Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

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

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Trump’s legal defense is going to be a dumpster fire inside a clown car on a derailing train.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

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Proud to Be A Democrat

Sunday Morning Open Thread: “This Is Our Moment”

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In case you missed it earlier. I like that Senator Warren didn’t say ‘This is my chance… ‘ but ‘This is our chance’.

On a related topic, the Washington Post had a good article on the various (nationwide!) local initiatives to raise the minimum wage closer to something approaching a living wage:

States and municipalities across the country are leading a localized push to raise the minimum wage, driven largely by Democrats, who see an opening to appeal to working-class Americans at a time of growing inequity.

Efforts in Congress to raise the national minimum wage above $7.25 an hour have stalled. But numerous local governments — including those of Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, and the District — are forging ahead, in some cases voting to dramatically increase the pay of low-wage workers….

President Obama has called for an increase in the national rate, mentioning it in his most recent State of the Union address and recently signing on to a proposal from congressional Democrats to set a $10.10 hourly rate. But congressional Republicans have opposed any increase, saying it would hurt employers and curtail job growth….

Even in red states, Democrats see opportunity in minimum wage increases. Democrats are deep in the minority in legislatures in South Dakota and Arkansas, for instance. But both states allow for statewide referendums, and Democrats there are gathering signatures to put minimum wage increases on the ballot in 2014.

Just as Republicans used initiatives banning same-sex marriage as a way to boost turnout in 2004, Democratic candidates may find that sharing a ballot with a minimum wage measure helps draw the contrast between the two parties…

“Having minimum wage measures on the ballot in certain states next year may prove electorally beneficial to Democrats,” said Carolyn Fiddler, a Democratic strategist at the Atlas Project. “It certainly seems to poll well generally.”…

At its highest purchasing power, in the 1960s and 1970s, the nation’s minimum wage approached a rate of 50 percent of the country’s median wage. That’s a ratio economists say is still important in assessing its ability to keep low-income residents out of poverty…

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Apart from remembering what the Democratic Party is supposed to stand for, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up this holiday weekend?

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Open Thread: The Grownups in the Room

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Politico is grieved by her refusal to roll over like a proper Repub-fearing Democrat, but I {heart} Nancy Pelosi, and her stalwart fellows:

In a news conference Thursday after a meeting with White House officials, the top four Democrats said they won’t apologize for that promise, instead defending the language of the Affordable Care Act — their prized legislative achievement.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who shepherded Obamacare through the House as speaker, said Obama was “very gracious” in making that apology but that the president’s words – in the context of the law – were “absolutely” precise.

“There’s nothing in the Affordable Care Act that says that your insurance company should cancel you,” she told reporters. “That’s not what the Affordable Care Act is about. It simply didn’t happen.”…

Because she is a responsible adult Representative and not a lowly blogger, she did not add “All of you Media Village Idiots are free to kiss as much of my arse as you can reach from under your rock”, but I do believe the MVIs got the message.

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No. No. No. NO. NO! GODDAMNIT!

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I can’t sleep again, so I am sitting here actually reading all of the comments, and I have to say, some of you all still have not learned. I worry that some of you never will, or if there is just a sort of decency in the liberal DNA that keeps you from figuring this out.

This is not the fucking time to say “Can we all just agree that Richard Cohen is an asshole and move on?” Haven’t y’all been doing that for several decades (I’m kinda new to the cause, having converted late)? How has that worked out? Moving on and not talking about him has meant several more decades of talking about him. How about we once and for all do something about it?

This is what shocks me over and over and over again. Wingnuts, at any perceived slight, go for the throat- and more often than not they get the head. Don’t believe me? Ask Phil Donahue and Ashleigh Banfield and Dan Rather and David Schuster and on and on and on. And those are just media folks- you could start with Shirley Sherrod and work your way through public servants all the way through academia down to the smallest most insignificant guy working for ACORN. They go for the kill.

