Progressives (Liberals)

‘What she’s selling is bitter division’: Tucker Carlson suggests Stacey Abrams wants to ‘overthrow’ white men

Yeah. It's a sadness for me that so many folks are unprepared to confront the complexities of such an endeavor. Passion is a grand thing except where it is melded with unrealistic certainties.

I was recently listening to an interview with David Milch. He said that reason is about 17th on the list of human attributes and that he'd be quite content if it was ranked much lower.

The architects of Obamacare, prominently including profs. Jonathan Gruber and Ezekiel Emanuel turned out to be arrogant idiots with a rather low regard for the intelligence and actual interests of the people whose freedom they were planning to replace with the sophomoric pile of unworkable stupidities known as Obamacare. The last thing we need is efforts to restore and "improve " it.

Judging by exit polls, the single most effective midterm issue for Democrats was health care — in particular, the argument, made by Democratic candidates across the country, that Republicans were out to eliminate the Affordable Care Act’s regulations governing pre-existing conditions.

So when a Texas judge ruled in December that the entirety of the health law was unconstitutional, he ensured that this issue, and this argument, would remain front and center heading into the 2020 election.

Legally speaking, the ruling is weak, and the case may be tossed in the appeals process. But if it travels all the way to the Supreme Court, it would effectively guarantee that health care remains politically potent throughout the presidential campaign. You can expect the Democrats’ cast-of-thousands presidential field to all swear to protect Obamacare’s pre-existing conditions rules — and President Trump to demonstrate his usual command of the finer points of health care policy in response.

The ruling thus represents a challenge for Republicans — but also an opportunity. At least in theory, it could force the party to finally figure out, or at least start figuring out, exactly what it stands for when it comes to health care policy.

The empty mantra of “repeal and replace” — which was all but buried by the midterms — was never a stand-in for an actual shared vision for the governance of health care in the United States. At the moment, the party seems confused about what, exactly, American health care policy should look like.

That confusion extends beyond Obamacare to Medicare (which President Trump has ruled off limits) and Medicaid (which the repeal bills tried and failed to restructure), as well as to the tax deduction for employer-sponsored insurance around which health care policy has contorted for so many decades.

It’s not that there’s a shortage of ideas: Conservative think tanks have health policy white papers to spare, and have for years. All the way back in 2012, for example, you could find the right-of-center health policy scholars James Capretta and Robert E. Moffit outlining principles for an Obamacare replacement in the journal National Affairs. Their plan called for limiting the tax break employers get for offering health coverage, converting existing public coverage programs to premium support (essentially a subsidy) while promoting competition among private plans, protecting people who maintain continuous coverage from spikes in premiums, and allowing states more flexibility to opt in and out of national health care initiatives.

The Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon has long called for the creation of large Health Savings Accounts that would dramatically increase the amount of money individuals could put into tax-free accounts for medical expenses, including health insurance, potentially giving millions of people an optional exit from employer-sponsored insurance.

What connects these ideas is that they are not merely bullet-pointed lists of policy tweaks; they are frameworks for thinking more broadly about what federal health policy can, and perhaps should, be.

That sort of thinking — about both general principles and the specific policy components necessary to make them a reality — is exactly what the Republican Party lacks, and what it desperately needs.

It’s true that some Republican lawmakers have cobbled together proposals of varying degrees of specificity over the year: During his 2016 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida sketched out a mostly forgotten health care plan that would have set up a broad-based system of refundable tax credits intended to subsidize the purchase of insurance in hopes of helping people buy coverage. And during the 2017 Obamacare repeal effort, Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy offered a plan to give states far more flexibility, eliminating many of Obamacare's provisions at the national level while essentially turning the program into a block grant to the states.

But these efforts have tended to be cursory and short-lived, with tiny or nonexistent constituencies. Few conservative lawmakers talk about them today, and it’s unclear whether many Republicans in Congress today even grasp the basics.

Which is why, for all these ideas, if you ask Republican politicians what they stand for when it comes to health policy, you are likely to hear slogans like “patient centered” and “preserving the doctor-patient relationship” and possibly something about how Democrats want to “socialize Medicare” — as if the nation’s largest government health program is not already an essentially socialist enterprise.

So it’s possible to imagine that at least some in the party will try to resolve, or at least start acknowledging, some of these questions.

