Seniors who are shrieking at tea bag rallies and town halls are in for a rude awakening

Jill
Brilliant at Breakfast
August 30, 2009

You’ve got to love the “Don’t let the government get its hands on my Medicare” crowd. That’s the kind of sound bite that so beautifully encapsulates the willful ignorance of people who think with their jerking knees. Republicans, with their “pull the plug on Grandma” rhetoric, are making some headway in convincing seniors that it’s they who are the guardians of Medicare while the Obama Administration and the Democrats want to destroy it. This is what happens when we forget history, or never learn history, or are too incurious to take history and place it in context as part of a continuum leading to the present day.

Sometimes I wonder what my late father-in-law would have made of all this. He was a son of Italian immigrants, and as wingnutty a wingnut, as racist a racist as you’ll find. This was a guy who had a photograph of Ronald and Nancy Reagan sitting on top of the TV on which he watched Fox News.

DougJ over at Balloon Juice wrote yesterday about the syndrome of people who were discriminated against when they first came over aspiring to reach the point of finding someone else to shit on. My father-in-law was one of these guys. A funny thing happened to him, though, after his health started to go and he spent more time in hospitals: He began to realize that Medicare was not a Communist plot to turn us into the Soviet Union, but a vital service on which he could rely when he became ill. Some of his mellowing was because he moved to the Jersey shore, where he squired around the widows of his friends who had predeceased him instead of spending ALL his time feeding Fox Hate Network into his head. But some of it is the realization that perhaps something run by the government isn’t so bad that for many people only comes when they need it. It didn’t hurt either that for the first time in his life, he was actually interacting with people who were from groups he’d always hated — Black and Hispanic and Filipino nurses. I remember seeing him joking and flirting with a black nurse in a way he never would have when he was well.

I often wonder what he would have made of what’s going on now, whether his mellowing would have continued or if he would have remained stuck in right-wing ideology about health care. I wonder if he would have been one of those people screaming “Keep the government’s hands off my Medicare!” at Congressional town halls. It’s hard to imagine he would; the man wasn’t stupid. But I wonder what kind of hoops he WOULD have jumped through to protect his Reaganite worldview.

Reality is going to smack them hard across the face, should these people decide to turn Congress over to the Republicans in 2010. Because Republicans may be playing to their fears about Medicare now in an effort to keep health care in the hands of for-profit insurance companies, but once they succeed in that, Medicare will have outlived its usefulness to them.

Jacob Weisberg, in Newsweek

The republicans charge that Democratic health care reform would, in Sen. Charles Grassley’s words, “pull the plug on Grandma.” According to Sen. Jon Kyl, the bills before Congress would ration medical treatment by age. Rep. John Boehner says they promote euthanasia. Sarah Palin has raised the specter of “death panels.” Such fears are understandable. It’s not preposterous to imagine laws that would try to save money by encouraging the inconvenient elderly to make an early exit. After all, that’s been the Republican policy for years.

It was Grassley himself who devised the “Throw Mama From the Train” provision of the GOP’s 2001 tax cut. The estate-tax revision he championed will reduce the estate tax to zero next year. But when it expires at year’s end, the tax will jump back up to its previous level of 55 percent. Grassley’s exploding tax break has an entirely foreseeable, if unintended, consequence: it incentivizes ailing, elderly rich people to end their lives—paging Dr. Kevorkian—before midnight on Dec. 31, 2010. It also gives their children an incentive to sign DNR orders and switch off respirators in time for the deadline. This would be a great plot for a P. D. James novel if it weren’t an actual piece of legislation.

[snip]

Other GOP policies promote death for senior citizens with more modest incomes. Take George W. Bush’s failed plan to privatize Social Security—a program that has driven life expectancy up and death rates down since it was instituted. It has an especially pronounced impact on suicide rates for the elderly, which have declined 56 percent since 1930. Had Bush prevailed, those who gambled on the stock market and lost would be less able to afford medicine, food, and heating for their homes. In aggregate, they’d likely die younger and commit suicide more often.

