American Politics Thread 2013: I'm a cool Rodham grandma in the USA

However, the Veterans disability application and review process is completely backlogged. But some folks would rather tear down "Barrycades" than vote for increased funding for a federal agency that rules on Veterans disability claims

My situation sux but it is what it is. And as I've noted, I will likely get some direct benefits from Obamacare, even if not obvious or large. FWIW, my annual premiums had been rising at (I think) around 15% or so for the past few years. Maybe more.

Would love to see a source for that study lagoon, just for the fun of it. Better to know for sure that I'm not making things up...the reason I say it is not well run is via my own experience.

There was lots of media coverage awhile back of problems with the VA hospital in DC; but I think they have now addressed those issues.

Would love to see a source for that study lagoon, just for the fun of it. Better to know for sure that I'm not making things up...the reason I say it is not well run is via my own experience.

― the rofflestomper (dandydonweiner), Wednesday, October 16, 2013 12:41 PM (7 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i didnt read this article i just google and picked one but theres tons of stuff out there if you want to read up http://health.usnews.com/usnews/health/articles/050718/18va.htm

i mean im sure the VA has its share of problems but there just not as bad as commercial healthcare which has much bigger problems

There was lots of media coverage awhile back of problems with the VA hospital in DC; but I think they have now addressed those issues.

― curmudgeon, Wednesday, October 16, 2013 12:42 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah and that was just one hospital in a huge system

Honestly, public hospitals are easier to scrutinize than private ones...and it's an easy news story to show how poorly (or not) vets are getting treated.

Republicans who shut down the government in a bid to undermine President Obama’s health-care program would win no major changes to the law. But they would get additional safeguards to ensure that people who receive subsidies to buy health insurance are in fact eligible.

Alas, no additional safeguards re farm aid and various tax deductions though.

the United States’ world-record health care costs are driven by a combination of policy factors, both on the private and the government side. In 2010 Mariah Blake showed how a cabal of medical supply behemoths keep the innovations of smaller companies off the market. In 2011 Phillip Longman showed how getting Medicare out of the fee-for-service business would improve things, and earlier this year showed how a GOP effort that kept cost-benefit research out of Obamacare is harming the health care system. Finally, again this year Haley Sweetland Edwards showed how a secret committee of doctors heavily weighted with specialists fixes the prices of Medicare.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_10/americas_projected_deficit_is047340.php

care at the VA is highly site dependent from my limited experience

Brit Hume:

In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew.

And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy. They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan. They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they’ll try anything to bring that about. And if some of those things turn out to be reckless and doomed, well so be it

yup, otm

how you know something is bullshit: it includes the word "unfree"

TS: "an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew" versus "Most Americans will no longer have the ability to raise a family with dignity and freedom."

I thought Reagan's trickle-down economics and HW Bush's and Dubya's was supposed to create wonderful private sector jobs for everyone so that no one would even want that entitlement spending

The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded.

While, of course, the budget deficit shrank. But debt grew because these fuckers won't allow for any increases in tax revenue.

You can have low taxes, a low budget deficit, or low debt, and some combinations of two, but you can't have all three.

In short, these people are morons and deserve to be treated like morons.

aaaand The Houston Chronicle basically retracts its endorsement of Ted Cruz.

lurking behind all that (and the "47% freeloader" stuff from the '12 election) is a growing discomfort with participatory gov't itself.

if you want to shrink the state, well, then run on that, get elected, and do it. but the state, in more or less its current form, is electorally popular enough to be stable. it is hard to prune. GW did try to privatize social security and got fried, remember? you'd have to promise something better if you got rid of it. don't like the EPA? well, you could try to overturn the clean air and water acts, etc. go ahead and try!

and so the next step is a lot darker: the "right thing" may not be better for everybody, and may never be electorally popular. once you've decided on that, well...

wau @ that Houston Chronicle piece

from the free and self-reliant people Who populated the West by kicking out the Mexicans with the U.S. Army, killed or swept aside the Natives with the U.S. Army, homesteaded said stolen land thanks to the Homestead Act (Government largesse, anyone?) and traveled and did business thanks to government sponsored railroads. The totally free-market based Post Office then instituted free rural delivery. This all 19th century Federal government at work, enslaving honest Americans with hand-outs and eroding their dignity.

Their whole narrative is rampant and hypocritical self-regard dressed in puerile romanticism.

More on Cruz at Sullivan, from a reader who went to law school with him:

On the Ted Cruz ego vs. paranoia discussion, I will say I knew him pretty well in college, law school, and beyond, and it’s hard to believe that he’s actually become someone who believes this stuff. He’s incredibly well-educated, and at least used to have a circle of friends that included people very different from his general conservative bent. Sarah Palin, for instance, wouldn’t have survived a day at Princeton, and certainly not as an editor on the Harvard Law Review. My sense is that being in the Senate has taken him too far outside his natural skill-set. He has always been a debater at heart – someone who enjoys taking extreme positions – not because he believes them necessarily, but because it’s fun.

Being a lawyer was a great fit in that way because you are paid to take a side, knowing that you are not tasked with crafting the outcome, but instead are playing your part in an adversarial system. Making policy, on the other hand, requires a very different mindset, and rewards different skills. I didn’t watch the filibuster, but having heard about it, it’s completely in his comfort zone, and exactly the kind of thing he knows how to do – talk for hours about why an extreme position actually makes a lot of sense because working out compromises with fellow legislators, or considering the actual consequences of taking such extreme positions – not naturally his strong suit, and not what he enjoys doing.

