I agree completely with E.D. that focusing on climate change before health care would have been a mistake. The one argument I’ve heard in favor is that St. Lindsey and a few other principled, centrist Republicans would have gone along with a climate change bill. That’s bullshit, Republicans won’t even go along with the payroll tax holiday now:
From my reporting, the problem wouldn’t be in the White House. It would be in Congress. I’ve asked a number of Republican offices whether they’d be willing to work with the Democrats on a payroll-tax holiday. Without fail, they’ve told me no, that they no longer support a payroll-tax holiday given the size of the deficit.
These bipartisan compromises we’re always hearing about are never going to happen, at least not during this Congress, no matter how tantalizingly close they seem. Without knowing that climate change had 60 potential Democratic votes behind it, there is simply no reason to believe it ever could have passed.
Alwhite
Can we please ignore any supposed Republican cooperation now? Really, any pundit that starts a sentence with “would have gotten Republican cooperation” should be ignored forever.
If Obama really wants to kill Ws tax cuts he should have come out in favor of them & the Rs would be against them now. HRC is basically the Republican alternative proposed in 1992 & they didn’t support that. Those people are about winning elections not about governing.
homerhk
In any event, what is the point of all this second guessing?
Climate Change is a global issue and needs to be tackled globally. On the other hand HCR is a solely American issue – given that most other western and prosperous nations have some sort of universal coverage.
El Cid
Lindsey would have gone on long enough insisting that just one and then another modification would be needed for a more bipartisan bill, then at the actual vote would declare that he just couldn’t.
Linda Featheringill
Sorry for the interruption and I know this is OT:
How do we get to our Act Blue thingies?
Maybe a link permanently pasted at the top or something?
Thanks.
Now back to your regularly scheduled program.
Allison W.
If Obama’s for it, their against it.
Bokonon
Amazing how the GOP can pivot back and forth between claiming that the Bush tax cuts MUST be extended for the good of the economy (deficit be damned!) and that a payroll tax holiday is unthinkable (because of the deficit!)
That sort of lays out the GOP’s priorities – they are more loyal to their donor base than they are to the economy at large. That’s Obama’s problem, anyway.
And the bottom line: the massive, structural deficit that the GOP created is now an unbelievably useful tool that they can use to prevent the Democrats from governing. And it is a great excuse for the GOP’s ideological program to gut social programs like Social Security. But the GOP is fundamentally not serious or sincere about solving the actual deficit. Why should they be? Nobody holds them accountable.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Given Dem ties to the energy industry (and you have to say that like Mary Landrieu– Louisiana, Arkansas, WVa, VA, CO, MT, AK, even Illinois), I don’t think any meaningful climate bill was possible. When I think about that, I kind of think nothing else matters and we’re fucked and I just want to start smoking again and spend all my money on lethal debauchery in five star European hotels like a coke-fueled ’70s rock star
Brachiator
Bipartisanship, in all areas of government, has gone the way of the Wicked Witch of the West
Did you all see the recent NY Times article on partisanship in the Supreme Court (A Sign of the Court’s Polarization: Choice of Clerks)?
A climate change bill would never have stood a chance of getting through the Congress. I don’t know what revisionist tea these pundits are drinking to think it might have been possible.
They seem to be inventing a new game, blaming Obama for hypothetical failures.
Zifnab
@Bokonon:
Damn shame we don’t have a competent Democratic opposition, or a media in any way interested in reporting on actual politics rather than horse race bullshit.
Honestly, if Democrats wanted to be really clever they’d just go through a bunch of old CSPAN footage and press releases for each Republican challenger. Propose any non-batshit-crazy idea that a bunch of them are on the record for supporting. Then watch them bat it down on camera. Then go into November running non-stop “These guys are full of shit” back-to-back guy contradicting himself ads.
Then GOTV like crazy rabid ninjas.
lamh31
OT:
Peter Orszag clarifies “rift” with Obama admin over Bush tax cuts
RSR
Truly pathetic if the Democrats can’t win the messaging on a payroll tax cut (stop calling it a ‘holiday’ already, even if it is) vs extending Bush tax cuts for the super rich.
