Hey Eli! That’s a great contrast with the 45 million.

Hey egreg!

Marcus is quite possibly the least informed person ever to comment on this.
Or just plain lazy.
I am shocked.

health care is a human right!

what would humanism do?

Hey, Ruth. Bite me, you moron.

moran!

“Expanding access to health care”! Mandated insurance WON’T DO THAT!!!

Man, I remember those 50s outfits. Shades of Ozzie and Harriet.

Don’t invite her to bite. You might catch the drooling, rabid stupid.

Senoreater La Morona

All it will expand is… insurance.

Ruth the hippie puncher.

Oh, noes

I’d bet my last nickel that if a journalist went out on the street and asked 1,000 people what they understood the ‘public option’ to be, 99% of them believes that it is some sort of free government health insurance. They are going to shit when they learn it isn’t, and whatever it is won’t take effect until years from now.

How do you keep costs down without a public option? Price controls? What page is that on?

This kind of goes along with Jonah’s output about ‘Obamacare’ in the LA Times. (No, I won’t link to it. Why give him readers?)

And only 6% will be eligible for the privilege of the option.

OT, but I got a great vid. Mute the sound cuz the background music suxxxxxxxxxxx.

ma vida del local

Medicare has price controls. Public utilities have price controls. Why shouldn’t the public option have price controls? How else are you going to discipline a health care monopoly that acts like it’s Major League Baseball?

I can’t wait to see what amendments are offered up next week. That oughta be a thrill.

You misundertake me. The public option IS the price control against the Wall Street ATM’S private Health Insurance companies.

I can’t afford to go to a Rays game much less health insurance.

I think the goal might be to turn the U.S. into a giant Jonestown. Everybody not wealthy enough to pay for their own health care should sign over all their assets, drink the Flavor Aid and stop being a burden to Real (rich) Americans.

If you are right, I will drag Ruth Marcus down with us. I promise.

Ooooh that camera would have been pulp if it had stayed behind the wall for a fraction of a second longer as the he sprinted past the chair. What a stealth little thing!

meow-dorable!
run awaaaaay!

FWDiva

Wow, now I’m feeling so conflicted.

Soylent Green. Rich people shit–whatta way to go.

No job creation except in the minds of the Villagers, losing 200+ a month. No manufacturing base. Six people for every job. Wages, except for the upper class, stagnant, utility rates rising (Florida Progress wants a 23% hike next year), food prices rising. Soylent Green comes to mind.

It is a shame, I always envisioned myself as The Omega Man.

Whaddya drinkin’?

From Moses to The Omega Man. Ol’ Charlie lost it in there somewhere.

They’d have to either allow illegals to freely enter the country to work, or start doing the physical labor themselves. (Like that’s going to happen. /s)

Edward G. Robinsons last movie.

Nothing cheap and domestic. Crown.

It’s not a ripoff if you quote yourself.

Anyway, you’re right, the news has been a problem in this fight. Of course, they’re either owned by or partly dependent on the finance industry.

It’s not a ripoff if you quote yourself.

Anyway, you’re right, the news has been a problem in this fight. Of course, they’re either owned by or partly dependent on the finance industry.

They’d have to either allow illegals to freely enter the country to work

So that at least wouldn’t change.

Got a server error and couldn’t get back on for a few minutes. Little hiccup, I s’pose.

*sliding tumbler full down bar*

One is left to wonder why all these months of reform scrimmage of American healthcare were not more narrowly focused on solution(s) for bottom (or first?) 50 to 80 or 100 million Americans who either have no healthcare coverage or poor healthcare coverage or highly unbalanced exposure to catastrophic involuntary healthcare expense(s).

This is the group that is most abused/shoved around by current American for profit based healthcare regime. The group that should have had a real and workable solution put in place and ready to go no later than Spring of 2010. Expansion of current Medicare Plan could have been made to get started and then over next 3-5 years reset/tune/modify it as required.

What is cruel with this fumbled so called American healthcare reform is how Obama WH fouled out on basic empathy for this being done and done well.

What is cruel is how this reform was hijacked by the for profit players of current American healthcare regime to divert attention from this not served or poorly served bottom 45 – 65 million Americans in Congress to serve their entrenched and skewed economic interests. These healthcare players are supposedly agents of compassion or caring in American healthcare — are they not?

