them; Republicans themselves have described the sequester as a 'victory'), and to delay or block parts of Obamacare on top of that. In the 'compromise' scenario Republicans are insisting on, then, only one side -- Democrats -- would be making concessions, and Republicans wouldn't be giving up anything. Folks inclined to blame 'both sides' for what's happening here need to reckon with this basic imbalance." ...
... Burgess Everett: "About 20 House Republicans gathered on the steps of the United States Senate on Sunday afternoon ... demanding that the Senate come back in session, accusing the Democratic controlled chamber of being 'lazy' and Majority Leader Harry Reid of taking his ball and going home rather than negotiating with GOP leadership over the weekend." ...
... Dylan Stableford of Yahoo News: "With a possible government shutdown looming, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz tried to place the blame on squarely on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for refusing to compromise on the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's signature health care law." ...
... BUT. I'm prepared to vote for a clean resolution tomorrow. It's time to govern. I don't intend to support a fool's errand at this point. -- Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.)
AND. I disagree with the strategy of linking Obamacare with the continuing functioning of government-a strategy that cannot possibly work. -- Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) ...
... Brigid Schulte & Justin Jouvenal of the Washington Post: "The Washington region ... could lose an estimated $200 million a day and could see more than 700,000 jobs take a financial hit if the federal government shuts down Monday night.... And that's not counting the blow to tourism, one of the region's economic mainstays, if the Smithsonian museums, the National Zoo, Civil War battlefields and other federally funded attractions are shuttered...."
... Paul Krugman: "This may be the way the world ends -- not with a bang but with a temper tantrum.... This all sounds crazy, because it is. But the craziness, ultimately, resides not in the situation but in the minds of our politicians and the people who vote for them. Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves." ...
... Fiscal Conservatives, My Ass. Tara Culp-Ressler of Think Progress rounds up some of the costs to the economy (& for consumers) that would result from the GOP "compromise" of delaying implementation of the ACA for a year. ...
... Andy Borowitz: "In a special Sunday radio address, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) delivered a health tip to the American people, advising them to delay getting cancer for a year." CW: if I didn't say so last week, I meant to: people will die if House Republicans get their way. ...
... Andrew Cohen of the Atlantic: "If rogue Republicans do not relent over the budget impasse by October 1, whatever pandemonium happens next will largely be governed by a federal statute you likely have never heard of: the Antideficiency Act." Very interesting. Thanks to contributor Barbarossa for the link. ...
** Impeached if He Does, Damned if He Doesn't. Henry Aaron (no, not that Henry Aaron) of the Brookings Institution in the New York Times: "Failure to raise the debt will force the president to break a law -- the only question is which one.... If President Obama spends what the law orders him to spend and collects the taxes Congress has authorized him to collect, then he must borrow more than Congress has authorized him to borrow. If the debt ceiling is not raised, he will have to violate one of these constitutional imperatives.... In 2011..., Professors Neil H. Buchanan and Michael C. Dorf, who parsed the arguments in the Columbia Law Review in 2012, concluded that all options were bad, but that disregarding the debt ceiling was least bad from a legal standpoint. I agree.... If Congress leaves the debt ceiling at a level inconsistent with duly enacted spending and tax laws, the president has no choice but to ignore it." ...
... CW: Maybe the Orange Man is cagier than we thought. As Aaron points out, if President Obama takes his (Aaron's) advice -- which I think is excellent advice -- the House could impeach Obama, though the Senate would not convict him. This would give those Tea Party grandstanders exactly what they want; a number of them have already said they wanted to impeach Obama: they just haven't been able to find a law he's broken. Poor things are impeachers in search of an impeachable offense. Obama's ignoring the debt ceiling could be just the ticket. The downside for Republicans: the public has no taste for impeachment. Even though President Clinton's behavior actually was scandalous, impeachment made Clinton more -- not less -- popular. I doubt that impeachment would be better the second time around. ...
