Today I received an electronic newsletter from John Cornyn that rather surprised me. In his letter to his so-called constituents, Senator Cornyn informed us that he agrees with the uber liberal/progressive former chair of the DNC and governor of Vermont on the health care reform bill.
Wow. This is a new and interesting twist in right/left politics.
In what way, Senator? Please do explain.
My colleagues and I picked up an unlikely ally in our quest to stop the Reid health care bill. Gov. Howard Dean pleaded for his fellow Democrats to "kill this bill" in a Washington Post op-ed on Thursday morning, saying that it "will do more harm than good to the future of America." Despite the vocal protests from Liberals, Conservatives, and Independents, Democrats remain determined to force the bill through by Christmas. I assure you that my fellow Republicans and I remain resolute in stopping the Reid bill dead in its tracks.
As usual, Cornyn is full hot air. The Republicans are screaming about expanded government, as usual, and a health care program that will be affordable and will include millions of uninsured Americans. Republicans are obviously perfectly pleased with the status quo of nearly 50 million uninsured folks who use emergency rooms for their primary care needs. When this happens, the expense is passed along to taxpayers. As W. said during his Administration, everyone has access to health care. Everyone can go to the emergency rooms. Taxpayers shoulder this burden as we do W.'s war in Iraq and his tax cuts to the wealthy. Republicans hate taxation except when it comes to sticking the middle class with taxes.
Progressive Democrats are very unhappy about the lack of a government run public option that would introduce competition into the health insurance market. Many are also worried about the mandates if there is no real competition in the insurance market. Folks have every right to fear that the insurance sharks will take advantage of them if there are no checks and balances. They would do it in a New York nanosecond. Cornyn and the Republicans, by the way, have been enabling these sharks for decades.
If Cornyn had paid attention to the news today he would have known that Dr. Dean now believes the bill should pass. Are you still on board with Dr. Dean, Sir?
I didn't think so.
If John Cornyn and his Republican Party were so concerned about their constituents they would have engaged in this debate a long time ago. They failed to. And now the spineless cowards are trying to align themselves with Dr. Dean and other Progressives who are rightfully upset about the absence of a public option.
Cornyn also writes:
As Texans are well aware by now, the Senate is coming to the end of its third straight week in the debate over health care reform. I think many of you have seen that as this debate progresses, we've learned two important things. First, with each passing day we have more questions than answers about the Reid bill, and secondly, the more the American public learns about it, the more they don't like it. The most recent Washington Post / ABC News Poll says that a solid majority of Americans are opposed to the Reid bill, with a CNN estimate pegging opposition as high as 61% among Americans. I met recently with a group of San Antonio firefighters in my Washington office who echoed this sentiment to me, telling me they could not afford the new taxes they would be saddled with should the bill pass. The President's own chief cost analyst recently became the latest expert to sound alarms over the Reid bill. The Chief Actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Rick Foster, issued a report last week concluding that the Reid bill would increase health care costs, threaten access to care for seniors, and force people off of their current coverage. In other words, the Administration's own expert conclusively demonstrated that the Democrats' rhetoric does not match the reality of their bill and that passing the legislation would be worse than doing nothing. You can read the CMS report for yourself here.
Dude, the public is against a health care reform bill that lacks a public option.
Reform with public option or medicare expansion won 59% to 31% support.
Now tell me Sir, are you going to embrace a public option if it is present in the final bill?
I didn't think so.
Folks might be interested to know that John Cornyn has accepted millions of dollars in donations from the insurance, health professionals and pharma sectors. He has received:
$576,878 from insurance, $1,371,928 from health professionals and $288,165 from pharma.
Cornyn has also taken $362,390 from lobbyists. Banking and oil & gas are his biggest contributors.
As far as Cornyn's statements about the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services are concerned, they are yet another typical Republican distortion.
The study confirms Republicans' arguments that the Democrats' legislation would "drive up this country's unsustainable level of health-care spending," Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said in a statement.
Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat who is a chief architect of the legislation, said the report shows the health- care overhaul would extend the life of Medicare and reduce premiums in the government health-insurance program for the elderly.
On Saturday Senator Harry Reid inserted the Manager's Amendment that the CBO scored favorably in terms of overall savings and deficit reduction. I will make no claims about having a thorough understanding of this complex scoring process, but it seems to me that both the House and Senate have made good faith efforts at having proposed HCR legislation and the various amendments scored by the non-partisan CBO.