Republicans continue working to short-en and sadden the lives of the elderly in more oblique ways, too. One of President Obama’s first official acts was to reverse Bush’s executive order limiting government funding for stem-cell research, which remains the most promising avenue for new treatments of diseases that afflict the aged, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Clean-air legislation, which the Republicans defeated in 2002, has the potential to save 23,000 lives per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Many of those victims are elderly people, who suffer disproportionately from cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses exacerbated by air pollution. Because emissions of carbon monoxide and such are merely a contributing factor, you can’t name the individuals who have died because of this policy choice. But it’s reasonable to deduce that there are tens of thousands of people who would still be elderly today if Republicans didn’t value the rights and campaign contributions of polluters more highly than their lives.

If the Democrats were even a tenth as savvy about the reptilian brain as Republicans, they’d use this reality. But because they are gutless, lazy, AND as much in the pocket of the insurers as the Republicans, they won’t. And all those elderly people and the near-elderly screaming about socialism are going to find themselves living their own nightmare very soon.

http://brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com/2009/08/seniors-who-are-shrieking-at-tea-bag.html

Copyright 2009 Brilliant at Breakfast

PROFESSIONAL LIAR RESIGNS

Bob Cesca
Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog
August 23, 2009

Betsy McCaughey resigned from her position at Cantel Medical Corp. following her ridiculous appearance on The Daily Show. Of course no one can be sure it was because of her clownish performance with Jon Stewart, but the timing is curious.

Anyway, I doubt she’ll have much trouble. Corporate America and the healthcare lobby is always in need of a professional liar.

http://www.bobcesca.com/blog-archives/2009/08/professional_li.html

Copyright 2009 Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog

Now more than ever, bipartisanship is for suckers

Republicans want Obama to fail. He needs to stop seeking consensus, because it makes him look weak

Joe Conason
salon.com
Aug. 21, 2009

From the earliest moments of Barack Obama’s presidency, the most perplexing question was how he would fulfill his promise to change Washington’s partisan standoff – and whether that promise was ever more than a rhetorical and political campaign gambit. More than once, observers have suggested that he always knew he couldn’t rely on Republicans to act in good faith, to negotiate reasonable compromises, or even to speak honestly in debate. According to that theory, Obama’s commitment to bipartisan solutions was and is theater aimed at persuading independent or centrist voters to trust him.

But if seeking consensus is still his strategy, as he and his advisors insist, it may be time for a rethink. All the months of bipartisanship in talk and tactics from the White House have neither brought congressional Republicans closer to supporting Obama’s objectives nor preserved Obama’s early support among moderate voters. What they have done is encourage the most outrageous conduct by his opponents – including those who themselves claim the bipartisan mantle – and make the president look weak.

The simple truth is that there is nobody on the Republican side who wants to negotiate with Obama. They are no longer afraid of him, and they unanimously want to ruin his presidency, regardless of the consequences. They are in thrall to the stupid extremism that questions the president’s citizenship and suspects that he is driving the country toward a socialist dictatorship – while simultaneously demanding angrily that the government be stopped from interfering with Medicare.

Whether there was ever any prospect of significant Republican support for Obama’s recovery and reform agenda is a moot point. Certainly, the potential for obstruction and worse, in a party dominated by Rush Limbaugh and William Kristol, always outweighed the possibility of cooperation. Now, however, it should be clear to the president that even the supposedly reasonable Republicans scarcely pretend to want to work with him anymore. What the president must do is make that reality clear to the public.

Lately those reasonable Republicans have given him plenty of opportunities. The most widely noted example is Charles Grassley, the Iowa senator whose dishonest endorsement of the “death panels” myth at a town hall meeting must have ranked as one of the most craven performances by an elected official in that state’s history. Dim and reactionary as he usually seems to be, Grassley outdid himself by encouraging Americans to “fear” the healthcare legislation that he is allegedly negotiating in the Senate Finance Committee. He is one of those Republicans – like Sarah Palin – who has demonized end-of-life counseling despite his own past support of that essential service for families enduring distress.

With Grassley it is also important to remember his role in shepherding the Medicare prescription drug legislation sponsored by the Bush White House, the extraordinarily expensive and flawed bill that subsidized Big Pharma and only became law through gross chicanery. For a man who now professes to worry about the evil effects of a new health bureaucracy, he created a hellish paperwork nightmare when that bill passed.

As for the current health legislation, Grassley’s position isn’t easy to understand. Sometimes he says that he will vote for a bill that meets his positions on certain issues – and sometimes he says he won’t, because too many other Republican senators refuse to support any bill.

