01-13-2010
TOP TEN Immediate Benefits of Health Care Reform
1. Uninsured Americans with a pre-existing illness or condition will finally be able to purchase coverage they can afford.
2. Children with pre-existing conditions will no longer be refused coverage, and young adults will be able to stay on their parents’ policy until they’re 26 or 27 years old.
3. Small business owners who can’t afford to cover their employees will be immediately offered tax credits to purchase coverage.
4. Early retirees who receive coverage from their employers will see their coverage protected and their premiums go down.
5. Seniors who fall into the coverage gap known as the donut hole will receive discounts of up to 50 percent on their prescriptions as we begin to close that gap altogether.
6. Every patient’s choice of doctor will be protected, along with access to emergency care.
7. Insurance plans will be required to offer free preventive care to their customers – so that we can start catching preventable illnesses and diseases on the front end.
8. Insurance companies will no longer be allowed to impose restrictive annual limits on the amount of coverage you receive or lifetime limits on the amount of benefits you receive.
9. Insurance companies will be prohibited from dropping your coverage when you get sick and need it most.
10. There will be a new, independent appeals process for anyone who feels they were unfairly denied a claim by their insurance company.
This is what reform really means. Don’t let opponents of reform scare you into believing otherwise. Send this TOP TEN to your contacts to help SPREAD THE TRUTH.
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08-20-2009
The Awesomeness That is Barney Frank
In honor of Frank’s facedown with a townhall “Obama is a Nazi” protestor, the New Republic has reprized some of Frank’s greatest moments, and they are great. We can’t resist a couple of our favorite quotes and a copy of our favorite clip below:
“I am appalled … because somebody hurt their feelings, they decide to punish the country. . . Give me those twelve people’s names, and I will go talk uncharacteristically nicely to them.”
“Mr. Speaker, I had underestimated the tenderness of the feeling of the members opposite.”
And, for this one, you really just need to watch the full clip:
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08-19-2009
John Ensign Compares Himself To Clinton
Note to John Ensign: a man devoted his professional life to serving you and making you look good, and you slept with his wife. Your actions will not compare favorably to Bill Clinton’s, in fact, they will not compare favorably to just about anyone. Focus less on other philanderers and their assorted and comparative legal problems and focus more on how you are a horrible excuse for a man. Here’s one place to start: be more like the Mayor of Milwaukee, Tom Barrett.
In other news: we remain huge fans of Barney Frank. This is great viewing. Money quote to questioner holding Obama-as-Hitler sign: “Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.”
Posted by genblue in General | 2 Comments »
08-14-2009
Another Strong Performance From President Obama in Town Hall
President Obama spoke in Montana today. Unfortunately, while it is difficult for industry funded protestors to shut down and drown out a Presidential town hall meeting, they can still easily do it to Senators and Congressmen, making discussion of the issues inaccessible to most ordinary Americans. We’d single out Senator McCaskill, friend of Generation Blue, for handling her town hall showdown particularly well.
We’d also note that it probably isn’t a coincidence that as the country is struggling with how to manage the ongoing explosion of health care costs, a new report is out today that income inequality has reached an all-time high. One important reason for that is that for years now, the compensation increases for all but the wealthiest Americans have been entirely diverted by their employers to pay for their health care.
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07-17-2009
Now You Own It . . .
Kindle owners have certain books they purchased erased when the publisher changed their mind. And of all the books, it happens to be 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell.
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07-14-2009
Do You Think This is A Coincidence?
Newt Gingrich suggested three weeks ago that conservatives support conservative Dems in districts Republicans can’t win, and this week Sarah Palin suggested she would stump for conservative Democrats. Both suggestions were made to the Washington Times. We wonder what Newt has to say about cap and trade . . .
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07-14-2009
Whitehouse
The Senator from Rhode Island, not the place. His opening remarks at today’s confirmation hearings of Judge Sotomayor summed up the hypocrisy of right-wing legal “philosophy” extraordinarily well. Here is our favorite part:
I particularly reject the analogy of a judge to an ‘umpire’ who merely calls ‘balls and strikes.’ If judging were that mechanical, we would not need nine Supreme Court Justices. The task of an appellate judge, particularly on a court of final appeal, is often to define the strike zone, within a matrix of Constitutional principle, legislative intent, and statutory construction.
The ‘umpire’ analogy is belied by Chief Justice Roberts, though he cast himself as an ‘umpire’ during his confirmation hearings. Jeffrey Toobin, a well-respected legal commentator, has recently reported that ‘[i]n every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.’ Some umpire. And is it a coincidence that this pattern, to continue Toobin’s quote, ‘has served the interests, and reflected the values of the contemporary Republican party’? Some coincidence.
