The Inmates are Running the Asylum

They came from all over the country. From every middlesex village and farm. In terms of diversity, they ran the gamut from pink to beige. They joined together with a single purpose and raised their patriotic voices in a single message; stop the House healthcare reform bill! And taxes are too high. And Glenn Beck is awesome. And Barack Obama is black.

These are the wingnuts, the teabaggers, the FOX-addled and the Limbaugh-confused. They're motivated, poorly informed, and -- let's face it -- pretty gullible. They're also dedicated to the cause -- whatever that might be. If you take a look at the signs they carried, what the cause was was a little unclear; no to healthcare reform, Obama's a commie, and hell no you can't take my guns. Shrill, angry, and a lot less than focused, they descended on on the Capitol to be shrill, angry, and a lot less than focused.

This was the sort of crowd you'd expect to answer a call put out by Rep. Michele Bachmann, who even fellow Republicans call crazy behind her back. It was the lunatics, the cranks, the people who hang on Glenn Beck's every word. And it has become the soul of the Republican Party.





This is something new for the GOP. The base used to be about 90% religious right, who were surprisingly content with empty promises of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and overturning Roe v. Wade. The right wing evangelical movement never seemed to notice that the GOP didn't actually get around to addressing their issues, focusing instead on serving the wealthy. But the teabaggers are different. They expect results. And, considering the relatively fact-free atmosphere that follows them everywhere they go, that's a little tough to deliver on. For example, how do you stop Obama from taking everyone's guns away, when he's so obviously not taking anyone's guns away? You can see the problem. The wingnuts want issues addressed that don't actually exist, because they believe all the BS that spills out of talk radio and FOX News. This is why you get incoherent and ignorant arguments from teabaggers, such as "Barack Obama's a Marxist, like Hitler." All they ever listen to or read is propaganda -- so they have no idea what the hell is really going on -- and their knowledge of history is practically nonexistent. When someone believes that fascism, communism, and socialism are all indistinguishable, you're not dealing with some who has a firm grasp on the facts. You can't make these people happy by addressing their issues, for the same reason that you can't fight the dragon that lives under the Lincoln Memorial.

This leaves Republicans in a pretty crappy place. They empowered these people over the summer, by sending them off to Democratic townhall meetings to have tantrums and shriek out their insane and totally unfounded fears. The party can't afford to be identified with these people, but they can't afford to lose them either. And the wingnuts demand attention, they've become used to it. As a result, the GOP is stuck doing a highwire act, walking a razor-thin line between not turning the cranks off and not being part of the angry mob (or, at least, not being seen as part of it) themselves.

"Early this morning The Politico got hold of a Republican Study Committee email asking staffers to send their members to the event but also to avoid words like 'rally' and 'protest' in favor of 'press conference' or 'press event,'" Josh Marshall wrote yesterday. "Clearly, there was an effort to sanitize the event and get away from Bachmann's high-strung rhetoric about a 'last stand' against health care reform. So on the one hand the House Republicans wanted to take over the event. But they also felt the need to get out in front of it, to be in front of the crowd. It was a perfect, real-time illustration of the current struggle within the GOP, with the party establishment trying to harness but also control and not be overrun by the grassroots mobilization on the right."

That'll be a good trick. For the wingnuts, the loss of the election is New York's 23rd congressional district was a victory. Sure, they wound up with a Democrat in a district that hasn't elected one in over one hundred years. That's not the point. The point was that they knocked out a Republican they deemed insufficiently crazy. They even managed to convince themselves that the establishment candidate they forced out of the race, Dede Scozzafava, was funded by ACORN and, like Barack Obama himself, secretly a "radical leftist." They don't care that a Democrat won the seat -- not much, anyway -- all they care about is the fact that the candidate they convinced themselves to hate didn't win. And that's a victory -- one they seem more than willing to repeat.

So you can see the problem Republicans face with these people; 1) they're not very rational, 2) they're not very smart, 3) they don't give a damn about the Republican party, and 4) they're the Republican base.

Good luck with that, guys.

-Wisco


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Democrats Suck and Republicans Suck More... For Now

Apparently, Republicans and Democrats are in some sort of contest to see who's worse at finding their own asses in the dark with both hands and a flashlight. While Democrats continue to prove that they couldn't organize a backyard barbecue, Republicans are proving they couldn't write up a grocery list. The word of the day is "Incompetence" with a capital "I." On healthcare reform, we now have House and Senate bills that were originally deadlined in August possibly being pushed back to next year. And, if you're really in the mood to bang your head against your keyboard, there's this headline in the New York Times to consider -- "Democrats to Use Election to Push Agenda in Congress."

