Kentucky Governor To Mitch McConnell: Get Your Facts Straight On Obamacare
Wait just a cotton pickin minute!! You mean to tell me that Mitch by god McConnell might be … a lyin sack o’ shit?! No! Say it isn’t so!!
Tag Archives: ACA
More Failed Political Theatre
July 24, 2013 – The “Amash Amendment” was voted down. What was this amendment, you might wonder? It got very little coverage really, so you wouldn’t be so out of line to ask. The Amash amendment, surprisingly, was offered by a Republican representative despite the opposition of the Speaker of the House, Boehner. It would have limited the NSA’s ability to collect the so-called meta data on phone and internet data usage, and otherwise reduced the funding and scope of the NSA. It drew, as politics sometimes is wont to do, a strange series of bedfellows. Right wing “libertarians” and “left wing liberals” joined together to support this bill and still it failed by a vote of 205 to 217. Here is the roll call so you can see how your own representatives voted.
On the one hand, it really didn’t matter how this vote turned out. We should all understand that. Should this have passed, and then succeeded in the Senate, which was far from likely to begin with, the POTUS had promised to veto it. Of course, he has promised to veto numerous things in the past and then signed them any way. However, this one, I find his threat much more credible as it is more in line with his right wing totalitarian regime approach to things. “Trust me. We’ve got your best interest at heart. We’ll give you some pretense of good faith, such as lip service about believing in same-sex marriage, but in reality, we’re going to call out the militarized police to control you and beat you into submission, while half way around the world, we kill children in your name.” {Some Afghan kids aren’t bystanders, indeed!! You right wing, murderous bastard!}
– Deep breaths – Deep breaths – Deep breaths –
It is also very likely that he would not have vetoed it because he has come out so strongly in support of the program. For example, on June 18, 2013:
Charlie Rose: So I hear you saying, I have no problem with what NSA has been doing.
Barack Obama: Well, let me — let me finish, because I don’t.
Except, we are not allowed to look at the details, so you are asking us to take your word, and since you have shown yourself to be a liar, we can’t trust that, Mr. President.
So, if you think that there was really any chance that this amendment would have succeeded, then I would like to discuss a lake I have for sale. You might be interested. It has a beautiful view, and several ships are included. Details here.
Okay, so it didn’t really matter because president Napoleon the Pig, er, I mean Obama would have vetoed it. However, it also didn’t matter, because if the POTUS is to be believed, and he has been backed on this by many in the congress, then:
Understand what that means is that each of those 205 members of congress that voted for the Amash amendment is one of two things. Either they are so spineless that they couldn’t act without sufficient support around them. They couldn’t stand on their own two feet to say, “This is wrong, and I must stand against it.” Or, they are still conducting political theatre. They saw that there were enough people in their constituencies that were at least a little upset that they would benefit from making it appear that they were trying to do something to end these programs, without actually trying to do something. Then, they can return to what is much more important to the Republicans in the House of Representatives – a 40th attempt to repeal the ACA, other wise known as Obamacare.
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The Boys Who Cried Wolf
Does anyone else remember fairy tales? As I recall, they used to serve a very different purpose many, many moons ago. You see, fairy tales used to be used to scare children into behaving. The stories as originally preserved by the Grimm Brothers, for example, were “capricious and often cruel”. National Geographic says it well, except they leave out a crucial detail, which I’ll come back to in a moment.
Once they saw how the tales bewitched young readers, the Grimms, and editors aplenty after them, started “fixing” things. Tales gradually got softer, sweeter, and primly moral. Yet all the polishing never rubbed away the solid heart of the stories, now read and loved in more than 160 languages.
So, what was left out? The modern, as in the last 30 years or so, impact on the fairy tale. What I will call, “the Disney effect”, when fairy tales became even more sanitized and Pollyanna-ish1. When fairy tales lost their truly moral lessons, and simply became entertainment.
