TomCADem
TomCADem's JournalBloomberg - "California Obamacare Sign-Ups Exceed 28,000 in First Week" - Contradict RW Meme
The corporate media has been pushing Republican talking points trying to judge the effective of the ACA based on implementation difficulties at the federal level. Of course, the media repeatedly ignores that thousands have been able to gain access to health care coverage in just the first week alone. Indeed, the California, New York and Washington experience serve as excellent proof of concept implementations of the ACA.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-08/california-tops-28-000-in-health-exchange-enrollment.html
The numbers for California, the largest U.S. state by population, were for the Oct. 1 to Oct. 5 period and exceeded expectations, Peter V. Lee, executive director of Covered California, said at a news conference today in Sacramento. New York, the third most-populous state, said in a statement that its pace of sign-ups shows the exchange is “working smoothly.”
The Oct. 1 rollout of the Affordable Care Act exchanges has faced technical issues, with consumers unable to access parts of the U.S. government’s website that serves people in 36 states. California, one of 14 states running its own website, has fared better. Success is critical in California, where the Obama administration has sent almost $1 billion in exchange grants.
“Looking back at this one week, the response has been nothing short of phenomenal,” Lee said. “We anticipated we’d have very low enrollment in the first week.”
Salon - "The Inevitable Republican Collapse That Will End the Shutdown" - A Bit Optimistic
I do think that this piece by Noam Scheiber assumes a certain level of civic responsibility that I don't think is present in today's Republican party, which I think sort of wants to blow everything up for shits and giggles, but assuming there is an iota of responsibility, then perhaps this scenario could play out.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115171/shutdown-2013-deal-will-end-it?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=margin&utm_campaign=mostpopular
The problem for the GOP is that, as insulated as the House jihadis are from national trends, Senate Republicans and House pragmatists emphatically are not. When the approval rating for Republicans drops nationally, these people are badly exposed. They begin to fear for their jobs. They become desperate to cut a deal—any deal—that will end their political pain. And once they do—once there is a deal that a large chunk of Republicans either explicitly sign onto or tacitly endorse—then it is game over for the House. There is simply no House Republican leader who can resist a bill that many if not most Republicans want to see pass, a bill that has passed the Senate, and to which the only alternative is the complete annihilation of both the Republican Party and the global economy.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see how we ended up here: The Tea Partiers, high on their own apocalyptic fantasies, force the GOP down a strategically catastrophic path. For a few days, they are convinced that victory is at hand. The feedback they get from their constituents is overwhelmingly positive. The right-wing media urges them on. They are convinced providence is on their side. “This is about the happiest I’ve seen members in a long time because we’ve seen we’re starting to win this dialogue,” Michele Bachmann told Sean Hannity on Day Two of the shutdown.
At this point, the Tea Partiers are so convinced of their own impending success that sober Republicans, mainstream reporters, even liberals begin to wonder if there isn’t something to it—if they haven’t badly underestimated the public’s appetite for thuggery. At which point it all collapses. The polls trickle in and they are horrific. The pragmatic wing of the party is completely demoralized. It lashes out more violently than before. The national media both encourages and adds to their derision of conservatives. Suddenly every Republican in town is shopping his own terms of surrender. The biggest challenge for Democrats isn’t getting their way. It’s that there are so many offers, it’s hard to know which one to take. Politico labeled the spectacle a “buyer’s market” for Barack Obama, massively understating the point. It is a buyer’s market in the sense that the day after the Super Bowl is a buyer’s market for pork rinds.
* * *
What Costa doesn’t discuss is the Republican leadership’s incentives, which is the final, poetic wrinkle in all of this. McConnell and Boehner, in addition to understanding how badly the Tea Partiers have hurt their party, have yet another reason to sue for peace. McConnell is facing a Tea Party primary challenge in his re-election campaign. Boehner has been repeatedly embarrassed by the Tea Partiers in his caucus, who have actively sabotaged his leadership (egged on/manipulated by Texas Senator Ted Cruz). Both men know their side has lost. Both men also know their party’s fanatics are to blame. Do you think they don’t want to see the Tea Party humiliated before all is said and done? Do you think they might want to see the Tea Partiers stuck with all the blame?
