This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Health Care debate

  • Whose activism is this?

    The Washington Post writes this morning that Republican activists are battling for “Ted Kennedy’s seat” in Massachusetts. I don’t know how they figure that seat belongs to the late Kennedy unless his fat ass is still stuck to the damn chair;

    Fueled by the energy of conservative activists, a solid debate performance and a 24-hour, $1.3 million Internet fundraising haul, Massachusetts state Sen. Scott Brown (R) has thrown a major scare into the Democratic establishment in his bid to win next Tuesday’s special Senate election over once heavily favored Attorney General Martha Coakley.

    The intensified activity around the campaign to fill the seat of the late senator Edward M. Kennedy (D) highlights the degree to which the race has taken on national significance. A victory, or even a narrow loss, by Brown in the competition for the symbolically important seat would be interpreted as another sign that voters have turned away from the Democrats at the start of the midterm election year.

    But, I got a note from my BFFs at Organizing for America this morning;

    ofa-mass-to-md

    I guess the Democrats figure that Marylanders are smarter than Massachusans when it comes to finding polling places in Massachusetts. Or more reliably Democrat. But the Post makes it sound like the only cranks in this debate are Conservatives tilting at windmills, but in this case it looks like the windmills are at least a little bit worried, too.

    Added: Brown Neck Gator send along this video in which David Gergen calls the vacant seat in Massachusetts “Teddy Kennedy’s seat” and Brown corrects him;

    Actually, it’s not the people’s seat either – it’s the Commonwealth’s seat.

  • Burris’ T’was The Night Before Christmess

    Tankerbabe sent us this link from Democrats.com starring one of this year’s best walking punchlines, Roland Burris, as he recites his staff’s version of Twas the Night Before Christmas;

    I guess his staff had to do something while they worked so hard to avoid reading the health care bill – this poem is the result of idle hands. This is how Democrats “remain civil“.

  • Biden in the New York Times

    Joe “Mad Bomber” Biden, who has been consistently wrong on every piece of legislation for which he ever voted while he occupied his dunce seat in the Senate, tries to convince his former fellows to vote for the dubious health care bill before them this week from the pages of the New York Times. His reason? What else – it’s historic;

    If I were still a United States senator, I would not only vote yes on the current health care reform bill, I would do so with the sure knowledge that I was casting one of the most historic votes of my 36 years in the Senate. I would vote yes knowing that the bill represents the culmination of a struggle begun by Theodore Roosevelt nearly a century ago to make health care reform a reality. And while it does not contain every measure President Obama and I wanted, I would vote yes for this bill certain that it includes the fundamental, essential change that opponents of reform have resisted for generations.

    We have been here before. In the past, as the moment of decision drew nearer, criticism from both the left and the right grew louder. Compromises were derided. The perfect became the enemy of the good.

    The last time we, the American people, were told to cast our vote because something was merely historic, we got bumbling Obama. Sure he wasn’t perfect, but he was black and that’d be historic, wouldn’t it? Well, he’s not really black, he even lacks perfection in that regard, but he’s black enough to make it historic, isn’t he?

    While it is not perfect, the bill pending in the Senate today is not just good enough — it is very good.

    Just like our vote for Obama was very good at the time, and we’ve come to regret it since. Joe figures as long as he told those whoppers, he might as well shoot the moon;

    President Obama and I know we have to put our fiscal house in order. This is why those who claim they oppose reform because they fear for our country’s fiscal stability should finally acknowledge what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office makes crystal clear: not only is the Senate bill paid for, it is this country’s single largest deficit-reduction measure in a dozen years.

    After all, it’s only taxpayer money – what do those schlubs know?

    If the bill passes the Senate this week, there will be more chances to make changes to it before it becomes law.

    And there you have it. No matter what those goobers in the Senate for this week, it won’t be the same when it finally makes it to the Federal Register.

  • VoteVets: Medicare buy in helps veterans

    I hate to keep harping on the folks at VoteVets (who am I kidding?), but the other day, dicksmith made the most absurd assumption I’ve ever read. In his article he claims that unless there’s a medicare buy-in provision in the health care bill, veterans will suffer.

    Another group that this will hurt greatly is veterans. A recent study out of Harvard found that 2,266 veterans died last year because they did not have health insurance. This is more than 14 times then number of deaths suffered by US troops in Afghanistan in 2008. Without the Medicare buy-in, thousands of Vietnam era veterans-who fall precisely in this age range-will not be able to afford healthcare coverage.

    For one thing, that Harvard study which concluded that 2266 veterans died last year from a lack of health care is completely manufactured. From what I’ve read about the study, it was taken from a small sampling and extrapolated across the entire population, ending up with an entirely made up number – instead of actually counting dead bodies. That’s twice in two weeks someone at VoteVets has used that study to scare their readers into backing the health care plan in Congress.

    As far as Vietnam veterans not getting health care as a result of the buy-in going down to defeat, that’s ridiculous. The only veterans who can’t get VA health care are folks without a service-connected disability who make enough money to buy their own insurance. If they can afford their own insurance, why would they want to buy into Medicare? And if a veteran is poor, how can he afford to BUY IN to Medicare?

    Of course, dicksmith goes right off the rails answering my comments with some crap about the Air Force being unconstitutional without answering the main thrust of my points. I don’t how the buy-in part shoots right over his head. How is a veteran with no money going to afford a buy-in? I guess that sort of pretzel logic is what Soltz requires from his bloggers so they can support the Democrat/Soros agenda.

