Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

I really should read my own blog.

People are complicated. Love is not.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

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56Comments

  2. 2.

    Comrade Luke

    Check out the McCain career earnings number on that list.

    Wow.

    The other thing that stands out to me is that Demcrats are a fucking cheap date.

  3. 3.

    John Bird

    DASCHLE: I don’t think [the public option] was taken off the table completely. It was taken off the table as a result of the understanding that people had with the hospital association, with the insurance (AHIP), and others. I mean I think that part of the whole effort was based on a premise. That premise was, you had to have the stakeholders in the room and at the table. Lessons learned in past efforts is that without the stakeholders’ active support rather than active opposition, it’s almost impossible to get this job done. They wanted to keep those stakeholders in the room and this was the price some thought they had to pay. Now, it’s debatable about whether all of these assertions and promises are accurate, but that was the calculation. I think there is probably a good deal of truth to it. You look at past efforts and the doctors and the hospitals, and the insurance companies all opposed health care reform. This time, in various degrees of enthusiasm, they supported it. And if I had to point out some of the key differences between then and now, it would be the most important examples of the difference.

  4. 4.

    trollhattan

    I love how the Republicans have turned the public’s head into thinking TARP was all Obama’s doing. You know, when he was in office before the election.

    OT, but California Republicans have to be seen to be believed. Here’s one hoisting Godwin’s Law up the ol’ flagpole, whilst invoking water boarding and the poor set-upon Koch brothers. Why? Commie environmentalists have been attacking farmers again!

    http://devinnunes.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html

    Talk about bought and paid for.

  5. 5.

    cyntax

    Another salient point from that piece is that making it such a painless bailout was a very bad idea. Here’s an interview with Raghuram Rajan (one of the people who correctly predicted a number of years ago the problems we’re having now):

    All I am saying is that there are no easy answers in this thing … and one doesn’t have to be corrupt or in the pay of the financial sector to say, hey, wait a minute: it’s not as simple as letting them all go under or taking them all over. That’s my rant about the banking sector. By and large, I think we’ve done all the things that needed to be done. I think the downside of what we haven’t done is that we haven’t made the banks face up to more pain. That would have made it politically easier to do what needed to be done.

  7. 7.

    General Stuck

    Bought and paid for.

    These stories were once bugs, but no longer. Common winger corporate whoring that is now blessed as a constitutional virtue by the wingnut SCOTUS via Citizens United. I seriously doubt we pull out of it without going through a dystopian phase of at least semi anarchy.

    Imagine that, an autonomous south with thermonuclear devices.

  8. 8.

    Moses2317

    These clowns have never been for fiscal responsibility. Keep in mind that these same Republicans filibustered aid for small businesses and to prevent the layoff of teachers, firefighters, and police officers but are now aggressively fighting to increase the national debt by $1.3 trillion in order to give an average of $103,000 per year in tax relief to millionaires and to eliminate the estate tax on the top 0.3% of estates.

    For Republicans, fiscal responsibility applies only when the middle class, working class, and poor are involved. When it comes to their billionaire sugar daddies, Republicans don’t care about fiscal responsibility.

    Winning Progressive

  9. 9.

    Comrade Javamanphil

    Logic and facts only confuse the teabaggers. We keep thinking the truth will set us free from this madness when all it does is cause them to dig their heels in further. I wish dday’s piece mattered as much as Halperin’s latest “who’s up and who’s down” nonsense but it never will.

    Who’s got the scotch?

  10. 10.

    Ash Can

    Jane Hamsher might be an attention whore, but if her “All About Me” TV punditry tour of the last few days has directed more eyes to FDL to see this, it’s a consolation. The public at large — and the constituencies of these assholes in particular — need to get it through their heads just what these pricks are doing.

  11. 11.

    Mark S.

    That isn’t really fair. They were taking the principled conservative position of opposing anything our Muslim president is in favor of. They are disciples of Burke and Oakeshott.

  12. 12.

    El Cid

    Remember, they’re not against proper financial regulation, they’re just against Obama’s attempt to impose Stalinist anti-capitalist Kenyonesian repression against Our Nation’s producer class.

    These Republicans would have been perfectly happy to vote for financial reform legislation if only Obama had resigned and appointed a Republican President. Obama’s intransigence lost him their support.

  13. 13.

    General Stuck

    @Ash Can: She is right about one thing. Democrats are in fact destroying the democratic party. Maybe Jane figures she will emerge from the rubble of a crumbled America as the new Queen of Chaos and begins lopping off the heads of rivals for fun.

  14. 14.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    @General Stuck:

    That’s ok Stuck, I prefer the rear seats on the bus. I like throwing shit at the people up front and when they turn around to see who threw it I just smile.

    Banksters own our congress and I would really like to see a law passed where they have to wear racing-style suits that proudly display the logos of their corporate sponsors on it.

    They should be proud of their corporate sponsorships!

  15. 15.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @El Cid: Plus, they weren’t consulted in a bipartisan fashion before it was rammed, rammed, I say, down their throats.

  23. 23.