What number would make him feel cozy and compliant? According to Grassley – and his equally insincere colleagues Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah – any health reform bill must win at least 75-80 votes in the Senate before it could be considered truly bipartisan. Of course, this isn’t a standard that any of these legislators required to support initiatives of the Bush administration, or any other Republican bill for that matter. Only Obama must somehow clear that absurd hurdle for them.

Unfortunately, Obama opened himself to this hypocritical gaming when he pledged to pass bipartisan legislation, and he does himself no favors by reiterating that dead promise. He must not be listening when Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., says openly what all of his colleagues believe – namely, that their party’s future depends on destroying Obama, which will begin with defeating healthcare reform.

The opportunistic and irresponsible stance of the Republicans was cemented, so to speak, by their amazing reversible positions on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or stimulus bill. Having voted or campaigned against it, they proceeded to take credit for spending in their own communities as if they had supported the bill all along. (Now that it is obviously working, they will probably claim credit for that, too.)

Even John McCain, the Republican who could truthfully boast of working with Democrats on serious legislation, and often did during his presidential campaign, now indulges in sourly partisan posturing. Unlike many other conservatives, who refuse to admit that climate change is real and must be mitigated by government action, McCain has advocated measures to reduce carbon emissions for years, against the grain of his own party. But now that grave issue matters less to him than defeating Obama, so he denounces the White House for seeking “cap-and-tax” legislation, calling it a “giant government slush fund.” Instead of negotiating, he pandered to the right by foreclosing hopes for bipartisan compromise.

Faced with lying and demagoguery, confronted by unflinching partisans who want nothing but his destruction, the president has so far refused to respond with equal force. To most Americans, especially those without strong ideological perspectives, that is not a sign of strength. In a time of uncertainty, strength is what the public demands. What matters is not what Obama believes, but how willing he is to fight for what he believes.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2009/08/21/gop/

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Why are Dems still negotiating on healthcare?

BocaGuy: Wise up they are never going to support anything!
Alex Koppelman
salon.com
TUESDAY, AUG. 18, 2009

For some time now, Democrats in the Obama administration and Congress have been negotiating healthcare reform with the more conservative members of their party, as well as the handful of Senate Republicans most likely to cross party lines. So far, it hasn’t gotten them much more than a few deadlines.

People like Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., are unlikely to give up on negotiations, or the dream of a bipartisan bill, anytime soon. But with Baucus’ negotiating partner, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, happily admitting that he’s unlikely to vote for reform, no matter how many concessions to him are included in the legislation, there’s a question that has to come up: Are negotiations worth it? Or, with Democrats firmly in control of both houses of Congress, can they write further concessions off as a lose-lose proposition?

At first glance, negotiations on this issue make sense. Everyone always wants to look bipartisan, and anyway, it helps in a situation like this to give some of the more vulnerable Democratic members of Congress political cover with Republican votes for the bill. Plus, every Republican senator successfully wooed means one fewer Democratic senator whose every whims need to be catered to in the event of a filibuster.

But at this point, continued negotiation with the goal of getting a bill through the Senate means a risk of losing the vote in the House. Liberal House Democrats are already threatening to vote against reform legislation if it doesn’t include a public option — for now, the administration seems confident they can eventually be won over, but further concessions to conservatives will lengthen those odds.

Then there’s the question of what has actually been gained by the moves towards bipartisanship that have been made thus far. It’s not like the administration got any kudos from Republicans, or even hesitant Democrats like Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., when its appeared to back away from the public option.

In fact, with many pundits now treating the public option as DOA, Republicans have begun targeting the co-op plan that Conrad’s promoted as a compromise solution. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., told reporters, “That is the step towards government-run health care in the country …. It is a Trojan horse. And therefore no, I don’t believe Republicans will be inclined to support a bill.”

Kyl was, apparently, just following the party line. In a release titled “Reports of Public Option’s Demise Greatly Exaggerated,” the Republican National Committee itself said the co-op idea “is still government-run healthcare.”

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/08/18/negotiations/

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc

“Death Panel” Scare Tactic May Backfire on Republicans

Robert Creamer
Political organizer, strategist and author
The Huffington Post
August 16, 2009

Last week we had a death in our family – a young person suddenly taken from the ones he loved by a tragic accident. That may make me particularly sensitive to the way Republicans are using the powerful emotions surrounding end-of-life decisions in their desperate attempt to stop President Obama’s heath insurance reforms.

