Republican lack of partisanship

 

Continues to be shocking, if not surprising.

 

March 7, 2010

Retiring Dem: GOP doesn't want to dance on health care

Posted: March 7th, 2010 11:24 AM ET

From CNN Associate Producer Martina Stewart

Retiring Rep. Brian Baird said Sunday that Republicans see health care reform as 'a potent political weapon.'

Washington (CNN) – A retiring House Democrat who is himself unsure whether he will back his own party’s health care reform bill criticized congressional Republicans Sunday for their lack of bipartisanship on the issue of health care.

“Tom DeLay was on ‘Dancing with the Stars,’” Rep. Brian Baird, D-Washington, said on CNN’s State of the Union, referring to the Republican former House Majority leader, who was also a guest on the show.

Later: DeLay explains turn on DWTS

“We don’t have a dance partner,” Baird said. “We don’t have someone on the other side who is seriously willing to say, ‘If you do these things, you will have our support.’ And the reason is they see it as such a potent political weapon.”

Assuming - as many in his party have recently – that the final health care reform legislation will get no Republican support, Baird defended use of a Senate procedural measure called reconciliation which allows certain budgetary bills in the Senate to be passed with just 51 votes.

“The choice you’re left with is a majority vote which I think most people think is how we ought to do things anyway,” Baird told CNN Senior Political Correspondent Candy Crowley. “And, secondly, the Republicans used reconciliation on multiple times including for the mother of all deficit increases, the Bush tax cuts.”

Baird previously voted against the health care reform bill that passed in the House. Now the Washington Democrat is trying to determine whether he will support a final bill based largely on the version passed by the Senate but modified slightly to address some issues of particular concern to the White House and House Democrats.

Related video: Dem unsure on health care

Baird, who was a practicing neuropsychologist before being elected to Congress, told Crowley he supports the idea of overhauling the health care system. “We have to do something and I actually applaud President Obama and the Democratic Party for taking this difficult challenge on,” he said.

“The question is: Is this the best way we can do reform?,” Baird said of his reservations. “It is very complicated. It will be expensive.” Baird quickly noted that both the House and the Senate bill would be largely paid for and have both been projected to reduce the deficit over time.

Baird said he would have approached crafting a bill “a good bit differently.”

“I would like to see us start and say ‘What are the things we can agree on?’”

The Democrat told Crowley he thought most Americans agree that “you should not discriminate against pre-existing conditions. I think it makes a lot of sense to be able to buy policies across state lines so you have competition and you can carry your policy with you if you move or lose your job.

“The complexity, I think, worries a lot of people,” Baird added.

Baird also said Sunday that he is not swayed by the notion of voting in favor the bill because his impending retirement means he will face no political consequences for supporting an unpopular piece of legislation.

“My personal struggle is, quite frankly, could we not do this in a much more simple, elegant, direct, straightforward way? I think we could. I doubt I’m going to get a chance to do that, so the difficult choice for some of us is to say: ‘This is not the bill I would write, by a darn sight, but it is certainly better than the status quo. What would we do if we don’t have this option?’”

Asked by Crowley whether he would vote against a final bill after determining it did not met his personal criteria even if that vote meant that one of the president’s top domestic agenda items would not pass, Baird did not hesitate: “Yes.”

But Baird quickly sought to clarify. The retiring Democrat said it would be “a tragedy” if some type of health care reform was not enacted. “And so that’s the choice. I don’t think this bill is what I would like to see us do if I ran the universe, as it were, but I don’t get to do that so the status quo is unsustainable.”

After a year of legislative work on health care reform on Capitol Hill, the White House has recently stepped in to try to move the process forward. Right now congressional Democrats are waiting for the administration to release final legislative language for a bill that would be put to a vote in both chambers through the reconciliation procedure. The bill crafted by the White House would contain a number of tweaks to the health care reform bill passed by the Senate late last year. In order to harmonize the provisions of the two separate bills passed by the House and Senate last year, the House will be asked to pass the Senate bill unchanged and then both chambers would be asked to vote on the White House bill.