    Ash Can

    @General Stuck: She’s right about a lot of things. That’s why she makes me crazy when she goes off on her anti-Obama and other tangents. Like I say, though, if her notoriety draws more eyes to the good stuff at FDL, then it’s a little less crazy-making.

  26. 26.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Comrade Luke: Could be. I followed the links within the links and the $34 million stayed consistent. If there was a typo, it was in the source documents.

    ETA: Great minds.

  29. 29.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    @Ash Can:

    I think that the only way to shame them is to make them wear the logos of those corporations that they have sold themselves out to. I’ve seen someone once photoshop a congresscritter into a NASCAR-type racing suit with corporate logos. It would be cool if someone with mad photoshop skillz would put together custom suits with appropriate logos for each congresscritter and then let the radicals on teh intert00bs copy and paste them into press conferences and tv appearances. Get that shit out there on the internet and let people stare, point and ridicule. If this was done regularly you can bet it would start to bite the pols in the ass.

    Get shit like that out in front of the public and they will pay attention if only for the uncomfortable squirming the congresscritters will do when anyone points to one of the pics and asks them what they think about it. If they won’t wear their corporate logos on their own then lets help them out!

    :)

  34. 34.

    jonas

    I’m sure now that it has come to light that a lot of the Republican Senators are bought-and-paid-for bitches of the financial industry that benefited from the TARP, the Tea Partiers are sure to turn on them.

    Right?

    *Crickets*

  35. 35.

    General Stuck

    @You Don’t Say:

    Doesn’t bother me either way how it happened. And the theory of a WH sellout, is belied by the fact that Harry Reid put the PO in the senate version of HCR and Joe Lieberman said no way jose. If there was some behind the scenes agreement by the WH, then Reid didn’t get the memo, and you would have to believe Holy Joe was in cahoots with the WH running cover. I don’t buy it, but it is possible and maybe even likely, that Obama agreed to not go all out for a PO, if the HC industry would not go all out to kill reform altogether. But this particular bill was too big a deal to expect Obama to control congresses actions very much. A lot of people for a long time had been fighting for it, and a few on the dem side fighting against it. The ones with close ties to the industry and the GOP like Nelson et al. So Obama couldn’t really make any deal with the industry that he could control, short of promising a veto if a PO came out of the sausage grinder. Does anyone believe that?

  36. 36.

    Martin

    @General Stuck: Obama had many of the insurers on board to reform early on, but the PO was a big concern for them, and one that was likely to get them to drop their support depending on how it was crafted. I can state that definitively.

    The worry by the insurers, which is actually playing out now to taxpayer benefit in Medicare Advantage, is that once the government got the power to negotiate better rates, they’d be vastly stronger than the insurers at getting costs in line leaving the insurers highly uncompetitive in the marketplace. Basically, the PO had the potential to put them all out of business. Would that have happened? Probably not, but it probably would have put a number of them out of business.

    Here’s an example: CMS, who negotiates Medicare rates, has considerably more power now than it did a year ago and it’s taking the big stick to the Medicare Advantage insurers and forcing them under the new mandated medical loss ratio. How hard are they squeezing them? Pretty hard, but not as hard as they could. A big issue is what counts as medical loss? ‘Administration’ is a hazy term. If your insurer sends you information on how to keep your blood pressure low, is that administration spending or medical spending? (It’s considered administration spending.) If we want to change that to medical spending, every insurer will slap that information on the back of every bill and statement they send you and declare all of it medical spending. That’s where the battles are.

    If the federal government wants to run these guys fully out of business, it probably could do it with a public option – and that’s particularly true of the for-profits, and that not only threatens part of the insurance industry, but also gets the attention of every corporation that has employees spread across the country. Where does FedEx get their insurance once the for profits are run out? They need to cobble together plans across different states. It’s a legitimate worry for them.

    Now, I personally think that’s a grand idea when it comes to hospitalization coverage, but I’m less enamored with doing it for health coverage. If there was going to be a public option, it was going to have to be weak to get the insurers in any way on board (and you have to get them onboard). I think people miss who the villains are here. To consumers, the villains are the insurers, no question, but the villains to the Federal Government are the care providers, not the insurers. The insurers are their allies in that fight. The fight to get costs down should be the feds and the insurers working together against Pharma, suppliers, hospitals, doctors groups, etc. That’s what they wanted at the outset, and the public option didn’t help advance that. Once costs were down, we could have a separate debate about whether the insurers were a problem or not, but from day one, the WH saw the insurers as the Soviet ally against the common enemy of the care provider axis. The PO was always there to keep everyone in line, so no, it wasn’t taken off the table, but that was supposed to be for the 2nd fight. Winning the public option but having to gut Medicaid and Medicare because the trust fund is broke is a shitty bargain, but it’s the bargain the left insisted on. It was a stupid strategy.

  37. 37.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @You Don’t Say: It’s the only sane explanation for the way the situation played out. Obama deserves a lot of credit for pulling it off in the face of Democratic majorities in the house and senate and public support for a PO north of 60%. That is fucking brilliant. (Nothing I haven’t said before, BTW.)