Hey, that's a pretty good idea. But you know when that would've been an even better idea? Maybe last year, when Obama and Dems were both insanely popular. Way to get right on top of that, guys.

Blaming election setbacks on a drop in voter enthusiasm, Congressional Democrats said Wednesday that losses in governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey — and a striking House win in New York — should give new urgency to their legislative agenda, including a sweeping health care overhaul.

As they assessed the results, Democratic lawmakers and party strategists said their judgment was that voters remained very uneasy about the economy and did not see Democrats producing on the health, energy and national security changes they promised when voters swept them to power only a year ago.

Both of the congressional seats Democrats gained Tuesday night were gained by candidates who not only supported healthcare reform, but the public option. Meanwhile, one of the dems who lost gubernatorial races that night -- Creigh Deeds of Virginia -- said he'd consider opting out of the public option if it came to that. In other words, the Blue Dog position was the big loser on Tuesday and the rest of the party wants to use the results to get the Blue Dogs off the dime. In races where healthcare reform and the public option had been brought up as an issue, healthcare reform and the public option won. This isn't extremely surprising, considering that poll after poll shows the public option is popular with voters.





But if Democrats can't get it together, they're partially saved by being able to rely on a Republican Party that's incoherent, leaderless, and motivated only to oppose. While Democrats are about a year late on implementing their big "use the elections" strategy, Republicans are busy screwing up their own work. You might remember that Republicans finally released their big healthcare reform alternative and -- get ready to be surprised -- it turns out it sucks.

Capitol Briefing, Washington Post:

The long-awaited Republican entry in the health care debate received its assessment late Wednesday from congressional budget analysts, who concluded that the proposal would barely dent the ranks of the uninsured.

The measure would cover only 3 million additional people at a cost of $60 billion through 2019, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It would leave more than 52 million Americans uninsured a decade from now.

Worse -- if possible -- it doesn't do anything about the preexisting conditions dodge that insurers have abused and it doesn't reduce the deficit as much as Democratic plans and it won't reduce costs by any more than 3% for 80% of consumers. And even then, that measly 3% wouldn't kick in until 2016.

"The GOP bill does require less new government spending, but that's what you get when you don't insure anybody," writes Brian Beutler for Talking Points Memo. "And though it does reduce the deficit, it does so by billions less than the Democrats' bill does."

Let's consider the timeline here; we first got a glimpse of a Republican alternative in March and it became an actual promise in June. And, after the better part of a year, we get this big pile of nothing. Kind of makes you glad they didn't rush it, doesn't it? It'd probably require that people with preexisting conditions be shot if they hadn't -- that's one of the few ways I can think of that it could possibly be worse. Basically, the House GOP plan is what we've got, with minor and inconsequential tweaks. "Tonight CBO confirmed that the Republicans' only solution for health reform is to preserve the status quo," said Democratic Rep. George Miller in a statement. On the bright side, you couldn't compromise in any way that wouldn't improve it.

Polling shows that voters believe Republicans are winning this "who sucks more?" game the GOP and dems are playing, but that's not to say that Democrats are giving it a damned good try. With just a tiny bit more effort, Democrats could take the lead here and prove themselves even more incompetent than their opposition.

The bad news is that it looks like they're making that effort.

-Wisco


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The Party Purge That Wasn't

I've never given much credit to "signs." If you read my roundups, you know I haven't been taking the off-year elections that took place last night all that seriously. In my opinion, a big part of all this "referendum on Obama" talk has been an effort by the media to get you to care about races you otherwise wouldn't. If you don't live there, when was the last time you actually cared who was the governor of Virginia or New Jersey? By the end of the night, some were saying that electing a Republic Mayor in Stamford, Connecticut was a sign of a pro-Republican "earthquake." You know the old saying, "As goes control of the Stamford Streets Department, so goes the nation." Clearly, we're looking at a failed presidency.

FiveThirtyEight.com has the final score; New Jersey and Virginia governorships go red, Republicans take no seats in Congress. Were those races a referenda on Obama? That depends on who you ask; if it's some random talking head on cable news, they were totally referenda on the president. But if you ask the voters, they'll tell you no.

