One Senator mentioned how funny it was that the same Republicans who fought so hard to stop Medicare now paint themselves as the program's champion:

The Senate voted Thursday to keep nearly $500 billion in Medicare cuts in its overhaul of the health care system, protecting the bill's major source of financing against a Republican attack.

On a vote of 58 to 42, the Senate rejected a proposal by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to send the bill back to committee with orders to strip out the cuts, a move that would effectively have killed the measure. Two Democrats -- Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Jim Webb of Virginia -- voted with all 40 Republicans on the amendment.

The vote was among the first cast on proposed changes to the package, which would spend $848 billion over the next decade to extend coverage to more than 30 million additional people and implement the most dramatic revisions to the nation's health-care system in more than 40 years. Though debate officially opened on Monday, legislative progress has been hampered by disagreements between the two parties over the terms of debate and the timing of votes. But Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) still hopes to hold a vote on final passage before the Senate adjourns for the Christmas holidays, and on Thursday he told senators to plan on working throughout the coming weekend.

The vote on Medicare cuts was the most significant of four votes held Thursday. Republicans argued that the cuts, which would slow the projected increase in Medicare by about 5 percent over the next decade, would decimate the popular program for people over 65 in order to finance an expansion of insurance coverage for younger people. Any cuts to Medicare, they argued, should instead be dedicated to preserving the program, which is scheduled to start running out of money in 2017.

"If we're going to take money from Grandma's Medicare, let's spend it on Medicare," said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).

Democrats, backed by an array of major senior organizations, including the AARP, argued that the cuts would extend the financial life of Medicare by several years. The cuts would not reduce guaranteed benefits or increase co-payments, they said. And because hospitals and other providers have agreed to absorb the cuts by working more efficiently, Democrats said they would not affect access to medical services.

"I think it's pretty clear that the main organizations that care about seniors support this bill," said Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which drafted the bill that formed the foundation for a compromise package assembled by Reid.

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I'm no fan of Dylan Ratigan but I enjoyed seeing someone, anyone rip into Brad Blakeman for once. I've just got no use for Blakeman after watching one too many of his interviews on MSNBC. He's a class A jerk, liar and unashamed shill for the Republican Party no matter how wrong what they're doing may be for the country. Ratigan, unfortunately, is determined to push this whole "the left does it too" and "all sides are equal" B.S. during this segment, but it was just about worth putting up with to watch Blakeman flailing in the wind here.

Ratigan: Brad, if you were to look at the opening that seems to be there for the Republicans on the center-right, how they get to a place where they can simply come out in favor of free and fair markets, competition, all of the things that were lacking in these massive industries people are so angry about. The President has made it clear he would like to engage many of those things even if some on the left have said things that are more, that harken back to a previous era. We clearly have a President for a new era and yet I feel like on the left and right we are having old spitball fights. How do we move forward?

Blakeman: Well, for the President to be successful he has to come more towards, to the center, the center-right. That’s where our nation is. And lets face it, for Republicans to seek a nomination they have to get, run to the right and then once they get the nomination, run back to the middle, so the type of rhetoric you’re going to be hearing from Republicans this week as we approach the next Presidential season is that they’re going to talk to their base, whether it’s talk to the values… (crosstalk)

Ratigan: I guess the question is what is their base because if the base simply is epithets and accusations that obviously is not going to be a hugely viable political party and there’s a string of broken systems and broken problems in this country that you would think a healthy opposition could do a good job of keeping everybody honest on and from what I’ve seen so far, and I’ve only been here a few months, it doesn’t seem to be that that happens very often.

Blakeman: Well Dylan as we approach and get closer to the election, you’re going to hear more nuts and bolts of what the Republicans stand for and what they will do. (crosstalk)

Ratigan: Why are you going to wait until the election? Because is that the only thing Republicans care about, getting elected because they could care less about actually creating efficient health care systems, solving too big to fail, dealing with energy… why do we have to wait until an election to hear what these people think Brad?

Blakeman: Because we’re not in power. (crosstalk)

Ratigan: We’re paying taxes. Why do we have to wait until an election?

Blakeman: Because we’re not in power. We can come up with the best solutions and the Democrats would throw us to the side. They have not included…

Ratigan: Oh, nonsense. (crosstalk) Either step up and deal with the problems as a party or get out of the building.

Blakeman: We don’t have the votes!

Ratigan: I don’t care about the votes. This is a debate about ideas. Believe me if you are capable of (crosstalk) ideas, I guarantee you there are Democrats and Republicans who are persuadable to rational thought if you actually care about America and you actually want to solve (crosstalk)… you don’t care about America unless you care to be constructive to the conversation and if all you care for is personal destruction and personal assignation, whether it’s fear from the right or guilt from the left you are all eating this country from the gut, and it’s got to come to a conclusion…. Hang on one second Brad….

Karen Finney then points out that this is not a “center-right’ country and that this tactic of moving far to the right and then trying to move back to the center after everyone seeing you cater to your wingnut base isn’t working out so well for Republicans. She adds that it is pitiful that the Republicans excuse for everything is they can’t help get anything done if they’re not in power.