  38. 38.

    cmorenc

    HERE’S ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW:
    An incumbent US Senator faces re-election every six years, which = 2190 days, not counting the one or two extra days for leap years during that time. So: For every million dollars ($1,000,000) that Senator will need to raise for their re-election campaign, they will have to raise an average of $456.62 every single day, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays included, during those six years. For every ten million dollars they need raise for their re-election campaign, that’s $4,566.20 they’ll need to raise each and every day during those six years.

    HERE’S THE QUESTION:
    How do any US Senators manage to avoid being “bought and paid for” by some of their steadiest, most generous campaign donors? Some are of course much, much worse than others, but the present system contains almost irresistible pressures toward corrupt judgment and voting behavior by US Senators.

  40. 40.

    General Stuck

    @Martin: Obama threaded the needle through the multi headed monster arrayed against him. Even if he had just gotten a ban on banning pre existing conditions from coverage, it would have been a major victory against the potent forces not wanting any change. And of course, we got much more than just people no longer being denied insurance because they are, or were sick.

  41. 41.

    Nick

    @General Stuck:

    I don’t buy it, but it is possible and maybe even likely, that Obama agreed to not go all out for a PO, if the HC industry would not go all out to kill reform altogether.

    Liberals looking for a sellout will believe whatever they want to believe anyway.

    But I don’t see how this is different from what everyone was already saying. If the public option had the votes in Congress to begin with, there wouldn’t need to be compromises because what the industry wanted wouldn’t have mattered.

    This goes back to whether or not you think he has any influence over Congress and I’ve long said (and am backed up by recent proof) that he doesn’t, so whatever his position on the public option, doesn’t make a lick of difference.

  42. 42.

    Nick

    @General Stuck:

    Even if he had just gotten a ban on banning pre existing conditions from coverage, it would have been a major victory against the potent forces not wanting any change.

    I still think we should’ve just done that, and maybe a few other things. America just doesn’t do comprehensive.

  45. 45.

    Steve

    @Nick: If you’re telling people you really really want a public option, and you’ve already made a deal to give it away, it’s not a defense to say “we couldn’t have gotten it anyway.”

  46. 46.

    Dennis SGMM

    @dday:

    According to the totals at the piece that you linked, the amount that Wall Street has spent fighting financial reform this year ($251 million) works out to around a dollar apiece for each life that their insane casino has negatively affected, or a fraction of the amount that Wall Street paid out in bonuses this year, or a rounding error in the amount paid to the top twenty-five hedge fund managers.

    Not only are our politicians bought, they’re bought for what their purchasers regard as chump change.

  48. 48.

    burnspbesq

    In other news, the sun rose in the east today.

    C’mon, y’all, the Republican Party has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Chamber of Commerce since the 1880s.

    The last piece of meaningful economic regulation enacted when there was a Republican in the White House was the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Prez at that time? Benjamin Harrison.

  49. 49.

    burnspbesq

    @cmorenc:

    Point taken. And it’s always going to be easier to raise that money in increments of $100K than in increments of $20. That’s why left aggregators like ActBlue have the potential to be transformative.

  50. 50.

    Karmakin

    Obama was “against” single payer (he’s said that if he were to design a system from scratch it would be single payer) because of how economically disruptive it would be. I’d imagine that there’s the possibility of the public option being similarly disruptive as well.

    I think that in that case, not outright attacking the stakeholder’s was probably the right thing to do. The problem is that Obama has done that for everything now, which isn’t always the right thing to do.

  52. 52.

    Dennis SGMM

    Ooops, used the word fi-nan-ci-al in my comment and now it’s awaiting moderation.
    FYWP

  53. 53.

    Nick

    @Steve:

    If you’re telling people you really really want a public option, and you’ve already made a deal to give it away, it’s not a defense to say “we couldn’t have gotten it anyway.”

    I’m sure he would’ve been damn happy if Congress gave him a public option.

    Congress was the one who gave it away. Or did we forget the President didn’t write the bill, something he was criticized for. If Congress wanted to give him a public option, that’s great, but he could neither get them to pass it, nor get them not to, so he didn’t make it a sticking point.

  54. 54.

    Elizabelle

    @Odie Hugh Manatee:

    re photoshopping disclosure re congressional sponsors:

    Like this idea. I hope someone does this, soon.

    And if it’s lots and lots of money, one could make the congresscritter bigger.

    Jolly Orange Boehner Giant striding about.

    Tiny Ike Skelton there too.

  55. 55.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    @Elizabelle:

    I think it would be an excellent way to rip on the pols who vacuum up the cash from the corporations. I picture one of those Capitol Hill photographs where they are all out on the steps. Photoshopping the whole gang there into their uniforms with corporate sponsorship logos on them would make for an epic picture. I bet that if enough people modded the pols photo ops that it would soon follow that the pols would start to get pissed off seeing these pics being distributed online. With those assholes, their appearance is everything to them.

    Take that away from them and they will wilt on the vine. What I am proposing would do just that. I know that they would get very sick and tired of seeing themselves being correctly depicted in their ‘racing uniforms’, proudly displaying their corporate sponsorships.

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