For all the talk of ‘modesty’ and ‘restraint,’ the right wing Justices of the Court have a striking record of ignoring precedent, overturning congressional statutes, limiting constitutional protections, and discovering new constitutional rights: the infamous Ledbetter decision, for instance; the Louisville and Seattle integration cases; the first limitation on Roe v. Wade that outright disregards the woman’s health and safety; and the DC Heller decision, discovering a constitutional right to own guns that the Court had not previously noticed in 220 years.
It would have been tempting to devote today’s post to the NY Times retrospective on Sarah Palin, which is fun and juicy reading, but at the end of the day, probably irrelevant to the future of the Republic. If you don’t look to Sarah Palin for your entertainment reading, we’ll sum up the piece for you with the money quote: “Feuds begat feuds.”
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07-10-2009
“She was not thoughtful enough to know that she wasn’t thoughtful enough.”
We’re not big Peggy Noonan fans here at Generation Blue, but that’s a good quote about Sarah Palin.
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07-07-2009
The Destruction of Palin’s Non-Existent National Prospects
Over at TalkingPointsMemo, Josh Marshall has devoted some ink over the weekend to the insane speculations of various pundits on whether Sarah Palin’s big move will hurt or couterintuitively help her national prospects. But with all due respect to Josh, whether Palin is now finished in national politics is really the wrong question. The better question is whether she ever had a prospect of a beginning in national politics.Palin defenders will defend her poor performances and clear lack of any policy knowledge by saying that “elites” “sneered” at Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and those two former Governors went on to become two-term Presidents. Let’s set aside the fact that the depth of Palin’s knowledge and views make Reagan and George W. Bush look like college professors. Let’s set aside the fact that Palin appears incapable of stringing together a sentence with a subject and a verb rather than an incoherent string of malaprop right-wing slogans, and that if only compared to her, George W. Bush would go down in history as the Demosthenes of his time.
What you can’t set aside is the fact that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both had an exceptional capacity to unite their entire parties around them, not just the factions that produced them. Sarah Palin, if you’ll recall, can’t unite her Wasilla aerobics class, the Palin campaign alumni, Alaska Republicans, or anyone else that’s ever come into intimate contact with her or her family, which time has demonstrated is a pretty important component to winning a major party nomination, if not just any tough election. This became evident for all to see during the campaign, and certainly after. The fact that it hasn’t already been incorporated as retained knowledge by the political media establishment says something about their inability to report even the most obvious things.
That doesn’t mean Palin isn’t a fascinating individual and a sort of Rosetta stone of the conservative movement’s ‘id’ (which, let’s face, is all that’s left now). Many important Republicans (McCarthy, Nixon, Bush, Cheney) are better understood by their simmering resentments against people who they believe think they’re better than they are. But only Sarah Palin is so consumed by her grudges and feuds that she had to quit her job to devote more time to them.
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06-30-2009
Senator Franken
We couldn’t go the entire day without noting today’s good news about the imminent seating of Senator Al Franken. Just about everything to be said about this has been said, except this: Why Not Me is one of the funniest books you will ever read, although to some degree you have to read it in the context in which it was written, 1999.
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06-30-2009
Vanity Fair Article on Sarah Palin
Today’s must read, just completely fascinating. One worthwhile, if not particularly juicy insight, is the attribution to President Obama himself the view that Palin would not be able to adjust to national politics in the short time that she had during the campaign, which was probably why the Obama campaign made the decision to refrain from attacking her and generating any backlash stories. With 20/20 hindsight, we wish we were that savvy.
UPDATE: From Josh Marshall:
I have little doubt and some direct knowledge that we’ll be hearing new shocking details of who this woman is for months, perhaps years, to come.
For someone who loves politics, and perhaps also finds people with personality disorders straight out of the DSM-IV equally fascinating, this is very good stuff, way better than the drama surrounding Jon & Kate plus 8 minus Jon.
Josh, don’t hold back on us! Bring it!
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06-30-2009
The Anti-American Oklahoma State Legislature
Perhaps you’ve had a chance to review the proclamation of the Oklahoma state legislature that the financial crisis can be chalked up to American debauchery. This kind of broad brush blame America first accusation is oddly familiar and reminds of the old Soviet bloc habit of blaming all that was wrong in the world on the decadence of American capitalism. Like we were saying, when do we get to call them the anti-American right?
