JABbering Stooge

Baucus Could Lose Chairmanship Over Stalled Health Care Negotiations

Oh, pleasepleasepleaseplease PLEEEEEEEZZZZEE let this happen! Nothing could be sweeter than for the DINO who had single-payer advocates arrested and then joked about it to have his chairmanship yanked out from under his fat, murder-by-spreadsheet industry-protecting ass.

That seems to be the motto of CIGNA, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, United Health Group and the rest of the major health insurers, according to Raw Story.

The healthcare industry is spending upwards of $1.4 million each day on average to lobby members of Congress on health care legislation, a report issued by Common Cause this week reveals.

Industry spending has nearly doubled since 2000. Healthcare interests contributed $94 million to Congress members during the 2008 election cycle alone — up from $40 million in 2000.

Common Cause’s report has received almost no treatment in the press — with a single article in Bloomberg News and one in the National Journal.

The industry is attempting to alter the course of Democrats’ plans to provide universal health coverage for most Americans.

You’d think that if they have this much money to bribe Congress with, surely they could spare some pocket change for, say, ACTUALLY COVERING POLICYHOLDERS. You’d be sorely mistaken. This story comes barely a month after the murder-by-spreadsheet industry responded to demands by Congress to stop culling the poor and minorities by spitting in Congress’ face en masse.

Talk about chutzpah.

* With apologies to Robert Goodloe Harper.

Say it ain’t so, Rahm:

In his efforts to fashion a bipartisan compromise on health reform, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) has been trying to find alternatives to a robust public plan, which many Republicans refuse to consider. One of Baucus’s ideas has been to institute a public plan “trigger.” Under this proposal, the public plan would be created only if private insurance companies don’t make “meaningful, affordable coverage available to all Americans” within a certain period of time.

The Wall Street Journal reports that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is now lending Baucus his support for the public plan “trigger”:

[Long cite of Murdoch Street Journal article omitted — Ed.]

The concept of a public plan “trigger” seems to be driven by a desire to protect the private insurance industry. As The Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky writes, “Why shouldn’t we require private industry to deliver on their promise to contain costs? Health reform isn’t about protecting private industry; it’s about adopting policies that are most likely to lower health care costs.” And as former Sen. Tom Daschle said, “I can’t think of a tool that more effectively controls costs than a public option.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who has been pushing the Senate Finance Committee to adopt a public plan, said a “trigger” is unacceptable. On Face the Nation this past Sunday, he said a public plan “has to be available on the first day to everybody…so there shouldn’t be a trigger.”

Allow me to borrow Tom Tomorrow’s genius to explain things to the co-dependent Democrats as clearly as possible:

The Dems caved yet again:

Senate Demands Plan for Detainees
Democrats Scrap Funding to Close Guantanamo Bay

Under pressure from Republicans and concerned about the politics of relocating terrorism suspects to U.S. soil, Senate Democrats rejected President Obama’s request for funding to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and vowed to withhold federal dollars until the president decides the fate of the facility’s 240 detainees.

The decision represents a potentially serious setback for Obama, who as a candidate vowed to close Guantanamo and who signed an executive order beginning the process soon after he took office.

Obama had asked Congress for $80 million to close the facility, located on a U.S. military base in Cuba, by early 2010. Many Democrats see Guantanamo as an affront to the U.S. legal system and a symbol of Bush-era detainee policies, but they are increasingly wary about the next step, as yet undefined by Obama, of relocating the terrorism suspects who are detained at the site.

And you wonder why I call them “Co-dependent Democrats.” I think Bartcop put it best:

How did I get in a party of gutless wankers?

How, indeed.

According to Max Baucus (DINO), if you’re not his pimps in the health insurance companies, you belong in a psikhushka*:

Fuck you, Sen. Baka. Fuck you to hell.

* Cf.

This is not the change I voted for, Mr. President.

Democrats’ “Battered Wife Syndrome”

In recent years, the Washington political dynamic has often resembled an abusive marriage, in which the bullying husband (the Republicans) slaps the wife and kids around, and the battered wife (the Democrats) makes excuses and hides the ugly bruises from outsiders to keep the family together.

So, when the Republicans are in a position of power, they throw their weight around, break the rules, and taunt: “Whaddya gonna do ‘bout it?”

Then, when the Republicans do the political equivalent of passing out on the couch, the Democrats use their time in control, tiptoeing around, tidying up the house and cringing at every angry grunt from the snoring figure on the couch.

This pattern, which now appears to be repeating itself with President Barack Obama’s unwillingness to hold ex-President George W. Bush and his subordinates accountable for a host of crimes including torture, may have had its origins 40 years ago in Campaign 1968 when the Vietnam War was raging.

[…]

In 1992, I interviewed Spencer Oliver, a Democratic staffer whose phone at the Watergate building had been bugged by Nixon’s operatives 20 years earlier. Since then, Oliver had served as the chief counsel on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and had observed this pattern of Republican abuses and Democratic excuses.