Senate Democrats have had to fall back on the reconciliation process after losing the critical 60th vote in their caucus when Republican Scott Brown won a recent special election to occupy the seat held for decades by the late Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Follow Martina Stewart on Twitter: @MMStewartCNN

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Let The Sun Shine In......

No Way to Treat a President

Damn straight it isn't! 

The citizens of wingnuttia are dangerously close to going too far if they haven't already. How much more can decent American's take?

Posted on Sep 10, 2009

By Eugene Robinson


Anyone who watched Wednesday night as President Obama explained his health care reform proposals to Congress saw a chief executive making what sounded like a genuine appeal for bipartisanship—and his opponents behaving like a bunch of spoiled first-graders. Obama should ignore them, even if they hold their breath until they turn blue.


House Republicans were particularly ostentatious in showing their disrespect not just for Obama but for the office he holds. The outburst by Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina—who shouted “You lie!” when Obama said his plan would not cover illegal immigrants—was only the most egregious display of contempt. Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House minority whip, fiddled with his BlackBerry while the commander in chief was speaking. Other Republicans made a show of waving copies of their own alleged reform plan, which isn’t really a plan at all.


And Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas waved hand-lettered signs at the president, as if he thought he were attending one of those made-for-television town hall meetings rather than a solemn gathering of the nation’s highest elected officials.


Throughout the speech, there was grumbling, mugging and eye-rolling on the Republican side that was not only undignified but frankly un-American. When I was a correspondent in London, I covered far more raucous sessions of the British House of Commons—that’s how Parliament treats the prime minister, who is the head of government. In the United States, that simply is not how Congress treats the president, who is the head of state.
Congress didn’t heckle Lyndon Johnson like that during the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Congress didn’t even show that kind of bitterness and aggression toward George W. Bush, who did lie—specifically, about the intelligence that his administration relied on to justify an unnecessary war that has cost 4,300 American lives and enough money to fund Obama’s health care proposals for a decade.

(Perhaps someone should have challenged Bush. It might have saved thousands of American Lives and millions of Iraqi lives. Bush and Cheney lied about something far more serious than health-care; taking this country into a war of aggression (a major war crime). That's not to say that health-care reform is not important. It baffles me that health-care isn't a national security issue given the anthrax attacks and what Cheney and Bush termed the constant threat of bioweapon attacks on the U.S.) Whatever the case is about that threat, reforming health-care is of great importance to every American as well as commerce, American as well as global. Actually they seem to be one and the same these days.)

 


Wilson issued a statement of apology after the speech, saying he had “let my emotions get the best of me” and calling his interjection “inappropriate and regrettable.” As apologies go, it sounded insincere—a variant of the “mistakes were made” dodge. In fact, however, the right-wing Republicans in Congress, especially those in the House, are all too sincere. And that’s the problem.

Last November’s election so wounded the GOP that the nation is now suffering collateral damage.  

The Republicans who were punished at the polls for the failures of the Bush years were those in the most evenly contested districts, which meant they tended to be relatively moderate. Those who represent solidly Republican districts were safe, and their greatest fear isn’t being defeated by a Democrat next fall but being challenged by a primary opponent who’s even more of a right-wing yahoo.

There are quite a few Democratic pragmatists in Congress—which is why health care reform is being worked over so thoroughly by the Blue Dogs. In the Republican ranks, especially in the House, pragmatists are few and ideologues are legion. Many of them probably believe the nonsense they spout about creeping socialism and an urgent threat to America As We Know It. But it’s still nonsense. The ideologues’ sincerity just makes this toxic, rejectionist rhetoric more dangerous.


You will note that I have not yet mentioned race. For the record, I suspect that Obama’s race leads some of his critics to feel they have permission to deny him the legitimacy, stature and common courtesy that are any president’s due. I can’t prove this, however. And if I’m right, what’s anybody supposed to do about it? There’s no way to compel people to search their souls for traces of conscious or unconscious racial bias. We could have an interesting discussion about the historical image of the black man in American society, but that wouldn’t get us any closer to universal health care.

What will get us closer, I believe, is the clear, steely resolve that Obama showed the nation Wednesday. His most important line, I thought, came near the beginning: “I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

He told those of us who support a public health insurance option that we might have to settle for something less. He threw Republicans a bone on tort reform. And he drew one bright line in the sand: Throw spitballs all you want, but this will be done.

Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.
© 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

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A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.

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Let The Sun Shine In......

You Have A Right To Be Heard!!!

Please take time to be heard on the health-care issue. Help us slap down the crazies and their fear-mongering, deceitful, hateful blabbering.

Our health-care system is broken and stands to become even more broken if there is no reform which includes a public option.

It is now or never, Peeps.


 DEBUNK HEALTH CARE REFORM MYTHS (click to send a letter to your hometown news paper)

Write a Letter to the Editor

Myths, distortions, and bald-faced lies about President Obama's proposed health care reform have been cynically promoted by the insurance industry and right-wing extremists for several weeks now.  And to some partisans, killing health care reform by whatever tactics are necessary is simply a way to derail the Obama presidency. 

Evidence is now emerging that these falsehoods -- amplified by millions of dollars in special interest advertising and the 24-hour news cycle -- have begun to set in among otherwise conscientious citizens, threatening our reform efforts.

Submit a letter to the editor of your local newspaper today to make sure your neighbors know the cost-reducing FACTS about health care reform and the public option.

Don't forget to COMPLETE YOUR LETTER by clicking on one or more talking point (Step 2)!


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Let The Sun Shine In......

We Must Demand A Public Option

Or their will be no reform. Just more corporate/government b.s.



It's fashionable in media circles right now to treat the "public option" as nothing more than the political football du jour, to discuss it only in the context of vote counts and political strategizing, to write it off as a particularly hysterical obsession of the political "left", and -- oh, yes -- to declare it dead.

But the fate of the public option is not yet sealed. And it's much more than just a bargaining chip. The concept of offering health care consumers a government-run alternative to the rogues that comprise the modern

American insurance industry not only has a powerful appeal to the general populace, it's central to effective health care reform, both symbolically and concretely.

In fact, the most extraordinary thing about the mainstream media's attitude toward the public option is how an opposition movement so obviously born of the insurance industry's rapacious self-interest, so blatantly fueled by calls to arms that have little to no basis on reality, and so dependent on a particularly ugly strain of know-nothingism, has become viewed by our elite journalists as the pinnacle of rational centrism.


Let's be blunt. The public option -- emphasis on the word "option" -- is a way to hold the insurance companies accountable should they (entirely unexpectedly, of course) fail to live up to their promises, ignore the rules, and keep doing things the way they have for the past several decades.


By contrast, the core of the argument against the public option is nothing more than a sort of whiny plaint of "Leave the insurance companies alone!"

But it's a well-funded plaint. The public option is a grave threat to the regime of obscene profit-making that has left the health care industry with plenty of cash to now throw in reform's way.

The growing "opposition" to the public plan is a direct result of that money. This is -- remember -- exactly how money works in Washington. It buys congressmen. It buys message. It generates publicity. It even makes presidents flinch. For the political journalists to whom this is all just a big game, those are the things that matter the most: Who's up and who's down, who's winning the message wars, the soundbite battles and the day's "visuals."


But the public option deserves better journalism than that. It deserves to be covered for what it means. And in this case, what a public option that provides an alternative to consumers means is that there would actually be consequences in the coming years if things don't turn out the way our good-hearted leaders intend.

Without consequences -- as we've seen in the runaway national security establishment of the Bush era or the colossally irresponsible behavior of financial titans that drove our economy to the brink of disaster -- things go out of control. Anything goes -- regardless of the "rules."Are you really confident, for instance, that the insurance industry will work hard to control health care costs? Our health insurance chieftains have been talking about that for decades. But rather than do it, they seem perfectly happy taking a big cut of an ever-bigger pie -- and focusing their cost-cutting energies on denying coverage to people when they need it. This seems to work for them. Changing the rules under which they operate may have some modest impact on their behavior, but not nearly as much as will looking over their shoulders and seeing a government-run program bending the cost curve, lowering rates, and improving service.