CBS News:

[M]ajorities of voters in both states (56 percent in Virginia and 60 percent in New Jersey) said President Obama was not a factor in their vote today. Those who said Mr. Obama was a factor in New Jersey divided as to whether their vote was a vote for the president (19 percent) or against him (19 percent). In Virginia, slightly fewer voters said their vote was for Mr. Obama (17 percent) than against him (24 percent).

So, by looking at races in which clear majorities of voters say they weren't thinking about the president, we're supposed to be able to glean the voters opinion of the president. And two states become representative of everyone. Sure, I'll buy that -- right after I finish pounding holes in my skull with this claw hammer.

In the only real bad national news last night, Maine rejected marriage equality. Had they passed the measure -- and there was a good chance they would -- it would've been the first time that a state's voters chose same sex marriage. Instead, Mainers joined the 30 other states that have made the same bad choice. We've got to stop putting people's rights up to a majority vote. It's just plain wrong.





Still if you're looking for good news (and the closest thing to an electoral sign), point your eyes in the direction of New York's 23rd congressional district. This was the race that the teabaggers put all their chips on, driving out the Republican candidate and putting a third-party candidate in her place. I risk pointing out omens in a self-serving way here, but if the teabaggers' candidate, Doug Hoffman of the Conservative Party, had won, it wouldn't have meant a whole lot. But he didn't. And that means a whole lot.

See, NY-23 is a red district in the strongest sense of the term. No Democrat has been elected there for over one hundred years. The wingnuts got their hooks in that district and deemed the establishment GOP candidate insufficiently crazy. So Dede Scozzafava was out. Sarah Palin horned in, other teabaggers and assorted wingnuts threw their support to Hoffman, and the farther right of the Republican Party decided to stage a mini-purge. Scozzafava was a RINO and that meant she had to go. Nevermind that she's virtually identical to current GOP hero Joe Lieberman -- conservative, but pro-choice -- Joe's a great American and Dede was a commie. She had to go.

Once the smoke had cleared, the teabaggers managed to screw up what should have been a gimme. Some still hold out hope that absentee ballots will put Hoffman in (despite the fact that he's conceded), but that's unrealistic: Hoffman would have to take absentees over the Democrat Bill Owens at a rate of 4:1. And those ballots were all cast when Scozzafava was still in the race. It's all over but the denial.

So what's the lesson here? Don't go on ideological purges when your party's already small. But wingnuts don't do that lesson-learning stuff and they've already got their eyes on moderates like Florida's Charlie Crist. Having failed spectacularly in NY-23, they plan to do the whole thing all over again. As another old saying goes, "If at first you don't succeed, try again. Fail better."

Am I happy about the outcome in NY-23? I suppose. It's not much of a victory really. Jim Owen is the sort of Democrat you'd expect from a conservative district. If I could swap, I'd take marriage equality in Maine and give the teabaggers one seat out of 435 -- it's hard to see how that one seat makes much difference either way. But do I feel a little schadenfreude at seeing wingnuts walk away with a self-inflicted shiner? You bet. If this is going to be an ongoing strategy, Democrats should be sending thank you notes.

-Wisco


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A Strategy of Lies

There's something you should know about the Republican party; they lie. Somewhere along the line (let's say, the Bush administration), it became the worst thing in the world to point this out. You can use the word "misled," you can say someone "fudged," you can use almost any synonym you like, but you can't call a Republican a liar. I suppose it's supposed to be incivil and I'd be inclined to agree in cases where the charge is itself a lie, but calling a lie a lie is just a statement of fact. If Republicans find being called liars offensive, they could always take the drastic step of knocking off all the lying. It seems to me this is the easiest remedy to the problem, but it's also the least likely one to happen.

Not that I'm saying that Democrats are truth-machines either. If you drop a comment after this post pointing that out, I'll take that as proof you didn't even read this to the second paragraph. All politicians lie, but Republicans make it look easy and run to that strategy like it's the only tool in their toolbox. I think that if you looked at history, you'd see that, while Democrats tend to lie in defense of themselves ("I did not have sex with that woman"), Republicans tend to lie to attack other people.

