Monthly Archive for August, 2009

FactCheck.org has been really busy poring through conservative claims about the house health care bill, particularly a chain email claiming to summarize the bill:

The chain e-mail purports to give “a few highlights” from the first half of the bill, but the list of 48 assertions is filled with falsehoods, exaggerations and misinterpretations. We examined each of the e-mail’s claims, finding 26 of them to be false and 18 to be misleading, only partly true or half true. Only four are accurate.

Conservatives keep coming back to the same old bogeymen, even when they don’t make sense:

[The chain email] claims that a section about “Community-based Home Medical Services” means “more payoffs for ACORN.” ACORN does not provide medical home services. The e-mail interprets any reference to the word “community” to be some kind of payoff for ACORN. That’s nonsense.

How are we supposed to have a discussion about health care when one side is so completely unhinged? I think it’s important to have a debate, but there’s really no way to do that when we can’t even agree on basic facts.

Read FactCheck.org’s entire analysis here.

Senator Edward Kennedy passed away last night at the age of 77. Kennedy was part of a dying breed — a Senator with strong partisan beliefs, but who nevertheless was renowned for his willingness to work with members of other parties to craft bipartisan compromises. What motivated him to work so closely, so often, with people who so strongly disagreed with him? Ultimately, his commitment was to improve the lives of the American people.

Just his weekend, in fact, two Republican Senators were bemoaning Kennedy’s absence during the health reform debate:

Two Republican Senators said that Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) — who has been absent from the Senate for most of the year fighting brain cancer — was sorely missed during the health care debate. Both believe he could lead the way to a bipartisan bill.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on This Week: “No person in that institution is indispensable, but Ted Kennedy comes as close to being indispensable as any individual I’ve ever known in the Senate, because he had a unique way of sitting down with the parties at a table and making the right concessions, which really are the essence of successful negotiations. So it’s huge that he’s absent, not only because of my personal affection for him, but because I think that health care reform might be in a very different place today.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) on Meet the Press: “Well, Sen. Kennedy would, first thing he would have done, would have been call me and say, ‘Let’s work this out.’ And we would have worked it out so that the best of both worlds would work.”

To me, this says a lot. McCain and Hatch’s positions on health care are worlds away from Kennedy’s, but they know from experience that Kennedy would have been able to find a middle ground that left all parties satisfied. Whether it was on health care, education, or social issues, Kennedy was the guy who brought his colleagues to the table to get it done. He leaves behind a tremendous legacy.

MATT ADDS: I had the opportunity to work in the Senate for a term while I was in undergrad; I worked for Senator Mark Dayton.  As part of the internship, we were encouraged to go to committee hearings to see how the real work gets done.  For whatever reason, and I can’t remember why, I attended the committee mark-up meeting for the infamous Bankruptcy Bill.  Let me say first, this was (and is) a disgraceful bill that exploits the poor, the down-trodden, and the unfortunate in order to extract more dollars for credit card companies.  Ted Kennedy knew this.

I had never seen him “in action” before, but I watched Senator Kennedy futilely throw amendment after amendment at the bill (for example, an amendment excluding individuals who went bankrupt due to a medical emergency — shot down) as the committee’s Republican majority sighed at the spectacle.  I can’t explain how deeply his fight touched me.  For the first time I knew that the people had a voice in the Senate, and that voice was Ted Kennedy.

Let us hope that his voice lives on in others, because we need it now more than ever.

It’s been a whole week since Democrats started talking about going it alone on health reform, and they haven’t backpedaled yet. In fact, led by Chuck Schumer, they seem to be seriously considering using procedures such as budget reconciliation to pass a health reform bill without Republican votes. Really, they’ve been left with no choice, since it’s clear that the Republicans will vote against absolutely any bill the Democrats put forward. Doing nothing isn’t an option, even if the GOP would like to present it as one.

Given the Democrats’ history, I’m pleasantly surprised to see them actually standing up for themselves and for meaningful health reform. From early on in the health reform debate, their first impulse has been to capitulate to the Republicans. Rather than sticking to their principles, they started out with a compromise, only to be forced into weakening the compromise even further by Republican “negotiators” who have clearly shown they are not interested in negotiating at all.

For a long time, the Republican strategy appeared to work. They steadfastly refused to support any health reform whatsoever, even going so far as to admit that they would vote against a bill no matter what provisions it contained. The Democrats, desperately trying to produce a bipartisan bill without the help of the other party, continued to weaken their bill more and more, until it appeared they might actually pass the useless health co-op plan.

Now, they’re finally standing up for themselves and for the American people by refusing to let Republicans hold the bill hostage. It’s unlikely that anything the Democrats could do would convince Republicans to actually participate in crafting health reform legislation, let alone voting for it. For once, the Democrats have finally realized the political reality and committed to achieving real reform despite Republican obstruction. Let’s hope their resolve doesn’t weaken.

Krugman absolutely nails it today.  The whole article is really worth reading in it’s entirety, but here are a couple snippets to whet your appetite:

Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.

…

There’s a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. “We know now that it is bad economics.” And last year we learned that lesson all over again.