Industrialists Bitten By Financial Support of the Radical Right - The Story of Fritz Thyssen
It might be worth while to consider the story of Fritz Thyssen who was liberated from a German prison by American soldiers at the end of World War II. Who is Fritz Thyssen? Why does his story sound familiar?
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2506&dat=19380320&id=CjRJAAAAIBAJ&sjid=mQgNAAAAIBAJ&pg=1631,4430822
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Thyssen
In 1923, Thyssen met former General Erich Ludendorff, who advised him to attend a speech given by Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party. Thyssen was impressed by Hitler and his bitter opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, and began to make large donations to the party, including 100,000 gold marks ($25,000) in 1923 to Ludendorff. In this he was unusual among German business leaders, as most were traditional conservatives who regarded the Nazis with suspicion. Postwar investigators found that he had donated 650,000 Reichsmarks to right-wing parties, mostly to the Nazis, although Thyssen himself claimed to have donated 1 million marks to the Nazi Party. Thyssen remained a member of the German National People's Party until 1932, and did not join the Nazi Party until 1933.
* * *
Once the Nazi dictatorship took hold, however, Thyssen began to have second thoughts. Although he welcomed the suppression of the Communist Party, the Social Democrats and the trade unions, he disliked the mob violence of the SA. In 1934 he was one of the business leaders who persuaded Hitler to suppress the SA, leading to the "Night of the Long Knives". Thyssen was horrified, however, at the simultaneous murder of various conservative figures such as Kurt von Schleicher.
Thyssen accepted the exclusion of Jews from German business and professional life by the Nazis, and dismissed his own Jewish employees, but he did not share Hitler's violent anti-Semitism. As a Catholic, he also objected to the increasing repression of the Roman Catholic Church, which gathered pace after 1935: in 1937 he sent a letter to Hitler, protesting the persecution of Christians in Germany The breaking point for Thyssen was the violent pogrom against the Jews in November 1938, known as Kristallnacht, which caused him to resign from the Council of State. By 1939 he was also bitterly criticising the regime's economic policies, which were subordinating everything to rearmament in preparation for war.
Obama and Democrats, united by shutdown, looking for gains beyond it
Source: Washington Post
President Obama and congressional Democratic leaders, in their ongoing showdown with Republicans, now have a goal beyond protecting the health-care law, reopening the government and preventing the first-ever default on the nation’s debt.
They are gambling that if they can hang together and remain tough to the end, they stand a chance to break a dangerous cycle that has taken hold in Washington — one of legislating through brinkmanship, which has brought the government and the financial system to the edge of disaster at least four times over the past three years.
“This not just about Barack Obama. This is about the next president, whoever and whatever party it might be,” Obama told Democratic senators at a White House meeting on Thursday, according to Senate majority whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.).
So far, the Democrats’ strategy of refusing to meet Republican demands — which is not without risk — appears to be working.
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-and-democrats-united-by-shutdown-looking-for-gains-beyond-it/2013/10/12/143f1954-32be-11e3-89ae-16e186e117d8_story.html
It is nice to see an article that discusses one of the main goals of Democrats is to try to break this vicious cycle of manufactured crises. Republicans now just want to get something out of the crisis that they created even if they don't know what that is. The problem with that is that it allows them to rationalize that this was all worth it. Worse, they have not learned anything, since the great compromise offered by House Republicans is leaving the government shut down and extending the debt ceiling to expire just before the Holiday shopping season. Boehner as the Grinch anyone?
It is too bad that the corporate MSM seems to take it for granted that government by crisis is okay. This is part of the reason why Republicans have gotten a free pass for their deliberately destructive tactics.
House GOP furious with Senate
Source: The Hill
House Republicans were furious with Senate Republicans and President Obama on Saturday for trying to cut a debt ceiling deal that leaves them out in the cold.
Members emerged from a conference meeting saying Obama had double-crossed them by breaking off talks in order to shop for a better deal from the Senate GOP.