Perhaps that’s unfair, the individuals behind this resolution seem to love America, they just hate the majority of people in it who don’t share their theocratic worldview. Here’s the money “whereas” quote:
WHEREAS, this nation has become a world leader in promoting abortion,
pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery; and . . .
Perhaps you are curious where Oklahoma falls among the states in rankings on divorce rates, on-line porn subscriptions, and teenage pregnancy? According to Charles Blow’s NY Times op-ed, 4th, 5th, and 10th respectively. 25 out of 28 states that voted for President Obama had better measures than Oklahoma on all three metrics. You would think that before imposing their theocratic worldview on the rest of the country they’d get it working better in Oklahoma.
Too bad they didn’t include in their resolution that quote from the Bible about casting the first stone . . .
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06-29-2009
The Health Insurance Market
Thanks for checking in with us after a long hiatus. The must-read today are these two posts at TalkingPointsMemo on the competitiveness (or lack thereof) of the health insurance market. Its a critical angle on what is going on with sky-rocketing costs and the vested interests against reform.
Posted by genblue in General | No Comments »
06-10-2009
Michael Steele’s Republican Party
I think most comedy writers would be challenged to match the unintentional hilarity that has so often ensued:
According to those present [at the College Republican National Convention], in his speech, RNC Chairman Michael Steele singled out the one black woman in the room for special recognition.
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06-10-2009
The Anti-American Right
For decades now, anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan has had to bear the slings of “anti-American” as if anything other than devotion to conservative orthodoxy means secret sympathy for Jane Fonda’s trip to Hanoi and the bombing campaign of the Weather Underground.
But can we take stock of some of the news in the past couple of days? The right’s spiritual leader, Rush Limbaugh, having previously stated in public that he hopes the current President will fail, has now called for a boycott of America’s leading car company, for the express purpose of causing its failure at the expense of American taxpayers. The Republican Governor of Texas, the U.S.’s second biggest state has publicly flirted with secession. Now Republican Congressman Mark Kirk, a leading contender for the GOP Senate nomination in Illinois, has bragged about telling China, both a major rival to the U.S. as well as a major creditor, that we have been lying in our budget numbers.
When do we get to call them the anti-American right?
Posted by genblue in General | 1 Comment »
06-08-2009
Racism
Many conservatives often argue that the country has moved beyond its history of racial discrimination and should therefore move on in light of the election of Barack Obama. Many mainstream voters might reject this but believe that, at a minimum, the country has moved beyond the type of mainstream, overt racial discrimination and segregation that characterized the civil rights battles decades ago. Its understandable that they may think so, but reading this piece in the NY Times Magazine section about segregated proms in the rural South demonstrates that, painfully, its just not true. Its really worth your time to check it out.
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06-08-2009
Paging Marshall McLuhan
Does anyone else find it interesting that Republicans are convinced that their path back to power lies in a medium that involves the broadcasting (i.e. twittering) of one’s views 140 characters at a time? Just by point of contrast, Madison and Hamilton wrote the Federalist Papers.
Also, to be clear, “the medium is the message” is basically the only thing we know about Marshall McLuhan. Well, that, and crucially for any New Yorker, this.
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06-04-2009
Why That’s Very Graceful of You . . .
“We need to accept the role of the loyal opposition much more gracefully than our opponents did. If you haven’t noticed, the meanest people in politics are on the American left.”
– Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R), showing that wanting to act more gracefully may also require some sense of irony.
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06-04-2009
Twenty Years Later
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06-03-2009
I frankly haven’t had the opportunity to study her record
The full quote from Jeff Sessions is:
Sessions was asked if he queried Sotomayor on the “wise Latina” remark. “No,” he responded. “We talked about the idea and the concept of personal feelings, to some degree, you know, how that influences a decision and how it should not … we talked about it briefly and did not go into that in a lot of detail. I did tell her that, You know, i do think that we may well talk again. So we might get into more specific details. But I frankly haven’t had the opportunity to study her record enough to fairly ask a lot.”
Question: If someone who is likely to become a Supreme Court justice for the next couple of decades were coming for a private meeting with you in your office, in all likelihood just the one time, and you had about a week’s notice and a large staff, how much time would you find to study their record and ask them some questions? Maybe plow through some of their key decisions, speeches and articles, read some critiques? Call John Turly see why he thinks what he thinks?
Usually, the problem with Republicans is that they have a nihilistic ideology aimed at wrecking the modern institutions that protect us. So when they are bad at governing, some say, they can’t be good at governing if they don’t believe in government. But this Sessions quote makes us wonder if they are just lousy at their jobs, full stop. Perhaps we should check in with Michael Steele on that one.
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