More likely, given the state of the G.O.P. under Trump, who is no one’s idea of a wonk, is that Republicans will simply decline to pursue the issue with any force, and the shabbiness of the party’s current non-position will become even more glaring. Indeed, just this month, Mr. Trump continued to predict Obamacare’s demise, saying he believed that “it’s going to be terminated,” possibly as a result of the Texas case, and that in the aftermath, “a deal will be made for good health care in this country.” What sort of deal? I suspect that even (perhaps especially) the president doesn’t know.

That sort of glibness, in turn, is likely to give already-ascendant Democratic ideas a boost. The party’s enthusiasm for Medicare for All has flourished recently in part because it exists in a vacuum, with little if any substantive competition from the right. There are serious practical and political impediments to making a transition to single payer, from the enormous increase in federal spending and the tax increases it would almost certainly entail to the disruption that would be caused by the elimination of current private health insurance coverage for millions of Americans.

Yet by failing to make even a halfhearted case for an alternative, Republicans are helping to clear the path for their opponents. When the options presented are single-payer or “I don’t know,” it’s not surprising that many Americans would gravitate toward the former.

In the meantime, the Texas case will ensure that the G.O.P.’s waffling and uncertainty on policy basics, like legal requirements regarding pre-existing conditions, remain in the spotlight. The red state attorneys general who brought the case may have imagined it was a clever way to highlight Obamacare’s flaws, but instead it shone a spotlight on their own.

Okay, so how about we make a few changes and call it "Romneycare"? I don't understand why you are so opposed to controlling rising costs of drugs, medical equipment and care and making insurance accessible. Many of the problems of the ACA are the direct result of GOP lawmakers' hostility to the program and their efforts to make the program unworkable.

"The very bright light that is shining on Virginia right now is sparking a painful but, I think we all hope, important conversation," Herring wrote in a long, remorseful statement in which he revealed putting on blackface to attend a party dressed as a rap artist nearly 40 years ago. The incident haunted him "each time I took a step forward in public service, realizing that my goals and this memory could someday collide and cause pain for people I care about," he wrote.

blatham wrote:
Yeah. It's a sadness for me that so many folks are unprepared to confront the complexities of such an endeavor. Passion is a grand thing except where it is melded with unrealistic certainties.

I was recently listening to an interview with David Milch. He said that reason is about 17th on the list of human attributes and that he'd be quite content if it was ranked much lower.

The explicit and implicit presumptions here that the reasoning ability of "the people" is limited ( and therefore in need of the self appointed "vanguards" who would lead them to an illusory peace and security)

Obamacare is more popular with American voters than the Republican-enacted tax cuts, according to a new Fox News Poll.

Slightly more than half of voters – 51 percent – had a favorable opinion of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

Support for President Barack Obama's signature domestic achievement — the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare — is at record highs less than three weeks before the midterm elections.
A majority of Americans (53%) and of likely voters (54%) approve of the healthcare law

Virginia is certainly in a bad place, all three top leaders are in scandals. In my opinion, the Attorney General ought to take the place of governor since he openly admitted to once putting on a blackface. People make mistakes, but denying and then just stubbornly refusing to back down and not acting contrite at all, makes all the difference.

As I've noted before, here in Canada

It’s no secret that Pelosi is on a personal crusade to deny the American People healthcare as a right.

Liberal Democrats have been talking about a Green New Deal for months now, and on Thursday morning, they unveiled its first iteration, a resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (Mass.).

The resolution, which you can read here, isn’t a detailed piece of legislation. Instead, it’s a statement of intent, explaining the justification and goals of a massive infrastructure program to transition to a sustainable future. This is at once incredibly ambitious and politically practical, in that its advocates seem to have in their minds a long-term plan to get it accomplished.

Don’t be surprised if in short order it becomes one of the defining pieces of the Democratic agenda, both in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail.

WASHINGTON (CNN)Nearly nine in 10 Americans say Robert Mueller's investigators should produce a full, public report on their findings, a sentiment that crosses party lines, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

I hate them now with every part of my being that is fibrous.

It Had to Be Said–> Ben Stein on Ocasio-Cortez: “She Doesn’t Know her Ass From Her Elbow”

The next time it gains control of the federal government, the Democratic Party is going to need to quickly implement an ambitious program to reduce carbon emissions. So far all the political oxygen on this problem has been sucked up by a slogan, “Green New Deal,” for which a blueprint was unveiled by New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts senator Ed Markey. The strategy they have produced is at best grossly undercooked, and at worst fatally misconceived.

