Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

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

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

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

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Accountability, motherfuckers.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Infrastructure week. at last.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

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

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

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Everything’s Obama’s Fault

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Jeff Greenfield over at WIN THE MORNING decides that this whole “President Obama kicking ass for the last year or so” thing is getting boring, and giving a black President a positive can’t possibly be right, so we’re back to everything is Obama’s fault as to how he has destroyed the Democratic party.

Under Obama, the party started strong. “When Obama was elected in 2008, Democrats were at a high water mark,” says David Axelrod, who served as one of Obama’s top strategists. “Driven by antipathy to George W. Bush and then the Obama wave, Democrats had enjoyed two banner elections in ’06 and ’08. We won dozens of improbable congressional elections in states and districts that normally would tack Republican, and that effect trickled down to other offices. You add to that the fact that we would take office in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and it was apparent, from Day One, that we had nowhere to go but down.”

The first signs of the slowly unfolding debacle that has meant the decimation of the Democratic Party nationally began early—with the special election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s empty Senate seat in Massachusetts. That early loss, even though the seat was won back eventually by Elizabeth Warren, presaged the 2010 midterms, which saw the loss of 63 House and six Senate seats. It was disaster that came as no surprise to the White House, but also proved a signal of what was to come.

The party’s record over the past six years has made clear that when Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017 the Democratic Party will have ceded vast sections of the country to Republicans, and will be left with a weak bench of high-level elected officials. It is, in fact, so bleak a record that even if the Democrats hold the White House and retake the Senate in 2016, the party’s wounds will remain deep and enduring, threatening the enactment of anything like a “progressive” agenda across much of the nation and eliminating nearly a decade’s worth of rising stars who might help strengthen the party in elections ahead.

The really weird part is that nowhere in the entire piece do I see the words “Debbie Wasserman Schultz” who, as chair of the DNC, would ostensibly be the person in charge of the election strategies and GOTV tactics that Greenfield is complaining about, but I guess Greenfield has never met her or something.

Also, there is the small matter of the impressive number of Democrats who lost by running as far away from Barack Obama as possible in 2010, 2012, and 2014 but no, the problem is of course Obama.

That’s the Beltway wisdom, and it will be for a very, very long time.

 

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Just having some fun

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I’ve not been to Firedoglake since the summer of 2009 when they went magical purity pony on healthcare.  They have some good writers, but the signal to noise ratio just isn’t worth my time or effort.

That was probably a wise decision as I went into comments at their one post concerning King v. Burwell:

TPP as an ACA clincher:

So the odious corporate bailout ACA stands. It won’t be fixed because the TPP will prohibit it.

The Corporate Coup d’Etat is almost complete.

A good 15 comment sub-thread on who is intellectually dishonest:

The first comment — “he sold us out to corporations”  which if one believes that Roberts is solely a corporate whore was the only way to get the a 5-4 working majority on the Supreme Court.

Of course the Supreme Court didn’t touch the Obama administration’s massive giveaway to private insurers, pharmaceutical companies and for-profit hospitals. That was a foregone conclusion.

Nothing is better than something :

I’ve been bitching about it here at the Lake since Obama selected sleazy Senator Max whatever the hell his name is from Montana to shepherd this piece of crap legislation through the Senate and entered into those secret backroom deals with Big Pharma.

Single payer or bust:

HR 676 is thirty pages and is comprehensive, but sitting on the shelf. The ACA was one thousand pages.

A thousand pages to conceal the bullshit.

Unsupported by evidence predictive assertions:

God forbid the ACA becomes the model for Employer policies going forward. The ACA is neither health Care nor is it Health Ins. what it is is a not so clever con of the American public.

Probably should have stayed away from FDL.

Richard + 3

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Afternoon Open Thread: Trade Off Back On

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It’s baaaaaack.

To recap, the version of the TPP fast track authority with worker protections that passed the Senate was blocked in the House by Democrats. The version without worker protections has now passed the House and is headed back to the Senate.

Fun times.

Open thread.

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A Generally Higher Elevation Point Upon Which To Expire

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Progressive organizations keep winning big, you guys.

With the high-stakes vote on Fast Track set for today, the liberal group Democracy For America is threatening to primary any Democrats who vote for it. From DFA’s statement:

We will not lift a finger or raise a penny to protect you when you’re attacked in 2016, we will encourage our progressive allies to join us in leaving you to rot, and we will actively search for opportunities to primary you with a real Democrat.

If Fast Track passes, and we do get a final Trans Pacific-Partnership trade deal, these divisions will only continue.

Awesome. I move across town and get my new apartment set up, I get internet back and this is the crap that greets me: DFA now actively threatening to primary anyone who backs President Obama on fast track authority.

What could possibly go wrong there?

Fight it out in the comments.

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Good News Everybody

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From Kaiser Health Foundation:

A total of 16.4 million non-elderly adults have gained health insurance coverage since the Affordable Care Act became law five years ago this month – a “historic” reduction in the number of uninsured, the Department of Health and Human Services said Monday.