Of course the notion that the Obama health insurance reform includes a requirement for a panel to determine whether or not someone gets end-of-life care is simply a lie - made up out of whole cloth by people who specialize in generating fear among average Americans to protect wealthy special interests – in this case the health insurance industry.

And it’s not just the far right fringe of the Republican Party that is spreading this lie. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with these bills knows it is untrue, but just yesterday, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch refused to acknowledge that fact when given the opportunity on This Week.

In fact, the House proposal provides reimbursement to physicians who counsel families and patients on their care options if they were to be confronted by terminal illness – on living wills, hospice care, power of attorney and other issues that can come up at the end of life. Right now the government doesn’t pay for those consultations, so not surprisingly, it doesn’t happen as often as it should.

Far from giving the government the power to decide who lives or dies, the goal of the proposal is to assure that families are themselves empowered to make those critical decisions – and that is exactly where the power belongs.

Like most people my age, I have been involved in many end-of-life decisions for loved ones. My mother, father, mother-in-law, and father-in-law have all passed away after long illnesses. Those decisions are complex and they are emotional. Often they don’t involve black and white judgment calls. To the extent possible, it is extremely important to know the wishes of the person who is ill – and that often involves a living will that expresses his or her wishes, because in the end they are often unable to express them directly.

It is unforgivable that the Republicans would intentionally distort these provisions of the health insurance reform bill in order to prey upon fears that the power to make these critical decisions would be ripped from the hands of families and given to government bureaucrats.

And when voters begin to discover their intentional deceit the very power of the emotions they are trying to unleash can – and should – create a massive backlash.

That is particularly true since historically it has, in fact, been the far right that has tried to snatch decisions about end of life from their rightful place in the hands of families and to inject Government decision makers in their place.

Recall that when the husband of Terry Schiavo made the difficult judgment to end her life in a persistent vegetative state, it was Tom DeLay and the Republicans that tried to get Congress to intervene in that decision. At first they thought it looked like good politics. But it didn’t take long for a powerful backlash to form – driven by families all across America – who had themselves faced those judgments and didn’t want Tom DeLay and George Bush to substitute the decisions of politicians for their own.

This time, they may face a similar fate as voters come to understand that – for the sake of partisan advantage, and to protect powerful special interests – Republicans in Congress are trying to deny patients and families the right to consult physicians about all of the options for the end-of-life care- if they want that consultation – and even if they can’t pay for it.

By taking this position, it is the Republicans who are standing in the way of empowerment for families.

In their attempt to enflame the powerful emotions surrounding the deaths of loved ones by spreading intentional lies, the Republicans have stooped to a new low. The Terry Schiavo case should have taught the Republicans that some emotions are too precious to be exploited for partisan political advantage. Apparently it did not.

But when Americans begin to discover just how far the Republicans have been willing to go to stop health insurance reform, they may receive a new lesson. Republicans will learn that combining those powerful emotions with deceit can create an explosive mixture that they will find impossible to forget.

Robert Creamer is a long time political organizer and strategist and author of the recent book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/death-panel-scare-tactic_b_260717.html

Copyright © 2009 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc

Sarah’s Ghoulish Carousel

Maureen Dowd
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
August 15, 2009

I’m not sure the man who popped off and tweeted that Sonia Sotomayor was a “Latina woman racist” is the best Henry Higgins for the Eliza Doolittle of Alaska.

But Newt Gingrich was a professor. And he does know something about pulling yourself up by dragging down others and imploding when you take center stage — both Palin specialties.

Besides, he agrees with Sarah — who fretted that her parents and son Trig might be in danger from Obama “death panels” — that we should be very wary about trusting government with end-of-life decisions.

So Newt took it upon himself to become Palin’s Pygmalion. He told Politico that the out-of-work pol should write a book; take a commentator gig on TV; get a condo in D.C. or New York to use as an East Coast base; and prepare three types of speeches — one “to make money,” another to “project her brand” before universities and interest groups, and a vivid campaign stump speech to use for Republican candidates in 2010.

Most important, he advised, the dizzy Palin has to be “clear in her own head what she wants to do.”

At the moment, what she wants to do is tap into her visceral talent for aerial-shooting her favorite human prey: cerebral Ivy League Democrats.