Which of course means that’s the likely outcome.
As for the Republican stance: between the two, of course the Bush tax cuts (bonus? gift?) is the one most lucrative to their wealthiest supporters.
Napoleon
It absolutely was not a mistake to lead with health care. 1) other then in the very short term I think a broad range of people will come to see it as a generally good program, regardless of some of the near term polling results, 2) its good governance in action and 3) if progressives ever want to get some of their other programs off the ground or strengthened the government must control healthcare cost (for this same reason extending the Bush tax cuts in total is insane since it basically guts the Dems ability to do anything in the future).
I think there are plenty of other things to complain about in how they got it passed, but that is a different story.
Napoleon
@Alwhite:
Hell, they voted against their own proposal back in 1992. Remember Dole voted against the alternative he introduced. To me after that example anyone who thought that Obama would get anything other then what has happened is completely clueless.
wvng
@Brachiator: “They seem to be inventing a new game, blaming Obama for hypothetical failures. ”
As one who sees the climate change problem as the biggest problem the world has faced beyond instantaneous nuclear annihilation, I agree with Brachiator. It wasn’t going to happen. The political will to do something meaningful to combat a problem that remains too vague or simply untrue in far too many people’s minds at the risk of losing key political support for the next election (see: Rockefeller, Jay) didn’t exist, even though it felt for a while like it might.
And I find that depressing as hell.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Bipartisan is simply a shorter word for: there are northeastern liberal Republicans and conservative southern Democrats in Congress, who are willing to make deals with ideological allies in the other party. Those days are gone. We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.
ETA: Props to Brachiator at #8 for getting there first with the Wizard of Oz metaphor.
Sentient Puddle
It’s like they expect the American people to totally forget all that rhetoric about how extending the Bush tax cuts don’t have to be paid for!
Oh wait…
Kryptik
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Now Bipartisanship means ‘Democrats must cater to Republican wants (regardless of who controls what), or else…
Zifnab
@Brachiator:
A climate change bill did pass the House. In the Senate, we had 60 Ds in office right until Massachusetts handed Ted Kennedy’s seat to an underwear model. So it very well could have passed. Probably as watered down cow-plop. But it could have passed.
beltane
Bipartisanship does not exist when there is a Democratic president; that’s just one of the facts of life. Regardless, any climate bill that would have made it out of Congress would have been a toothless monstrosity that totally failed to address the problem. At least the health care bill, as flawed as it is, will still benefit real people in our lifetimes.
Redshift
@Alwhite: I’m somewhat hopeful that the one good thing to come out of complete GOP obstruction is that the Bush tax cuts will die entirely. I’m not as hopeful about the messaging on it, since it was always stupid to describe the Dem plan as “extending the Bush tax cuts for the middle class” rather than “letting the expiration that Republicans voted for go ahead and then passing a more fair and more responsible Democratic tax cut.” But if that’s explicitly what happens, and there’s a gap between the two, I do think it will be easier to put Republicans in a box if Dems have a bill that sets rates back to what they are now, and the GOP is opposing it unless it also includes cuts for the rich.
WaterGirl
Could someone here define “payroll tax” in a couple of short sentences? I thought I knew what it meant, but I apparently do not.
eemom
I don’t know anything about football, but my Dad taught me the phrase “Monday morning quarterbacking.”
Having passed away before the innertoobz took over the world, however, I don’t think he could have envisioned the depths of useless stupidity to which the practice has sunk.
thefncrow
Wait, the Republicans won’t support the payroll tax holiday because of the size of the deficit?
But I thought tax cuts were exempt from deficit consideration. Isn’t that the entire argument over why the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy must be extended, that there should be no concern over the effect of extending those cuts on the deficit because they’re tax cuts and somehow magically exempt?
I know, it may be too much of me to expect consistency from the GOP, but, seriously, what the fuck?
Corner Stone
I am just sick to death of seeing this rotten tooth Civil War Era no brain having motherfucking “Pastor” from FL on my teebee.
Just go away already you attention whore clown.
I don’t need to hear it may harm our troops in the field, it’s just stupid.
