Fact-esque

Healthcare "Reform" and Labor: A Bad Combination

At FDL's new Labor blog, Work In Progress (which, ahem, I should be writing, *cough cough* *splutter*), Michael Whitney opens a post on how disastrous this "healthcare" bill is for Labor with this picture:

It's an appropriate response.

Our New American Unicameral Legislature

Well, b's & g's, we have now reached the point where the US is no longer governed by 2 equal legislative chambers. Four Blue Dog Senators have decreed that it doesn't matter what the House does, if they try to change the healthcare "reform" bill by so much as the addition of a comma, they'll kill it. IOW, the House of Representatives is now, as Jane Hamsher puts it, "irrelevant".

The only congressional body that was mildly responsive to populist pressure is now irrelevant.   Evidently you can forget about any efforts to influence your member of Congress, because corporatist Senators who write all our laws say the House no longer exists:

Democratic centrists have informed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) they will accept few changes in the final healthcare bill negotiated between the House and Senate.

Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) have made clear there is little room to deviate from the bill the Senate passed on Christmas Eve.

They have also threatened to vote against the bill if it includes a government-run health insurance program, a proposal that liberal Democrats in Congress acknowledge has little chance of winning inclusion in the final bill.

Reconciliation? Pfui. We don't need no steenkin' reconciliation. The House can just STFU. Who do they think they are, anyway? Elected representatives of the people or something? The Senate is the only deciding deliberative body left and the 4 of us run it. Like it or lump it.

Bush Tricks from Obama's Commerce Dept?

We used to be one of the few people around who went after Bush's Commerce and Labor Depts, as well as his politicized Budget Office and GAO, for playing numbers games. One of their favorites was to report pretty good (or, by the end, not gawd-awful) numbers for unemployment, the trade deficit, jobs created, jobs lost, and so on. Again and again and again we would be given positive numbers only to watch them be "revised" toward much more honest - or at least less dishonest - and worse negatives after a few weeks, and then, after a few weeks more, "revised" again until their endpoint was nowhere near their starting point. It happened too often to be co-incidence. It was clearly a deliberate attempt to mislead the public by using numbers to lie about the real situation.

Government by Kabuki Fools NYT Completely - Or Not

Or maybe it's just pretending.

Anyone who looks objectively at the healthcare "reform" debacle realizes that the Democrats never intended to pass a public option.

[T]he "effort" to get a Public Option was never a good faith effort. The administration actually told the press that talk of a public option was intended solely as a threat to use against the insurance companies in order to try to make them feel sweeter about a little tinkering to reduce costs a little. That's it. That's all the administration ever intended to offer us, in spite of the fact that they were already giving the insurance companies the gift of millions more suckers who would be forced to buy their crappy product despite the fact that they were the least likely ever to need it. (And the rest of the new suckers would be people who were in no position to fight to get what they'd been forced to pay for.)

But to the daredevil investigators of the NYT (whose sole source would appear to be Rahm Emanuel), Obama was forced to accept a bad bill because it's the best he could get.

After weeks of frustrating delays and falling poll numbers, Mr. Obama decided to take what he could get, declare victory and claim momentum on some of the administration’s biggest priorities, even if the details did not always match the lofty vision that underlined them.

From Copenhagen to Capitol Hill, the president determined the outer limits of what he could accomplish on climate change and health care and decided that was enough, at least for now. He brokered a nonbinding agreement with other world powers to fight global warming, averting the collapse of an international summit meeting. And he blessed a compromise on health care to guarantee the votes needed to pass the Senate.

He gave up the game before it had even started, handing defeat to conservatives on a silver platter garnished with dead crows and roses, but NYT "analyst" Peter Baker only sees what his Villager-view allows him to see: poor President Obama. He just wanted too much too soon.

Corruption As Standard Procedure (Updated)

When you buy somebody off to shut his mouth about some truth that may hurt your business, that's unethical and irredeemably shabby but it isn't illegal. When you buy off public officials and even whole countries in order to avoid consequences to your profits in defiance of the public good, that's called "corruption" and has been illegal since the time of the Babylonians. Which, as of today if not before, makes the Democrat party leaders - and President Obama directly -  corrupt. Why?

Because the corrupt Democrat leadership bought off Ben Nelson's vote with a giant Medicaid payment for Nebraska only in order to get their shitful "reform" package, while President Obama bought off the entire Third World so polluting corporations could keep polluting.

And (I seem to be saying this a lot lately) I'm not kidding.

Friday Palin: End of the Rogue (Updated)

Sarahcuda got caught acting like a dweeb three times this week (OK, she got caught more often than that but these are the three I'm writing about. I mean, there's so much to work with here that you gotta make choices, right?) as her fabulous book tour ended, a tour in which she visited 25 states (including Alaska, which maybe I shouldn't count because she had to go home sometime) and sold over a million copies of a book so bad it makes Anne Coulter's stuff look like Francis Bacon by comparison.

