Monday, October 7, 2013
After an entire day of talking about the Republican plan to shutdown the government in response to the implementation of Obamacare, perhaps it is also time to remind everybody that the very premise for their "concern" is total bullshit.
After an entire day of talking about the Republican plan to shutdown the government in response to the implementation of Obamacare, perhaps it is also time to remind everybody that the very premise for their "concern" is total bullshit.
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| The above graphic is brought to you by Republican propagandists. |
For years, Republicans have labeled President Obama’s Affordable Care Act a “job killer.” But as the essential elements of the law begin to phase in, conservative critics have become more specific, latching onto alarming stories about certain businesses cutting employees’ hours or declining to hire workers — all, apparently, because of the health-care law’s dictates.
As usual with Obamacare, it’s not that there isn’t something to be concerned about. But Republicans have blown the law’s potential problems so far out of proportion that their attacks sound like a “Saturday Night Live” parody.
“Americans all over this country are suffering because of Obamacare,”Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said last month. “It is the single biggest job killer in America.”
Well, here’s what the law requires: All firms that employ 50 or more full-time workers — or the equivalent in part-time workers — must provide health-care coverage to all of their full-time employees. If they do not, starting in 2015 the government will assess a fine based on the number of employees the businesses have. The fear is that companies on the cusp of hiring their 50th full-time employee might hold back. Other businesses might try to cut their employees’ hours.
The potential for some reduction in the availability of low-wage work is real. But mainstream economists aren’t seeing anything like the catastrophe Republicans have foretold, and they don’t anticipate a calamity, either.
That is because only 3 percent of small businesses — those with fewer than 500 employees — have more than 50 workers, so 97 percent of small employers are exempt from the law’s mandates. Meanwhile, virtually all large companies already offer health insurance to their employees. Aside from things such as reporting requirements, Obamacare’s mandates will directly obligate only about 1 percent of American businesses to do anything different.
Okay so this is what we have learned today? Well first we learned that potential donors for the GOP are freaked out that they are shutting down the government and potentially holding raising of the debt ceiling hostage in order to stop Obamacare. Then we learned that the plan for shutting down the government has been in the GOP playbook virtually since Obama took office. And now we learn that the frightening consequences of implementing the Affordable Care Act on businesses, that the Right Wing has been screaming about, are completely and totally false.
So yes the country may indeed default on its debt. The only political party responsible are the Republicans who have been pushing this agenda for years. And the reason that they feel it is overwhelmingly important to pick this fight, it NOT to protect the American people, or even American businesses, it is to protect the future of their party whose death throes they feel all around them.
And here you thought you could never dislike the Republican party more than you already did.
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Plans to shutdown the government in attempt to derail Obamacare were months in the making. Color me unsurprised.
To many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere. But interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 — waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known.
With polls showing Americans deeply divided over the law, conservatives believe that the public is behind them. Although the law’s opponents say that shutting down the government was not their objective, the activists anticipated that a shutdown could occur — and worked with members of the Tea Party caucus in Congress who were excited about drawing a red line against a law they despise.
A defunding “tool kit” created in early September included talking points for the question, “What happens when you shut down the government and you are blamed for it?” The suggested answer was the one House Republicans give today: “We are simply calling to fund the entire government except for the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare.”
The current budget brinkmanship is just the latest development in a well-financed, broad-based assault on the health law, Mr. Obama’s signature legislative initiative. Groups like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight, as is Club for Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some, like Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both aimed at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, too, founded in 2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of its sister group, the Heritage Foundation.
The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort. A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight. Included was $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure popping up between a woman’s legs during a gynecological exam.
The groups have also sought to pressure vulnerable Republican members of Congress with scorecards keeping track of their health care votes; have burned faux “Obamacare cards” on college campuses; and have distributed scripts for phone calls to Congressional offices, sample letters to editors and Twitter and Facebook offerings for followers to present as their own.
I don't think this is particularly surprising to any of US who have been paying close attention to the behind the scenes manipulations by Freedomworks and the Koch brothers, or who remember that infamous secret meeting held, on the night of Obama's first inauguration, by certain Tea Party and GOP types, which laid out their strategy for denying the President ANY POLICY that he wanted to get passed during what they believed would be his first and ONLY term as President.
Hell Freedomworks even advertised online what they would be willing to see done to stop this law from being enacted.
And this is what needs to be brought up EVERY time the media asks who should get the blame for this shutdown, or anybody attempts to suggest that it is the Democrats or President who is being unreasonable for allowing it to continue.
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Maureen Dowd's vision of a Ted Cruz inspired American Armageddon. Think "The Terminator" meets Ayn Rand.
Dead cherry blossom trees litter the bleak landscape. Trash blows through L’Enfant’s once beautiful boulevards, now strewn with the detritus of democracy, scraps of the original Constitution, corroded White House ID cards, stacks of worthless bills tumbling out of the Treasury Department.
The BlackBerrys that were pried from the hands of White House employees in 2013 are now piled up on the Potomac as a flood barrier against the ever-rising tide from melting ice caps. Their owners, unable to check their messages, went insane long ago.
Because there was no endgame, the capital’s hunger games ended in a gray void. Because there was no clean bill, now there is only a filthy stench. Because there was no wisdom, now there is only rot. The instigators, it turned out, didn’t even know what they were arguing for. Macho thrusts and feints, competing to win while the country lost.
