Millionaires lead GOP crusade against health insurance for working people

I never voted for Barack Obama and my criticisms of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") are on the record, but GOP attempts to hold the economy hostage to defund it and ram through other parts of their fringe agenda are despicable.

The Republican strategy is essentially this: get a bunch of guys with taxpayer-subsidized health insurance, most of whom are millionaires. Anoint them to be your spokesperson on why people who have to work for a living shouldn't necessarily have access to health insurance.

Let me know how that works out politically.

Majority oppose Obamacare... but not in the way you probably think

A CNN poll reports that 54% of Americans oppose Obamacare. But the dynamic is not as simplistic as the “tea party” or Obama partisans would have you believe. 

It reports only 35% of Americans think Obamacare is ‘too liberal.'

Nearly 1/3 of all opposition to Obamacare is by those who, like myself, think it is ‘not liberal enough.’

This reality probably isn't something you've ever heard in the mainstream media's narrative.

Occupy vs the Tea Party

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.

The American political system pretty much boils down to the craven and corrupted Democratic Party, the venal and corrupted Republican Party and smaller parties who are mostly well-intentioned but don’t show the tiniest desire to become remotely electable (bearing in mind there are thousands of public offices below the presidency). What a depressing state of affairs. No wonder there’s so much frustration and anger that’s been expressed via the non-partisan Occupy movement and the formerly non-partisan Tea Party.

The Tea Party has been taken over by the Republican Party (the Dems would love to co-opt Occupy but they haven't succeeded yet), but there are still strains within it that remain independent and certainly the anger that originally animated it was organic; most of them are part of The 99 Percent too. The left likes to look down their noses at the Tea Party as comprising The Other, ignorant, racist rubes, but this ignores what the two movements share.

Both the Tea Party and Occupy reflect the anger of ordinary people against a corrupt system that serves the elites and not the people... or rather, at the expense of the people. The main difference lies in the response. The objective of the Tea Party is to starve government of money, since cash is what feeds the beast of corruption. Occupy's is to re-direct that money so it's used in a more humane manner. Both want to blow it up. One wants to replace it with something better; the other believes that something better is not possible so replace it with nothing.

Both really diagnosis the same problem, but offer different prescriptions.

Republicans are holding the economy hostage and thumbing their nose at the Constitution

I'm not a Democrat or a supporter of President Obama, but the Republicans' actions with regard to raising the debt ceiling is completely disgraceful, although that's probably an understatement.

To recap...

-Congressional Republicans are refusing to raise the debt ceiling to pay for expenditures Congress has already authorized as part of the regular budget. Given that 'Tea Partiers' yammer on incessantly about strict fidelity to the Constitution, perhaps they can explain how their demand that spending be approved by Congress twice squares with the 14th Amendment.

-The current federal fiscal year ends on September 30. This means that Republicans and their 'Tea Party' fringe are holding the economy hostage to their probably unconstitutional ideological posturing rather than waiting two months for budget negotiations, where such grandstanding belongs.

A piece from last year in The Washington Post sheds some more light on the widening inequality in the US.

From World War II until 1976, considered by many as the "golden years" for the U.S. economy, the top 10 percent of the population took home less than a third of the income generated by the private economy. But since then, according to Saez and Piketty, virtually all of the benefits of economic growth have gone to households that, in today's terms, earn more than $110,000 a year.

Even within that top "decile," the distribution is remarkably skewed. By 2007, the top 1 percent of households took home 23 percent of the national income after a 15-year run in which they captured more than half - yes, you read that right, more than half - of the country's economic growth. As Tim Noah noted recently in a wonderful series of articles in Slate, that's the kind of income distribution you'd associate with a banana republic or a sub-Saharan kleptocracy, not the world's oldest democracy and wealthiest market economy.

It's worth noting that not only Republicans but Democrats, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have been complicit in crafting policies to this effect.

Thoughts on yesterday’s elections

Green gubernatorial candidate Howie Hawkins got more than the 50,000 votes required to secure ballot status for the Greens for the next four years. This will allow Greens all across the state to run for all public offices much more easily and offer an alternative to the corporate Democrats and Republicans. It also established the Greens as the third party in New York state and the top non-corporate party. Thanks to all who voted for him and a progressive agenda and, by extension, for multipartyism in NYS.

Before 2009, the last time Democrats controlled all three of the governorship, Assembly and Senate was 1935. So it was entertaining to hear state Senate Republican leader Dean Skellos act like his party has had nothing to do with the mess that is NYS. The two corporate parties have run the state into the ground in that most sainted of manners: bipartisan. It's time for some multipartyism, courtesy of the Greens.