Redshift
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Very good point. It’s often overlooked that the reason people like Broder pine for the days of bipartisanship is that they spent their glory days in a period that was extremely unusual, even for this country, and they steadfastly refuse to recognize it, preferring to be certain in their own minds that it was just because politicians were better people in the good old days.
Looking at it from a glass-half-full perspective, that suggests that we have a decent chance that this myth will die with that generation.
(BTW, it’s not just that they are dense. I actually remember being taught in my high school government class that “America has non-ideological political parties,” and my teacher was no dummy. The historical anomaly was just not generally recognized then.)
Daulnay
Since there’s not going to be a payroll-tax holiday, we need to take other opportunities to stimulate the economy. We do, after all, have to be ‘responsible’ and not increase the deficit.
Since we don’t need to worry about the deficit so much that we must let the Bush tax cuts expire, we must be at just about the right amount of deficit. However, we are #$%^ close to a Keynesian liquidity trap right now, so it’s pretty important to goose the economy somehow.
We have an excess of saving, capital going unused (capacity utilization is low), and plenty of unemployed Americans. At the moment, we do not need to encourage saving since it will not be productively invested (there’s very little demand for investment capital: interest rates are extremely low, and banks are hard-pressed to find profitable loans so they are sitting on their cash). We need to encourage spending, in order to get the economy going again.
We need to let the Bush tax cuts expire, and replace them with equivalent (in terms of revenue effect) tax cuts for working poor Americans. We stay responsible (in terms of the deficit), but get a significant boost to stimulus, since the working poor will spend their tax savings rather than unproductively banking it as the wealthy would.
cleek
@WaterGirl:
payroll tax = FICA/FUTA = social security + medicare + unemployment taxes.
employers pay 1/2 of the total, and you pay the other half. it’s around 15%, altogether, IIRC.
thefncrow
@WaterGirl: Payroll tax is what you get deducted for Social Security, FICA, and unemployment insurance.
These taxes amount to roughly 7.5% for a regular employee, and 7.5% paid by the employer.
This would be a huge deal to anyone who is self-employed, because they pay both the 7.5% employee contribution and the 7.5% employer contribution.
Napoleon
@WaterGirl:
To add to what Cleek said it is not an income tax and you don’t need to file a income tax form regarding it or anything like that since you can’t get a refund or fall short in paying it, assuming it was properly withheld originally.
El Cid
@Zifnab: Hey man, HE DROVE A TRUCK. Admittedly, it was just a little while, for his daughter’s horses, and he didn’t like it because it was smelly, but still.
liberal
@thefncrow:
It’s a huge deal to anyone, insofar that if you believe the published elasticities, much of the so-called employer portion really falls on the employee.
WaterGirl
@cleek: @thefncrow: @Napoleon: Very helpful, thanks!
So that means that neither the employer nor the employee would be paying into social security, medicare or federal unemployment insurance, right?
How does that not add to the deficit if we are not funding those programs?
thefncrow
@Napoleon: Well, it’s not so long as you’re a standard W-2 employee.
If you’re a 1099 contractor, it shows up as the Self-Employment Tax, and it goes on your income taxes just the same as your regular income tax. You even get a slight deduction from paying it, in order to deduct out the employer half of the tax, since W-2 employees aren’t taxed on the 7.5% their employer shells out on their behalf.
Redshift
@Daulnay: Since none of this stuff is going to pass anyway, I’ll happily engage on what we “should” do.
No, we don’t have to be “responsible” on the deficit; or more precisely, being “responsible” on the deficit doesn’t mean avoiding adding to it in the short term. If the economy fails to grow, the resulting shortfall in tax revenues will be far worse for the deficit than hundreds of billions in one-time stimulus spending right now. This is even more true because interest rates are incredibly low, so it’s extremely cheap to borrow to produce all sorts of durable infrastructure that we actually need (and that has been on deferred maintenance for decades.)