  • Fear mongering

    I’ve heard the President and Democrat Congressional leaders charge the Right with fear mongering among the citzenry. Well, I got this in an email yesterday from Organizing For America and I forgot about it until I read Gary’s comment in the preceding post.

    scaremongering

    If that’s not fear mongering, I don’t know fear mongering.

  • Right on cue

    The other day, I wrote about political leadership, or rather the lack thereof, in the Democrat Party – particular the so-called leaders of the party. Right on cue, they provide us some examples. Pelosi announces, as reported in the Washington Post that she won’t stump for a troop surge in Afghanistan;

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Wednesday, adding that she is finished asking her colleagues to back wars that they do not support.

    “The president’s going to have to make his case,” Pelosi told reporters at a year-end briefing on the legislative session.

    You can see the yellow streak running right down her back. Cowardice pure and simple – Pelosi is scared of Code Pink yelling in her hallway and outside her house. We’re supposed to be at war, and she’s hiding behind politics.

    Here’s another example of cowardice; Fox News reports that John Conyers doesn’t have the testicular fortitude to admit that the reason the health care bill is failing is because it’s unpopular among regular Americans who don’t live in the Beltway;

    “The insurance lobby is taking over,” Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., was quoted as saying in Roll Call.

    No, the American voters are taking over you imbecile. And Mitch McConnel explains why voters are so angry;

    this bill has become a political nightmare for them.

    “They know Americans overwhelmingly oppose it, so they want to get it over with.

    “Americans are already outraged at the fact that Democrat leaders took their eyes off the ball. Rushing the process on a partisan line makes the situation even worse.

    “Americans were told the purpose of reform was to reduce the cost of health care.

    “Instead, Democrat leaders produced a $2.5 trillion, 2,074-page monstrosity that vastly expands government, raises taxes, raises premiums, and wrecks Medicare.

    “And they want to rush this bill through by Christmas — one of the most significant, far-reaching pieces of legislation in U.S. history. They want to rush it.

    “And here’s the most outrageous part: at the end of this rush, they want us to vote on a bill that no one outside the Majority Leader’s conference room has even seen.

    “That’s right. The final bill we’ll vote on isn’t even the one we’ve had on the floor. It’s the deal Democrat leaders have been trying to work out in private. “

    Oh, while health care and the war were popular, Democrats bent over backwards to take credit – and now that they face an angry crowd, it’s “rush, rush, rush” and hand responsibility and culpability off to someone else. McConnell quotes Olympia Snowe’s disappointment with the Democrats’ process, too. I hope she summons the courage to admit her fault in this, too.

    But more than likely, she’ll just collapse into the Democrat camp and sell us down the river to prove that spinelessness isn’t a partisan condition.

  • Leadership, and the lack thereof

    John Aravosis at AMERICAblog News, a Left-of-center blog, writes, if he’ll allow me to boil it down to it’s simplest elements, that the Democrats are spineless wienies. Aravosis compares what Bush was able to accomplish with only 55 Republican Senators as compared to what the Democrats can’t deliver with their 60 pledged seats. While I agree with some of what Aravosis wrote, he gets some of it wrong;

    What the GOP lacked in numbers, they made up for in backbone, cunning and leadership. Say what you will about George Bush, he wasn’t afraid of a fight. If anything, the Bush administration, and the Republicans in Congress, seemed to relish taking on Democrats, and seeing just how far they could get Democratic members of Congress to cave on their promises and their principles.

    How did they do it? Bush was willing to use his bully pulpit to create an environment in which the opposition party feared taking him on, feared challenging his agenda, lest they be seen as unpatriotic and extreme.

    There was nothing “cunning” about George Bush. He told us what he was going to do, and he did it – just the way he said he’d do it. Republicans and Democrats knew exactly where he stood on every issue. And he explained WHY he was going to do it and how it would benefit us. Whether you agreed with him or not, you understood his motivations. That’s called leadership – not that whiney Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama leadership – where everyone is too loud, everyone is out to get them, and they’re scared of “tones” of the debate.

    Aravosis even points out how before the election, Obama said he was going to vote against FISA and then didn’t. Even Democrats can’t trust him to do what he says. With healthcare, Obama tells us “the system is broken” that “we can’t continue with the status quo” – but that rings hollow when 86% of Americans are happy with their healthcare. When we all know that the poor get the best healthcare in the world and no one can tell us who this healthcare bill is supposed to help.

    See, that’s not leadership. Leadership isn’t standing up in front of the American people and talking about yourself and how things are going to affect you. Leadership is telling everyone why you’re doing stuff and how it’ll help. Saying things that make sense – not making wild sweeping gestures like telling us stupid shit like a government take over over of healthcare will save the economy when there’s no evidence that it’ll happen. Things like committing troops to war and sending them there on lame burros so it takes a decade for their presence to have an effect.

    Honestly, you guys voted for the guy solely because of his skin pigment and didn’t allow any of us to look deeper because you didn’t want to look deeper than his skin.

    So quitcherbitchin’.

  • New OFA propaganda video coming to your living room

    A few weeks back, I showed you the ten finalists for the Organizing for America video contest. Well, they’ve made their choice and they went with the typical liberal “For the Children” message;
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