Tweet
Content removed by Author.
Post Removed by Author |
|
| By: hctomorrow Monday March 15, 2010 2:14 pm | |
Content removed by Author.
About MyFDL
MyFDL is the community site of progressive political blog Firedoglake. Anyone can participate by writing a diary, commenting on others’ diaries, or joining groups to find other people in your area. Content posted to MyFDL is the opinion of the author alone, and should not be attributed to Firedoglake.
News. Community. Activism.
Firedoglake is a member-supported organization.
Help us continue our work for as little as $45/year.
29 Comments
The excise tax does seem like faith among “economists,” doesn’t it? Nuts.
It’s actually a lot worse than that.
The cult of Obama terrifies me. So many of us “lefties” have fallen under the sway so hard that they can’t even realize that this bill is not even good.
Even beginning to speak about Obama will get you a shit load of angry people.
He’s a liar, he’s a cheater, he’s a centrist fraud…..and he’s also now a religious icon.
Gruber admitted as much. That’s when the whole thing tanked utterly for me. I don’t need free market magic solutions, I want data. For the sheer amount of cash he was paid the least he could do is produce some that we, the taxpayers who funded his research, could look at.
It seems that cults just multiply when everyone has been inducted into the Cult of Money…
Hallelujah!
Following some links yesterday, I ran across some righteously pissed off PUMAs who were sticking up for Jane/FDL or at least the position against the Changeling’s HCR bill where a fattened calf tried to associate jane with PUMA.
On the post, they laid out quite an interesting series of connections.
James Roosevelt Jr.
President and CEO of Tufts Health Plan
Chairman of Massachusetts Association of Health Plan
Co-chair of the policy committee of AHIP
Co-chairman of the DNC rules and bylaws committee and a super-delegate.. .. this guy was at least partially responsible for handing the primary to Obama.
Short resume from Tufts.
Before joining Tufts Health Plan, Mr. Roosevelt was the associate commissioner for Retirement Policy for the Social Security Administration in Washington, D.C. He has also served as chief legal counsel for the Massachusetts Democratic Party and as co-chair of the Rules and By-laws Committee of the Democratic National Committee, for which he currently serves on the Change Commission. Mr. Roosevelt spent 10 years as partner at Choate, Hall and Stewart in Boston. He is past chairman of the board of trustees for the Massachusetts Hospital Association, past president of the American Health Lawyers Association and past chairman of the board of trustees for Mount Auburn Hospital. Currently, Mr. Roosevelt serves as chairman of the board of directors for Massachusetts Association of Health Plans, and as a member of the board of directors and co-chair of the policy committee at America’s Health Insurance Plans. He is a member of the Massachusetts Heath Care Quality and Cost Council and the board of directors for the Rhode Island Quality Institute. Mr. Roosevelt is also a board member at Emmanuel College and the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center, and is co-chair of the board of directors for the Tufts Health Care Institute. In November 2008, President-elect Barack Obama appointed Mr. Roosevelt to his transition team to co-chair a review of the Social Security Administration.
Lets see Bernie Sanders is the Devil, Howard Dean has been brainwashed, Obama is just another Black drug dealer – their all bad PINOs (progressives in name only)
Grover Norquist and the Teapartyers are your Allies.
What’s wrong with this picture?
I think you all morphed into Republicans and hopefully one day you will wake up. Of course you could always move to Costa Rica with Rush.
I don’t recall saying any of that. What I said is that this mockery of reform is based upon a bunch of pure fantasy nonsense, and that rather than saving money it will devastate health benefits while lining the pockets of the large insurers… without raising wages.
I think your projections reveal far more about you than they do about me. Especially the racism, yeesh.
Not to mention the reading comprehension problems you obviously have. Sanders isn’t mentioned once in my post, nor is Dean, nor the Tea Party, nor Norquist.
Nice try though.
Repent!
Funny post.
Well, there is an oblique and unintended point to what Moonhead says: Sanders and Dean and Weiner as well as the entire Prog caucus have all bought in to the mumbo jumbo thereby illustrating the point that this nation has been running on mythology, superstition and hypnotism for so long that we are starting to have faith simply in the act of having faith.
