Political Theatre category archive

“Nobody in America cares about 60 votes. People in America care about saving lives and saving money. That’s what we [Congress] should be concentrating on.”

Join the defensive line here.

John Cole suggests a means for a sense of perspective on the health insurance biz:

Has anyone offered an amendment requiring employers to, somewhere on every pay stub, list how much the employer and employee contribution to their respective health care plan was for that pay period, the cumulative for the year, and how much that is up from the same time last year, over the past five years, and over the past ten years?

about the failure of the local rags to cover the local HCAN protests and finds a double standard, nay, a triple standard even, as Snagglepuss would have said. A nugget:

So a woman confronting the wealthy and powerful CEO, from the left, is a staged event unworthy of coverage, but a bunch of confused and misinformed people riled up by a Fox News bloviator to stage an event in which they confront a politician, from the right, makes the front page? isn’t that also “just a bunch of people going blah-blah-blah”?

Shaun Mullen has some ideas.

Follow the link; you can spare five minutes to read the whole thing:

But a funny thing happened on the way to the new millennium. While Democrats still talk the talk, they’ve lost a few steps and then some in walking the walk as the income gap began growing again in the 1970s and accelerated during the Dubya Era. That gap, of course, has been exacerbated by the Bush recession that has spiked unemployment to near 10 percent and left the middle class deeply in debt at a time when the rich are, of course, getting richer still.

Why, you may ask, have the Democrats lost a few steps? Because they have become as addicted to the lobbyist’s crack pipe as their brethren across the aisle.

That begins to explain why Obama’s health-care reform initiative is in trouble although passage in more or less the form the president has laid out would be a ginormous economic stimulus, deficit reducer and, in an indirect but very real way, an income gap closer.

The initiative is being held hostage not by naysaying Republicans but by Democrats personified by Senator Max Baucus, who represents one of the most sparsely populated states but in the last two years has received $453,000 from 109 health-related lobbyists who represent a Who’s Who of opposition to reform, including Amgen, Blue Cross-Blue Shield, Aetna, Astra Zeneca and the American Hospital Association.

I was busy yesterday, but I stored this to come back to because it is stunning in its irrationality.

George Will starts with rude behavior in a parking lot and concludes that, therefore, since persons behave badly in parking lots, standing up for rights is a bad thing:

Rights talk is inherently aggressive, even imperial; it tends toward moral inflation and militates against accommodation. Rights talkers, with their inner monologues of preemptive resentments, work themselves into a simmering state of annoyed vigilance against any limits on their willfulness. To rights talkers, life — always and everywhere — is unbearably congested with insufferable people impertinently rights talking, and behaving, the way you and I, of course, have a real right to.

He must think that those folks who wrote the Declaration of Independence were truly insufferable rabble.

Read more »

Congressman Grayson: “If Barack Obama has a BLT sandwich for lunch, (Republicans) will try to ban bacon.”

Just a silly little millimeter:

Rattei, 51, was diagnosed with a rare cancer in 2006 and had chemotherapy twice, with little success. In January 2008 her doctor prescribed a radiation treatment, but the insurer managing Rattei’s health plan deemed it experimental—and thus not covered.

The problem: Her cancer was in a bile duct just outside the liver. Had it been in the liver, the treatment would have been approved. The difference is “a matter of millimeters,” says Rattei.

Then there’s this.

The man who summarized the Republican health plan as follows:

Grayson said on the floor Tuesday night that “if you get sick, America, the Republican healthcare plan is this: Die quickly.” He even had a sign printed reading, “The Republican Healthcare Plan: Die Quickly.”

In your heart, you know he’s nailed it. In Republican (and Blue Dog) Land, personal wealth of insurance company execs trumps all, even the health of their fellow citizens.

When Congressman “I Know I Am but What Are You?” Wilson accused a truthful President Obama of lying during a speech to a joint session of your elected representatives incongruously assembled, many American reporters compared his to that in the British House of Commons.