According to the CBO report Reid's Amendment enables $132 billion reduction in the budget deficit over 10 years. There will be an increase in tax credits for small businesses and 31 million of non-elderly uninsured will have insurance. The non-elderly below 133% poverty would be eligible for Medicaid. 25 million would be left uninsured, one-third of which are undocumented workers.
If anyone who does have a deep understanding of this process would like to jump in and simply this for the rest of us, I'd be most grateful. My point is that Cornyn and the Republicans are grabbing on to unfavorable pieces of reports here and there in an attempt to manufacture their own fiction about the impact of health care reform. They are certainly not being honest with the American people and some are lying outright to their constituents.
Speaking of lying, isn't it well past the time for Republicans to give it up? Many of us have called them on it on more than several occasions. But it seems that all Republicans seem to be suffering from an epidemic called Unyielding and Obtuse Deafness Syndrome.
This current crop of Republican lawmakers seem to be the worst of the worst in terms of obstruction, distortion, misinformation, disinformation, hate mongering, fear mongering and right wing extremism. The GOP has brought very dangerous fringe groups into its bosom.
Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that - or, I'm tempted to say, any of it - if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate?
Some people will say that it has always been this way, and that we've managed so far. But it wasn't always like this. Yes, there were filibusters in the past - most notably by segregationists trying to block civil rights legislation. But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn't like, is a recent creation.
The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, "extended-debate-related problems" - threatened or actual filibusters - affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.
70% of the time Republicans fight for themselves and their Party instead of those they take an oath to serve. Republicans also showed us that they were willing to put funding for our troops on hold in order to hold up the defense spending and the HCR bill.
So think for a second about what happened here. The Senate GOP sought to hold up military spending -- and not because of an argument with the defense appropriations bill itself or something in it that might have been offensive to them, but in an attempt to block a domestic political debate. It was an especially interesting position for a party that repeatedly accused then-Senator Barack Obama, during the 2008 campaign, of trying to "defund the troops" when he voted against a military funding bill because it didn't include a timeline to withdraw from Iraq.
Is there even a precedent for this sort of thing? We put that question to Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and also asked whether it would be accurate to look at this and say that funding for the military was being held hostage in a domestic political dispute.
"Let me put it this way. Strange things often happen at the end of congressional sessions, especially in the Senate," Mann said. "Those seeking to block action are even better positioned than usual. But I have never seen a Senate minority act in so unified and extreme (though ultimately unsuccessful) a fashion to deny the president a vote on his highest domestic priority. It is entirely accurate to say that troop-funding was being held hostage to a domestic political dispute. They gambled that a successful filibuster on the defense bill would force the Democrats to defer health reform until next year. They lost."
John Cornyn, a Vietnam War drafter evader, voted to hold up funding for our troops. Of course Senator John wouldn't know what it would be like to run out of ammunition while in the middle of combat.
It is no wonder the majority of Americans polled believe the last decade of the Bush Administration was awful. That it certainly was. And then some.
On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially. [...]
Bush built his economic strategy around tax cuts, passing large reductions both in 2001 and 2003. ... But the bleak economic results from Bush's two terms, tarnish, to put it mildly, the idea that tax cuts represent an economic silver bullet.
The poll comes as loyal Bushies are attempting to rewrite the former president's legacy and delude the public into believing that the country's current problems are all the fault of President Obama. Former White House adviser Karl Rove, for example, has been all over the media, issuing statements like the Bush administration has "no" responsibility for current budget deficits. Bush officials have even tried to claim that they made Afghanistan a top priority and that Obama is the one who has been screwing up their work.
There they go again with their myth making. Dudes, 58% of us know better. We are living in the hell you created. You can write all of the fictional adventure stories, romance novels and comic books you want. We won't be reading any of your fairy tales anytime soon.
A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds that Americans are entering 2011 with a negative view of the events of the past decade, which was largely marked by President Bush's tenure from 2001-2009:
According to the poll, a combined 58% said the decade was either "awful" or "not so good," 29% said it was fair, and just 12% said it was either "good" or "great." [...]
The 12% good or great must include the Bushies and their revisionists.
Historians rank W. Bush in the top 10 worst Presidents list. His legacy is like that of Nixon and Hoover.
The GOP would love nothing better than to take us back to the wonderful olden days of the last decade where 12% of them could love and enjoy their lives.
