Sick Policy

Up until late this past week, Democrats were worried that Donald Trump, having been non-vindicated by William Barr's non-exonerating synopsis of the Mueller report, will build his base into a formidable juggernaut by whipping up anti-Democratic (and anti-democratic) sentiment over his opponents' investigations into his international and financial dealings.  

They can rest easy now. Trump wants to dismantle the remainder of the Affordable Care Act.

Democrats won back the House and were able to prevent huge losses in the Senate while capturing seven governorships - all while emphasizing health care at a time when the Affordable Care Act has actually become quite popular.  Democrats are more than ready to let Trump try to tear the health care law out while defending it.

Of course, the Democrats could easily snatch defeat from the jaws of victory if any of the leading Democratic candidates for the Presidency advocate some form of single-payer health care system - at a time when the politics and the process to get there are non-existent - allowing Trump to bash the Affordable Care Act because some Democrats want to replace it either. At least the Democrats have something to replace it with.  Hopefully, though, they won't overreach and try to give us single-payer when it can't happen just yet.

Of course, a certain politician from Maryland suggested phasing in an all-payer approach as a way of getting to single-payer, but you know how Democrats are, they won't listen to reason within their own ranks.            

Ha Ha Herman!

That Herman Cain - what a sense of humor.  He somehow managed to become the rarest of birds - a black front runner for the Republican presidential nomination - and now he's joking about putting up an electric fence on the Mexican border to discourage and possibly electrocute illegal immigrants.  Here's a man whose father who worked at three jobs to own his own house and whose mother was a cleaning woman, and he's telling the unemployed and underemployed Wall Street occupiers that it's their fault, not the fault of greedy banks, if they're not well-off or gainfully employed.  Even Ron Paul was aghast at Cain's remarks. (Cain is a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Missouri, something you don't hear about because the media keep playing up the fact that he was the chairman of a pizza parlor chain.)

Cain has shot up to the top of the Republican field for the same reason Michele Bachmann  and Rick Perry did - he's seen as a "conservative" alternative to the likely nominee, Mitt Romney, who's seen as more "moderate" (until you look at his record).  His "9-9-9 plan" - a nine percent national sales tax, a nine percent flat tax, and a nine percent business flat tax - seems reasonable enough until you realize that it will raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans making an average of 35,000 a year while lowering taxes on those with an a average annual income of $350,000.

But he's sure to do some damage to the body politic while he's around.  Cain is getting the bulk of his economic ideas from the greedy Koch brothers, who hope to turn America into one big strip mine, and his effect could force Romney, as the nominee, to move so far to the right that the Tea Party will be able to write the entire 2012 Republican platform.

Oh yeah, I didn't want to bring it up, but Cain was instrumental in sabotaging President Bill Clinton's 1993 health care reform plan when he challenged the President at a town hall meeting in Kansas City.  Cain told Clinton that a proposed employer mandate would hurt small businesses, and that subsidies to help such businesses guarantee health insurance to workers were inaccurately calculated.  Cain, according to Bob Cohn of Newsweek, "transformed the debate" on health care reform, which went down in flames for Clinton in 1994 and was never revisited in the remainder of his Presidency.

So how much do Republican voters like Cain? They love him.  At a Republican debate, they applauded his assertion that the unemployed have only themselves to blame for their plight, just as they cheered Rick Perry's executions in Texas and booed at a gay soldier in earlier debates.             

You Call This a Budget Deal?

Planned Parenthood may have been spared from the budget deal worked out in Washington over the weekend, but the deal still chomps the royal prong.

The National Science Foundation got its research funding cut by $43 million. Pell college grants and AmeriCorps were spared, but education spending and social programs were cut overall by $5.5 billion. Health care took one of the biggest hits from the Republican House majority. Talking Points Memo lays out the ugly numbers: $1 billion in cuts to programs preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, $600 million in cuts to community health care centers, and $78 million in research on controlling health care costs. (That's one cut I happen to agree with. How do you control health care costs? Here's the answer for free: Establish single-payer public medical insurance.) The GOP gleefully went after a provision of the health care law, eliminating entirely funding for health co-ops created by the law.