What gets me most about all of this is just how shameless GOP lying is. Republicans will drop a lie, get called on it, and keep telling it. It doesn't make any difference that this has been proved wrong, what matters is that the lie has been focus-grouped and market-tested and the data shows it works. For example, House minority leader John Boehner recently put out "10 Facts Every American Should Know About Speaker Pelosi's 1,990-Page Gov't Takeover of Health Care." It included this little morsel of BS:

MASSIVE CUTS TO MEDICARE BENEFITS FOR SENIORS. Despite grave warnings from CBO, FactCheck.org, and the independent Lewin Group that cuts to Medicare of the magnitude included in Speaker Pelosi’s bill would have a negative impact on seniors’ benefits and choices, Speaker Pelosi’s health care bill stays the course and cuts Medicare by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Two problems here; one, the Lewin Group study has been widely debunked, yet the GOP keeps going back to that same well. The group is "independent" in the same way that a wad of chewed gum you find under a movie seat is a pearl. According to the PR watchdog site SourceWatch, Lewin Group is "wholly owned by the health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group." The site says, "The Lewin Group has a reputation as the 'go to' firm for beleaguered organizations in need of reports and research to support controversial positions and issues." Like a professional witness, Lewin Group reaches the conclusions they're paid to reach.





Second, FactCheck.org calls Boehner's memo "a partisan document containing misleading characterizations of the bill" and calls BS on the House GOP leader.

We never have said that seniors would suffer "massive cuts to Medicare benefits" under the pending House or Senate overhaul bills, and in fact have done our best to debunk claims to that effect. The only seniors who might see cuts are those enrolled in Medicare Advantage, about 22 percent of the Medicare population. Currently, many of those seniors receive a bit more in benefits than regular Medicare fee-for-service patients – perhaps a gym membership, a pair of eyeglasses, a reduced premium. But, as we’ve written, Medicare pays the private companies that administer Medicare Advantage about 14 percent more per beneficiary than it does for the rest of Medicare beneficiaries, who wind up subsidizing the program, according to government analysts.

And here's where things get fun -- and by "fun," I mean shameless. After FactCheck.org called the GOP out on their lie, the official stance of the Republican party is to stand by it. "We asked Boehner’s office to take our name out of the document, but spokesman Michael Steel said: 'I’m not inclined to do so,'" and invited us to send an e-mail further making our case," FactCheck.org reports. "We are doing so."

Caught in a lie, the Republican Party refuses to correct the record and, as a result, continues to tell it. Check the page yourself, the claim is still there.

You can't call this anything other than a blatant lie. I'm sure Republican apologists would tell you that this is merely a difference of opinion, but the difference lies in what FactCheck.org actually said. Seems to me that they ought to be the experts on that subject, not the GOP. Especially when we can go back and check.

This tendency to lie is cropping up again in Republican criticism of the economic stimulus:

Associated Press:

Beware the math. Some Republican lawmakers critical of President Barack Obama's stimulus package are using grade-school arithmetic to size up costs and consequences of all that spending. The math is satisfyingly simple but highly misleading.

It goes like this: Divide the stimulus money spent so far by the estimated number of jobs saved or created.

You see the problem here, right? If stimulus money is spent to build a school, and the school costs X, then you're dividing the cost of labor and the school -- which will be there long after the construction stops, providing other jobs and lasting value -- and saying that the jobs provided by the school came at an insanely inflated cost. This calculation would only be honest if the construction workers, architects, etc., created all the building materials, tools, and machinery themselves, built the school, then knocked it down when they were finished and went home to count all their stimulus money.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you haven't noticed that happening anywhere in your neighborhood. X plus labor divided by laborers gives you a meaningless, nonsense number. But it's a focus-group tested number, a lie put to rigorous scientific testing to see how it holds up, and it turns out that it's probably pretty effective. So, despite having been called out as a lie by AP, don't expect Republicans to stop telling it.

So that's it in a nutshell; Republicans lie. If they tell you the sun came up this morning, look out the window and check. Their lies are more than deliberate; their lies are tweaked and tested as thoroughly as a marketing campaign for a new brand of toothpaste.

And how good can an argument for or against something be when it's all a lie?

-Wisco


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Republicans Promise a Healthcare Reform Bill... Again

Stop the presses! Republicans have an alternate healthcare reform plan... Well, maybe "have" is the wrong word. They don't actually have a plan, but they're gonna -- you just wait and see.

