The Greens oppose the CPRS not because it is too weak, but because it will point Australia in the wrong direction with little prospect of turning it around in the timeframe within which emissions must peak, says Senator Christine Milne.
Those crazy ole Republicans aren’t funny anymore
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So OK re the whole Obama thing, remember when I admonished people for not enjoying the spectacle of Republicans with their pants round their ankles, running six ways from crazy a coupla months ago, because it was rare to get a win, and it wouldn’t last, and soon it wouldn’t be fun anymore? Well, OK, I can officially declare I am not having fun anymore. I noticed this a couple of days when I went to click on the bookmark for nationalreview.com, the centre of US right-wing sane craziness — and decided not to. For a while — since about November 5 last year I think – it’s been great to read their rolling blog The Corner an extended version of the sick room dialogue in Cuckoo’s Nest, try to convince themselves that everything Obama got done, from overtures to the Arab world to getting two journos back from North Korea, was some sort of catastrophic disaster for the US. Now, not so much. With Obama’s health care plans running into the ground, and his team carving off and giving away so much of it in order to get a bill they can pass, I don’t need to read the enemy — the friends are idiotic enough to take care of all my anger needs. Team Obama has already given away Medicare parity — the idea that fees for the public provider would be set by using the government’s aged-care (Medicare) free health service fees for providers (i.e. doctors hospitals etc), which are mandated lower than most health insurances fees. This means that the proposed public health care provider has less scope to leverage fees down, a big part of the exercise. Then there was the “death panels” madness, in which a specific line item whereby providers could bill for the specific tasks of treating end-stage patients — counselling, etc — was constructed as some Nazi health selection, and the ruling Republican on the Senate health committee sucked up to his lunatic constituency, even though he knew the charge to be false. This had these line items “removed” — i.e. hidden in other more general parts of the proposed service — and was a pointless distraction, though enough of one for conservatives, including one Australian who, had he been subject to US health care for an illness he publicly discussed a couple of years back, would be bankrupt or dead or both, to declare a win. But the real biggie is what it was always going to be — the simple refusal of “Blue Dog” Democrats to vote up a public option, because they receive over the odds funding from big Health, and are elected by Republican states. The whole Obama health care strategy was designed on making the public option as small a target as possible, in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s approach in 93, and to avoid the kamikaze charge that finished off the Clinton presidency as any sort of left-liberal adventure. The White House has tried to appeal to Blue Dogs to adopt a one-two strategy — don’t filibuster the bill, allow it to get through to an up-down vote, and then vote against it. The White House only needs to get 51 votes then, which they’ve got — though not by much — but half a dozen Blue Dogs could peel off and boldly announce back in the mid-west that they’d voted against ObaHitla’s communist Nazi health plan etc etc. The strategy relied on presuming that Midwest American republicans and independents had the memory of goldfish and the intelligence of a lawn sprinkler, in other words it was sound, strategically. But the Blue Dogs are running so scared that if pushed, they would vote Obama down, to ensure their risk-free political survival. As Obama ruefully noted, what LBJ was trying to do with the Civil Rights Act in 1965 was harder — but he had a more disciplined party, who ultimately had the courage to make a vote that would “lose us the South for a generation” as the man put it. LBJ was pointing the cattle to the slaughterhouse, Obama is herding cats. But that doesn’t make up for the terrible terrible game the White House has played on this. With the word “swiftboating” now in official dictionaries, how on earth was it possible to be surprised by the way in which a batsh-t Right would use the tactics of hysteria and the big lie to turn a debate about health care provision into a war for civilisation? As they did in the campaign before the financial meltdown hit, they retreated to an austere, wonkish position that let the feistier GOP kick the sh-t out of them. This was retrospectively canonised as ‘tactical restraint’. It’s unlikely that this weak campaign will be — it will be seen as the worst trait of American liberalism, the failure to step up for a fight, unless it’s one with your onside, in order to conspire to lose again. The Democrats express amazement at the lies the Right use – but the whole debate has been so topsy-turvy from the start, that what was required was to combat their myths with ours. Good sense went out the window long ago. Take this issue of ‘rationing’ that the Right twitters on about. This is the idea that a public health care provider will bar access to drugs and treatments that are too expensive, given the chance that they will make a difference. Yes, public insurers do it. But so of course do private ones – firstly by refusing to insure people with pre-existing conditions, and then by simply hiding the limits of treatment in their contracts, so that policy holders then have to beg and plead on the phone to their HMO, to get another set of tests, another round of treatment etc. This rationing has been normalised in the American mind, as business practice. But the other aspect of rationing is weirder — it’s the unsustainably generous provisions of Medicare, a piece of open-ended socialist provision by Big Government that half of the crazies in the town hall meetings appear to be on. It’s pure cognitive dissonance — get the government out of our lives, but pay for any and all care for the last 20 years of our lives. Obviously it can’t go on. The US is heading towards a health care bill of 20% of GDP, at which point the country has, economically, become one huge hospital. If Obama is not allowed to fix it, it will crash and burn. But politically the important thing is to get through any sort of bill that will extend care — because there is then a constituency who will resist it being taken away. And then it becomes everyone’s problem. |
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21 Comments
Does anyone seriously consider that we should continue a pragmatic allegiance with these maniacs whose own country is turning into sh*t while they are trying to save the world for their corporations, by bringing “freedom” to millions of people with a bullet.