... Buchanan & Dorf, BTW, read the Constitution exactly as I do (something I mentioned last week) -- that the President has an obligation to pay bills incurred under the aegis of Congressional laws as part of his Constitutional mandate to "take care that the Laws be faithfully executed." ...
... Conservative & former Bushie David Frum in the Daily Beast: "... it's hard to see any positive outcome emerging for Republicans from this confrontation. Yet the party is charging forward anyway. Why? The short answer is a breakdown in the party's ability to govern itself. It can't think strategically. Even when pressed to do something overwhelmingly likely to end in disaster, as this shutdown looks likely to do for Republicans, the party has no way to stop itself. It stumbles into fights it cannot win, gets mad, and then in its anger lurches into yet another fight that ends in yet another loss. "'
... Steve M. of NMMNB: "... even if Republicans get all the blame for what's about to happen, and plummet in the polls, it doesn't matter: the political establishment will desperately cast about for some 'new' GOP, at least until the stench of the shutdown/default moment has lifted. Mainstream journalists will develop a fascination with Chris Christie (he's not a Washington Republican!) or Jeb Bush (he's so reasonable!) or Peter King (he doesn't like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, and he didn't vote for Bill Clinton's impeachment!) They'll do anything not to admit that that the Republican Party is rotten to the core." Steve makes his case with a short history lesson on the Short Life of Major GOP Screw-Ups. ...
... Zeke Miller of Time: "Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the once esteemed Heritage Foundation, has been working day and night for years to bring about just the crisis now gripping DC.... Heritage's willingness to take aim at its own party has irked more mainstream Republicans." ...
... David Rogers of Politico blames it all on -- Paul Ryan. Ryan's so-called balanced budget for FY 2014 was a winger's wet dream that didn't add up. It "held out the promise of repealing Obamacare but got to balance only by keeping hundreds of billions in added revenues and Medicare savings in the Affordable Care Act." There were other problems -- even for fiscal conservatives -- in the fine print: to achive a pretense of balance required drastic cuts to programs that teabaggers favored. Ryan "is too smart not to have seen the holes in his budget plan. And once the Senate followed with its own resolution, he failed to follow up by aggressively pursuing a conference with Democrats." CW: When, or when, will the Village People get over the notion that Paul Ryan is a brilliant numbers guy? Rogers is perhaps the best news analyst Politico has, yet he can't see through the smoke-&-mirror scams of the Vice Presidential Second Runner-Up.
Vice President Joe Biden in the Des Moines Register on the Affordable Care Act & explaining some of its provisions. ...
... Emery Dalesio of the AP: "With new online health insurance exchanges set to launch Tuesday, consumers in many Southern and Plains states will have to look harder for information on how the marketplaces work than their counterparts elsewhere. In Republican-led states that oppose the federal Affordable Care Act, the strategy has ranged from largely ignoring the health overhaul to encouraging residents not to sign up and even making it harder for nonprofit organizations to provide information about the exchanges." ...
... Robert Pear of the New York Times: "The Obama administration plans on Monday to announce scores of new health insurance options to be offered to consumers around the country by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association and the United States Office of Personnel Management, the agency that arranges health benefits for federal employees.... The options are part of a multistate insurance program that Congress authorized in 2010 to increase options for consumers shopping in the online insurance markets scheduled to open on Tuesday. Congress conceived multistate plans as an alternative to a pure government-run insurance program -- the 'public option.' ..."
Bill Keller joins the ranks of pundits who try to equate Tea Party anarchists with 1960s anti-war radicals. Not exactly original thinking; political scientists often drawn the left-right continuum not as a straight line but as a circle. At least Keller has the sense to note some of the differences: the conservatives' "mobilizing cause is not putting an end to an indecent war that cost three million lives, but defunding a law that promises to save lives by expanding access to insurance."
** Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "The Justice Department is expected to sue North Carolina on Monday over its restrictive new voting law, further escalating the Obama administration's efforts to restore a stronger federal role in protecting minority voters after the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, according to a person familiar with the department's plans."