They said the deal, formulated by centrist Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine.), would never get House GOP approval.
“They are trying to jam us with the Senate and we are not going to roll over and take that,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said after a GOP conference meeting.
Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/328205-house-gop-furious-with-senate
Put another way, the Tea Party House is pissed that Republicans in the Senate won't let them engineer another debt ceiling crisis in just six weeks before the Holiday shopping season. The amazing thing is that House Republicans don't see why this is a terrible idea. It is as though everyone else has to save House Republicans from themselves.
The Nation - "Saving Face: Falsely Balanced Accountability Is the New False Equivalence"
The new MSM false equivalence as exemplified in this article, breezily acknowledges that Republicans are at fault for the shutdown and debt crisis, but then argues that the President now shares responsibility for ending it:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/white-house/why-obama-must-talk-to-the-gop-20131007
However, as noted by the Nation, this is still false equivalence, because it once again gives Republicans a free pass and encourages them to once again generate a crisis. The article above does nothing to explain why Republicans would not once again set a crisis and ignores the fact that Republicans are only offering a six week extension of the debt ceiling, thus guaranteeing another crisis.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/176601/saving-face-falsely-balanced-accountability-new-false-equivalence#
I believe it would be false equivalence to say Republicans and Democrats are equally to blame for the government shutdown and the possibility of a debt default. Republicans engineered the shutdown to protest a three-year-old health care law, knowing their defund-or-delay demands were unattainable.
But hold off on those Hosannas. For, whatever the public discourse has gained by this more honest and fair coverage of singular Republican intransigence, it’s not been matched in the press by concomitant demands for accountability from the GOP. This is perhaps not surprising. Decades of the media exercising just one set of journalistic muscles has left its others atrophied and increasingly incapable of rising to the task of speaking truth to power.
As a result, watching news coverage of the government shutdown reveals Capitol Hill reporters visibly struggling with how to “objectively” frame the obvious legislative misconduct of just one political party. Likewise, perusing a steady stream of op-eds about the debt-ceiling impasse demonstrates that most pundits literally have no concept of how to direct rhetorical outrage at or publicly apportion shame to just one ideology anymore. Thus, we’ve arrived at a surreal moment where the D.C. media’s conventional wisdom has moved past one version of false equivalence only to latch onto another—one that now doesn’t care who’s right or who’s wrong. Or, put another way: Yes, the Republicans are mostly to blame for getting us into this crisis, but all that matters now is holding both sides accountable for getting us out of it.
Atlantic - "Inside the Conservative Bubble, It Looks Like Ted Cruz Is Winning Big"
The crazy thing is that Ted Cruz won a straw poll at the Value Voters' summit, which just underscores how radical the Republican base has become.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/inside-the-conservative-bubble-it-looks-like-ted-cruz-is-winning-big/280532/
You might expect this news to put a damper on a roomful of conservatives. In official Washington, Republicans were in a full-on panic; commentators called the party suicidal, and lawmakers began scurrying toward a resolution to the standoff. But Senator Ted Cruz of Texas—the man whose adamant resolve and 21-hour filibuster had helped bring on the stalemate, earning him the loathing of many of his colleagues—was in a defiant mood.
Taking the stage at the Values Voter Summit, an annual gathering of religious-right activists, Cruz announced that they were winning the fight. “I am here this morning with a word of encouragement and exhortation!” Cruz said. A woman in the front row shouted a passage from Romans: “If God is with you, who can be against you?” “I receive that blessing,” Cruz said somberly.
The conventional wisdom that the battle to stop the health-care law cannot be won, to Cruz, was merely a “trick” perpetrated by the deceitful left. “Look, the Democrats are feeling the heat,” he said. Cruz has been huddling with the lower chamber’s most conservative members, urging them to pressure Speaker John Boehner, prompting some to declare him a sort of shadow speaker. “In my view, the House of Representatives needs to keep doing what it’s been doing, which is standing strong,” he said.