The truly responsible thing to do for the deficit is to borrow and spend enough to get the economy growing robustly. Pity that’s the thing our debased political/economic discourse has decided is the least responsible.
aimai
@Zifnab:
Correct. I want Obama and all the Dems to be on TV every single minute saying “Republicans: We Just Can’t Afford Them.” Tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent? We Just Can’t Afford Them. Throwing your job away so that large corporations can make a little more money? We Just Can’t Afford To Do It. The Republicans have spent a ton of money and psychic energy associating the Democrats with “policies we can’t afford.” A really good piece of Rovian Jiu Jitsu is to turn that around on the Republicans and to attack them from their right flank with the same language. You don’t move right, you don’t triangulate, you go all the way around. Obama and the Dems tried to outflank the Republicans before, especially on Religiosity and Climate Change (there were very short lived efforts to create a religious/climate linkage which would turn the “God gave dominion over the land and etc…” evangelical dominionist line into “we need to be good stewards.” It was dropped too soon and I think they underestimated how stiff the opposition would be. But that is also because they tried to outflank the Republicans and convert the hardest core and farthest right of the base. Right now we are fighting simply for the independents and our own base voters.
aimai
Redshift
@WaterGirl: There have been different proposals floated that would have suspended one or both halves. The only truly stupid one (from a political perspective) was the proposal to suspend only the employer half.
liberal
Of course not. Krugman put it best in his forward to The Great Unraveling: the Republican Party is a revolutionary power. In general, over the long run, negotiating with it is pointless. Our only hope is to destroy it before it destroys us.
Chris
The Democrats’ problem… (sigh, as if they only have one)… in terms of big policy-making legislation, is that they want everything to be bipartisan: because they are afraid Republicans will attack them for doing anything in upcoming elections.
Which is completely fucking stupid and futile; Republicans will attack them for doing anything, ever, all the time, whether it’s election season or not. That. Is. What. Republicans. Do.
Also, Lindsey Graham is a whiny bitch. That’d be the same guy who was telling Obama, “If you want Republican cooperation, you should do a climate bill before you do immigration” one week and “If you want Republican cooperation, you should do immigration before you do climate” the next.
patrick II
Aside from the politics, there are two reasons climate change should have passed first. First, the potential size of the calamity that is coming and second the lead time it takes to do something about it.
When one reads of the possibility 10 meter ocean level raise by the end of the century causing drowning coastal cities and large parts of Florida, mass extinctions, drying rain forests, glaciers supplying river water through central asia drying up, climate change is a big f$#king deal.
And it has inertia. Unlike health care which can be remedied pretty quickly, the C02 in the air is already there, to reduce the rate we (as in everyone on earth) are putting C02 and methane into the air is, unlike medical care, a complex engineering problem as well as a political one.
The larger danger to the world’s population is climate change. And although the point at which it affects us seems far off, the point at which we can do much about it may be closer than we know — or at least closer than we seem capable of bringing ourselves to do something about.
It may be politically impossible to do anything about until people start feeling enough negative effects, but by then the problem will be much more difficult, if at all possible, to remedy.
thefncrow
@WaterGirl: No question, by itself, without something to offset it, it will add to the deficit.
The reason people keep pointing to that is because the GOP is also arguing that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy should be extended, and their rationale there is that, well, sure, it’ll add hundreds of billions to the deficit, but it’s a tax cut, and so somehow the deficit increase just magically doesn’t matter.
But if you argue for a tax cut that adds less to the deficit, one that’s targeted at people with regular jobs, and targeted more specifically at people at the lower levels of the income structure, now all of a sudden the deficit increase is incredibly important and you can’t possibly stomach this increase in the deficit.
There was a recent column by Robert Reich, where he proposed this payroll tax holiday, offset by applying payroll taxes to income >250k. Right now, the Social Security tax stops at incomes above $106,000 or so. From that point on, you pay zero SS tax on any income. Rubin argues that if you reinstate those payroll taxes at the $250k level, they’ll completely offset exempting the first $20k from payroll tax.
Redshift
@aimai: That’s really good and succinct. And it could even encapsulate their current thrust in the broader theme: “Going back to economic crash policies? We can’t afford that.”
rickstersherpa
I saw this on Steve Benen’s blog. He appears so gobsmacked by this position that he appears to be flummoxed by it, in a “they can’t be serious” kind of way. I am afraid we liberals are stupid this way and hence why we lose elections.