How about a worldwide embargo while they implode?
’..let the feistier GOP kick the s*it out of them”
Ain’t it the truth, and that gorgeous chick from the deep North led the charge! Sarah gave it to them, and in spades.
The Democrtas tried to bulldoze the American public and failed abysmally. As I have said in previous postings, Geithner is digging Obama’s political grave. When Geithner worked for the IMF, during the Asian financial crisis, he proved so bad in terms of the advice he gave, that many of the Asian finance ministers thought him incompetent and swore off the IMF forever.
The American deficit is growing and Obama has given an election undertaking that no-one under $250,000/yr will see their taxes increased. The Democrats gave the best ‘magic pudding’ explanation about how a trillion dollar bill, on top of Tim Geithner’s already overblown shopping list, was going to be paid.” Ah, who cares?” the Left always say, but it just wont wash.
Obama also alienated a natural ally in the Catholic health care system by attempting to have federal funds mandated for “reproductive health” which is the Left’s code for butchering the unborn.
What goes around comes around! Go for them Sarah.
nice write up of the madness over there.
I am going to re-read your book, but what is driving the fear behind this - the only way you can have people who are protesting at town hall meetings to “keep your hands of my Medicare”?
The US, long before 911 had spent more than the rest of the world combined on defence - and the spending wasn’t just because of an imperial over-reach. There was/is real fear of any sort of change.
I believe they still have penny (1 cent coins) and paper dollar bills.
Any sort of voting reform/modernisation would be presented by the right as a threat to democracy.
John James, you’re not much of an economic historian are you? The Democrats left the Republicans with a budget SURPLUS when Clinton handed the White House to Dub-Ya. The latter then proceeded to piss it away with his medieval adventures in the Middle East trying to convert the world into his idea of ‘freedom’ (ie: guns and god).
Since losing office, the Republicans have completely lost the plot, denying the legitimacy of the Obama administration and trying to white ant every sane initiative by maliciously spreading lies and misinformation, which you seem to be a part of.
The rest of the world, meanwhile, looks on gobsmacked at the insanity in America. God help us all if that bimbo fundamentalist fascist from Alaska is taken seriously. You are joking aren’t you?
kooks is how an American blogger aptly put it, and kooks they are. Your right in when you say that American’s have become normalised to paying premiums for a badly run service. When they need their health insurance companies to pay up, the insurance companies refuse or part pay. The American consumers swallow this and have done for some time.
It seems the norm for the American media outlets to give a seat at the table to the lying republican congressmen and usually they don’t call them out for it. Some are trying lately and far too late, to correct the facts. But why they keep getting these people on who represent a minority of the people who voted for them, gobsmacks me.
Big insurance and lobbing groups employ ex republicans and are doing a good job of turning the media’s head. Weiner a Democrat in the House said that the white house will lose 100 votes from progressive deomocrats if the public option is not included in the bill. They need 218 votes to pass the bill and with 100 withdrawing their support then the white house will be left with shite on their faces.
The blue dogs are republicans dressed up as democrats. Rahm’s experiment has backfired tremendously with trying to have these so-call band of six. They seem to vote with republicans many times and are funded by Health insurance companies. Progressives have given up the single payer, for the middle ground of a public option. Now they’re being told pull your head in and swallow the co-op version. From the blogs I’ve read today the white house just broke the once strong straw.
I think the emotion, fear - call it whatever you want, is more interesting than the economics of this.
From an outsider looking at this any rationality left this a long time ago.
And even if it does pass, the same thing will happen again with the next reform, imagine implementing any sort of energy policy (ie. reduction of imported oil consumption) in this sort of environment.
“Sarah gave it to them, and in spades”.
John, hate to break this to you, but, well - they lost. Sarah helped.
John James is NOT much of anything.
I love it.
An extreme socialist like Rundle slandering Republicans for fiscal irresponsibility.
Obama and truly ‘b-tshit’ Dems like Reid and Pelosi are responsible for a oh so very real grass roots revolt described disingenuously and beyond arrogantly by this hubristic leftist sneering class as nothing more than “astoturf” or right wing swastika waving anarchists of the GOP!