Just as she was able to stir up the mob against Barack Obama on the trail, now she is fanning the flames against another Harvard smarty-pants — Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a White House health care adviser and the older brother of Rahmbo.

She took a forum, Facebook, more commonly used by kids hooking up and cyberstalking, and with one catchy phrase, several footnotes and a zesty disregard for facts, managed to hijack the health care debate from Mr. Obama.

Sarahcuda knows, from her brush with Barry on the campaign trail, that he is vulnerable on matters that demand a visceral and muscular response rather than a logical and book-learned one. Mr. Obama was charming and informed at his town hall in Montana on Friday, but he’s going to need some sustained passion, a clear plan and a narrative as gripping as Palin’s I-see-dead-people scenario.

She has successfully caricatured the White House health care effort, making it sound like the plot of the 1976 sci-fi movie “Logan’s Run,” about a post-apocalyptic society with limited resources where you can live only until age 30, when you must take part in an extermination ceremony called “Carousel” or flee the city.

Painting the Giacometti-esque Emanuel as a creepy Dr. Death, Palin attacked him on her Facebook page a week ago, complaining that his “Orwellian thinking” could lead to a “death panel” with bureaucrats deciding whether to pull the plug on less hardy Americans.

Never mind that Palin herself had endorsed some of the same end-of-life counseling she now depicts as putting Grandma down.

As the Democratic National Committee pointed out, Palin put out a 2008 proclamation for Healthcare Decisions Day “to raise public awareness of the need to plan ahead for healthcare decisions, related to end of life care … and to encourage the specific use of advance directives to communicate these important healthcare decisions.”

Consistency was long ago sent to a death panel in Palin world.

Sensing traction, she took more shots against Dr. Emanuel, quoting the bioethicist’s past writing that some medical services might not be guaranteed to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. … An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”

“Dr. Emanuel,” she wrote ominously, “has also advocated basing medical decisions on a system which ‘produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.’ ”

She crowed that she had him on the run, and the White House felt that the doctor, who was being portrayed as a proponent of euthanasia, needed to get out there and explain his opposition to euthanasia. So he interrupted his hiking vacation in the Italian Alps to give a raft of phone interviews saying he was taken out of context and calling Palin’s charges “completely off the wall.”

But, much to Sarah’s delight, he also conceded to The Washington Times that his “thinking has evolved” on the “very vexing” issue of deciding who gets treatment and who doesn’t.

“When I began working in the health policy area about 20 years ago … I thought we would definitely have to ration care, that there was a need to make a decision and deny people care,” he told the paper, adding that he now feels that if we get rid of expensive “unnecessary care” that “we would have absolutely no reason to even consider rationing except in a few cases.”

A few cases? Sounds like another Facebook entry for Sarah.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinion/16dowd.html
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

The Simplest Explanation for Why Palin and Gingrich Are Wrong

John R. Bohrer
The Huffington Post
AUGUST 10, 2009

You don’t have to know a lot about our health care system, or even be a close follower of the recent debate to know and explain how incredibly wrong Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich are.

Two of the leading contenders for the 2012 Republican nomination have said health care reform will lead to “death panels” and “turning power over to the government, when there are clearly people in America who believe in establishing euthanasia….”

Palin said bureaucrats will pass judgment on whether her elderly parents “or my baby with Down Syndrome… are worthy of health care.” Gingrich defended her statements (albeit in less bold terms) by talking about “selective standards” for who will be covered…. Therefore, if you’re disabled, sick or old, you don’t want government health care.

This is equivalent of, “Up is down. Black is white.”

The two groups that government seeks out to care for — not kill — are the elderly and the disabled. Private insurance companies are the ones who do their best to minimize risk and thereby try to keep these people from joining their rolls. This is Civics 101 — a principle function of government is to take on needed services the private market deems too costly to provide.

Again, you don’t have to know a lot about our health care system, or even know which side of the argument you fall on. But if someone doesn’t understand or acknowledge that the government goes out of its way to make sure the disabled and the elderly are cared for, they’re irrelevant to this debate. And they’re irrelevant because not only do they refuse to accept facts, they believe in the opposite of facts. Gingrich and Palin included.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-bohrer/the-simplest-explanation_b_254984.html

Copyright © 2009 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.