Agence France-Presse:

A leading Republican Congressman said Sunday that his party would present by the end of the week its own plan for health care reform, one of President Barack Obama's top domestic priorities.

House Minority leader John Boehner spoke after Obama's top allies on Thursday unveiled sweeping compromise legislation, including a government-backed insurance plan to compete with private firms.

"By the end of this week, people will be able to look at one proposal" that provides transparent cost figures and clearly states the number of people to be covered, Boehner told CNN.

"Boehner declined to give details on the Republican proposal," AFP reports, "but said it would not increase taxes, cut existing government programs for the poor and elderly, or have 'mandates on individuals or businesses.'"

Republicans have a history of being sketchy on the details. In March, Republicans released an "alternative budget" that didn't actually include any numbers. Math is hard, you see, and it's much easier just to say you've got a budget that will reduce the deficit while cutting taxes than it is to actually reduce the deficit while cutting taxes. So the GOP just declared it so.

It was in this "budget" that we got our first glimpse of the Republican Healthcare plan:



"It's like someone showed them a flowchart," wrote Ezra Klein. "Once. And only for a few seconds. And refused to explain it." Not surprisingly, this whole numberless budget idea didn't go over very well. The GOP caught a lot of flack for trying to pull one over on the public -- rightly. It's insulting that this is just how stupid they believe everyone is.





Not having learned their lesson from the numberless budget, Republicans then released an equally foggy healthcare reform alternative in June.

ABC News:

House Republicans unveiled an outline of their healthcare reform plan at a Capitol Hill news conference Wednesday.

The broad-stroke plan, given to reporters as a three-and-a-half page summary, lacked details or a cost estimate.

The Republicans promised those would come later.

Once again, no numbers, no hard data. Boehner didn't so much release a healthcare reform plan as he did a to-do list. They would have a detailed healthcare reform plan later -- absolutely, Scout's Honor."I will guarantee you we will bring you a bill that costs far less, far less than the Democrats and will provide better results for the American people," promised Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), the chairman of the House GOP's Healthcare Solutions Working Group.

But a Republican "guarantee" wasn't worth much. By July, that offer was pulled. "Late Wednesday, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), chairman of the House GOP Health Care Solutions Group, said House Republicans would not release a health care reform alternative," wrote Steve Benen. "Despite several weeks of promises about a superior plan, Blunt said the minority party's focus was on attacking the Democratic plan, and there was no need to 'confuse the focus' or 'divert attention.'"

24 hours after Blunt's statement, the promise of a GOP alternative was back. "We're continuing to put the final touches on our bill as the Democrats are continuing to put the finishing touches on their bill," John Boehner said. Months later, that bill they were just polishing up still isn't finished. But it will be, don't you worry. It'll be out this week and this time for sure.

I don't have many doubts that this time it's for real. The GOP has been written off in the healthcare debate and they aren't under any real pressure anymore to produce anything -- that's what got them off the dime the last few times. There's no panic to poduce a bill, so there's no reason to pretend they've got one. Still, you never know. No one ever went broke betting that Republican leadership would be hamhanded and irrational.

But the bill won't be much to write home about. The two ideas Republicans have managed to come up with so far are both bad. One is allowing insurance companies to compete across state lines, which sounds good until you think about it. Credit card companies do this and, as a result, the industry is based in the states with the fewest regulations and the weakest consumer protection laws. In reality, this would be a stealth deregulation of the health insurance industry -- something few voter would think would be a good idea right now.

Another is tort reform. But limiting lawsuits wouldn't actually reduce costs. "According to the actuarial consulting firm Towers Perrin, medical malpractice tort costs were $30.4 billion in 2007, the last year for which data are available. We have a more than a $2 trillion health care system," explains Tom Baker, a professor of law and health sciences at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. "That puts litigation costs and malpractice insurance at 1 to 1.5 percent of total medical costs. That’s a rounding error. Liability isn’t even the tail on the cost dog. It’s the hair on the end of the tail." Wow, one percent. Now you can finally afford that bubblegum you've had your eye on. All tort reform really is is an attack on trial lawyers, most of whom support Democrats. It's got nothing to do with healthcare reform.

The only real question is whether Republicans are going to offer a bad bill or -- still not learning from their mistakes -- a numberless joke that doesn't even qualify as a broad outline. My money's on "bad bill," but you really never know.

-Wisco


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