"Blind adherence to ‘balance’ makes the media dangerously dumb"
I am sure the media will holdup House Republicans' offer to extend the debt ceiling to just before Thanksgiving, but leave the government shutdown, as some great compromise on their part. Of course, this ignores the fact that this means that we would have another debt crisis right before the Holiday season starts. The fact of the matter is that this crisis is direct result of not only the Fox News right wing propaganda machine, but the false equivalency that is pushed by the MSM, which effectively protects Republicans from being held accountable for their actions.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/11/blind-adherence-to-balance-makes-the-media-dangerously-dumb/
On the other hand, according to the grassroots American Council of Liberty Loving Ordinary White People Propped Up by the Koch Brothers, the liberal media want to contaminate your precious bodily fluids and indoctrinate your children in homosocialism.
Haha, kidding. Of course, there’s no such group. But false equivalency in the news has been very much, in fact, in the news lately – thanks to reporting on the US government shutdown that characterizes the impasse as the consequence of two stubborn political parties unwilling to compromise on healthcare.
* * *
As an institution, the American media seem to have decided that no superstition, stupidity, error in fact or Big Lie is too superstitious, stupid, wrong or evil to be disqualified from “balancing” an opposing … wadddyacallit? … fact. Because, otherwise, the truth might be cited as evidence of liberal bias.
Ezra Klein - "Why Senate Democrats rejected the Collins deal"
The key problem with the Collins deal is that it sets as the starting point for negotiations the current sequestration levels of spending, which means that Republicans end up ahead.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/12/why-senate-democrats-rejected-the-collins-deal/
Second, the deal's delay of the medical device tax meant it was, in fact, a concession in order to reopen the government -- and Democrats think it's important to convince the GOP that they can't win anything through this kind of hostage taking.
Third, in a few months, we'd be back at another shutdown/debt ceiling debate, and there'd be no reason for the Republican Party to approach it any differently.
Behind these arguments is the fact that Senate Democrats believe the GOP is losing this fight, and badly. What they hope happens next is this: The GOP eventually caves on the debt ceiling and reopening the government for some period of time. Budget negotiations can, at that point, begin.
Senate Republicans Look to Jam Boehner
Source: National Review
Returning from their White House meeting with President Obama, some Republican senators said they are fed up with how Speaker John Boehner and the House GOP have handled the shutdown showdown and are ready to take charge of the debate.
“The House Republicans so far don’t want to get rid of the shutdown. I don’t know in what world we’re faring well under the shutdown, in terms of policy or politics. So, in that sense, yeah, I’d rather have the Senate” take charge, says Arizona senator Jeff Flake.
Senator Susan Collins of Maine is leading negotiations with Democrats over a bill to combine a government funding bill with the debt-ceiling increase along with repeal of the medical-device tax in Obamacare. House Republican leaders have shown a new sense of urgency to deal with Obama in part because of fear that Collins’s plan will gain steam, rolling the more conservative House position.
One scenario that would mirror how several standoffs between Boehner and Obama have ended since Republicans took control of the House in 2010 is for Senate Republicans to help pass a bill deeply disliked by House Republicans, after which political pressure would force Boehner to pass the bill largely with Democratic votes.
Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/361030/senate-republicans-look-jam-boehner-jonathan-strong
When I heard about the original House Plan, which entailed keeping the government shut down AND delaying the debt ceiling drama until just before the Holiday season AND barring the Treasury from taking any steps to avoid default, I thought OMG are Republicans seriously trying to kill their party by trying to drive the Nation into a Great Depression just before the Holidays?
I guess even Senate Republicans could no longer take this self-inflicted misery any longer, and are going to try to jam Boehner and House Republicans with a plan to end the shutdown and extend the debt ceiling. HOWEVER, this is the same tactic Senate Republicans took with immigration reform, but the Tea Party killed it, so no guarantee that this will work.
Edit to add: This is in a Republican publication, the National Review (William Buckley's magazine), which just goes to show just how deep the GOP civil war has spread.
Profile Information
Member since: Fri May 8, 2009, 12:59 AMNumber of posts: 17,387