Eric Schmitt & Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: "As the nation's spy agencies assess the fallout from disclosures about their surveillance programs, some government analysts and senior officials have made a startling finding: the impact of a leaked terrorist plot by Al Qaeda in August, [first reported by McClatchy News,] has caused more immediate damage to American counterterrorism efforts than the thousands of classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden.... American counterterrorism officials say they believe the disclosure about the Qaeda plot has had a significant impact because it was a specific event that signaled to terrorists that a main communication network that the group's leaders were using was being monitored."
Felix Salmon of Reuters: "I don't know which producer at CNBC had the genius idea of asking Alex Pareene on to discuss Jamie Dimon with Dimon's biggest cheerleaders, but the result was truly great television" (read Salmon's commentary, too):
Getting a Jump-Start on Starving the Kiddies. Kevin Murphy of Reuters: "As Congress and the White House debate proposed cuts in the federal food stamps program, Kansas and Oklahoma are going ahead with reductions that could leave thousands of people without subsidies for food if they do not find work, or sign up for job training. The two states will require healthy adults through the age of 49 with no dependents to work at least 20 hours per week, or be in job training, in order to be eligible for food stamps."
Local News
Jeff Spross of Think Progress: Anita Perry, who is married to Gov. Goodhair, twice during a brief interview, referred to abortion as "a woman's right." She said (somewhat inarticulately) that she herself wouldn't choose to have an abortion, but that "If they want to do that, that is their decision. They have to live with that decision.... It is not something that I would say for them." CW: Anita Perry is a nurse & the daughter & granddaughter of doctors.
Lieutenant Governors Race
Washington Post Editors: "... the lieutenant governor [of Virginia] does have one important task: preside over the state Senate and cast the deciding vote in the event of a tie. At the moment, Democrats and Republicans are evenly split in Virginia's Senate; each party holds 20 seats.... E.W. Jackson, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia..., is an embarrassment to the Republican Party, which nominated him in a sparsely attended party convention based on little more than stirring oratory.... The Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor is Democratic state Sen. Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist. In contrast to Mr. Jackson, Mr. Northam, a fiscal conservative who represents a district encompassing parts of Hampton Roads and the Eastern Shore, is a calm, collected fellow, well respected by members of both parties."
News Ledes
New York Times: "Two senior Marine Corps generals [-- Maj. Gen. Charles M. Gurganus & Maj. Gen. Gregg A. Sturdevant --] have been ordered to take early retirement after being found responsible for errors in judgment and failure to provide adequate security at a base in southwestern Afghanistan that was the scene of a deadly -- and humiliating -- insurgent attack last year that killed two Marines and destroyed six Harrier attack jets.
BBC News: "The Pope said in July that he would canonise his two predecessors, after approving a second miracle attributed to John Paul. Polish John Paul, the first non-Italian pope for more than 400 years, led the Catholic Church from 1978-2005. Pope John was pontiff from 1958-1963, calling the Second Vatican Council that transformed the Church. The decision to canonise the two at the same time appears designed to unify Catholics...."
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Reader Comments (27)
Andrew Cohen on wthe law that governs a government shutdown:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/the-odd-story-of-the-law-that-dictates-how-government-shutdowns-work/280047/
It costs more to restart the government than it does to shut it down, another reason that this is so stupid.
Hi: "Kansas and Oklahoma are going ahead with reductions that could leave thousands of people without subsidies for food if they do not find work, or sign up for job training." (see Kevin Murphy, above).
Does anyone have a good description of why the above is not so good. I've done a lot of shit-work for food and shelter. Why is this a Dem/Repub issue?
That exchange with Alex Pareen and the financial apologists was stunning. The following paragraph from Felix Salmon's article struck me as the crux of the matter:
"This view — that profits cleanse all sins, and that so long as you’re making money, nothing else matters — is not normally expressed quite as explicitly as it was here. After all, there are licit and illicit ways of making money, and surely if your profits fall into the latter category, you should not be able to remain comfortably ensconced as a celebrated captain of industry. Besides, banks shouldn’t be obscenely profitable: they’re intermediaries, and in an efficient economy their profits should be quite easily competed away. When bank profits are high, that’s a sign that the bank in question is extracting rents from the economy, rather than helping it to grow."