Taking the position perfectly seriously, the Ad would run against all these Republicans as follows: “If Joe Teatard has his way, this will the last election in Colorado you will be able to vote on who will be your Senator. Instead, politicians in the state legislature will be picking the Senators for Colorado in a back room with the special interests. But you will not be invited! Protect your right to choose Colorado’s future Senators, vote Democratic!”” Put ominous sounding music in backgroud. Now being proper liberals, one could say this is not quite accurate because voters will be able to indirectly choose a state’s senators by voting for candidates party state legislature, but this is quibble.
As for the current dynamics, the right-wing noise machine, once the tail, is definitely wagging the dog now in Republican politics. For Republicans as the parties currently breakout, there is little upside (except perhaps in New England), for cooperating with a Democratic President, also known as the Devil’s spawn (whether Clinton or Obama). It is all downside in loss of donor base, possible conservative primary challengers in red districts and states, and being savaged as a namby-pamby moderate on right wing talk TV, radio, and web sites. A deeply felt resentment (minorities get privileges we don’t get), fanned by a gang who are using it to build not so small fortunes, and falling home values and sent at least 45% of the electorate into cloud-cookooland.
Redshift
@Chris: Yeah, the most mystifying thing in politics is that there are Democrats who still believe that there is some magical way they can say and do things just right that will make it impossible for Republicans to attack them.
If you do things they’re against, they’ll attack you for it.
If you do things they’re for, they’ll lie and attack you for it.
You can’t avoid this, the only thing you can do is make sure you have something better to respond with.
I wish I could tattoo that on the forehead of every Democratic official, backwards so they see it every time they look in the mirror.
WaterGirl
@aimai:
I love that!
If John could do a google bomb against paypal couldn’t we do something similar to get this phrase out there? We could put it in our signature files for every email message, put it on every blog, hopefully other blogs could pick it up. Those who wanted to could add that line to the end of every blog post. I know the Obama folks read some of the blogs; we just have to get this picked up by one of those.
Shouldn’t be too difficult since some days it seems like all the blogs are just posting things they saw on the other blogs…
Edit: Republicans: We Just Can’t Afford Them.
Suffern Ace
@Chris: There really is no reason why all three couldn’t have been done at once. I have no idea why 100 wise men and their staffers and whatnot can only handle 1 issue at a time.
That said, I think the order of doing healthcare first then finreg was probably the right one. There was barely a consensus on what to do about healthcare. There seems to be even less consensus about what to do about greenhouse gasses. My guess is that the senate would still be dithering and the Dems would still be fighting a rear guard election battle.
rickstersherpa
@rickstersherpa: whoops ,forgot the link:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
MAKING THE 17TH AMENDMENT A CAMPAIGN ISSUE…. It’s become one of the great examples of contemporary conservative nuttiness — the growing push among Tea Partiers and other Republicans to repeal the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which allows Americans to elect their own U.S. senators.
The right is, alas, completely serious about this. Marc Ambinder recently noted that the position has “become a part of the Tea Party orthodoxy.”
Democrats, betting that the American mainstream might find all of this bizarre, are starting to embrace this as part of the Democratic campaign strategy this year. In Colorado, for example, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee last month launched its first ad, going after Republican Senate nominee Ken Buck’s remarks supporting repeal of the 17th.
Greg Sargent reports this morning that “vulnerable Dem incumbents are now beginning to air ads hammering GOP opponents who have come out in support of repealing the direct popular election of U.S. Senators.” Specifically, Democratic Florida Reps. Suzanne Kosmos and Allen Boyd both have new ads up, hammering their respective Republican opponents for wanting state lawmakers to choose the country’s U.S. senators.
I have no idea whether this will resonate with voters — I suspect focus groups liked the message, or Dems wouldn’t be running with it — but it should. In fact, I see this as something of a disqualifier — candidates who oppose Americans electing their own senators are almost certainly not part of the political mainstream.