I don’t include the ideologically malodorous Rundle in this sneering class as I’m sure that that class would find Rundle ‘noc’ as well. Besides, he’s an anarchist as well……..
The feisty housewife from Alaska ends one the most loathsome aspects of the bill almost overnight with just two words out her divine mouth: “death panels”.
Game over despite NYT characterisation of Palin’s two word blood stained sword as her “ghoulish carousel”. The Dems promptly remove that provision.
As six time Presidential candidate for the Socialst Party of America, Norman Thomas famously said: “The American people will never knowingly
adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation,
without knowing how it happened.
That’s the dishonesty of Rundle too…… socialism-by-proxy as socialism itself is already known to be anathema to freedom and dignity.
Americans are waking up to the dishonesty of Obama.
The question is when Australians will wake up to the dishonesty of Rudd.
Kate, are you and I reading the same article? Or are you just living in the past all the time?
JamesK is your thesis that people are so dumb they will accept any ideology as long as they like the name?
Guy, love your work (but then I’m a baby-butchering, malodorous commo) the other bits of that stat are that for 20% of GDP being spent on private and public health about 1/5th of the population have no health cover. In Britain (with an NHS JamesK would decry as a hulking inefficient stalinist abomination) 99.8% of the population is covered and the percentage of GDP spent on health is 8. Makes the argument about ‘how will we pay for this galloping socialism (sorry, liberalism)’ a bit hollow.
It’s beyond me how anyone can make an argument that one in five of your fellow citizens can just take their chances if the get sick and many of the rest get health care determined by the profit of a health insurance business. Just what part of that is sane, humane, cost effective, societaly cohesive? Don’t care? I know, but leaving human decency aside, at it’s basest, in a cohesive society people don’t climb through you window and rob you at gun point.
“two words out her divine mouth:”
Hahahahahaha
All we need to do is isolate the rightardation gene, healthcare problems and other ignorances would be solved overnight. Science has also discovered that it was the rightardation gene in the dinosaurs not a big rock that lead to their demise. So if you can wait for evolution to do it’s thing with humans just sit back, watch and laugh, they’re really quite the joke.
For a gneration, even amerikan sitcoms have been poitning out the vicousness of their (un) health care - viz Rozanne the ulotimate bogan/Joe Sixpack but, as always, ignorant, scared people can easily be induced to vote against their own bestg interests. PJK often quoted his mentor, Jack Lang “vote for self interest coz you know it’s trying..” but ignored the fact that most people wouldn’t know their own best interest were it hanging out of them.
Ignorance, prejudice, ignorance, stupidity, schadenfreude, did I mention pig ignorance? and sheer selfishness will always see the majority self immolate.
I think it was jay Gould, one of the 19thC railway robber barons on amerika who said “I can always hire one half of the working class to oppress the other half to my benefit”.
Thing is, as Guy sez, BOI ain’t dumb but look at what he has to work with!!
“Insane” is the only suitable word to describe a population resisting better, cheaper healthcare. How is it that these people are so easily conned? Even the Liberal Party here, who would jump at the chance of instituting a U.S. style health system, know that Australians just won’t have a bar of it.
Liberal Americans mass angrily to protest war, while conservative Americans do the same to protest… universal health care?
@AR
Jay Gould: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
This was said in relation to wage slavery.
Remember when we were living in The American Century?
I have some American friends whom I sometimes prompt to nominate who will own the 21st century by say 2030. They don’t answer. They don’t even try to bluff. They are still psychologically affected by 9/11, let alone every thing that has hit the US since. They are in no condition to own a country, let alone a century.
When you try to democratically govern 300+ million people spread across 50 states you have a problem of, well, American proportions.
It sometimes surprises me how vehemently many Americans, regardless of education or social status, simply do not trust the government — regardless of who’s in power. It’s almost an article of faith that the government is out to get everybody, even when it’s trying to provide universal health care.
At it’s most fundamental, effective democratic politics is the art of compromise. When a committee sits down to design a horse, what inevitably emerges looks a whole lot like a camel. Get ready for CamelCare.
yawn…..culture differences to the max. Many people in the US have no problem with there being NO SOCIAL WELFARE SYSTEM.
The US was founded on the basis of lower taxes small government and guns for the people. get over it people, its not OZ, but it is the US.
“Many people in the US have no problem with there being NO SOCIAL WELFARE SYSTEM.”
Those would be the young and employed.
If it weren’t an issue of national proportions then it would hardly rate a mention, let alone be a top priority of the President.
If our American friends have any success reforming their healthcare, perhaps they can then look at reducing their defense budget.
Good luck with that (sincerely).