@ citizen625:
I've often hearkened back to what Franklin Roosevelt said about what he called "the poverty of the dole." Roosevelt did give us a system of unemployment insurance, but mostly he was concerned about putting people to work, for their own good as well as for the good of the economy, saying, “The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief . . . . Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration, fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.”
Instead, Roosevelt gave people jobs. The benefits provided through the WPA and CCC are still with us, and the entire country has prospered as a result of their work.
For that reason, and for many others, I have long been in favor of eliminating all relief programs (except short-term unemployment insurance and aid to the disabled) and replacing them with a single program that simply guarantees people a job at a living wage with medical insurance.
This would have many advantages. First and foremost, it would guarantee full employment. Second, it would put people to work doing things that desperately need to be done, like fixing our bridges and rehabilitating our national parks.
Guaranteeing everyone a job in this way would also eliminate the need for laws mandating that employers pay a minimum wage. Since anyone could always work for the government at a living wage, private employers would have to offer at least that much to get anyone to work for them.
In the same way, if employers realized anyone could also get health insurance simply by taking a job with the government, businesses would be forced to offer medical insurance to their employees as well. But instead of moving business to provide that insurance themselves (and thereby absorbing the cost), I believe employers would push the government to provide medical insurance for everyone, not just for those employed with the government, giving us the national single-payer system we need.
If someone is physically incapable of working then their fellow citizens would still be there to help. But moving away from a system of guaranteed income toward a system of guaranteed employment makes sense on any number of levels.
@Noodge: an excellent policy. If put into effect, the federal government would still effectively set the minimum wage, though it might do so on some sort of GS-type scale: i.e., $11/hour for unskilled labor; $30 for engineers, etc. That is, if the government is hiring unskilled labor at $11/hour + benefits, then private employers would have to offer nearly that much.
I'm not sure an individual state could initiate such a program, as unemployed people would flock to the state (altho there could be a residency requirement to mitigate the moocher effect). I do think it could be done on a regional basis: say, all of the Northeastern states agreed to participate in a joint program. Yes, people from elsewhere would still flock to the guaranteed gummit jobs, but since these "immigrants" would be absorbed into a large existing population & into an area that needs a lot of infrastructure improvement, etc., it might work.
Anyway, it's not going to happen at the federal level. We live in TeabaggerLand now.
Marie
Jamie Dimon will likely retain his crown and throne. It seems that he has visited the Crossroads and the devil is his chief shareholder.
Looks like the media is playing its usual role. They speak really loud while spewing gopher dung all over the walls and furniture. Stating the facts isn't an option, it requires some semblance of journalistic integrity. Worse, the public has to digest the information rather than parrot their favorite talking head. Thinking and analysis, on the part of the public, is bad for ratings. Talking head doesn't seem accurate, its more like really noxious flatulence than speech.
The current question, fomented by the media, "Are Republicans or Democrats responsible for the dung heap we face?" The question should be "Is the media or are the Republicans more responsible for the success of regressive, racist, poverty producing and just plain damn evil shit that is going on?"
Noodge, Marie: Thanks for the response. There is too much vitriol and anger directed at those on welfare; it'd be nice to have more/better ammunition to defang the opposition. But I guess a lot of these same people against welfare are against helping feed low income children so the bar of compassion is set really low by the false conservatives of a Republican stripe.
@ CW: It's all in the way you sell it. No need to mention to the teabaggers that we're guaranteeing employment, a living wage, and medical care. Simply tell them we will no longer offer a check to people who are too lazy to work.
They'll eat that sh*t up. :-)
Maybe I'm noticing only what I like to see, but is there really more explicit and public discussion of capitalism's dark underpinnings now than has been the case for years?