Thomas Jefferson’s utopia devolved into Ted Cruz’s dystopia.
Law and order broke down as police, who were not getting paid, eventually decided to stay home. The fanatics barricaded in the Capitol dug in, determined to tear down what their idols, the founding fathers, had built. Darkness soon devoured the rest of the country.
Whose to blame you may ask? Who do you think?
A gaunt man and sickly boy, wrapped in blue tarps, trudge toward the blighted spot that was once the World War II monument, scene of the first shutdown skirmishes. They know they may not survive the winter.
“How did this happen, Papa?” the boy asks.
“Americans had been filled with existential dread since the 9/11 attacks, but they didn’t realize the real danger was coming from inside the government,” the man says. “It started very small with a petty fight over a six-week spending bill but quickly mushroomed out of control.”
“Whose fault was it, Papa?” the boy presses.
The man tries to explain: “The Grand Old Party, the proud haven of patriots who believed in a strong national security and fiscal responsibility, was infected with a mutant form of ideology. It was named the Sarahcuda Strain after the earliest carrier. Remember when you saw that old science fiction movie, ‘I Am Legend’? A scientist described the virus that burned through civilization as being like ‘a very fast car driven by a very bad man.’ That’s what happened: In the infected Tea Party politicians, brain function decreased and social de-evolution occurred. They began ignoring their basic survival instincts.
“It’s hard to believe now, but they were fixated on stopping an effort to get health care to those who couldn’t afford it. It eventually led them to destroy all the things they said they held most dear.”
The boy is confused. “They killed America because they didn’t care about keeping Americans alive?” he asks.
"The Sarahcuda Strain," I love it!
But yes in the final analysis the young boy's question is absolutely accurate.
I don't always enjoy Maureen Dowd, but this is a must read and it does a pretty great job of putting a rather ridiculous conflict into a context that is both entertaining as well as informative. .
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The healthcare costs that the Republicans keep blaming on Obamacare have nothing to do with it. Have you ever heard of Reagancare?
What’s that you say? Hospitals are mandated to give away free services?
Yes. In response to some earlier bad behavior from hospitals called “patient dumping,” a mandate for unfunded medical care was created and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. It said, “Hospitals provide care to anyone needing emergency healthcare treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay.”
That’s right, Reagan created a universal coverage mandate, forced the private sector to pay for it, thereby creating the world’s most expensive, least efficient health-care program. Hospitals hated it, the poor and indigent took advantage of it, and prices were jacked up in response to it. Eventually, the costs spread to everyone else.
Given that history, it is no surprise that hospitals were quietly pleased with Obamacare. After the Supreme Court ruled on the legality of the new rules in June 2012, hospital stocks rallied. It should come as no surprise: They get to remove a huge cost that they had no ability to control. They also get a massive number of new paying customers. And they now have some control over who their patients will be.
Yes the man who claimed to want to keep government out of our lives created a law that put the burden of caring for those without insurance or money onto the hospitals, which forced them to make up the cost by gouging insurance companies, who in turn gouged their customers. In other words, us.
And then when President Obama came up with a plan to reduce the cost of insurance, and remove the burden from hospitals, thereby lowering the cost of medical care and prescription drugs, he was accused of being un-American and undermining the freedoms of the American people.
In other words the man who has worked diligently to protect our citizens from the unseen tax placed on them to cover uninsured hospital visits, is vilified. While the man who created that problem in the first place, is idolized.
Not only that but in order to protect Ronald Reagan's destructive health care mandate, his Republican heirs are willing to bankrupt the entire country.
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With Republicans fighting each other tooth and nail, is a possible Democratic takeover of Congress a real possibility? Maybe.
His take is supported by William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a veteran of the 1995–96 shutdown when he was President Clinton’s domestic-policy adviser.:
Before the shutdown, Democrats were pretty much reconciled to falling short in efforts to retake the House next year. With so many gerrymandered seats, the 17 pickups Democrats need seem out of reach and may still be. But Galston points to research that says Democrats can overcome the structural disadvantage they face if they add 5 percentage points in their overall votes for the House, then they would have a better than 50 percent chance of winning control. “The Republicans are doing the only thing that could conceivably endanger their majority,” Galston says. The latest Quinnipiac and Pew polls show Democrats with a 9-point generic edge, twice what it was in late August. “After the dust settles next November and the generic Democratic edge is 9 points, I guarantee you the next speaker is Nancy Pelosi,” he says.
On the Senate side, Republicans need six seats to gain control of the chamber. In just about every contested race, Republicans are battling each other in primaries to see who can be the biggest cheerleader of the government shutdown. “If Ted Cruz becomes the public face for the Republican Party, it will be a cold day in hell before they have a Senate majority,” says Galston. The last shutdown 17 years ago helped reelect Clinton. This one could give Obama the Congress he wants.
I am cautiously optimistic, but if the Republicans were able to make such incredible gains in 2010, using unsubstantiated fear of the President to energize their electorate, I don't see why it would be impossible for the Democrats to use the very much substantiated fear of what these Teabagger idiots are doing to our political system to run the board on them in 2014.
I mean it is not like there is not ample evidence as to the negative effects of this group of insurgents on the country, so all it takes is to wait out the upcoming Bloodsport version of the GOP primaries and kick the broken and battered survivor in the face before he can regain his footing.
All I know is that I am going to keep a happy thought.
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