It was also amusing to hear Sen. Skellos say that we needed a GOP senate to act as a check on the corruption in Albany. A check on Joe Bruno-style corruption?

It was maddening to hear all these liberals rave about Andrew Cuomo. Do they even have a clue what he ran on? I mean, besides the empty “Change Albany” rhetoric. Guys who will act as a check on Wall St. excesses do not get oodles of campaign cash from Wall St. Guys who run on progressive agendas do not get endorsed by the far right New York Post. Remember that, more often than most people want to believe, you really do get what you vote for.

I went to vote and I saw a bunch of cameramen and photographers outside my polling place. So I was prepping myself for the red carpet walk which they obviously wanted me to do. But then this tall red-headed guy with his family comes walking out and all the paparazzi follow him instead. Some Congressman Murphy guy, apparently. I suppose that’s the modern media for you: all substance, no style.

I remember that when Tea Party candidates won primary elections, many liberals were gloating, sure that they would get slaughtered in the general election. As that famous Bard, Lord Dark Helmet of the movie Spaceballs, said, “Evil will always prevail because Good is dumb.”

I don’t think much of most Democrats but am still very disappointed at Russ Feingold losing. When the Profiles in Courage of the last 50 years is written (a slim volume to be certain), Feingold's lone vote against the Patriot Act in the face of post-9/11 hysteria will be one of the chapters.

I love how all the media outlets declared Andrew Cuomo, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand the winners only a few minutes after the polls closed despite reported vote totals of 0 for all of them. Only in the punditocracy is 0 > 0.

If the only way you can get elected is to buy office with your own fortune or to buy it with corporate America’s fortune after they buy you off, is it democracy or oligarchy?

How come no one is demanding to see Marco Rubio’s birth certificate? Or for that matter, John Boehner’s?

Those running on the purported agenda of ‘smaller government’ and ‘less spending’ won big last night. I wonder what amount of the military budget, which by itself accounts for 52% of all discretionary federal spending, these principled spending cutters will slash.

A Tea Party presidency

I am convinced that if a Tea Partier ever got elected president of the United States, he’d sound something like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: loud, hysterical, belligerent, peddler of a martyr complex, an expert manipulator and blaming everything including the bad weather on the US government.

Hobbling journalism's crutch kicked away while foreigners offer a glimpse at the Tea Party's vision

I’m no fan of the Tea Party-backed Carl Paladino but... I do take a little joy from the fact that the polls, the modern substitute for actual journalism, were spectacularly wrong.

The polls had this a neck-and-neck race between Alan Alda-look-alike Paladino and Rick Lazio in the race for the GOP nomination for governor of New York.

Paladino won by 24 points.

Though Larry Sabato, the resident political science expert used by pretty much every national media outlet, pointed out that anti-incumbent fury wasn't quite as lethal as you might think.

As he Tweeted: Final tally: 417 Sens. & Reps. renominated, 7 lost (98% won)

And speaking of the slash-and-burn approach advocated by Paladino and other self-proclaimed small government types, Canada's MacLean's magazine has a profile of what Tea Party's vision would look like. Collapsing bridges, street lights turned off, cuts to basic services... sounds like paradise!

The Tea Party’s Founding Myth

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.


Brian Mann of NCPR’s In Box blog has a great essay on the self-delusional siege mentality and martyr complex that animates the Tea Party “movement.”

The triumph of rhetoric

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.

North Country Public Radio did a news report on a northern New York meeting of fiscally conservative Republicans.

It was a seemingly ordinary piece that brought to light the complete intellectual bankruptcy of most of those (non-libertarians) who espouse fiscal conservatives.

All the interviewees preached the standard mantra of less spending, lower taxes and smaller government... all stuff that sounds great in theory. But when pushed for specifics to translate that theory into reality, it was one giant #fail, as Tweeters might say.

The self-described fiscal conservatives talked a good game until it was pointed out that the politically conservative region is heavily dependent on taxpayer money, particularly from Albany and Washington. With the Fort Drum military bases, universities, school teachers, park rangers and prison guards, NNY's economy is very heavily based on jobs in the public sector or that are funded by public money.

When challenged with this fact, the small-government types reassured their potential supporters that this reality was no impediment to their ideology. It would be no problem preserving the taxpayer spigot to NNY; they could just make other regions suffer the budget cuts instead.

One interviewee pretended to sound specific by suggesting that Medicaid spending be slashed. When asked what particular Medicaid programs she'd want to cut, she said she didn't know.

I didn't hear one thing in this piece that showed that these so-called fiscal conservatives were the tiniest bit serious. Cheap NIMBY rhetoric is good for the fantasy world of rabble rousing, not for the real world of governance.