Turning The Tables On Michael Steele And The GOP

This is a pretty nice take down of Michael Steele and his spurious op-ed in the Washington Post the other day by Steve Pearlstein also in the Washington Post.

An excerpt:

On the issue of end-of-life care, Steele was uncompromising: In a Republican world, no government funds could be used to pay doctors to provide information about living wills, hospices or palliative care, whether seniors and their families ask for it or not.

"Government programs that seem benign at first can become anything but," Steele explained in articulating the new philosophy. Once back in power, look for Republicans to apply the same approach to issues such as flu vaccinations, disaster relief and air traffic control.

According to Steele, Republicans will also seek to outlaw "any effort to ration health care based on age." You don't have to be a lawyer like Steele to understand that would effectively make it a federal crime for any hospital to refuse a heart transplant to a 95-year-old, or for any doctor to refuse to prescribe Viagra to a sexually precocious seventh-grader. Although Steele did not indicate what the penalty would be, he did not rule out the death penalty.

Indeed, Republicans seem determined to preserve the uniquely American system under which health care is rationed today -- on the basis of employment status and ability to pay. According to the respected Institute of Medicine, this market-based approach to rationing has held the number of untimely deaths each year to a mere 18,000 uninsured souls. Thanks to Medicare, all of those victims are younger than 65, but apparently that is the kind of age-based rationing that real Republicans can embrace.

After reading his broadside, one is left wondering exactly what health reform plan Steele thought he was attacking. At one point, Steele claims that Democrats would prevent Americans from keeping their doctors or an insurance plan they like. Later, he warns that government will soon be setting caps on how many heart surgeries could be performed in the United States each year. Where is he getting this stuff? Has the chairman of the Republican Party somehow gotten hold of a top-secret plan for a government takeover of the health-care system that GOP operatives snatched during a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters?

If all that sounds spurious and unsubstantiated, it is. And like many of the overstated claims in this column, its purpose is to highlight the lies, distortions and political scare tactics that Steele and other Republicans have used to poison the national debate over health reform.

Have you no shame, sir? Have you no shame?

Me being the cut throat bastard that I am, would love to see Democratic strategists go after the GOP with similar memes even if they aren't necessarily factually correct. I for one am tired of only being on the receiving in of the misinformation, maybe its time we put out some of our own.

Im just sayin.

Its Time To Stop Singing And Start Swinging.

Showing that he has a little bit of Malcolm X in him to offset that MLK Jr persona President Obama has an op-ed today in the Washington Post largely echoing the statements he made yesterday about his economic stimulus bill. Setting aside for a moment that our previous President would have needed crayons to write an op-ed, this one by President Obama is just right. It lays out the challenges facing us, it describes in details how his plan will address them, and he directly and forcefully takes on his detractors. Damn good job Mr. President now if you can just get the rest of your party to follow suit. Thia bill is in fact a risky and very expsensive proposition. We need more people willing to stand up and fight for it and make the case to the American people instead of letting the Rethugs frame the argument. This op-ed is a very good start but there is still much work to be done.


First he lays out the situation we all see ourselves in right now

By now, it's clear to everyone that we have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression. Millions of jobs that Americans relied on just a year ago are gone; millions more of the nest eggs families worked so hard to build have vanished. People everywhere are worried about what tomorrow will bring.

snip

Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes. And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse

Then he lays out his plan to tackle these problems.

That's why I feel such a sense of urgency about the recovery plan before Congress. With it, we will create or save more than 3 million jobs over the next two years, provide immediate tax relief to 95 percent of American workers, ignite spending by businesses and consumers alike, and take steps to strengthen our country for years to come.


This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending -- it's a strategy for America's long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, health care and education. And it's a strategy that will be implemented with unprecedented transparency and accountability, so Americans know where their tax dollars are going and how they are being spent.

And now the much appreciated conservative smackdown.

In recent days, there have been misguided criticisms of this plan that echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis -- the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures; that we can ignore fundamental challenges such as energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change. They know that we have tried it those ways for too long. And because we have, our health-care costs still rise faster than inflation. Our dependence on foreign oil still threatens our economy and our security. Our children still study in schools that put them at a disadvantage. We've seen the tragic consequences when our bridges crumble and our levees fail.

Next President Obama lays out his vision for the future.

Now is the time to protect health insurance for the more than 8 million Americans at risk of losing their coverage and to computerize the health-care records of every American within five years, saving billions of dollars and countless lives in the process.

Now is the time to save billions by making 2 million homes and 75 percent of federal buildings more energy-efficient, and to double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy within three years.

Now is the time to give our children every advantage they need to compete by upgrading 10,000 schools with state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries and labs; by training our teachers in math and science; and by bringing the dream of a college education within reach for millions of Americans.

And now is the time to create the jobs that remake America for the 21st century by rebuilding aging roads, bridges and levees; designing a smart electrical grid; and connecting every corner of the country to the information superhighway.

One final shot across the bow at those who persist in having tin ears to the public's will.

So we have a choice to make. We can once again let Washington's bad habits stand in the way of progress. Or we can pull together and say that in America, our destiny isn't written for us but by us. We can place good ideas ahead of old ideological battles, and a sense of purpose above the same narrow partisanship. We can act boldly to turn crisis into opportunity and, together, write the next great chapter in our history and meet the test of our time.

I did happen to catch a Democratic Congressman (didn't catch his name) this morning on Morning Joe and he did a pretty good job of echoing the President's talking points so we have the foundation of a good platform here, now we just need to follow it up aggressively pushing back against the framing by the wingnuts who would rather play politics and score points than get our country back on track. Its time we painted them as the anti American, selfish hacks that they are and use their own kind of rhetoric against them. I can't think of anything that could prove any clearly that they want America to lose than their obstructinist tactics in a time of crisis in this country, can you?

P.S. Remember when President Obama first introduced the bill and everybody was saying that $775 billion was too little. Has anybody noticed that its almost $900 billion dollars now? Of course not.