Politics Plus

Many on the left and many all on the right are unhappy with the health care reform as it now stands.  Does that mean we are allies?  Think again.  The things in HCR that Republicans oppose are the only thing that we support.  We need to hang on to the good things the bill contains and build from there.  The Republican justifications for repeal require a degree of rational distortion that could not be accomplishes by anyone but a highly educated professional: a Doctor of Bullshitology.  This fine Krugman editorial demonstrates the extent of the deception.

My wife and I were thinking of going out for an inexpensive dinner tonight. But John Boehner, the speaker of the House, says that no matter how cheap the meal may seem, it will cost thousands of dollars once you take our monthly mortgage payments into account.

Wait a minute, you may say. How can our mortgage payments be a cost of going out to eat, when we’ll have to make the same payments even if we stay home? But Mr. Boehner is adamant: our mortgage is part of the cost of our meal, and to say otherwise is just a budget gimmick.

O.K., the speaker hasn’t actually weighed in on our plans for the evening. But he and his G.O.P. colleagues have lately been making exactly the nonsensical argument I’ve just described — not about tonight’s dinner, but about health care reform. And the nonsense wasn’t a slip of the tongue; it’s the official party position, laid out in charts and figures.

We are, I believe, witnessing something new in American politics. Last year, looking at claims that we can cut taxes, avoid cuts to any popular program and still balance the budget, I observed that Republicans seemed to have lost interest in the war on terror and shifted focus to the war on arithmetic. But now the G.O.P. has moved on to an even bigger project: the war on logic.

So, about that nonsense: this week the House is expected to pass H.R. 2, the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act — its actual name. But Republicans have a small problem: they claim to care about budget deficits, yet the Congressional Budget Office says that repealing last year’s health reform would increase the deficit. So what, other than dismissing the nonpartisan budget office’s verdict as “their opinion” — as Mr. Boehner has — can the G.O.P. do?

The answer is contained in an analysis [Agent Orange delinked] — or maybe that should be “analysis” — released by the speaker’s office, which purports to show that health care reform actually increases the deficit. Why? That’s where the war on logic comes in.

First of all, says the analysis, the true cost of reform includes the cost of the “doc fix.” What’s that?

Well, in 1997 Congress enacted a formula to determine Medicare payments to physicians. The formula was, however, flawed; it would lead to payments so low that doctors would stop accepting Medicare patients. Instead of changing the formula, however, Congress has consistently enacted one-year fixes. And Republicans claim that the estimated cost of future fixes, $208 billion over the next 10 years, should be considered a cost of health care reform.

But the same spending would still be necessary if we were to undo reform. So the G.O.P. argument here is exactly like claiming that my mortgage payments, which I’ll have to make no matter what we do tonight, are a cost of going out for dinner.

There’s more like that: the G.O.P. also claims that $115 billion of other health care spending should be charged to health reform, even though the budget office has tried to explain that most of this spending would have taken place even without reform.

To be sure, the Republican analysis doesn’t rely entirely on spurious attributions of cost — it also relies on using three-card monte tricks to make money disappear. Health reform, says the budget office, will increase Social Security revenues and reduce Medicare costs. But the G.O.P. analysis says that these sums don’t count, because some people have said that these savings would also extend the life of these programs’ trust funds, so counting these savings as deficit reduction would be “double-counting,” because — well, actually it doesn’t make any sense, but it sounds impressive.

So, is the Republican leadership unable to see through childish logical fallacies? No.

The key to understanding the G.O.P. analysis of health reform is that the party’s leaders are not, in fact, opposed to reform because they believe it will increase the deficit. Nor are they opposed because they seriously believe that it will be “job-killing” (which it won’t be). They’re against reform because it would cover the uninsured — and that’s something they just don’t want to do… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

If the Republicans get their way, comprehensive health care will be available to the rich only.  The rest of us will get RepubliCare: the right to pay premiums until we need the coverage, and then be dropped.  Sure we need single payer, Medicare for all, but the ray to get this is not to repeal the current bill.  It is to remove Republicans, and a handful of DINOS, from office.

I had no idea that the Patriot Act is up for renewal this month.  The media has not given us the slightest peep of warning.  Is this a conspiracy of silence?  I don’t know the answer,  but it’s too important an issue to let pass without at least raising a stink.  It represents the biggest Republican assault on Americans’ rights in history.  It also represents Obama’s greatest failure as President, given that he campaigned on ending this outrage and has since embraced the policy.

Did you hear that the PATRIOT Act is up for re-authorization? No? Well, perhaps the US intelligence services can still keep a secret.

President George W. Bush signed the PATRIOT Act into law on October 26, 2001. Nearly a decade later, some of its the most noxious provisions have burrowed their way deep into our legal system.

A year ago, President Obama signed a bill extending three provisions of the original Patriot Act. Last week Congressman Mike Rogers (R-Michigan), Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, introduced another extension of those provisions, triggering what’s sure to be a bipartisan effort to continue to deny Americans their civil liberties.

The bill starts with so-called "roving wiretaps" that allow the government to spy on a nebulous array of individuals and devices, without specifying any of them ahead of time. The FBI could, with a single search warrant, raid every house or office that an individual suspect has visited over an entire year — every single place, whether or not the residents themselves are suspects.

Then there’s the eerily-named "lone wolf" provision, which lets the government apply the full power of the special courts created to deal with foreign spies against anyone who the government alleges is "preparing to attack." You don’t even have to commit a crime to get these super-powered courts targeting you — the Justice Department says that just visiting a flagged website would be enough!

But worst of all is the infamous "Section 215". This incredible provision allows the government to take whatever they want — your phone records, medical records, email history, whatever — without having to show you’re suspected of a crime, or even relevant to an investigation! But it gets worse — not only can the government just search through your personal records whenever they feel like it, but everyone involved is under a gag order to never let you know that you’re being spied on — and to ensure that you can never challenge the order in court. The government could be looking through your emails right now and you’ll never even know.

The ACLU has a quick-and-dirty overview of some of the problems with these provisions over here. [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Huffington Post>

The reasons I oppose the extension are so obvious, I need not even list them.  If you love freedom, you already know.  Please join me in protest.  Tell your Senators and Rep!  Say NO to the unpatriotic PATRIOT Act!