Funding for the Environmental Protection Agency was reduced by 16 percent, along with a $49 million cut to climate change programs and $149 million reduction in the budget of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. And, I also understand, grey wolves been taken off the endangered species list, allowing states to make lots of money to issue hunting licenses for them and allowing the feds not to spend money protecting them.

And then there is high-speed rail funding. While federal spending on high-speed rail from now until September 30 has been eliminated and $400 million of the funding appropriated for the program in the 2010 fiscal year has been rescinded, the Federal Railroad Commission has sought to soothe fears of rail advocates by saying that $2.5 billion appropriated by Congress for Fiscal Year 2010 means that there is now $2 billion in high-speed rail funding available, down from the $2.4 billion previously available because of the previously mentioned rescission of $400 million, with $100 million apparently already spent.

So, it turns out, we were actually kind of lucky.

Did everything get cut? No - military spending is up by $5 billion!

No two ways about it: This deal sucks. It does nothing to ensure the social well-being of the country and it does not spread the sacrifice fairly. The military spending increase, in case you haven't noticed - and you probably haven't - is only $500 million less than the education, health and labor cuts!

If I were in Congress, I'd vote against it.

Budget Deals and Other Things

Funding for the Environmental Protection Agency has been saved in the latest federal budget deal. So has funding for Planned Parenthood. And apparently, I can now report, the National Endowment for the Arts. But President Obama realizes that he needs to come up with new cuts going forward in preparing the 2012 federal budget, and so he plans to propose cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. In ticking off the Democrats, he hopes that these cuts will make defense spending cuts and upper-income tax increases more acceptable to the Republicans.

Sure, when hell freezes over.

The spending cuts we're likely to get will continue, as they have for thirty years, to affect mostly the poor and the middle class. We'll be seeing more tax cuts for the rich and more programs and amenities wiped out. Far from heralding a golden progressive age, Obama's presidency looks to be the final act in destroying the amenities and services that make a country worth living in.

By the way, I saw the Johnny Depp-Angelina Jolie movie The Tourist yesterday, and I particularly took note of the high-speed train scene where their characters first meet. I grew envious of the sleek passenger cars, the comfortable seating, the elegant dining car . . . and, of course, wanted to blurt out, "Why can't we have this in America?"

Because the people in charge of America are in no mood to provide decent public services for its citizens, especially anything that reeks of too much "government spending" and "socialized medicine" or "socialized transport."

For more than twenty years now, I've always voted in favor of my own economic interests, particularly my interest in seeing better schools, modern intercity passenger rail, and, of course, single-payer health insurance. (Like Ed Schultz, I'm a single-payer guy.) Not all of the candidates I vote for win elections, but who cares if they do? Because no matter whom I vote for, no matter who wins, I lose!

And as far as I'm concerned, I think the game is almost over. That's when everybody loses. Except the rich, of course.

Although, when I think about it, maybe high-speed trains are an imperfect fit for America. The Tourist showed a high-speed train - the same kind of train President Obama hoped to get built in Ohio before John Kasich intervened - from Paris to Venice. Somehow, the idea of such a sleek, elegant train connecting Cleveland to Cincinnati - by way of Columbus - seems laughable.

Stand Pat

To be young, gifted and black . . .. It's apparently important to attract voters who are none of those things.

Recently, Pat Buchanan, playing the role of the "conservative conscience" of MSNBC, cited the less educated and older white voters who deserted the Democrats in last week's Massachusetts special Senate election and declared that they are the key to winning elections in 2010 and 2012 as the country keeps going through economic convulsions. Buchanan insisted that President Obama, who is young, gifted and black, ought to take the concerns of these voters, many of whom are opposed to larger government and a more public role in health care, into consideration if he wants to be an effective President. So, what the President ought to take away from the Massachusetts election is to just preserve the status quo? Because that's exactly what Senator Brown of Massachusetts (to avoid confusion with Senator Brown of Ohio, Sherrod Brown, the good Senator Brown) advocated in his campaign. Somehow, I don't remember the Obama slogan from 2008 as "Conventionality We Can Believe In."

