Wow.

The blog Phuck Politics has brought to our attention the existence of a shocking but intelligently produced and enlightening video document of the so-called "9/12 Tea Party" protests in Washington DC. The video was created by something called New Left Media, and I'm telling you that it's worth watching.

For one thing, it's not just shocking but really really funny.



And also: infuriating. And also: sad.

One of the things that I think makes this video so excellent and informative is its tone and pacing. It has a distinct and consistent editorial voice, but this voice is not intrusive or partisan. Moreover, although ruthlessly candid, it does not go out of its way to mock or condescend to its subjects. This reflects good editorial judgment in that the subjects do a more than adequate job of hanging themselves with their own noose.

An effect of this good editorial judgment is that this piece manages to do more than simply give the viewer a headache. It actually reveals the confusion and ignorance of the vast majority of the protesters. While this doesn't necessarily make them sympathetic characters, it does leave you with a strong sense of the forces/interests that are misleading them and profiting off of their ignorance, their lack of education and their general superstitiousness.

Sure, these rednecks are dumb as rocks, but that's not what I find most frightening. What I find most frightening is that they lack common sense.

Robert Reich poses a very good question about health care reform.

Why is the so-called "Gang of Six" -- a group of six senators, three Democrats and three Republicans (two of whom are on the extreme/fringe Right) who sit on a committee devoted not to health care but to finance -- deciding the fate of health reform for the entire country? Is "bipartisanship" that important? Don't the Dems, uh, have a majority in both houses and control the White House? Is it just the power of lobbyists, or have the Republican Brownshirts succeed utterly and finally in poisoning the well of civil discourse? Thomas Jefferson would be proud of you, Rush Limbaugh. Jolly good show...

Why the Gang of Six is Deciding Health Care for Three Hundred Million of Us

HYPOCRITES!!! (Part III)

Finally a journalist read by more than five people has given some attention to the hypocrisy of Right wing assholes who decry as "socialistic" the very idea of government-funded healthcare.

The article Health Care Hypocrisy: Many of the pundits attacking government health insurance rely on government health insurance for their own families, written by Daniel Gross, appears in Slate:

As we've noted before, if you add the failure of employer-linked health care with Medicare, Medicaid, government employment, and the military, a huge chunk of Americans already have taxpayer-funded health care. It's a diverse lot. Rich old people and poor kids, university professors, congressmen, teachers, DMV clerks and their families. Pretty much everybody you see on CNBC yelling about socialism? Their parents and grandparents (if they're still living) get taxpayer-funded health insurance. Mine do. Charles Grassley, the septuagenarian Iowan who is doing his darnedest to torpedo meaningful health care form, has it. Arthur Laffer, the 69-year-old economist who went on television and suggested that Medicare isn't a government health care program, is eligible for Medicare. Dick Armey, who spent many years teaching at a state university and served several terms in Congress, has had taxpayer-funded health insurance for much of his adult life. Same for Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich. Democratic senators like Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, and Ben Nelson? Yes, yes, and yes. Law professors at the University of Tennessee have it. The employees of George Mason University, which houses the free-market Mercatus Center, do, too. Policy analyst Betsy McCaughey, currently reprising her 1990s role of health care bamboozler, will be eligible for it in a few years' time.

Obvious? Yes. But it's still worth pointing out. All these people rely on—or have relied on—the government to pick up the tab for their health care and for their health insurance. And that hasn't caused euthanasia or the abolition of private property. Funny how you don't hear any complaints from worthies about taxpayer-funded health insurance when it's covering them, their staffs, and their loved ones. For many of these people, especially the older ones, there literally is no affordable alternative. Insurance companies prefer to insure healthy people, not sick people—that's how they make money. And older people are more likely to run into health trouble requiring expensive care. Dick Armey, who is suing to get out from under the tyranny of Medicare, is apparently under the illusion that insurance companies are really eager to cover 69-year-old men at a low cost. House Minority Leader John Boehner is a 59-year-old smoker whose skin has an orange hue. What do you think Aetna would charge him per month for a good policy?

Thank god for Daniel Gross: A journalist who tells the truth.

HYPOCRITES!! (Part II): Health care, Medicare Part D and generational politics.

At the conclusion of Part I of this discussion, I mentioned the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of Republicans who oppose a public health insurance option, yet have nothing negative to say about Medicare and Social Security, which, when combined with Medicaid, represent by far the most expensive government entitlement programs currently in existence.

The Republicans, like the Democrats, would never be caught opposing these unfunded programs because they are massively popular with the most active and influential sectors of the electorate: the elderly. As the Baby Boomers continue to age -- and increasingly bottleneck the system -- this popularity of these programs is unlikely to decline.

So, somehow, these government-administered entitlements do not get mentioned in the same breath as Congressional/Obamian health insurance reform when hard-Right ideologues and thugs hit the pavement or spread lies over the Internet about death panels and whatnot.

Thing is: Many of those who decry health reform as "socialistic" are themselves willing and continuing recipients of Medicare and Social Security Benefits. Thus, I should like suggest that these people are a bunch of crusty old self-centered whiners and liars, and that we ought to declare a generational war!

Doesn't it shame them that they would deny to succeeding generations the same entitlements from which they themselves have benefited, from the Social Security Act to the GI Bill to Medicare to Medicaid, up to and including the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit for those 65 years of age and older that was passed, without funding and in between the two largest tax cuts for the wealthy ever to be passed into law?