I would disagree with her statement since it looks to me like they're getting plenty done if you count Max Baucus' crappy health care bill that he was willing to give Republicans all they wanted on without a single vote in exchange for taking their amendments.

Dylan hits Blakeman one more time before the segment is over for his "we can’t do anything if we’re not running the show" nonsense.

Ratigan: The demand from the American people is not to play left right. The demand from the American people as I see it as a journalist right now is to demand that the politicians deal with the systemic problems. I’ve got to go. (crosstalk) We’ve only got two hours a day. Yeah. Thanks. (crosstalk) You can steal our money for another year, we’ll wait for you to win buddy. We don’t need to worry about it until you guys win. This is nonsense.

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Chuck Todd walks through the Republicans phony argument on why they won't be able to negotiate with the Democrats on the health care bill. Now that Ted Kennedy is gone there's no one else that will "have a conversation with" them "the way Ted Kennedy would have done it". As if they ever had any intention of working with Democrats on anything. Good bill, bad bill, doesn't matter. They were never going to do anything but obstruct.

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Paul Krugman appeared on MSNBC to discuss his latest op-ed Republican Death Trip. Paul reiterates some of the points he made in his article.

Krugman: The way I look at it, these people are unappeaseable. It's not really about what it's ostensibly about. It's not actually about the end of life provisions. It's not about the specifics in the bill. They're just going to grab onto anything and try to turn some it into something awful. So they saw this. It seemed to have something to do with end of life and so they said, you know, death panels. It's not about the substance, and that you can't actually satisfy the crazies by offering substantive concessions. What they hate is the whole idea of any kind of health reform and more broadly what they hate is the whole idea of Democrats actually, you know, holding the White House.

Harwood: Interesting point Paul and I've got to tell you one White House official told me today, our problem right now is if we tell some of the Republican opponents in the Senate you can have everything you want in the bill, they still won't vote for it. So...

Krugman: That's right.

So why are they still reaching out to them? From the article:

The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.

So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.

What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.

What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.

So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell.

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[YouTube]

Republican efforts to roadblock meaningful health care reform take on the fantastic and bizarre at times, and this example of Theatre of the Absurd is no exception. MyLeftNutmeg, a Connecticut blog, puts their silly manoeuvres into perspective:

This is a revealing moment from Monday's markup of the health care bill in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee that illustrates the level of procedural obstruction Senate Republicans are willing to rise to in order to impede its progress and in the hopes of killing its momentum.

At the opening of Monday's hearing, Sen. Dodd asked Sen. Enzi (R-WY), the ranking Republican on the committee, if he would agree to accept by unanimous consent a total of 64 Republican amendments. After a whisper from an aide, Enzi, a little perplexed and not a little embarrassed, refused to allow the 64 Republican amendments to be accepted, lowering his voice to mumble, "I think some of our members want votes on some of those." Dodd's visible exasperation and disbelief is priceless.

Continue reading »

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(Visions of the Fear Card: Priceless)

Historically, one would imagine every time any kind of reform is contemplated, the right wing quickly jumps in and pulls out the fear card. Socialism being the new paranoia. In 1949 as now, Socialism is lumped in with Fascism, Communism, Nazism, the entire spectrum - a whole stew of extremes geared solely to generate fear, paranoia and hate.

In this particular debate, part of the "Americas Town Meeting" series on December 4, 1949, the question "Are we slipping into Socialism" is asked of Republican Congressman Clarence J. Brown of Ohio and real-life Socialist Norman Thomas.

Typical of their exchange:

Brown: “ You can call any one of a dozen things, it all comes out of the same bottle. Socialism, communism, fascism, nazism, whatever it may be. It’s where the state becomes all powerful and the individual no longer counts”

Thomas: “I think, to be very . . . brutally frank, this sort of talk in itself is very dangerous. We’re not going to manage our very complicated civilization when you talk about fascism, socialism and communism being the same. When you talk about a movement like socialism, which has proved recently in New Zealand where it allowed itself very peacefully to be voted out of office, where you’ve got a movement that cares primarily for the individual and his rights, and you then equate it with a movement of that false renegade Mussolini, or with the communists and their tyranny, you’re mixing things up for the confusion of issues and the glorification of those who have power and property and don’t want to meet the challenges of democracy.”

Repeatedly during the exchange, Brown skirts the issues and solutions, instead throwing distractions around. It's typical of what's going on now - creating fear and hysteria in order to confuse. Thomas isn't exactly a saint either and his solutions aren't exactly concise.

But the fact is, whenever anyone tries to bring about some dialogue towards solution to a real problem, the Republicans have had a long track record for sand bagging and sleight of hand.

In 1949 we were knee-deep in the Cold War. It was very easy to play the fear card to gather support - the looming presence of the Soviet Union and the threat of nuclear war was very real, at least in the minds of most people. But in many ways, playing that card created an opportunity for many in the right wing to exploit the fear to their own advantage. And many have created huge fortunes and massive presences by scaring the shit out of you.

It was the same in 1949 and it's the same 60 years later.