Buchanan disparaged the black voters, younger voters, and better educated voters of any race as a fringe bloc, though he didn't use those words. Obama, alarmingly, may have learned the wrong lesson from the Massachusetts election results. He's ready to scale back health care reform and sidestep gingerly if not avoid altogether tough climate change legislation in an apparent effort to win back those older, whiter, and dumber voters. Scott Brown, born two years before the biracial Obama, is himself older, whiter and dumber than the President.

Meanwhile, I don't understand why the Democrats are ready to "stand pat" when, as one progressive group pointed out, they have a larger majority in the Senate under Obama than the Republicans did under George Walker Bush - who got just about everything he wanted from Congress. Also, you're telling me it takes a three-fifths majority of sixty senators to pass a law, but it takes only a simple majority of five Supreme Court justices to throw it out?

To give you an idea of Democrats have crippled themselves with their own timidity, it's worth referring the scene at Martha Coakley's concession speech last week. The astute observer will remember that John Kerry was present . . . he was standing to Coakley's right side on crutches. How fitting for a milquetoast presidential candidate whose election could have stopped John Roberts and Samuel Alito from getting on the Supreme Court.

In the News

Reports have circulated that President Obama is ready to give up on Republican support for health care reform, but his spokesman, Robert Gibbs, insisted that this is not the case. Gibbs said today that the President is still interested in working with Republicans, and he wants to work with legislators with constructive ideas.

Well, is Obama going to make up his mind?

Although more Americans are supporting a public option, many more Americans still believe in the lies about government takeovers of health care and rationing, and the lies have been repeated by health care reform opponents. Although they've been called out, these opponents are not interested in the truth. To paraphrase a movie line, if they wanted to get the truth out, they would have spoken to "60 Minutes."

Speaking of which, I heard that Don Hewitt, the creator of "60 Minutes," died today. Hewitt expanded television journalism with his news show, looking at stories with greater depth and digging deeper at timely issues. The show has kept the high standards it started out with when it debuted in 1968, even after Hewitt's retirement five years ago. RIP.

Pulling Plugs

The right-wing hijacking of the health care debate depresses me, as if the weather and the problems I've had with my car and with my job search weren't depressing enough. Right now, the reactionaries in America are trying - successfully, so far -to derail the health care debate by exploiting the provision that facilitates living will preparations, and preventing an intelligent discussion on how to reduce costs so that we don't spend any more on health care than other countries do. But then, in America, discouraging intelligent debate is easy.

Many lies have been told about the living will provision, most of which have implied that the government would deny care to elder Americans and encourage folks to "pull the plug on Grandma," and no matter how much health care reform proponents expose these claims as lies, the liars - including noted book-banning wolf killer Sarah Palin - scream louder. They're trying to pull the plug on health care reform.

They've even belittled the British health care system by bemoaning the idea that physicist and Lou Gehrig's disease sufferer Stephen Hawking would have been allowed to die under it . . . even though he's British and has benefited from it immensely.

I've only had health insurance as an adult when I've worked at a permanent job, and my employment has been so erratic for the past six years, I've mostly worked temporary jobs. So I have no health insurance now. If I become catastrophically ill in an America where Republican health care values prevail, I might as well just drop dead.

And then I won't have to listen to this death panel nonsense anymore.

"Post" THIS!

The New York Post's headline yesterday angrily complained that "successful" (i.e., rich) New Yorkers would pay a 57% "megatax" to support President Obama's health care reform plan. Apparently, the conservative paper was trying to stir resentment among their own readership.

The Post doesn't get it. Their readers aren't successful. They're losers!

That's why they read the Post.

Who's In Charge Here?

Tom Daschle is out even as Judd Gregg is in. President Obama finally got around to naming a Commerce Secretary, Republican Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, only to see Tom Daschle bow out as the designated Secretary of Health of Human Services due to tax problems. We may have lost one of the best people to push meaningful health care reform through Congress, which given the fact that health care reform hasn't been achieved for forty years, isn't all that serious.

Meanwhile, Minnesota still hasn't settled its U.S. Senate election.