They’re baaaacck!! At least one of them. The boy who cried wolf. Remember that one? In a nutshell, a shepherd boy who didn’t want to be alone in the fields watching the sheep cries out, “Wolf!” and the town’s men come running to protect him, even though there is no wolf. Eventually, though, he does this so many times, that they stop. Then, when there really is a wolf, he cries and cries, and no one comes to his aid. I am sure in the older version, the wolf not only drives off many of the town’s flock, but also kills him and many of the sheep. In the modern version, the wolf just scares the little miscreant and scatters the flock, because everyone knows that wolves don’t actually kill sheep, right? uh huh.
This presidency has been one never ending stream of accusations and trumped up scandals. It has been a series of boys crying wolf, and now that there might, actually be one that is legitimate, most of us who are not so easily worked up and manipulated by the right-wing press are so worn out from it, that we are having a hard time caring. How sad is that? You have managed to wear us out with your constant stream of made up malarkey that now that there is a hint of possible real scandal in the air, guess what? Most of us that you need in order to actually pursue it, don’t care. Way to go. Guess it’s time for the wolf to dine.
Before we get to that, let’s recap a little, shall we? (Not even a complete list. Just a survey.)
We have had, and still have, questions regarding the POTUS’ place of birth. This despite it having been established and verified and certified and re-certified.
We have seen attempts to tie him to terrorist organizations, domestic and foreign, from the time he began campaigning and still going today.
We heard about his “Apology Tour”, which when fact checked by more reliable sources, is shown to be either completely fallacious, misunderstood, or overly hyped, depending on which aspect of the “tour” to which you are referring.
For the last 8 months, we have been subjected to the far right-wing, led primarily by Fox news, of course, pushing an investigation into a supposed Benghazi cover-up and scandal. The Republican party and conservative public has dutifully followed along, wasting much time and money on a non-story. The rest of the main stream media has had almost no choice but to cover it as well, since this is what all the players are playing. If they didn’t, it would be like a reporter sent to cover a concert and ignoring the entire first set. With the latest disclosure being that someone, somewhere, very likely in a Republican congressional office actually changed the e-mails released by the White House in order to make them look more damning than they actually are. Could it be any more obvious how desperate they are to focus on anything other than real issues?
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Occupy Every Day
Every once in a while it is important to revisit older topics, that we’ve discussed before. Today, I would like to come back to a couple of those, because they remain important and relevant.
If we are going to maintain pressure and relevance, then we have to continue to remember to act, right? One of the major knocks against the Occupy movement, for example, is that it lost focus. Certainly the occupation of major parks, and the various actions that were taken beginning in September of 2011 were breathtaking and stoked the imagination. They fired me up. They captured the hopes of many who were struggling to find “hope and change” in an America that had yet again been lied to and misled.
And, then, they fell apart. As with most inclusive movements, it fell prey to its own grand ideals. Instead of staying focused on the financial purposes that it started with, it wanted to be leaderless and then it became amorphous and had so many tentacles and purposes that it lost its relevance. Oh, to be sure, it still exists. The movement that is. I believe that there are still a few active occupations. Somewhere… Maybe. Even I have lost track, and interest. They lost me when they got off track. And, yes, I admit that I boisterously proclaimed that it was the last great hope for America. I even went so far in my fervor at the time as to say that if it failed, then I would start voting for the most evil right wing candidate I could find in order to simply hasten the fall of America. “Bring on the burning,” I said.
I retract those words, and acknowledge my own foolishness in having said them. I can only say that I was fired up and hopeful. I was excited and trying to get others equally fired up and motivated. I do still believe that it had great potential. Had there been some strong hands to guide it and maintain focus at the core, then it could have accomplished great things. I do think that it had impact, in changing the focus of the conversation ever so slightly. It was not the impact though that it could have had, and the damn Tea Partiers are still holding too much sway. Largely that is because there was too heavy an influence in the Occupy movement that simply felt that they could somehow change the system without actually being participants in the system.