At this late point the Ds have dropped the ball several times too many as is and hopefully this bastardized reform will go down in defeat. Politics can be done better than this by better politicians. Getting the better politicians can happen during 2010 elections. This fake reform shows little in way of human compassion or quality of better mercy. It should go down in defeat and those who pushed this debacle should suffer for having done so. Civilizations should be graded on the quality of life for the poor and not advantaged. WashingtonDC gets a D- at best for this so called reform of American healthcare. Very likely deserves a F.

Does anyone have an analysis of what of the Senate bill could be handled under reconciliation. From what I’ve seen of it a lot could be done but I’m not an expert on that.

Marcus is an imbecile as noted and further proof is that she writes for the WaPo. She nevertheless does represent a point of view which is an exact parallel to the bailout of the Banks and to how wrongheaded that approach was as well.

Banks which caused the economic meltdown by indebting themselves with worthless derivatives were given enormous amount of public money in an effort to solve the problem with virtually nothing asked in return. And they continue to act as before as the problemm grows worse.

So too, insurers that have ripped off enrollees with exhorbitant premiums and copays and which are a major cause of the enormous cost of health care are now to be given more enrollees and in return can continue to function as before with no requirement that they rein in costs.

In each case these morons are perfectly convinced that continuing to rely on the culprits of the problem and to give them public money for their gain is perfectly reasonable. They claim to not see what all the fuss is about, even as the result will be a worsening of the problem.

It is especially effective to highlight Marcus as a proponent of this view since being such an idiot it lends more support to asinine nature of the view itself.

quiet applause from the snark impaired

But then those wealthy people would actually have to do their own cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping! Oh the horror! [/s]

I couldn’t even log in ….

Have you tried Congress Matters?

Doing it right is the moral imperative, the public option needs to be a strong one and there are other problems, like coddling Big Pharma.

Eli, the masses are under siege.

It’s good that more and more are recognizing this, due to YOUR efforts, and FDL, and so many more in the prog/lib beingosphere.

Hell, even moderates and centrists are beginning to figure it out, thanks to the work of those like you.

Thanks.

“Forcing people to buy shitty insurance they can’t afford doesn’t sound like much of a moral imperative to me…”

Bingo! Leverage economic servitude to health insurance corporations, now coerced under fear of tax penalty is outrageous. It is a forced “”association”" imposed on individuals by government with….. corporations? The very health insurance corporations which exercise discrimination under the color of law in denying access to healthcare as slave owners denied Americans protection of law.

What was the fist thing the slave owner said to the abolitionist who proposed emancipation for the slaves? The answer: “We can’t free the slaves, it would cost to much!” What was the true cost?

Americans need the protection of law from corporations who pick at the carcasses of the dead like vultures and deprive people of property life and liberty as Dred Scott was denied protection of law.

What we are witnessing is the protection of corporations under the facade of protecting Americans. A premium, a tax to be paid on “Life,” itself! A corporate wet dream! The very notion that a health insurance mandate under fear of tax penalty would be imposed immediately upon Americans prior to the protections allegedly afforded Americans by restricting the behavior of health insurers to discriminate, three or four years down the road, is ludicrous and asinine. Americans need access to affordable healthcare. America does not need health insurers discriminating like slave owners and segregationist!

More evidence that the MSM is circling the drain. The Washington Post is closing its last three bureaus outside of Washington, i.e. in Chicago, Washington, and LA.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/business/media/25post.html?_r=1&hp

I guess their theory is that they can just make up whatever they need to. I mean that’s what they do now. So why not do it all from Washington?

Americans have lost the ability to say “there but for the grace of God, go I” – it’s a sobering thought and no one can stand to think about it.

Goal or not, that’s where it’s headed.

Only the blowback won’t be dead people from tainted kool aid.

The blowback is gonna be epic.

I think, with about 20 years or so left in MY lifetime, I might just see that blowback.

Not saying it will benefit me or mine.

But it’s sure gonna change shit as we know it and have known it for our lifetimes when it comes.

*G*

Progressives want to help the uninsured, insurance companies want to milk them. And the Ruth Marcuses of the world can’t tell the difference

.

Neither can Rahm Emanuel or Barack Fucking Obama.

Hmmm, an echo to #29.

Unemployment in CA now up to 16%, more in Sacto.

Likely 25% or more if long term and chronic unemployed over past 4 years factored in.

Populous is restless, I’m tellin ya . . . real restless.