First, giddy and no doubt exhausted by her plane rides and having to answer such tough questions from conservative radio & tv hosts as "Do you think the Democrats are so dumb they actually believe that global-warming crap?", Teh Cuda ran off to Hawaii for a vacation wearing this T-shirt:

On the front it said, "If you don't love America," and on the back, "then why don't you get the hell out."

Quite an improvement on that old, worn-out cliche, "Love It Or Leave It". Betcha thought that was the controversy, din't yah? Well, you were wrong. This is the controversy: she tried to distance herself from the disastrous McCain campain by wearing a sun visor with McCain for Pres blacked out.

"In an attempt to 'go incognito,' I Sharpied the logo out on my sun visor so photographers would be less likely to recognize me and bother my kids or other vacationers.

"I am so sorry if people took this silly incident the wrong way. I adore John McCain, support him 100 percent and will do everything I can to support his reelection.

Sure. Of course. Although, as HuffPost added, "if she wanted to go unnoticed she could have just worn a different hat." Or gone to a private beach. Teh Cuda wants to avoid press attention like a 2-year-old wants to avoid candy.

The Argument for the Senate Healthcare Bill Forgets a Few Things - Like Insurance Co's

Nate Silver, for whom I have some respect, is desperately trying to make the argument that even if the bill isn't perfect it makes things better for average families. He goes through the numbers here. He uses the standard if hypothetical family-of-four making $54K/yr as his baseline. (Via Mahablog)

Price Rises? In a Depression?

OK, what am I missing here?

The economy is growing steadily but slowly. The latest sign was a report Tuesday that industrial production rose a better-than-expected 0.8 percent in November. The portion of industrial capacity in use rose to 71.3 percent, from 70.6 percent in October. It shows that factories, mines and utilities are using more of their plants as the recovery takes root.

Uh-huh. And selling it to who, exactly? Wages are still flat, we're still losing tens of thousands of jobs a month, the banks continue to keep commercial credit on a very short leash, personal credit is at an all-time high with more maxed-out credit cards floating around than Republican hooker-girlfriends, and these bozos are raising prices? Not to worry say the "experts". It's only "temporary".

Dems on Healthcare: "I Will Gladly Pay You Tuesday For a Hamburger Today"

That's our Wimpy Dems for yah. Here we got a terrible bill that even Gregg Levine finally agrees ain't worth the trouble it will take to Walk Holy Joe across the street for the filibuster.

You will find no more staunch advocate for helping people when the opportunity is given. I do not believe in destroying the hamlet in order to save it. Philosophical arguments don’t impress when forced to stand next to real suffering. I do not believe the revolution is just a kiss-off away. But if the final health care reform act resembles what I describe above (quite possibly with some not-quite-but-damn-near Stupak language further restricting access to abortion), I say: Kill the bill.

I say this with a heavy heart. Failure to pass health care legislation, even terrible legislation, will be a great loss for the Obama administration and for Democrats in Congress. But passing a bill as bad as the Senate’s eventual endpoint could be a bigger defeat for the Democratic majority we really want—one that takes progressive action on behalf of the voters.

Because, as I see it, a bill without the competitive force of a public option, or the opportunity for millions to buy into Medicare, without cheaper pharmaceuticals or meaningful controls on premiums, without bans on benefit caps or loophole-free safeguards against rescission, but with an individual mandate, will do nothing for the 30 million uninsured that advocates of the bill like to talk about helping—but it will do plenty for the private insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

This is becoming a bill that nobody except Obama and the conservaDem leadership want, and they only want it so they can say they did it. It doesn't matter a damn to them if it helps any real people or not so long as it doesn't upset the health insurance industry's or Big Pharma's profits, and they can run on it in '12, conning people yet again by bragging that they did something for people that those people haven't figured out quite yet they didn't do. It's a shell game. It's about illusion and imagery and feeding the coffers with corporate donations. It has nothing to do with healthcare, except possibly in Alice's Wonderland.

Friday Palin: Question of the Week

Who is writing these editorials under her name? Because it clearly isn't her. Try to imagine Teh Cuda writing this all on her own, I dare you:

With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue. 

Sarah Palin doesn't know how to spell "articulate", let alone what it means, although it is amusingly ironic to see that word in the first graf of an op-ed supposedly written by the least articulate figure in American politics today - which all by itself is saying something since she's up against the likes of John Cornyn, Jim Inhofe, Jittery Jim DeMint, and a host of Bushian Texans who wouldn't know an apostrophe from a ligature.