Most likely, this new-age discussion (even on CNBC, one of the media's houses of business worship, whose talking heads were forced to get downright defensive about Dimon's predations) reflects the growing and obvious gap between rich and poor, the disappearing middle class, and the exposure of folks like the Kochs, Dimons and Petersons to public view, putting faces to the formerly anonymous evil they so casually do.
Maybe people are actually noticing the economic death by a thousand cuts they have been experiencing for the last forty years, if not because they are suddenly more alert, but because death is now so near.
Here in the northwest corner of the nation that was once called "little Russia" there is an interesting Seattle Council race, with an avowed socialist running and doing quite well. I'm taking it as a bright and shiny omen of good things to come.
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-case-for-kshama-sawant/Content?oid=17825832
And a nod to the other son, not the one who sent me "The Stranger" link above: The following thought experiment, which he suggested to me yesterday.
Imagine the media reaction to a first or second year Senator who in 2006 or 2007 staged a twenty plus hour faux filibuster, protesting the policies of the sitting President. Imagine that neophyte Senator had not only attended Harvard Law, but was the president of the Harvard Law Review? And just imagine that he was black.
Would the media be bending a knee in his direction, talking about him as a possible Presidential nominee in 2008?
There is much to think about here--I've only begun--the way I see it, all of it revelatory of but not very complimentary to our cultural and political values and behaviors.
I've been refraining from throwing things at my various media resources (iPad, radio, TV, desktop) while reading the incredible (even for them) hypocrisies slithering off the tongues of the congressional wingers ready to detonate the government if Democrats and the president don't kill a law that has been duly enacted and upheld by the Supreme Court, just because they say so.
First, to hear these jamokes tell it, it's the president and the Democrats who want to shut down the government. It's the Republicans who are all about comity and compromise. Cruz has been saying that it's not him who wants to turn out the lights over the ACA. Noooo. Not at all. He has already compromised. Really he has. What is his compromise? Why, he doesn't want to kill affordable health care for Americans, nooo not at all; he only wants it defunded. You see? All you idiots out there, don't you realize there's a difference?
Sure Teddy. We get it. You don't want to blow up the car. You just want to drain the gas tank, pull out the spark plugs, steal the tires, put it up on blocks in the garage, and for good measure, pour sugar in the carburetor. What honest Ted doesn't want anyone to recognize is that either way, the thing won't go. No one will ever see through that ruse! Such a clever boy, that Ted Cruz.
As for idiots like Gohmert, frothing at the mouth and screaming that they've done everything they can to keep the shutdown from happening and that it's all the fault of the Senate, is like the arsonist who set your house on fire claiming that the fire department is to blame for not getting there before the structure collapsed. It had nothing to do with that Molotov cocktail he launched through the window.
I'm telling you right now, brothers and sisters, because I heard some rattlings from Dems over the weekend about "fixing things", if the president or a single Democrat blinks and gives in or even mentions compromising with terrorists, I'm gonna lose it.
Noodge,
Love your idea.
Only one problem. It makes sense.
Take it to the crazy house, paint it blue and have it run around in the woods for a few weeks. Change it so that the poor people work and rich people get their paychecks. Oh, and make it so that any lazy moochers getting jobs from the guvmint convert to fundamentalist Christianity and take a loyalty oath to the Kochs.
See? Now you got something that might pass.
(I wish this were all cuckoo hyperbole...)
Sesame Street had, and probably still does, a segment where they address compare and contrast with a sing-song little ditty that says "One thing is not like the other." Since many today sitting in those cushy legislative leather seats obviously never paid mind to Big Bird or Elmo teaching them that one thing is not like another, they have lately used Hitler, slavery, lynching, Marx, et al. to equate things that simply have no baring on the subject at hand. I thought of this disparity last night while reading about jellyfish.
