US POLITICS: AMERICANS, PLEASE WELCOME YOUR NEW PRESIDENT... SCOTT BROWN!

I don't really know how the government works. ILX is here to help me learn!

"I would have preferred to add oversight and judicial review improvements to any extension of expiring provisions in the USA Patriot Act," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "But I understand some Republican senators objected."

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_PATRIOT_ACT?SITE=NVLAS&SECTION=WEATHER&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Yeah we wouldn't want to upset the republicans.
Good job, fucking pussies.

David Price votes Nay on USAPATRIOT, fuck yeah - gotta take what good news I can get

The Patriot Act vote was a resolution to concur on the Senate's ammendment to H.R. 3961, a bill originally about the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act. So yes, the page that says Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act is the correct vote. The one Ed posted is not directly related.

I'm glad to see Blumenauer was a nay.

Small comfort.

(amendment of the renewal of the Patriot Act onto H.R. 3961, I should specify)

weirdly, my current liberal-democrat congressman (rangel) voted aye, but my soon-to-be conservative-republican congressman (duncan) voted nay. duncan also voted against the iraq war. he's a hard-right guy, but he's an old-line conservative who really believes all the small-government stuff (e.g., doesn't like unnecessary foreign entanglements). so... knoxville represent.

does he hate fags?

yes. he does. he is an east tennessee republican. just one with a little more consistency to his views than most.

Charlie "Four Rent-Controlled Apartments + Villa in the Dominican" Rangel -- NYC's kinda liberal

yeah. i couldn't bring myself to vote for him last time. i guess if he'd had any actual opposition or chance of losing, i might have. but yeesh.

Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA), you may well go down in November for being relatively principled, but I salute you. On climate change/energy reform:

"That’s more insider baseball crap. I don’t really care. I’m sick of starting with what can we get through the Senate; let’s start with what solves the damn problem. Until the Senate gets its head out of its rear end and starts to see the crisis we’re in, our country is literally at risk. Our economy is at risk, because these jobs are being created overseas. It should have the same urgency with this problem that it had bailing out Wall Street. We are swearing an oath to do what’s necessary to protect this country, not do what’s necessary to get a bill through the Senate."

– This is the challenge of our time—the jobs opportunity, the national security challenge, the scientific challenge of our era. Any plan that uses market forces to signal a carbon-constrained environment is going to move us in the right direction. People who don’t support this kind of aggressive energy independence are just selling Americans short.

– We’re so far behind China, Europe, and other areas in the energy jobs of the future because neither party has had the guts to take this on. There are so many spineless people in D.C.

– Every week the Senate doesn’t act, it either freezes that investment and innovation or it sends it overseas. We’re giving up jobs. The Senate—the ridiculous tactics of the Republicans and the timidity of the Democrats—is standing in the way of the kind of job creation we need.

– Unfortunately, good ideas, ideas that could save our country, sometimes take 30 minutes to explain and only 30 seconds to demagogue. In between those two things is leadership, and we haven’t had the moral courage to take this on

Pretty good stuff but I wish cap and trade weren't just an enormous giveaway to the exact same people that send us over the financial edge

I assume that's what he means by a "plan that uses market forces to signal a carbon-constrained environment"

let's get real here, people think "regulation" means forcing people to pay for owl habitats and jobs for crackheads. you try to point out that it means no thumbs in your meat, no viruses in your lettuce, and stairs that don't collapse...

― goole, Thursday, February 25, 2010 1:54 PM (2 days ago)

i am cool with paying for owl habitats and jobs for crackheads fwiw!

but yeah, otm

the POTUS (politics of the us) channel on XM radio has been replaying the health-care summit this weekend. it is striking how far superior obama is to the GOP in terms of policy understanding and analysis (i mean, sure, the GOP is determined to be obstructionist for political reasons, but they sound so hamfisted and addle-minded in the process).

yeah as much of a pussy as i think he and democrats have been over this whole thing, he was consistenly otm and reasoned throughout all that i watched.

he was basically the scottpl of pitchfork clusterfuck threads

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Damn, that dark haired woman behind Robert Andrews is HOT!!