There are only two ways to change a political system. One can either participate in and change it from with in, or one can violently overthrow it. That’s it. There are no other alternatives to changing it. If you play a pussy-foot, half-in-half-out game then what happens is that you wind up supporting (whole heartedly) the status quo. That is what happened with the occupy movement. Too many wanted to try to maintain the illusion that they were above and beyond the system, while still enjoying the benefits of that system. They wanted the technological benefits (the iPods, the smart phones, the lap top computers, the internet, the wifi, etc), they wanted the Constitutional protections, the responsiveness of the elected representatives, and all that the system had to offer. They screamed for and demanded their rights. “Whose park? Our Park!” and “This is what Democracy looks like” they screamed. Hell, I screamed, for I took my boys and went down to the streets, too. But, for all too many of them, they didn’t then want to exercise their responsibilities. They didn’t want to vote, or participate in the jury pools. They didn’t want to pay taxes or support that same government that they railed against. They didn’t want to participate by electing the candidates that would support the views that they wanted supported. They were only half-in.
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In loco vennum
Was it a critical decision? I’m not really certain about that in the big picture. And, by big picture, I mean long term. Why? Because in the long term, everything can change. The Citizens United v Federal Election Commission decision issued on January 21, 2010 which undid nearly a century of settled law, the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 which overturned the Dred Scott v Sanford decision of 1857 (probably the worst SCOTUS decision of ALL TIME), and Brown v Board of Education in 1954 had to overturn the precedent of Plessy v Ferguson from 1896, amongst others. The doctrine of stare decisis is less and less meaningful as we become more and more politicized at every branch and level of society, and as we become less and less educated. So, yes, though I promised to pick up on last week’s column, the SCOTUS decision on the Affordable Care Act and the ensuing madness has prompted me to deviate from that. Next week, will see the promised second part of the education column. However, I do see a very strong connection. Many of the arguments that are being thrown around are being put out by people who simply have no education about the facts. They do not have a clue what they are talking about. They are also over-reacting.
First, let us clear up a few things.
One, I am not a big fan of the ACA. It is better than nothing, but it barely qualifies as progress. The first thing that must always be said about it is that every single piece of it originated from the right. This is not in the same sense that I have been trying to drive home for a few years now and, that others have started to echo, that there is no visible left in America. This is, if you accept what Faux News and the rest of the mainstream media defines as the left and right in American politics, every piece of the ACA originated from the right and then was adopted by the “left”. After it was adopted by the “left”, and thus should have had “bi-partisan” support, then it was attacked by the “right”. This is the ridiculousness of the game being played by the far right wing in this country. This is why there are those, even on the far right, who are finally starting to admit that in the media’s attempt to be fair, they are being dishonest. In the attempt to give each “side” equal recognition, they are committing a lie that each side is equally valid. The individual mandate, for example, which was the focus of so much right wing ire, was the brain child of the Heritage Foundation, as so clearly explained here by Peter Ferrara who at the time was the “John M. Olin Distinguished Fellow in Political Economy” at said Foundation. It was an answer to Clinton’s attempts to move the health care system forward, but to do it on the worker’s backs instead of at the expense of the employer.
The point is that it is not an over-reach by the left. Not even if we let “the left” be defined by the mainstream media. It was passed through by the Democrats, yes. But, it is a Republican bill through and through.
Second, the damn thing is really complicated and there are some good parts in it that will benefit many Americans – allowing younger Americans to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26, preventing insurance companies from refusing to insure due to pre-existing conditions, and removal of lifetime benefit caps, for example. Being such a complicated law, it affects pretty much everyone top to bottom, and one source of reasonably accurate information is here. Most of the law does not, however, go into effect until 2014. By then, the infighting of the Republicans and the Democrats may have killed off parts of it, to the point where it may be pointless. In fact, that was likely the very reason it was pushed out to 2014 in the first place. (Much like the United States Congress Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction and its recommendations were set far enough out so that the the sequestering would never actually take place. The congress would have time to act and make sure of that. It is all a dog and pony show. Neither the ruling members of Democrats nor the Republicans are serious about keeping their promises to actually accomplish anything positive for the country. They are both in favor of serving their highest paying contributors and staying in power. Any appearance of serving the rest of us is only an illusion created in the interest of staying in power.)
S C I A M A G E 