Enacting an aggressive climate-change policy faces two large obstacles. The first is that every aspect of the policy contains a multitude of knotty technocratic challenges. It entails developing programs to wring carbon emissions out of the power sector, buildings, transportation, agriculture, and changing laws at the federal, state, and local levels. The difficulties faced by the long-developing bullet train in California, a state entirely controlled by Democrats, show how challenging it can be to carry out reforms that require buy-in from lots of stakeholders.

The second problem is political. Any national-level response quickly runs into the fact that, even if Democrats gain full control of government in 2021, and even if they abolish the filibuster or find a way to design a bill that can get around it, they will need the votes of moderate or conservative Democrats from fossil-fuel-producing states. The overrepresentation of oil, gas, and coal-producing areas in the Senate helped kill a modest energy tax under Bill Clinton, and a more ambitious cap and trade program under Barack Obama.

It would be unfair to expect any plan to solve both obstacles. But the Green New Deal fails to supply useful answers to either problem.

On the policy, the Green New Deal simply outlines ambitious targets for carbon reductions, without delving into specifics as to how the targets will be met. In place of detail it offers optimism. Noting that the International Panel on Climate Change proposes to cut global emission by 40 to 60 percent by 2030, and get to net zero by 2050 — which is itself a heroic goal — the Green New Deal proposes the United States get to net zero emissions by 2030.


How will the Green New Deal accelerate the already-ambitious objective by two-thirds? It doesn’t say. In place of even broad-brush answers to the trade-offs required by decarbonization, its advocates insist no trade-offs will be necessary a all. “The question isn’t how will we pay for it,” writes Ocasio-Cortez, “but what is the cost of inaction, and what will we do with our new shared prosperity created by the investments in the Green New Deal.” The Green New Deal’s advocates loftily compare their ambitions to World War II and the moon shot, but these projects were not undertaken on the promise that they would require no sacrifice from anybody.

But even as an expression of pure blue-sky idealism, the plan avoids several necessary commitments. It does not include any new construction of nuclear power, and leaves open the possibility of eliminating all nuclear power eventually, despite the fact that any realistic analysis shows zeroing out carbon emissions requires more nuclear power. Likewise, the Green New Deal shies away from any notion of upzoning cities to allow more population density, another vital step. It also avoids committing to a cap or limit on emissions, the omission of which would make it harder for the United States to negotiate emissions limits with other countries.

How to explain this curious lack of ambition? Simple: All these things divide progressive activists. Some of the most committed environmentalists got involved in the movement in the 1970s, before climate change was a major issue but when the left identified nuclear power with the Cold War and Three Mile Island. This mind-set shaped the thinking of enough environmentalists that their allies in the movement feel compelled to respect them despite overwhelming evidence that nuclear power, which does not emit greenhouse gasses, needs to fill some of the void left by phasing out fossil fuels. Likewise, many leftists regard relaxed restrictions on development and carbon caps, as unacceptably market-based. So those policies are out.

The operating principle behind the Green New Deal is a no-enemies-to-the-left spirit of fostering unity among every faction of the progressive movement. Thus, at the same time, the plan avoids taking stances that are absolutely vital to reduce carbon emissions, it embraces policies that have nothing to do with climate change whatsoever. The Green New Deal includes the following non-climate provisions:

–A job with family-sustaining wages, family and medical leave, vacations, and retirement security

–High-quality education, including higher education and trade schools

–High-quality health care

–Safe, affordable, adequate housing

–An economic environment free of monopolies

–Economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work

Sean McElwee, a socialist organizer with a penchant for colorfully threatening to destroy his enemies, designed the Green New Deal as a framework to encompass every maximal demand of the left. “The Green New Deal is what it means to be progressive. Clean air, clean water, decarbonizing, green jobs, a just transition, and environmental justice are what it means to a progressive,” he tells Vox. “By definition that means politicians who don’t support those goals aren’t progressive. We need to hold that line. Get on the GND train or choo-choo, ************, we’re going to go right past you.”

It is difficult to see how the task of finding 218 votes in the House and 50 in the Senate is made any easier by attaching a plan to such goals as economic security for people who are “unwilling to work.” Rather than think creatively about overcoming the formidable obstacles facing the green agenda, the Green New Deal retreats into a political fantasy world in which the ideologically median legislator is Bernie Sanders.

While rightly insisting on the primacy of climate change, it betrays its own confidence by submerging climate policy into a broader array of priorities. It simultaneously argues that we must move with urgent speed on climate, but that we must first achieve comprehensive socialism in order to move.

Speaker Pelosi received the plan icily. “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” she said. “The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?” Her skepticism appears well-taken. Democratic presidential candidates would be well-advised to start over.