Medicare for all.

he was basically the scottpl of pitchfork clusterfuck threads

― idgi, mon (k3vin k.), Saturday, February 27, 2010 6:09 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

lmao at this

the scottpl of p4k threads makes me wince

Was punishing myself reading David Brooks and other neo-cons talking about the summit. They think that because Republicans pointed out that the Dems plan is expensive that the Repubs made good arguments and were better prepared than the Dems. These commentors also remains convinced that a modified version of the Repubs buying across state lines thing (that will magically not lead to a race to the bottom) and malpractice reform caps are enough.

anyone who thought the GOP looked more informed and more insightful than obama is smoking dope.

i saw an earlier david brooks column where he predicted the HCR won't get done now, but this summit was a step in the right direction "for future generations of health-care reformers."

btw, now that i think of it, my father-in-law thought the GOP was much better and more insightful than obama. don't think he's smoking dope, tho. just an unreachable conservative-type.

narrative will always, always trump facts - especially in 2010

They think that because Republicans pointed out that the Dems plan is expensive that the Repubs made good arguments and were better prepared than the Dems.

well i think republicans really think that saying "This is a GOVERNMENT plan," and "This will cost MONEY" are solid, irrefutable intellectual arguments. that's basically as deep as their ideology goes. and sadly it has a fair amount of appeal (tho less than they think it does -- for all that they talk about polls, they conveniently overlook how actually popular lots of government programs really are).

and i thought obama was way too conciliatory in constantly framing things as "a philosophical disagreement." philosophy is way too kind a word to characterize current conservative thinking. i wish he had said, "we do have a philosophical disagreement, but your philosophy is based on a childlike simplification of economic ideas that are comically wrongheaded to start with. you guys still believe all that supply-side bullshit!"

Yes it kind of drives me crazy that in any other framing of this situation, these people would be identified as meathead bullies and treated as such - by which I mean, refuted in passing, on the way to doing exactly what you'd planned. The problem for this President is the whole 'seen to be' phenomenon, where you have to make a bunch of conciliatory noises at people to underscore their bloody-mindedness and I think nobody was prepared for how deep certain heels would dig in, or the form culture wars would take once he was elected.

I also saw that Repubs were mad when Obama would say "those are just talking points" rather than responding. Perhaps he should have prefaced every answer by saying "we have philosophical differences regarding your talking points as your points are based on ideas that have failed under Bush and prior presidents and where instituted state-wide."

But yea, Brooks seems to believe that some sort of version of the 2 Repub items (across state lines and the malpractice insurance thing) are a starting point for future reformers even though he ignores every study saying how those things don't work and would only have a tiny impact in the whole scheme of things even if they did work.

re: framing and the appeal of the GOP's arguments. it's interesting to note that, when you poll republicans, "entitlement programs," e.g., welfare, do very poorly, but medicare and social security do very well. that's because, i think, when many republicans visualize "entitlement programs," they see immigrants, blacks, and other minority groups; when they visualize medicare and social security, they see their parents or other elderly whites who need a safety net. the gop has a fairly easy time convincing its consituents that hcr is another "entitlement," which means it's easy to whip up opposition to it, based on some deeply hardwired biases.

obv., this is an over-generalization, but i think there's a lot of truth to it.

Yep, and I read somewhere that Rush Limbaugh has been referring to the HC plan as "reparations" although naturally Limbaugh supporters say this was taken out of context and he simply meant when he used "reparations" and "the Civil Rights Act" in the same sentence that if the health care plan included the ability to correct for disparities in healthcare services arising out of income equality that it would be reparations. So its race based and income based bashing nonetheless.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/rush_limbaugh_health-care_refo.html

You could almost say Republicans and tea-partiers have entitlement issues...

i know people who are opposed to this just because it is 'government' and involves 'spending money' and is considered a give away to 'obama's base' who are 'poor' and 'freeloaders'. yes I do. and one of them is a doctor. so you know, fuck the usa.