Sad but by all appearances true.

Dude, be brave, go for the Louis XIII!!!!

In some FINE crystal snifterware, of course.

*G*

late night upstairs

Lazy and least informed. They go hand in hand.

The aristocracy in the U.S. sees little reason to rock the boat. Marcus is a modern day Marie Antoinette. Things didn’t end well for Marie.

American will one day reap the whirlwind and it’s not going to be pretty.

How come there’s no talk of moral imperative when 4 stinking DINOs insist on bringing down HCR with a public option. (rhetorical question)

Thank you thank you thank you! The bait-and-switch that has substituted coverage for care has been driving me crazy.

Ruth Marcus is obviously a Beltway propagandist. She sounds a few liberal notes now and then, but she’s all about immunity for elite criminals.

Glenn Greenwald blew her cover last December (12/20/2009):

Just contemplate how stupid and irrational everyone would think a person was being if they wrote an article advancing this argument:

Much more important than punishing murderers or getting caught up in protracted disputes about prior murders is the need to prevent murders from occurring in the future. Therefore, we ought to abandon our quest to impose punishments on people who get caught having murdered someone. To expend resources trying to punish murderers is to squander vital resources on the past, to waste energies that could instead be more productively devoted to preventing future murders.

There are too many important challenges we face to waste time bogged down litigating past murders. Let’s allow murderers to go unpunished so that we can move beyond the past and concentrate instead on the more important priority of minimizing the number of murders in the future.

The argument, of course, is self-refuting. If we adopt a policy of not punishing murderers, we will obviously not be preventing future murders. We will be doing the opposite: ensuring and even encouraging a massive increase in murders, since people will know that they are now free to do it with impunity. . . . .

The evidence demonstrating that this is an exact analogy to what Marcus is advocating, an exact analogy to what we’ve generally been doing with political leaders and are doing now, is equally self-evident. A central observation in Marcus’ column is that the controversies that have now arisen over Bush lawbreaking in the areas of interrogation and surveillance are not new. As she points out, these are the very same controversies that we’ve been confronting for decades.

That’s exactly right. The same controversies over government lawbreaking arise over and over. And why is that? Because our political leaders keep breaking the law — chronically and deliberately. And why do they keep doing that? Because there is no deterrent against it.
[Emphasis added.] If criminal penalties are removed, what will deter future lawbreaking by political officials?

“Making sure it never happens again” is a myth, a very comforting wool blanket to pull over the eyes of the people.

As a poet and grad student of psychology, let me ask: Which has more power to move electorates: facts or myths? Even a cursory look back at the jacking of the health CARE reform debate answers that: Facts don’t move electorates; myths do.

This is absolutely crucial: ‘Myth’ is not synonymous with ‘lie;’ a myth is a metaphorical image of the composition and functioning of the cosmos that shapes the world in which we are presently enacting this wholly absurd theater of life.

National myths deliver us as a people into our Promised or Waste Land, exactly as we load them with our intentions: passengers into life boats, or kittens into burlap sacks?

Our myths, our shared narratives, are as indispensable as a mother’s womb.

Benign or malign, either way we’re getting taken for a ride. As Americans, we need to direct our own passage, but we aren’t educated and socialized to be self-sovereign citizens.

Instead, we’re taught to be loyal subjects, fans, of a political master of a mechanical universe; to shut up and do as we’re told; to demonstrate our loyalty by our fervor when presented with patriotic symbols.

In short, we’re treated like voting-machines on two legs, oh so easily hacked, and propagandists like Ruth Marcus are busily pushing our hot buttons.

Couple that myth with the myth that “the Big Man Upstairs Always Knows Best,” and there you have it. We can’t investigate the Big Men Upstairs because they were acting on orders from the Biggest Man Upstairs. That’s the power of myth, to defy logic and rationality, ie, that’s what makes us human beings, not machines.

We hold our beliefs closer to our hearts than facts. Analyzing irrational humans as if we were mechanisms leads to all kinds of spurious “anomalies” like this.

That’s why I so appreciate the crucial work done by emptywheel and FDL in general. Establishing our most accurate shared narrative is absolutely vital to our personal and national health. I say again: facts don’t move electorates anything like myths do. So what power on earth can overcome the power of myth?

The power of truth. Only the truth will set us free from our myth-jacking masters. All we want is the truth, Ruth, just give us some truth!