—
Cat Lady
@Corner Stone:
My suggestion is to just say no to all newscasts – seriously, it’s been months since I stopped watching the stupid parade, and it’s great for your mental health. It’s amusing to see the comments here about teh crazee on their tee vee – it’s like being Margaret Mead among the Samoans. However, the goober pastor seems to have taken stupid to another place where even the stoopids don’t want to go. Shining a harsh light on these motherfuckers never seems to work out for them like they hope.
WaterGirl
@Redshift: You forgot to say add:
If you don’t do anything, they’ll attack you for it.
RobertB
I don’t see how global warming is all that big of a problem. Global warming + nuclear winter = problem solved. Sure, there’s that radiation thing, but what animal (or plant, for that matter) _couldn’t_ use another couple of eyes?
p.a.
Someone here, I believe, maybe even John, noted that if Obama announced his support for motherhood and apple pie the Republicans would condemn him, mothers, and apples.
Mnemosyne
I wonder if the “driving the car into the ditch” metaphor could be extended to the deficit, like so:
Republicans drove the car into a ditch. You don’t have enough cash to hire a tow truck to get it back out for you. What’s your better option — wasting a lot of time walking to the bank to get cash and then walking back to the car to call the tow truck, or putting it on your credit card and getting towed out right away?
As others have pointed out, people go into debt all the time for rational reasons, like getting the car repaired so they don’t lose their jobs. Why can’t we turn these metaphors on the Republicans and point out that even in real life you can’t cut your budget to the bone and never, ever use credit even for necessities.
Oh, wait — we have people like Steny Hoyer standing in the background to tell us we don’t dare make our Republican Overlords unhappy by pointing out that they’re idiots. I forgot.
Mark S.
This is a lot of wanking over a David Brooks concern troll column. What I find most idiotic about the column
is the implication that health care has nothing to do with the economy. For fuck’s sake, we spend 16% of our GDP on health care while the average among industrial countries is 8%. It’s a trillion fucking dollars we’re just flushing down the toilet. And that’s not even taking into account the human costs.
Napoleon
@thefncrow:
I know, I was just trying to keep it simple and get the point across that basically it is a flat % period, basically no matter what.
Redshift
@WaterGirl: Yes!
ricky
@rickstersherpa:
I would support Democrats who came out against electing Senators period. Repealing the 17th is so trivial when you can repeal Article I, Section 3.
WaterGirl
@aimai:
I would buy that on a bumper sticker in a heartbeat!
John, could we could sneak this one political item into the BJ store?
Bill Murray
@WaterGirl: 1. SS at least is off budget, but more importantly, 2. SS takes in more right now than it pays out and 3. there is a large trust fund built up to pay future SS obligations
@liberal: Why would anyone would believe the elasticities argument? Especially in a time a large unemployment, I think it is much more likely that employers would simply keep the 7.5% for themselves, as only employees with lots of pull would have any ability to demand that they receive that money. So models with full employment and dynamic equilibrium are extra useless in our current predicament.
WaterGirl
@thefncrow: Great information, thanks! Love the idea in your third paragraph.
So at what point did all this legislation start? You know, the things that screw the regular folks and benefit only the rich. It wasn’t always like that. Or maybe it was and I never realized…
Linda Featheringill
@WaterGirl:
To the Twitter literati: If someone would start #-thread, it would be fun to keep it going. With examples and complaints, etc.
Not as big a deal as some “star” that I never heard of but it might get the idea out there.
Republicans: We just can’t afford them.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@p.a.:
Anchor babies!
Freedom fruit!
Pastry jihad!
See how easy it is to play wingnut madlibs! You don’t even have to be able to pass a Turing test. I smell an iPhone app.
ruemara
I guess this isn’t OT then.
Here’s my first effort at simple, yet memorable advertising to GOTV this Nov. Tell me what you think.
http://flic.kr/p/8zdg6L
The Moar You Know
Ha. Climate change. I want what these people are smoking; climate change is one of the hills that the Teatard Army is fully prepared to die on. Climate change legislation isn’t going to pass, not on the federal level, in my lifetime.
Same goes for federal marijuana legalization.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Mark S.:
It isn’t just the HC spending that is a problem.
Having a non-universal system of employer-based HC insurance was creating structural barriers to personal mobility and (along with underwater housing values) contributing to rigidity in the US labor market, especially for families with multiple wage earners.
