The sequester has turned out to be a massive political miscalculation.

Yeah and no one could have forseen that, right?

Conservatives, like Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Avik Roy, have shifting away from trying to repeal the ACA to promoting reforms to make it something they can live with.

And their concern for the health care that people need to actually live? About as evident as Marie Antoinette’s concern for starving peasants. Empathy is not only not conservatives strong point, for them it doesn’t exist. No help for the “undeserving”. Which of course is anyone that needs it. Because if you ever need it you’re one of those “takers” that refuses to take responsibility for their own lives.

“All the cuts he can reasonably make” or all the cuts he wants to make anyway? My guess is the latter.

Because he was forced to agree to the sequester in the last debt ceiling. We sort of have a gun at our head.

A gun Obama placed there. A country – like the US – sovereign in it’s own currency can’t technically “go broke”. By signaling during the last debt ceiling negotiations that he wouldn’t use the 14th Amendment option, Obama allowed the hostage taking of the country by the GOP. He should immediately reverse course on that decision which would do 2 things – 1) stabilize the markets with the knowledge that the US will honor its debts regardless of what the GOP crazies do and 2) remove the debt ceiling as leverage in this and any future negotiations with the GOP re the budget. The GOP is powerless to stop him short of impeachment and the Dems have 55 votes in the Senate. The main thing preventing Obama from taking this step IMHO is that he wants to cut entitlements and he’s using the GOP as cover – i.e. “they made me do it, I just didn’t have any choice”.

If Republicans in the House can’t be forced to break their campaign promises in large numbers so they can’t be primaried without the Republican Party becoming a minority party, the only hope is voters will defeat Republicans by the hundreds to make 2010 look like a Democratic victory.

The latter is unlikely thanks to the gerrymandering that took place after GOP statehouse wins in 2010 and in any case is at least 2 years away. In the meantime we get all that you indicate or Obama and the Dems capitulate. Which would make throwing out the crazies in 2014 even more unlikely IMHO. Either way – via the “cliff” or capitulation, some Euro-style “austerity” seems headed our way. The VSPs have decided that “somethimg” must be done about the deficit and the shiftless shirkers – aka not them – must take it in the shorts. So that’s the way it’s going to be.

Warren told the truth. “The game is rigged,”

Telling the truth is fatal in politics. The public can’t handle the truth. See Walter Mondale.

According to a new CBS News poll only 21 percent think abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest.

Only???? Seriously?? Gee, I feel so much better now. No worries then.

p.s. – Taibii wasn’t the first to make this observation:

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see..

- “Working Class Hero”, John Lennon

What is remarkable is that even though there is such a huge gap in which income groups the parties favor, it does not seem to have dramatically impacted the election.

Matt Taibbi effectively described why GOP voters – who know that their party favors the rich at their expense – continue to vote for them anyway several years ago in an article titled “The peasant mentality lives on in America“:

…actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires.

What seemed preposterous was that any civilization of otherwise thinking, feeling human beings could tolerate a society in which it defined as heroic and patriotic a set of games requiring that representatives of its children literally kill each other. How could any regime that fostered such horror retain any political or moral legitimacy? And how could you account for otherwise heroic and worthy characters accepting such evil and not plotting to topple any society and the regime that induced it to make such senseless murder the supreme heroic act that would make every family proud?

I saw the movie. It takes place in some distopian post-apocalyptic future where the “contestants” are from the districts that already lost a brutal civil war against the ruling elites – i.e. the regime didn’t have any “legitimacy”, it ruled through fear and the cowed populace apparently were willing to sacrifice a couple of children a year rather than potentially be wiped out. In the current US on the other hand the sheeple are just lying down and taking it – or in the case of conservative voters, begging for it – without [so far at least] putting up any noticeable resistance.

And it all could be solved, actually, by federalizing Medicaid.

And the entire problem of universal, affordable coverage could be solved – as it properly should be – by adopting single-payer.

It’s an incredible chart all right. Romney beats Obama on the economy by proposing to return to/double down on the same policies that dumped the country in the shitter and are destroying the middle class. That shows either a) how stupid the US public is or b) how useless Obama has been in promoting policies to defend the middle class – or more likely, both.

This wouuld seem to indicate it’s more of the former even than the latter.

It’s an incredible chart all right. Romney beats Obama on the economy by proposing to return to/double down on the same policies that dumped the country in the shitter and are destroying the middle class. That shows either a) how stupid the US public is or b) how useless Obama has been in promoting policies to defend the middle class – or more likely, both.

Real-life experience with employer-subsidized health insurance isn’t promising re the ACA. As health care costs have continue to rise faster than inflation – or wages – for decades, the “subsidy” has represented an ever-shrinking percentage of the actual cost of health insurance. And that’s for the employers that still offer coverage – their numbers have also been shrinking. As their out-of-pocket costs continue to rise and wages don’t, young healthy people will opt out of paying – either willingly as part of a cost/benefit analysis or out of necessity as health insurance becomes increasingly unaffordable. The reality is that the ACA – still it essentially preserves the status quo of private health insurance, is ultimately as unworkable as doing nothing is. Regardless of what the SCOTUS does re the ACA, at the end of the day, we must move to a national single payer plan IMHO. Whether that’s Medicare-for-all or in some other form, it’s that or rationing of health care to those that can afford it – the preference of conservatives. Which Alan Grayson rightly described as “don’t get sick, or if you do, die quickly”.

a good enough way to pay for this if you have to pay for this

And where is the economic benefit of “paying for it”? If the rationale for extending the cut is the drag on growth that would result from taking the money out of the economy by failing to extend the cut, doesn’t “paying for it” take the same sum of money out of the economy? I mean, those $$ are coming from somewhere/someone and won’t be spent, just as the $$ from failing to extend the cut wouldn’t be. Perhaps there’s an argument for a higher multiplier from the payroll tax cut [where's the CBO scoring?] but this really smacks of gamesmanship to me. And worse, of the the Dems adopting the GOP talking points re the deficit.

…the real effect will be to move the whole debate farther rightward.

This has been the entire rationale for the existence of the Democratic Party for 2 decades – to further moving the country to the right. The question that remains is why the “left” keeps aiding this process by continuing to vote for Democrats? If they were going to “take back” the party from the DLC/Clintonista/corporate-Dems, when exactly were they planning for that to happen? Is there anything – including the complete destruction of the social safety net – that would constitute the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back? Or, how many times will the “left” play Charlie Brown to the Democratic Party’s Lucy before they wake the fuck up and go 3rd party?