An Englishman says not:

This (behavior–ed.) may have something to do with the no-holds-barred atmosphere on US talk shows where it is not unusual to see panellists shouting at each other. In contrast, Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys merely repeating a question 10 times looks positively genteel. And while the serious papers seem to resist character assassination, the American radio airwaves are full of hate.

It is this kind of unbridled malevolence, accompanied by deliberate disinformation, that is so shocking.

The only thing I have seen in Britain that even comes close to the kind of viciousness so prevalent in American politics emanated from the now-banned Federation of Conservative Students, who sold the infamous “Hang Nelson Mandela” badges and had a centrefold in their magazine showing an electric chair with the slogan “IRA Terrorists: Plug ‘Em In”. This was back in the mid-1980s and they appear to have been reprogrammed since then.

Scientific Blogging takes a look and considers that it’s often not the data, nor the scholarly interpretation, but the journanimalism:

• The media already often get the details wrong in reporting scientific studies. It makes it worse to compound that with confusing reporting.
• The media often highlight the wrong bits, in efforts to get catchy headlines and “interesting” copy.
• Readers don’t understand statistics, and misinterpretation is likely even when the stats are there. Don’t make it worse by eliminating them.
• Readers are prone to generalize results beyond what’s valid, and they’ll likely apply a group trent to specific individuals, as in the example above.
• Readers don’t understand the limitations of studies. Reporters should try to talk about one or two key limitations.

Read this. It makes it easier to understand the mess.

Tim F. on the internal contradictions of contrarians:

With respect to common usage ther terms liberal and conservative have gone batshit insane. Conservative used to imply defending individual liberties against government interference. By that definition the ACLU is the most conservative nonprofit entity in America and Glenn Greenwald, Joe Klein’s “civil liberties extremist”, count as more conservative as anyone. Yet for some reason nearly every American who calls himself ‘conservative’ hates Glenn Greenwald and the ACLU*. Another solid conservative point of dogma was resisting international adventures. The Republican party tried to block the war against Hitler and it was two liberal Presidents (Kennedy and Johnson) who sent us to war in Vietnam. Today “conservatives” on FOX News sneer down their noses at anyone who disagrees with bombing and . . . militarily occupying Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Burma, Venezuela and whoever else they hate today.

The crappy U. S. health care system takes another life.

. . . great aches from little oak horns grow.

Congressman Jerry Lewis.

Act Blue. Now.

Update: The post at Kiko’s House seems to have disappeared. H/T to Karen for letting me know.

Update Two: Via the comments, Shaun Mullen tells me the post is available now.

Over at Kiko’s House, Shaun Mullen has written a very thoughtful post on the place of racism in rightwing politics. My two or three regular readers know that this is one of my hot buttons.

I won’t try to excerpt or summarize his post, just recommend it. I make this comment:

He is more generous than I. Though I do not believe that all Republicans are racist–not by any means, for I know those who are not, or who are at least as non-racist as any of us can be having grown up in a society where race is seldom far from the surface–it is unquestionable that the Republican Party set out to woo racists and now is full of them.

It was called the Southern Strategy (PDF).

And it has succeeded to the point that those Republican “strategists” who wished to exploit white racists, who were fleeing the Democratic Party because Lyndon Johnson betrayed his kind (as it was phrased back then), now find themselves captive to them.

The Republican Party chose to romance the racists. Now it is wed to them.

Addendum:

Alex Goodall brings another perspective.

Annette John-Hall goes to tea country and meets someone who believes that wanting reasonable health care is forbidden because it’s not in the Constitution (not to mention that all they had back then were country doctors who often were worse than the disease):

For now, Marino has good health insurance through her job at a public utility in St. Petersburg.

The president has assured that people like her wouldn’t have to change their coverage under the new bill. Marino wasn’t having it.

“I don’t believe that,” she said.

Why?

“I just don’t,” she said.

He’s been in office only nine months. You’re saying you don’t believe him, our president?

“Yes. I’m saying I do not trust him,” Marino replied, without elaborating.

I have to wonder whether she would not “just not trust him” if he were pink like me.