It is no wonder the labor market is so dysfunctional right now – the middle class effectively had become serfs bound to the land (in the form of mortgaged housing) and to their manor (in the form of employer based HC insurance).
One of the long term consequences of universal HC insurance will be to make it easier for people to move from one part of the US to another and to switch jobs from those with large employers to jobs with smaller employers, in ways they couldn’t do before.
But in the meantime we have the problem that it is taking too long for these reforms to go into effect for them to help our economy today.
Whoever is President a decade from now will have Obama and the current Congress to thank for what they’ve done to create more mobility in our labor market, and I don’t mean that sarcastically.
But it would be better to have those benefits now, if for no other reason than that by 2020 the GOP will be taking credit* for the HC insurance reform passed by the Dems this year, and our idiot media will go right along with them (see Our Medicare, keep govt out of …)
ETA:
*I realise they are doing this already (e.g. Grassley in Iowa). I mean on a much wider scale than they are today.
ruemara
@The Moar You Know:
We’ll get pot before we get real climate change legislation. I would bet on that.
WaterGirl
@ruemara: I like it the content a lot! One small thing – you almost lost me when I had to wait too long to get to the actual content. I would recommend a short and snappy version.
ruemara
@WaterGirl:
I built it around broadcast time lengths, so this is a 30 sec spot. I think I can see where there’s a time lag to tweak around the beginning, but thank you for the feedback. It helps.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@The Moar You Know:
If there is one thing the right loves with passionate devotion, it is private exploitation of a tragedy of the commons. Fixing a problem which affects almost everyone on Earth, with near universal benefits, while shutting down opportunities for somebody to make private money from a public disaster, is about as far from their ethical and moral code as you can possibly get.
If by some miracle of technology you invented a machine to stop AGW, they would blow it up, like the anti-space travel nuts did in the movie Contact.
DougJ
@ruemara:
Pretty cool, is it embeddable?
Linda Featheringill
@ruemara:
Ad:
Very good! Applause, applause!
aimai
@ruemara:
That’s really very, very, very good. The only thing I don’t like (as a viewer) is that its not perfectly parallel in construction and sometimes it seemed to lack confidence or be too busy. It begins “Elect a CommonSense Conservative” and the next line should be “What’s That?” Or “What’s Common Sense about this?” Followed by your examples. I also didn’t find the final bit with the whistle made sense. Maybe some other noise, like a car crashing? The ad is a brilliant little piece its just that where the sound and the text act as rebuses for each other I thought there was a little disjuncture. But its really, really, good and maybe I’m the only one who thinks that it needs a little tweaking.
aimai
ruemara
@aimai:
um, whistle? That’s crickets.
edit: did most hear the crickets, because now I is concerned
@DougJ:
It is, but not until the fully tweaked and final version is there. Right now, I’m addressing the tax cuts meme, corrections will be up tomorrow evening.
WaterGirl
@aimai: @ruemara: Loved the suggestion of: “What’s Common Sense about this?” I also shared the thoughts about the sound, which I couldn’t quite figure out, either.
I agree that it’s quite good, but with just a few changes, I think the reaction could be “wow”.
aimai
Ruemara,
I guess I mistook the crickets for a whistle. I think since the entire ad is silent instead of “hearing” the crickets as *standing in for silence* since they were the noisest part of the ad I heard them as something noisy, like a whistle. I think the overall silence of the ad is extremely effective so maybe you should just print “crickets chirping.”
aimai
aimai
Ruemara,
I guess I mistook the crickets for a whistle. I think since the entire ad is silent instead of “hearing” the crickets as *standing in for silence* since they were the noisest part of the ad I heard them as something noisy, like a whistle. I think the overall silence of the ad is extremely effective so maybe you should just print “crickets chirping.”
aimai
Nick
@Zifnab:
indeed, it could have passed, but if it was watered down cow-plop, then why would it be better than HCR?
and it would have needed Republican vote, ain’t no way a West Virginia Senator or Mary Landrieu (or probably Mark Begich) was going to vote for any climate change bill.