Oliver said: “What [the Republicans] learned from Watergate was not ‘don’t do it,’ but ‘cover it up more effectively.’ They have learned that they have to frustrate congressional oversight and press scrutiny in a way that will avoid another major scandal.”

[…]

But the Democrats — like the battered wife who keeps hoping her abusive husband will change — found a different reality as the decade played out.

Rather than thanking Clinton [for derailing the Iran-Contra investigation after Poppy Bush pardoned Caspar Weinberger on Christmas Eve, 1992], the Republicans bullied him with endless investigations about his family finances, the ethics of his appointees — and his personal morality, ultimately impeaching him in 1998 for lying about a sexual affair (though he survived the Senate trial in 1999).

As always, read the whole thing.

Once again, the GOP lets petty partisan politics get in the way of saving lives:

Rove dismissed Obey’s proposals as “disturbing” and “laden with new spending programs.” He said the congressman was peddling a plan based on “deeply flawed assumptions.”

Like what?

Rove specifically complained that Obey’s proposal included “$462 million for the Centers for Disease Control, and $900 million for pandemic flu preparations.”

This was wrong, the political operative charged, because the health care sector added jobs in 2008.

As bizarre as that criticism may sound — especially now — Rove’s argument was picked up by House and Senate Republicans, who made it an essential message in their attacks on the legislation. Even as Rove and his compatriots argued that a stimulus bill should include initiatives designed to shore-up and maintain any recovery, they consistently, and loudly, objected to spending money to address the potentially devastating economic impact of a major public health emergency.

Let me guess, Karl. No One Could Have Predicted™ that we’d actually need to spend money on preparing for a possible pandemic.

So who can we blame thank for this mess?

Famously, Maine Senator Susan Collins, the supposedly moderate Republican who demanded cuts in health care spending in exchange for her support of a watered-down version of the stimulus, fumed about the pandemic funding: “Does it belong in this bill? Should we have $870 million in this bill No, we should not.”

Even now, Collins continues to use her official website to highlight the fact that she led the fight to strip the pandemic preparedness money out of the Senate’s version of the stimulus measure.

The Republicans essentially succeeded. The Senate version of the stimulus plan included no money whatsoever for pandemic preparedness. In the conference committee that reconciled the House and Senate plans, Obey and his allies succeeded in securing $50 million for improving information systems at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

But state and local governments, and the emergency services that would necessarily be on the frontlines in any effort to contain a pandemic, got nothing.

Thanks for nothing, Sen. Collins! I’m sensing a pattern here…

Although, to be fair to Sen. Collins, she’s not alone in bearing the blame for this debacle. The co-dependent cowards who call themselves Democrats continue to bend over backwards for the Republicans, bowing and scraping for the slightest bit of approval. And what do they get for their efforts every single time? The Republicans proceed to rip off the proffered arm and savagely sodomize the eunuchs with it!

Memo to the Dems: one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Think about it.

Un-freaking-believable:

The Obama transition team also helped persuade Israel to end the bombing of Gaza and to withdraw its ground troops before the Inauguration. According to the former senior intelligence official, who has access to sensitive information, “Cheney began getting messages from the Israelis about pressure from Obama” when he was President-elect. Cheney, who worked closely with the Israeli leadership in the lead-up to the Gaza war, portrayed Obama to the Israelis as a “pro-Palestinian,” who would not support their efforts (and, in private, disparaged Obama, referring to him at one point as someone who would “never make it in the major leagues”). But the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of “smart bombs” and other high-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel. “It was Jones”—retired Marine General James Jones, at the time designated to be the President’s national-security adviser—“who came up with the solution and told Obama, ‘You just can’t tell the Israelis to get out.’” (General Jones said that he could not verify this account; Cheney’s office declined to comment.)

You just couldn’t let it go, could you DICK Vader? Not content with merely smearing Obama as some sort of “soft-on-terrorism milquetoast pansy,” you went and actively undermined him to the Israelis.

If I were President, this incident alone would be grounds for pulling whatever protections Obama has given Cheney and pack him off to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where he belongs. If that’s the game Cheney wants to play, then he can pay the consequences for his out and out sabotage of the then-incoming president’s foreign policy agenda. Because that’s what this amounts to. Sabotage. When it comes to the culpa innata of the former Vice President, Satan himself would have a hard time coming up with a suitable punishment.

Scott Lemieux makes some interesting points about the filibuster being an archaic relic that only serves reactionary ends. Ultimately, he argues that even keeping it just for judicial nominations (a point I have argued (somewhat obliquely) in favor of in the past, and that Publius makes a compelling case for) would be self-defeating and infeasible.

My main quibble is that the main reason that the filibuster was so ineffective at blocking Bush’s slate of right-wing ideologues was because the co-dependent Democrats never even bothered to try. Nevertheless, I feel that Lemieux may ultimately prove to be right on this issue.