And here, we have an allegedly well-meaning guy who just wants to translate to the 75% of un-enlightend Americans why interracial marriage is unconventional dead to rights, and folks wanna say “Let’s just move on.”

No. I’m not ready to move on. Moving on means moving forward, and moving forward means rejecting the status quo and working towards something better. And we can’t move forward until folks like Richard Cohen and his ilk are put out to pasture. If you want to change shit, do it one shithead at a time. I’m tired of waiting for David Broder to die while Fox News elevates Karl Rove.

Because I’m beyond sick and tired of putting up with this crap, and I’m done moving on.

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Medicaid Expansion (Pt. 1)

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Right now Medicaid expansion is going fairly well. People who were previously eligible but not enrolled are signing up, and people who are newly eligible in the non-stupid states are signing up.  States with Democratic control have overwhelmingly expanded Medicaid eligibility and states with Republican control where the faction of Republicans who can count to eleven with their shoes on are the dominant players are expanding Medicaid.  Arkansas has pioneered the “private option” for Medicaid enrollment, and they look like they should be good to go on Jan. 1, 2014.

States have a variety of options as to how they manage their Medicaid programs.  States can either act as an insurance company by setting up provider networks, paying claims, researching denials and appeals, and providing member service or they can set up a series of  non-state managed care organizations.  Most states have gone the managed care route.  Expansion quality will vary across states.  The states that have been planning for expansion the longest should have the easiest time.  Ohio will most likely have a rough kick-off because they decided to expand only a few weeks ago. Michigan was also a late decider, but they are not expanding until April 1, 2014 so they should have a smoother launch than Ohio.

The managed care organizations have a significant number of tasks that need to be done for a successful expansion.

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Open Thread: Camelot (What Might Have Been)

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Whole spate of new Kennedy books timed for November’s anniversary, and historians are still turning up new details. The Washington Post reviewed a bunch of them; here’s Evan Thomas on Robert Dallek’s ‘Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House’:

… Kennedy was devoted to the Great Man theory of history. As he spoke about Churchill, Stalin and Napoleon, “his eyes shone with a particular glitter, and it was quite clear that he thought in terms of great men and what they were able to do, not at all of impersonal forces,” observed the British historian Isaiah Berlin after several conversations with Kennedy at White House dinners. But of course even the greatest men, from time to time, need wise advisers to battle the impersonal forces. Kennedy surrounded himself with what he called a “ministry of talent,” personified by McGeorge Bundy, the brainy but chilly Harvard dean who became national security adviser. These men — and they were all men back then — were well-intentioned, but, as Dallek shows, they often served Kennedy badly.

In particular, they had difficulty handling the military and the intelligence community. The current Pentagon is relatively restrained about the use of force. Not so the top brass in 1961. Consider Air Force Gen. Thomas Power, the head of the Strategic Air Command. “Why are you so concerned with saving lives?” Power once asked the authors of a Rand Corp. study. “The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win.”

Power’s boss, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay — a model for Gen. Jack D. Ripper in the doomsday movie “Dr. Strangelove” — described Power as a “sadist” and “not stable.”

In his first few months in office, Kennedy was bamboozled by the CIA, which persuaded the new president to back a “secret” invasion of Cuba. The Bay of Pigs was a fiasco. After the defeat, Jackie Kennedy recalled her husband crying in the privacy of his bedroom. “He put his head in his hands and sort of wept,” she said, according to Dallek’s recounting. John Kennedy’s repeated refrain: “All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts. How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?”…

And here’s Thurston Clark on ‘Why we’re still obsessed with John F. Kennedy‘:

… One of the greatest challenges Kennedy poses to anyone writing about him is that, because he rigorously compartmentalized his friends and family members, their impressions and recollections of him are sometimes at odds…