The presence of an alternative -- a choice -- is critical. It's also about as American as apple pie. The insurance companies themselves understand this very well. The industry-backed PR firms that are bankrolling and inciting ostensibly "grassroots" protests understand this. That's why they encourage talking points about a "government takeover" of health care, rather than anything based in reality. They know full well that a public insurance option -- that, initially, relatively few people could even avail themselves of -- doesn't lead to doctors working for the government or committee of bureaucrats deciding who lives and dies.


That's also the reason why critics were absolutely right to cry foul when the word "choice" was removed from a recent poll's question about the public option -- and support predictably "dropped" like a rock. (See Sam Stein's latest on that story.)


The single biggest mystery about the public option remains: Why is the White House so peripatetic in its support for the measure? Who is whispering in President Obama's ear that compromise is the way to go here, when nobody else is compromising; that bipartisanship is still the goal, when the Republicans are clearly gearing up to use health care as a wedge issue; that health care co-ops, which no one can even define, are a legitimate alternative?


The high priests of Washington conventional wisdom summed things up this morning in a Washington Post editorial calling for the public plan to die. "This is not a matter of ideology but of political nose-counting," said the editorial. "[T]here's no way to amass 60 votes with a public option in the bill."

Now as it happens, that last part, as Ryan Grim wrote recently, ain't necessarily so. With a little gumption, Obama and Democratic leaders could present the caviling Democrats with an up or down vote on a bill that includes a public option -- and dare them to torpedo the whole package.

But regardless: The goal isn't just to get something passed. That's how you end up with no-reform boondoggles like "No Child Left Behind."

Real reform doesn't emerge from government by (faulty) nose-counting. It requires respect for the facts, a serious approach to the issues -- and a little common sense. Oh wait, that's just crazy leftist talk.

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Fox News viewers overwhelmingly misinformed about health care reform proposals.

Does this come as a surprise to anyone?

When hot civil war breaks out in this country these idiots will have only themselves to blame. 

I know we will be blaming them!

Last night, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal released a poll showing that “all the misinformation out there” about health care reform proposals in Congress is taking root with many Americans. For instance, 45 percent believe the false claim that legislation includes “death panels” while 55 percent believe the false claimviewers of Fox News are disproportionately misinformed: that coverage will be extended to illegal immigrants. MSNBC’s First Read notes that self-identified

Here’s another way to look at the misinformation: In our poll, 72% of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79% of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69% think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75% believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly.

But it would be incorrect to suggest that this is ONLY coming from conservative viewers who tune in to FOX. In fact, 41% of CNN/MSNBC viewers believe the misinformation about illegal immigrants, 39% believe the government takeover stuff, 40% believe the abortion misperception, and 30% believe the stuff about pulling the plug on grandma. What’s more, a good chunk of folks who get their news from broadcast TV (NBC, ABC, CBS) believe these things, too. This is about credible messengers using the media to get some of this misinformation out there, not as much about the filter itself. These numbers should worry Democratic operatives, as well as the news media that have been covering this story.

As ThinkProgress has pointed out, Fox News regularly distorts the truth about health care reform. Last week, Media Matters found that over a two day period opponents of health care reform outnumbered supporters by a 6-to-1 margin on Fox.

I guess we will get what we deserve!

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Get to know that amorphous Lewin Group

August 2, 2009

 

ON TUESDAY the Globe carried two stories with comments about the healthcare legislation working itself through Congress. “Mass. medical leaders wary of healthcare overhaul’s cost’’ (Page A1) quotes CEOs of Tufts Medical Center, Partners HealthCare, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Caritas Christi Health Care, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Tufts Health Plan, Boston Scientific, and Genzyme. “Senate group closer to compromise on healthcare measure’’ (Page A4), an Associated Press story, makes reference to the Lewin Group, identified only as “a private health research firm.’’

Lewin is funded almost exclusively by United Health Group, the nation’s largest healthcare insurer, which recently reported $1.44 billion in quarterly earnings and has been repeatedly fined for overcharging millions of patients.

It is interesting to learn the positions of those who are profiting the most from the healthcare status quo. However, I’m sure that Globe readers are even more interested in hearing from people who are less interested in their own personal financial well-being and more interested in healthcare outcomes for all Americans.


Michael Mullaley

Hingham  

 
© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company


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Let The Sun Shine In......