Most jellyfish are little more than gelatinous bags containing digestive organs and gonads, drifting at the whim of the current. But box jellyfish are different. They are active hunters of medium-sized fish and crustaceans, and can move at up to twenty-one feet per minute. They are also the only jellyfish with eyes that are quite sophisticated, containing retinas, corneas, and lenses. And they have brains, which are capable of learning, memory, and guiding complex behaviors. These boxers can kill you even if you just brush past them. I know this is a leap, but I wonder if Kermit would find some semblance of a connection between these jellyfish and the aforementioned legislative killers swimming around in those dirty waters that taste like bad tea. On second thought he'd dismiss it outright for the simple reason these fish have brains that are capable of learning, have a memory and can guide complex behaviors.
Never mind.
@Marie, Noodge, citizen625; OK pinkos, let's put a cork in any idea that you socialists-commies come up with. A federal program of job training and employment, why that's insane!
Imagine, if you can, a program set up by the feds to increase security and safety at transportation hubs such as airports, train stations and ports. Billions of dollars spent on staffing and training, more billions wasted on high tech equipment that is of questionable use; the costs would be staggering and the benefits minimal.
Billions more would be spent on office space for program management and the fees for the favored consultants that would advise those decision-makers.
Those wasted billions belong in the pockets of the over-taxed, over regulated corporations that made this country what it is today.
No more spending the national wealth on the poor; they are a bad investment.
Your Socialistic-Commie president would probably come up with some jingoistic name for such a dumb-ass government handout like " The Freedom and Lunch Act"
But that's not the exceptional American way, we are liberty-loving, moose hunting individuals and we don't cotton to govermint help.
So forget about any idea that promotes a healthy society; this is America. U (S)tand (A)lone. Pinkos.
Damn, JJG––just when I was getting ready to order some lacy pink under things you had to go and splash water on that grand plan that makes so much sense and won't work––you and Akhilleus are right–– because it makes so much sense. Tender comrades, we teeter on the brink of collapse singing Irving Berlin's Star Spangled Banner as loud as we can .
I'm thinking about old Ted. Wasn't he the smug puss to state that he didn't need the Congressional health plan. (His wife has a superb coverage at Goldman Sachs that covers Teddie and the family). Didn't I read that this costs the vampire squid around $40,000 a year for Mr. & Mrs Ted alone?
Hey, Mr. Blankfein ...drop that expensive, overpriced healthcare for all employees!
Hey, Mr. Blankfein...you can save GS beaucoup monies.
Let them sign up for Obamacare!
as for Mr. & Mrs. Ted...luckily, they can still grab the generous Congressional perk!
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/10/07/131007fa_fact_auletta?currentPage=all.
The above has a pretty good description of the Guardian and the Snowden coverage machinations. You have to wonder if the nervousness of the powers that be about this stuff reflect their concerns that the governed won't much appreciate how and how much of the money is wasted for how little benefit. Security theatre doesn't really impress when schools in Rahm Emanual's Chicago need parents to have fund raisers to buy toilet paper for their children's school. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/violence-in-chicago-a-tale-of-two-cities/280019/.
The Party of No has lately taken on new dimensions of negation and nihilism.
As Marie has pointed out, the plan (if you can call sitting in your dirty diaper, shaking your rattle and crying "Wah, wah, wah" a plan) to defund the ACA not only denies affordable health care to tens of millions of Americans currently without it, but will cost lives. So NO healthcare and NO help if you get sick. Go away and die, already.
If you live in one of the many states gearing up to deny Americans the right to vote it will be NO participation in the democratic process. And if you complain that these assholes are being racist, as the DOJ is ready to do in NC, there will be a big laugh all around because it's extremely difficult to prove that their plan is racially motivated. All they have so is lie and say NO we're not racists. In fact, that may be largely the case, even if there actually is a nice bonus in not allowing those awful nigg---ahh...nee-groes to vote. The primary goal is to deny Democrats enough votes to win elected office. So the larger "fuck you" is to America itself: NO you don't get to choose your representatives.