Those gaining insurance since 2010 include 2.3 million young adults aged 18 to 26 who were able to remain on their parents’ health insurance plus another 14.1 million adults who obtained coverage through expansions of the Medicaid program, new marketplace coverage and other sources, according to HHS’ report .

From New York Times:

Since the first open enrollment period began in October 2013, the officials said, the proportion of adults lacking insurance has dropped to 13.2 percent, from 20.3 percent.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, said the data revealed “the largest reduction in the uninsured in four decades.” Many people gained coverage after the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

It’s almost like the free market likes giving the back hand to people who need insurance and that the only way to expand access is through government programs.

Double plus ungood thought crimes.

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Blank Space, Not Shake It Off

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White Millennials are pretty much done with Obama according to Gallup.  His approval rating is as bad now among them as it is among older white Americans.

Gallup Poll finds White Millennial support for Obama at 34%.

Rest of America seems pretty damn happy with the guy, majority approval across the board among all age groups.

Also, Americans see things getting better financially and have for some time now.

58% of Americans see their standing of living improving according to Gallup.

A majority of Americans say their standing of living is getting better and that’s been true since 2012. I find it weird that President Obama is having such a hard time among one particular group of people considering.

Oh wait.

Now, naturally the right is saying this proves all opposition to Obama is about Obama’s policies because obviously they hurt Millennials so that’s why there was a drop.  That’s only feasible if you take into account only white Millennial voters and ignore literally everyone else in America, where among white voters Obama has been unpopular since 2009 and popular among non-white voters for the same period.

It just indicates a reversion to mean, in more than one sense.

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The Obama PPACA agreement zone

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Here is the transcript from President Obama’s press conference yesterday. I want to highlight the healthcare related segments:

Following the elections, congressional Republicans are pushing once again for major reforms to your health care act.

OBAMA: Mm-hmm.

QUESTION: In the past, you’ve said you hope some good ideas, that you don’t want to undermine the bill. Can you tell us what specific ideas you’re ruling out?
….
On health care, there are certainly some lines I’m going to draw. Repeal of the law, I won’t sign. Efforts that would take away health care from the 10 million people who now have it and the millions more who are eligible to get it, we’re not going to support. In some cases, there may be recommendations that Republicans have for changes that would undermine the structure of the law, and you know, I’ll be very honest with them about that and say “look, the law doesn’t work if you pull out that piece or that piece…..”

QUESTION: (inaudible) the individual mandate one of those lines that came across?

OBAMA: Yeah, the individual mandate is a line I came across because the concept, borrowed from Massachusetts, from a law instituted by a former opponent of mine, Mitt Romney, understood that if you’re providing health insurance to people through the private marketplace, then you’ve got to make sure that people can’t game the system and just wait until they get sick before they go try to buy health insurance. You can’t ensure that people with preexisting conditions can get health insurance unless you also say, while you’re healthy, before you need it, you’ve got to — you’ve got to get health insurance…..

So the core aspects of the law are off the table. This will produce a shutdown

QUESTION: Keystone XL pipeline, they will send you legislation on that. They will ask you to repeal the medical device tax as a part of a funding mechanism of the Affordable Care Act….

Obama:… — OK — medical device tax — you know, I’ve already answered the question. We are going to take a look at whatever ideas — let me take a look comprehensively at the ideas that they present. Let’s give them time to — to tell me. I’d rather hear it from them than from you

The agreement zone that Obama is sketching out is one that does not significantly alter the three legged stool of private market near universal health insurance. Those three legs are community ratings, subsidies and participation enforcement mechanism. He is laying down a hard marker on the individual mandate but I think the Democratic policy wonks who we know he listens to would be willing to trade an individual mandate for other participation enforcement mechanisms like the Medicare Late Enrollment Penalty scheme or very narrow open enrollment windows and much tighter qualifying event triggers as long as they do the same thing. Those are the three non-negoatiable items from his point of view, and since he has both a veto pen and at least a third of one chamber, those are enforcable views.

Notably he does not care too much about the medical device tax. That is a trading chip with low value. It is enough to cover the big blind.

Also of note is no mention of the employer mandate. The Urban Institute argues that getting rid of the mandate does also nothing to change coverage while screwing some workers and adding administrative burden and perverse incentives to employers:

Our analyses as well as that of others find that eliminating the employer mandate will not reduce insurance coverage significantly, contrary to its supporters’ expectations. Eliminating it will remove labor market distortions that have troubled employer groups and which would harm some workers. However, new revenue sources will be required to replace that anticipated to be raised by the employer mandate.

The National Federation of Independent Business and other conservative groups also want to get rid of the employer mandate. The question that could provoke significant conflict would be whether and how to replace the lost revenue. If there is no replacement, this is an easy policy and political win for everyone. The Republicans get a pound of flesh, their supporters are happy, while Democrats get a ‘mend don’t end’ moment as well as better coverage for low wage employees on the Exchange.

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