Three days before going to Dallas, he told Lincoln he was thinking of replacing Lyndon Johnson with North Carolina Gov. Terry Sanford as his running mate in 1964, but he did not share this bombshell with his brother Bobby, with whom he often spoke several times a day. Not surprisingly, Bobby later dismissed the conversation as a fabrication, telling historian Arthur Schlesinger, “Can you imagine the president ever having a talk with Evelyn about a subject like that?” Yet when former Cabinet member Abe Ribicoff went sailing with Bobby several months after Dallas, he was shocked to discover that he knew things about John that Bobby did not, confirming his impression that the president had “exposed different facets of himself to different people.”…

In a 1986 set of recollections by close associates of Johnson, I found that, according to speechwriter and adviser Horace Busby, two weeks before JFK traveled to Texas, Johnson told Busby that when he was with the president in Austin on the evening of Nov. 22, he would tell him he had decided against running for vice president in 1964 and would instead return to Texas to run a newspaper. Busby doubted that he was serious and thought that LBJ just wanted the president to cajole and flatter him. But given Kennedy’s increasing estrangement from Johnson, it is possible that he would have accepted his offer with alacrity…

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Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Uncivil!

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I like Alan Grayson, but then, verbal abuse has been a proud part of my peoples’ traditions going back many centuries.


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Apart from discussing the proper use of rhetorical overkill and the concommitent application of fainting-couch-fu, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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Open Thread: Progress, If We Can Keep It

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Tom Foley, Democratic House Speaker between 1989 and 1994, died last week. The New Republic took to its wayback machine to pull up what’s probably the best-remembered story about Rep. Foley — Lee Atwater sending out an official RNC memo comparing Foley to Barney Frank (“Tom Foley, Out of the Liberal Closet”):

… Atwater said, “I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.” Lesser functionaries insisted that no sexual innuendo was intended. The closet metaphor, they maintained, was purely political: Foley is a liberal who pretends to be a moderate…

To accept these explanations one would have to begin by accepting the dubious theory that Frank is uniquely qualified to represent House liberals, even though he is known for the heterodoxy of his opinions (he recently advised liberals to forget about gun control, for example)… More to the point, one would have to believe that the memo’s authors were unaware (a) that the primary meaning of the phrase “out of the closet” is to denote the public disclosure of previously concealed homosexuality; (b) that Frank is a gay person who became nationally famous when he came out of the closet two years ago; or (c) that for weeks prior to the release of the memo Foley had been the target of a campaign of scurrilous but unpublished rumors suggesting that he too is gay, and perforce closeted. (“We hear it’s little boys,” an aide to Newt Gingrich, the House Republican whip, had been going around saying.)…

Barney Frank, by the way, knows about deterrence. At a conference of political operatives and reporters at Harvard last weekend, I found surprising unanimity that the decisive factor in squelching the anti-Foley smear campaign had been Frank’s threat to name five gay Republicans on Capitol Hill. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have actually done it. But then, isn’t the purpose of possessing nuclear weapons to ensure that they never have to be used?

Frank, like many others, is unhappy about the underlying premise of the closet memo flap: That calling someone gay ipso facto a smear. “But the reality is that we still have a prejudiced society,” he says. “When FDR was being called ‘Rosenfeld’ and ‘Rosenstein,’ it wasn’t inconsistent with opposition to anti-Semitism for people to point out that he was not in fact Jewish.” In any case, Frank has done wonders for the “image” of gay people by facing down the bigots….

Lee Atwater, incidentally, died horribly just a few years after that, amid rumors his brain cancer was AIDS-related.

There’s all kinds of conclusions could be drawn from this twisted little epic, but I’ll go with these:

(1) Yes, American politics have always been pretty ugly;

(2) Barney Frank is a OG gunslinger; and

(3) Sometimes we do make progress. Twenty-four years ago, just suggesting a politician might be gay was considered a political death threat; being gay still isn’t a net positive in all parts of the country, but it’s been significantly defanged as a threat, largely due to the hard work of gay activists and politicians (like Mr. Frank).

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