But it is meant to help the poor, right? So if they're against it on those grounds, let's have the argument be about whether and/or to what degree the US government should be helping the poor.

Apparently a lot of people who've never been interested in Japan have referred to this meting as 'kabuki theatre' and you'll be unsurprised to find they're from the party of Noh.

x-post--Repubs say they're helping the poor by their alleged efforts to encourage small businesses and by allegedly making it easier for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Cliched but they say that (what they actually do in practice is a whole 'nuther story)

Some say the health care bill was a failure of marketing in that the large percentage of people who DO have health care need to see how this will help them; not just how it will it will help other folks (read poor) get health insurance. Do-gooderism for the poor isn't gonnna win over Independent voters

Some say the health care bill was a failure of marketing

Some are otm

Is do-gooderism for the poor gonna win over people on this thread?

it isn't being presented/marketed as "do-gooderism for the poor." the marketing angle is, "uninsured put incredible stress on the health care system, which raises costs for the insured population (e.g., they go to the ER for routine treatments (ERs can't deny services), but don't pay, causing providers and hospitals to pass those uncollected costs on the everyone else (obama says that alone costs every insured family 1K every year))."

BTW, the very morning i post here with assumptions about what demographic makes up the current GOP, the NYT has a feature story about the pierced-nosed, improv-performing 30-year old woman from ''a neighborhood with more Mexican grocers than coffeehouses,'' who is credited with beginning the tea party movement.

Do right-wingers support laws to permit or require ERs to deny services? Or is that gonna sound too cruel? I gather those in the ER business don't mind the present state of affairs either, since they don't get stuck with the bill.

Government money should be used to bomb the poor, not help them! Right, McCain?

the most logical marketing for health-care reform, imo, doesn't have to do with the uninsured at all. i mean, you mention them in passing, but the people to appeal to are people who have health insurance -- because there are more of them and they're more politically powerful. and there's an easy way to appeal to them: lots of them already hate their health insurance companies, and almost all of them know that they are exactly one lay-off away from losing their insurance. the GOP talking point about how "most people are happy with their insurance" totally papers over how much angst and anxiety most people really feel about their insurance. not many people who have ever dealt with a health insurance company in any involved way have warm feelings toward them, and most people can relate to the sense of insecurity inherent in having your insurance tied to your employment. so the way to sell it is to say, look, if your insurance sucks, or if you lose your insurance, under this plan you will still be able to get affordable health care for your family. this is such an obvious framing of the issue that it boggles my mind that the democrats haven't been pounding it for the past year. advocacy groups could have flooded the airwaves with true horror stories of people who a.) thought they were insured and discovered their insurance wouldn't actually pay for x, y or z, so they went bankrupt; or b.) lost their jobs and their insurance at the same time, and then got sick. there are hundreds of thousands of those stories out there.

democrats are trying to appeal to a sense of charity or fairness, or on the wonky side they're making arguments about efficiency and economics, when they have a much better FEAR card to play than the republicans, but they haven't been using it. baffles me.

Obama was making the argument you're giving, tipsy, during the election at any rate. I guess he's stopped doing so?

I'm not convinced by any polls I've seen that "the people" really bought that argument to begin with, or that they've stopped buying it. But it's not like that kind of data has really mattered, anyway. The "debate", such as it has been, over the last year has been between elites. The status quo obviously benefits those elites. So the argument has turned on questions of charity, because it's the elites' charity that matters.

i think one "messaging"/"narrative" problem the democrats ran into was just--b/c health-care reform was a centerpiece of the party platform, and because it was the biggest non-iraq campaign promise obama made, dems went into it just assuming that everyone wanted health care to change. which apparently they didnt.

obama still makes that argument. the argument i mention above is the counterspin to the GOPs rhetoric.

obama could have deemphasized HCR, tho, in favor of, say, a massive jobs bill to compliment the stimulus package.