Honestly, I think Obama could figure him out in five minutes. Hell, Obama probably managed people much like Ted when Obama was editor of the Harvard Law Review. More importantly, Obama’s natural strong suit – using the rope-a-dope strategy – is perfect for sending Ted back to the private sector (where he would probably be happier anyway). There is no limit to the extremism of the positions Ted would take, given the chance, and the right encouragement. He treats every political discussion like a college-style debate, and the more ordinary people see of his scorched-earth argument style, I think the less they’re going to like it.

yeah but freedom!

I don't want your freedom.

fredb • a minute ago −
It is hard to believe that the country has elected such an extreme radical to the presidency that for the first time threatened to default on debt payments rather than work with Republicans who wanted to prevent long-term economic disasters. Obama's anti-American and communist ideas cause him to want to default on our debt like they would in the African countries he draws his roots from rather than live up to debts as is the tradition in our country. He also figures that recessions are good for the country because they drive up the number of people dependent on the government otherwise known as the people who vote for him, but he is wrong in that aspect as a government default would have had little impact on our economy.

which congressperson gets the wwf-style champion belt for this, that's all this is about, right?

live up to debts as is the tradition in our country

lol

why the fuck do you ppl find idiots to be so fascinating?

i find the "obama wants to default and destroy the economy" vs "a default doesn't matter" incoherence to be especially weird.

if you don't gawk at idiots you aren't really following american politics

why the fuck do you ppl find idiots to be so fascinating?

you tell me

http://simpsonswiki.com/w/images/thumb/1/16/These_Things_I_Believe.png/250px-These_Things_I_Believe.png

why the fuck do you ppl find idiots to be so fascinating?

― eclectic husbandry (Dr Morbius), Wednesda

cuz it gives you the liberty to post clips from liberal blogs we've already read and agree with – oh, and Dennis Perrin?

ok, my work is done

nice how the country is still subject to sequestery austerity funding, but the democrats won! go team

nobody won anything

this has all been stupid bullshit from day one

Their whole narrative is rampant and hypocritical self-regard dressed in puerile romanticism.

― The normative power of the factual (Michael White), Wednesday, October 16, 2013 10:26 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yah. jo.gif basically. also explains the strength of its appeal, nothing that straight white males love more than jacking off. mix with religious repression, growing inequality, etc., get crazy time.

gop runs on that energy but it's umm not sustainable

hmm I didn't know about this!

The debt limit will be raised through Feb. 7, with Treasury permitted to use extraordinary measures to borrow after that date, if necessary. The plan includes a "motion of disapproval" wherein Congress can vote to disapprove of this particular increase within 15 days of the president's announcement. If the motion gets a majority in both chambers, he can veto it.

flexibility?

Rush Limbaugh! Him sad man in him room.

Christine Lagarde, the IMF babe

this guy

http://www.rushimg.com/cimages//media/images/obamateaparty5/1193644-1-eng-GB/obamateaparty.jpg

digging Obama as movie villain here

so Christine Lagarde, the IMF babe,

gross

oh lol missed Shakes' post.

I love Sara Robinson tbh.

http://www.alternet.org/story/154144/why_patriarchal_men_are_utterly_petrified_of_birth_control_--_and_why_we%27ll_still_be_fighting_about_it_100_years_from_now?page=0%2C3&paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark

That same frantic panic over the loss of the ancient bargain also lies that the core of the worldwide rash of fundamentalist religions. Modern industrial economies have undermined the authority of men both in the public sphere and in the private realms; and since they're limited in how far they can challenge it in the external world, they've turned women's bodies into the symbolic battlefield on which their anxieties over this play out. Drill down to the very deepest center of any of these movements, and you'll find men who are experiencing this change as a kind of personal annihilation, a loss of masculine identity so deep that they are literally interpreting it as the end of the world. (The first rule of understanding apocalyptic movements is this: If someone tells you the world is ending, believe them. Because for them, it probably is.)

scary as hell

http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/simgad/18053778015677764682

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/will-debt-ceiling-extortion-ever-return.html

i don't think i'd seen this put so succinctly:

The debt-ceiling fight was not brought on by Ted Cruz and his baying hordes. It was actually the preferred strategy of mainstream Republicans, especially Paul Ryan. The Ryanites opposed shutting the government down because they wanted to extort Obama with default. The crazies who favored the shutdown were actually willing to lift the debt ceiling so they could keep the shutdown going.

That is to say, debt-ceiling extortion was not the tool of Republican ultras, unwilling to acknowledge political limits. It was the tool of the calculating party leaders. They viewed the debt ceiling as a smart leverage play to fulfill their goal of winning concessions without giving any in return.

yeah this seems exactly right

The plan includes a proposal offered by McConnell in the 2011 debt ceiling crisis that allows Congress to disapprove of the debt ceiling increase, which means lawmakers will formally vote on whether to reject a debt ceiling increase until Feb. 7. Obama can veto that legislation if it passes. If Congress fails as expected to gather a two-thirds majority to override the veto, the debt ceiling would be raised.

let the republicans have their hissyfit, let them vote their consciences and reap the press associated with the presidential veto, just dont let them do any real damage

Chait noted the same paragraph: it looks like the burden is on Congress to keep the president from acting unilaterally to raise the debt ceiling under extraordinary circumstances. If I'm reading this correctly, this is a hell of an unexpected concession.

yeah but its just a one time thing, i doubt they are planning on trying this all again in a couple months anyway