Spot on, hctommorow. You very succinctly expressed my own apprehension of the religiosity of the HCR cheerleaders. When I first saw that Gruber quote about employer health insurance costs to wages and free trade(!) I was like, “You have got to be shitting me. Please tell this man isn’t arguing for the excise tax because he just believes in it.”
When it was revealed that Dr. Gruber was on the WH payroll and not an “independent” researcher at all I was reminded of religious proselytizers I’ve known. They told me I should accept the inerrancy of the Bible because early passages of Scripture “predicted” later events in Scripture. See how that works?
Great piece hcrtomorrow.
I think a lot of us leftists are no longer under the spell of Obama, at least those of us who aren’t in Congress or in the DC veal pen.
I hope Dennis sticks to his guns and a few others join him at the last minute. This bill needs to be killed until the Administration and the blue dogs are scared enough of the coming deluge in November that they will, in a blind panic, pass a decent health care reform bill, and also a serious jobs bill that can bring down the unemployment rate quickly.
We badly need those things and also an Administration smart enough to know that a nation with sovereign control over its own currency and no debt denominated in foreign currency can’t possibly run out of money.
Yeah, Gruber got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and the best he can come up with is, ‘It’s true because I BELIEVE it to be true.’
It’d be great if the world worked that way. Then I could choose to believe Obama was a great Progressive president and.. we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
I’m guessing you read the same piece by Galbraith that I did recently, about how stupid it is to think a country with a sovereign currency could go ‘bankrupt’.
It’s a great point. We’re not Greece. We control the printing presses on dollars. We can’t ‘run out’. We could in theory print so many that they’re devalued, but since we carry far less national debt than most countries, it’s… unlikely.
And at any rate, nobody asked if it was ok to run the presses hot to give the banksters their trillions. Why can’t we use a couple trillion on things that matter? How about we fix our broken water and sewage systems, our crumbling roads, our tumbling bridges? Screw Wall Street. They’re of negative economic utility anyway. The only money I want going to Wall Street is to increase the federal spending on leg-irons.
I greeted the latest news of “OMGZ MOODY’S MIGHT DOWNGRADE U.S. DEBT!!1″ with a yawn. Means we can’t buy as much Chinese crap. Good. It’s effectively the same as the tariffs we SHOULD have slapped on their imports long ago. Meanwhile, we could put our own citizens to work rebuilding infrastructure and making the stuff we need here. And meanwhile, China would have no choice but to spend newly devalued dollars buying stuff from us.
Unfortunately, the GOP/DLC/Corporate mob has long since stopped even pretending to give a shit about us.
It fails to discuss the actual issues or the role of money in politics.
we do a poll on this… I vote vomit.
good article. We have a faith-based iniciative in Washington, it’s called “The Obama Administration” and all it is, is an off-shoot of a previous religion, “The Bush Administration”, which was just a off-shoot of “The Clinton Administration”…
God bless the free markets and neoliberal structural reforms.
I vote vomit.
There are no “lefties” in the Democratic Party except for Kucinich and his tiny band. There is not one “leftie” in Obama’s entourage. Obama causes real lefties to puke their guts out.
They gave the Wall st. banksters trillions based on the same faith that these good men and women would reform their evil ways and come to the rescue of Main st. We all see how that is working out don’t we? The whole friggin economy is built on these kinds of cons. They should replace “In God we trust” on the $$ with our real motto “Never give a sucker an even break.”
Agree. That bankster bail outs that were alleged to be so good to us serfs out here on Main Street just resulted in more $$$$ for the uber rich. It’s part of the same continuum of phoney nonsense about how giving the obscenely wealthy more and more tax breaks will “encourage” them to create jobs for peons in the USA. And we all saw how well that worked out – yeah, those rich fat cats created more jobs but for even more downtrodden peons in the third world, not here.
and so on and so forth and scoobie do be do be….