Even though we routinely hear from the wingnuts about "job creators" they have no problem turning away tens of millions of dollars states could use to hire companies and ACA navigators to help steer uninsured Americans through a process several hundred of their former NOes made more difficult. So NO to employment.
Should you want to protect your children against being shot in the head while studying their history book that explains--if you happen to live in a winger state--that Evolution does NOT exist and that there is NO doubt that Adam and Eve kept a pet Tyrannosaurus Rex in their duplex cave, the answer to that is a big fat NO as well.
So NO to intelligence, NO to healthcare, NO to protection from being killed, or going broke from having no healthcare and NO to anyone who doesn't want to die because they have NO healthcare. And to round it all out, NO to jobs.
Your best bet is to be born wealthy. Barring that, and barring getting government handouts like Paul Ryan, you're screwed.
Courtesy of the Republican Party. Don't forget to vote!
Up here in North Georgia, we have Tom Graves (R-TP) leading tthe Light Brigade into the Valley of Death. He claims that at Town Halls, people are against the ACA. What do you expect from a bunch of Faux News junkies? Besides, he knows he's in a VERY safe district so he hears what he wants to hear. I wouldn't even dream of disagreeinng with the redneck crowd at one of his Gau meetings for my and my family's safety. Yes, suddenly it's 1933. There are plenty of people up here who disagree with him, but we know to keep a low profile.
How about David Gregory vs Teddy yesterday where Dave practiced actual journalism, asking tough questions and not letting Ted off the hook?
Barbarossa,
As you recall, the Charge of the Light Brigade is still remembered as one of the most ill considered, egregiously planned military examples of outright incompetence and failure.
At least Lord (Tailgunner) Cadigan supposedly rode at the head of the charge (even if he skeedaddled afterward) unlike the contemporary caliphs of calamity, the architects of idiocy (Cruz, Lee, etc) who will be standing on the sideline while the rank and file do their dirty work (I am in no way, however, comparing cavilling teabaggers to the brave but misled members of that British cavalry brigade).
Whatever you call it, it's ignorance and ineptitude on a grand scale.
But it's nice to see that Republicans, who have been actively pursuing and promoting ignorance in voters for decades, walk the walk and willingly embrace the stupid.
theirs not to reason why
theirs but to do and die
Oh, let it be soon.
Oh yeah, and a very big NO from wingers is elicited if you're poor and hungry. Oh, you want to buy food for your little moochers? Ha!
Praise the Lord, the Pope finally approved John Paul's second miracle! I mean, what's a guy gotta do to get some recognition within the Church these days? We're talkin' miracles people! It was starting to seem like fiddling with privates was the only way to get some up and up.
Now if only we could get some miraculous intervention within our own purported Christian cohorts, the world might actually become a slightly better place.
...I'm losing my faith.
@ Akhilleus: Your reference puts me in mind of Richard Thompson's paean to Margaret Thatcher, a song that could just as easily apply to our wonderful Tea Party:
O you lost your job, well ain't that a shame....
CW: Lyrics removed because of copyright infringement. However, I posted audio of Thompson performing "Mother Knows Best" in the October 1 Commentariat.
Noodge,
Wow.
All I can say.
Except that it sounds perfectly copacetic for the 'baggers (zombies) amongst us.
Any fans of Walking Dead will tell you that their obsession overrides even their need to live.
Murdering pigs.
Safari,
May I remind you of Father Guido Sarducci's analysis of saintly miracles?
He once submitted that a certain guy up for sainthood by the Vatican who was in need of that extra miracle might be in trouble since one of the "miracles" was a card trick.
But isn't that how all 'bagger politicians achieve popular wingnut and Fox "News" canonization?
Tricks?
And they ain't no cards.
Was watching the slugfest on the Hill most of the day, then got tired of it and opted for some diversion. So I watched "Hellzapoppin" (1941). Same thing, only funnier.
@Barbarosa: Here's an article that presents Graves pretty accurately:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114885/meet-tom-graves-republican-leading-us-default-over-obamacare