Nothing -- including military spending! -- even comes close to the costliness of these programs. Apparently, Americans 65 and older are simply more deserving of this bounty than those of my generation. My generation, by contrast, has been weathering an inhospitable economic and educational environment. Ours is an age in which the notion of class mobility has long been a cruel joke. Our experience is one of the accumulation of debts, of forgoing health insurance, of meager opportunities.

I'm not arguing that the Great Depression was a walk in the park. I am, however, arguing that, in the wake of the Social Security Act, the radical expansion of opportunities for higher education represented in the GI Bill and in the proliferation of colleges and universities in order to accommodate the Baby Boom, the United States enjoyed a sustained period of economic, social and cultural progress.

Anyway, in my limited experience with such things, the clearest, most objective and most focused discussion of the recent political-historical context of Republican flip-flopping on government-coordinated public health insurance plans is contained in a recent episode of the PBS series Frontline, titled: Ten Trillion and Counting. (You may wish to click here for a link to streaming video of the entire episode, which is well worth your time.)

The piece actually tackles the subject of the United States' skyrocketing national debt. but its discussion of George W. Bush's passage of Medicare Part D -- sandwiched between the passage of the two largest tax cuts for the wealthy in United States history -- could not be more relevant to our present discussion. Here is that section of the episode:



Here's part of the transcript:

FORREST SAWYER: It finally passed by five votes.
[on camera] Why would a small government conservative initiate a program that is so massive?
JACKIE CALMES, The New York Times: Politics.
FORREST SAWYER: What do you mean?
JACKIE CALMES: There's no group that votes at the rate and in the numbers as those over 55, and 65 and over certainly. And Democrats, as well as Republicans, want to please seniors, and that's why our entire budget is tilted towards programs for seniors.
FORREST SAWYER: [voice-over] The reason that the Bush administration could pass Medicare part D was that the Republican Congress in 2002 had let a rule called "pay as you go" lapse. It was a rule established by the first President Bush and a Democratic Congress to enforce fiscal discipline.
GREGG IP: His father endured some very serious political pain to do the right thing to get the deficit down. And one of the steps was that a rule called "pay-go," or pay as you go. And this rule basically meant that if you wanted to introduce a new tax cut or a new spending program, you had to find a way to pay for it with an offsetting tax increase or spending cut. Well, in 2002, that rule expired.
ALICE RIVLIN, Dir., Office of Management & Budget, 1994-96: In the Clinton years, we had the "pay-go" rule, pay as you go, and that meant we couldn't pass a lot of good-sounding ideas, including Medicare prescription drugs. It's not that nobody thought of that in the '90s. A lot of people thought of it. But we couldn't pay for it. To pay for it, we would have had to have done a tax increase or cut out some other spending in major proportions, and nobody wanted to do that, so we didn't do it.
FORREST SAWYER: But the Bush administration did do it. With "pay-go" no longer restraining spending, they had pushed through Medicare part D, a program that's projected over time to cost as much as $8 trillion.
DAVID WESSEL: They did not come up with a way to raise taxes or cut spending somewhere else to pay for it, so they just passed this thing. It goes into law. It's a promise to elderly people that we'll pay- subsidize their drugs, and we borrow every year to pay for it. And in the end, it's more expensive than the war in Iraq because the war in Iraq ends at some point. Certainly, it will end now that Obama's president. But the prescription drug benefit will go on forever.
FORREST SAWYER: It will go on forever because it's a promise made by the federal government to its citizens. Seniors are entitled to this benefit, just the as they are entitled to Social Security and Medicare itself. These entitlements are all enormously popular, but they're also enormously expensive. Medicare part D alone will cost $60 billion this year.
JACKIE CALMES: The expense of that over time, unfunded liabilities for the government, at a time when more people are reaching retirement age and qualifying for Medicare, added more to the long-term obligations of the government than all of Social Security.
FORREST SAWYER: Medicare part D was the largest spending bill the president signed, but there were dozens of others. During his first five years as president, with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, George Bush never vetoed a spending bill. Fiscal conservatives in his own party accused him of being the biggest spender since World War II.

I think this is worth bringing up next time one finds himself in a bar, confronted by someone who insists that Obama is a socialist or that the Democrats are the big spenders... It was, after all, Bill Clinton who balanced the budget.

LIAR!!!: GOP stance on Medicare vs. "Government Health Care"

By way of The Huffington Post:

Excerpts from the accompanying article:

Lawrence O'Donnell interviewed Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) in a devastating segment on "Hardball" on Friday, implying that the conservative congressman was a hypocrite for opposing a public option yet refusing to cut government-run health-care programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

O'Donnell repeatedly pushed the conservative Congressman to give a straight answer about what federal entitlements he would cut. Culberson refused to give a response for several minutes before finally admitting that he would have voted for Social Security and Medicare despite the fact that they are government-run health-care systems.

[...]

O'Donnell [asked] Culberson: "If Medicare is not socialism, why don't we just delete the over-65 part of Medicare and make it available to everyone? What's your argument against that?"

[...]

An exasperated O'Donnell asked the Congressman: "You know that Medicare is a completely government-run health care system and yet you're saying you would have voted for it."

Culberson's response: "Yes"

By the end, O'Donnell accused Culberson of hypocrisy and more:

"You lie to America about the evils of government-run health care because you people, not one of you liars about government health care is willing to repeal Medicare, to stand up and be consistent... 'I hate government health care so I want to repeal Medicare'... That is a lie that you perpetrate every day."