The Democratic Party is a fraud that’s been bought off by K Street lobbyists distributing Kool Aid talking points with big ole wads of cash. Only a few, like Kucinich, have resisted the lure and allure so far.
More pity for us serfs. I cannot answer for those peons who still “believe” in BHO. I think it’s because many citizens really just don’t pay attention; hold their nose; close their eyes; and hope for the best. For some, the bottom line is that BHO is NOT W… we here at FDL have opened our eyes and ears and see that there’s not much difference between the two.
Good post.
ooo sha sha
Go back to Kos so you can worship your leader.
Sanders has sold out multiple times. And has caved everytime it came to it.
Dean was against the senate bill, now all of a sudden he’s for it. That’s a sellout to me.
I don’t know where you get off even attempting to call Obama progressive. Name one piece of progressive legislation he has pushed. go on, I’ll wait.
Still waiting.
Norquist is a moron. But if he wants to work with us for this one goal, then I will work with him on this one goal. That sir is REAL bipartisanship, not the fake bullshit bipartisanship Obama is shoveling.
hi, i like your entry here and agree with the sentiment…i’d just caution against elevating atheists as the paramounts of rationality above all others. there are plenty of fundamentalist atheists who are just as irrational and, yes, defensive as any hillbilly southern Baptist I’ve met.
Thanks! The difference between the two is style not substance. BHO is more Clinton or Reagan but all are Corporatist neo-liberals or neo-conservs. Same basic policies with slightly different approaches.
Norquist is a fraud, his pockets are lined by the Corporatists big time. He ONLY hates the Big Gov’t side of the equation and of that only the Social ledger side. Ask him if he wants to cut the military or Homeland security or all the rest of the Corp. welfare being shoveled out here. NOT! He’s just pissed like the rest of the Conserv. hypocrites that FDR ever lived and he’s hell-bent on destroying the Welfare State as they used to love calling it.
Oh I know. But a lot of those people are just religious in another way, when you think about it.
I’m what Dawkins calls a ‘de-facto’ atheist, in that I’m an empiricist and I apply that principle to the realm of religion. Fifty thousand years of human history and there’s never been one single verifiable instance of the supernatural. Seems like a pretty safe bet to me.
But you do get atheists who are instinctively certain in claims about all powerful beings, and that’s just a sort of inverse religion. Being an atheist because it *feels* right isn’t any better to my mind than going to church because it *feels* right. We need to get past the point where we all act on our natural assumptions because that’s easiest and most comfortable.
Which brings us back to the topic of the post, and people like Ezra Klein and Jonathon Gruber pushing a form of healthcare ‘reform’ they know from the evidence won’t work.
Because to them, THAT is what feels right.
I don’t understand what the fracas over Jane working with Norquist was. You use your enemies to get what you want. That’s politics. It’s not so much an alliance as finding a way to get people who are against you on almost everything to work toward one of your goals.
It’s pretty transparent that the reason this one instance of bipartisanship was ‘bad’ was because it was against President Hope.
I agree on all counts. “The feeling” right now guides this current movement of the sanctioned elite and the blog tools to endorse really bad policy. EDIT: also “political expedience” and “pragmatism” [vs. principle] seem to be the other entertaining reasons offered to accept this garbage.
A very clever post. I, too, have been smelling the odor of magical thinking around the subject of health care reform.
An economist once explained to me why most economists support free trade and it seemed to be a very sound explanation, so I don’t know why Jon Gruber can’t explain it. I hope his position at MIT isn’t a teaching one.
Health insurance costs may come out of wages in a sense, but it doesn’t follow that if companies were relieved of health insurance expenses that they would immediately give their employees wage increases in the same amount. In any case, wouldn’t that be a good argument for single payer if were true.
What Gruber practicing isn’t economics, it’s propaganda. The same thing goes for Ezra Klein and his difficult graph, although at least he knows that there’s a problem.
Obama really has ushered in an era of magical thinking. It’s not just about health care reform. This is an from an old piece by Matt Taibbi:
We need a lot less faith.
I already vomited.