If the fear ain't broke, why fix it?

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While the cable news channels decided that nothing else was going on other than the death of Michael Jackson, John Boehner was on the floor of the House doing his best job to pretend he is in the Senate filibustering a piece of legislation. He was supposed to be using his two and a half minutes alloted to him to wrap up debate on the energy bill and carried on for well over an hour instead.

The entire fiasco looked like nothing less than cheap showmanship and games to me, with Michelle Bachmann for the better part of the hour in the background with the rest of the Republican peanut gallery yelling "Yeah!!! You go John!!!...Keep going!!!" every chance she got.

The party of "No" isn't too good at governing when given the opportunity, but they sure are good at theatrics.

You can watch the entire thing at CSPANJunkie's new site: Minority Leader John Boehner On The Clean Energy & Climate Change Bill. I've just got the last few minutes of his freedom lovin' diatribe here.

The bill passed, barely, but all this exercise appeared to be to me was Boehner seeing if he could talk long enough to make a few members of the House get tired of listening to him and leave. Games. Political theater, pure and simple. No one likes this bill on either side and it appears the sausage makers have mucked it up enough that is not a good bill. Boehner didn't need an hour long rant to get that point across.

David Waldman's got a summary of the bill at Congress Matters:
American Clean Energy and Security Act.

He makes a good point that goes to the hypocrisy of Boehner's theatrics yesterday as well. Will the Republicans actually read their substitute bill they're likely to offer? Here's a "Read the Bill" question for you...

Oh, to be given the gift of hindsight - or better yet, Time Travel. Well . . .the next best thing at the moment is a drift back to 1995, the infamous "Contract With America" and the dubious Newt Gingrich.

How all the posturing, promises and pretty words came to nothing. How the irony creeps in. How all the talk of Bipartisanship seemed, at the time like such a feel-good concept to the Republicans, now is treated like anathema - since the shoe fell on the other foot. How the lofty proclamations and buzz-words of de-regulation sounded so good to the Republican Majority Congress, but were ultimately disastrous for the rest of the country. How Gingrich falsely evoked the spirit of FDR and the New Deal. How it all somehow rang just a little hollow. And in retrospect, how it all failed.

"After all . . .the purpose of changing government is to improve the lives of our citizens, to strengthen the future of our children, to make our neighborhoods safe and to build a better country. Government is not the end, it's the means . . . . ."

L.A. Times' Michael Hiltzik:

On NBC, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), said she wanted the bill to have more spending on infrastructure, but she wanted it to be on military infrastructure, even though much of that winds up as scrap metal in Iraq and Afghanistan, not bridges and schoolhouses in the United States.

She said she would strip from the bill all the "social spending that is not going to create jobs," but when pressed by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), her on-air debating partner, she agreed to preserve some social spending, such as unemployment benefits. The effect of this exchange was to leave Hutchison sounding as though she made up her position as she went along.

Very little of these discussions addressed the principle underlying the stimulus bill. The idea is that when the private sector withdraws from the economy by cutting back on capital spending and laying off workers, it is up to the government to take up the slack, if necessary via deficit spending.

This isn't radical thinking. It's endorsed by, among others, Martin Feldstein, who was Ronald Reagan's chief economic advisor and is consistently voted by his peers as the Economist Least Likely to be Mistaken for a Democrat. Feldstein opposes most of the tax cuts favored by the GOP, especially business tax cuts. To be fair, he isn't entirely enamored of President Obama's proposal -- he thinks it should spend more on programs that will produce more short-term employment and less on open-ended programs.

Yet the plan before the Senate includes hundreds of billions of dollars in near-term programs and projects. There's $90 billion for school construction and renovation and educational grants and $79 billion for state educational programs, most of which would be spent within two years. Of the $27 billion for highway construction, most would be spent within four years.

The bill also appropriates billions for the kind of forward-looking projects we've neglected during the last two decades, such as broadband infrastructure, water and anti-pollution programs, and alternative energy research, which will produce long-term economic benefits for the entire country.

Is it possible to slip pork into a bill this massive? Well, duh. But pork is often in the eye of the beholder. House Republicans this week released a list of $19 billion in provisions they called "wasteful" (i.e., 2% of the total package). But the list includes numerous projects that many Americans would support and that would plainly stimulate our limping construction and manufacturing sectors. For example, the purchase of new computers and vehicles for federal agencies, the building of fire stations and other public facilities, and the upgrade of rail lines.

Is this the best the GOP can come up with? Or are Republicans just determined to undermine the recovery effort? It's hard to disagree with Obama's complaint that "modest differences" over the package are being inflated to stall the whole program.

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Rachel reports on the crumbling state of America's infrastructure which is in dire need of repair and the Obama administration's plans to use infrastructure projects as a way to stimulate the economy. A.B. Stoddard weighs in on whether the Republicans will actually block the projects or not. If they listen to Karl Rove they will. Stoddard feels that if they keep the projects free of earmarks and pork they'll get them though. It is pretty astounding to see these Republicans finally finding religion on spending when they've had no qualms about a bottomless pit called Iraq for the entire Bush Presidency.