Tag Archives: Republicans

The President is Correct about the Health Care Reform Law

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President Barack Obama delivers his state of the union address on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Photograph: Pool/Reuters

In the State of the Union Address tonight, President Barack Obama welcomed serious efforts fix aspects of the new health care law, but rejected efforts to overturn it and start over. He is right. The law is Constitutional and the apocalyptic scenarios regarding its impact on our health care system are absurd.

Most importantly, it is a good law protecting us from abuses by insurance companies and the health care industry. Here are a few of the most interesting provisions, as summarized in an article from Reuters that came out in March when the legislation was passed. I’ve selected some of the provisions that will have the most impact and inserted my comments in parentheses.

Already in effect are the following provisions. See the article for a fuller summary.

  • Insurance companies will be barred from dropping people from coverage when they get sick. Lifetime coverage limits will be eliminated and annual limits are to be restricted. (Note: If you, a friend or family member has every had a chronic condition, or an illness or injury that is difficulty that is expensive to treat, you will really be grateful for this provision.)
  • Insurers will be barred from excluding children for coverage because of pre-existing conditions. (If you’ve ever changed jobs in a state that doesn’t prohibit this, this is good news, too.)
  • Young adults will be able to stay on their parents’ health plans until the age of 26. Many health plans currently drop dependents from coverage when they turn 19 or finish college. (The job market it tough out there! A lot of young people and their worried parents will appreciate this.)…
  • A tax credit becomes available for some small businesses to help provide coverage for workers.

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    Theatrics of Seating for the State of the Union

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    Members of Congress are going to cross the aisles and sit together in a show of bipartisanship for the State of the Union Speech. It’s nice and probably ought to happen all the time. It’s political theater, of course, as is the whole State of the Union Speech, but it is theater, demonstrating national unity and resolve at times when we most need it, be it war or national crisis.

    This Congress has a penchant for political theater anyway, such as the reading of the Constitution at the beginning of the current session of the House. Tonight’s gesture will only be as meaningful as whatever follows on it. Is it followed by Civility and a willingness to put the nation first, or is followed by business as usual. The nature of politics in the American system is adversarial. In a two party system someone wins and someone loses and it is as simple that. The key is to choose battles and to compromise when necessary, and to always act with civility in accordance with the gravitas of legislating national policy on behalf of the constituents who put you in office.
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    Policy ≠ Politics

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    President Obama announces the compromise.

    A couple days ago the White House and Congressional Republicans reached a compromise on issues that included extending the Bush tax cuts and unemployment benefits.  It took a while.  In the press conference announcing the agreement, President Obama commented that the agreement is not what he wanted, but said that Republicans were holding tax cuts for the Middle Class and an unemployment benefits extension “hostage.”  Many in the Democratic base oppose the compromise, seeing it as capitulation rather than compromise, and are resistant to approval.

    Mainstream media has been providing blow by blow coverage of this process.  The tell us which side which wants what but not in a lot of detail and not why.  For the most part they spend their time speculating about the impact that whatever compromise might be reached will have on the 2012 elections.  Then they let party representatives and their surrogates in the punditry argue about what agreements might be better and for the nation and how.

    It’s all very entertaining.  There is drama, conflict, suspense.  Who is winning the skirmish as the pundits argue?  Who will win the battle when the legislation ultimately makes it out of Congress?  Most importantly, who’s likely to win the war in 2012!

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    Don’t Take My Tax Cut! And Get a Job!

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    Petition: Tell Congress: Protect Workers, NOT Millionaires!

    Senator Scott Brown made a fiery speech a couple of days ago as he blocked the Senate from considering an extension of unemployment benefits. He said that first we need to find a way to pay for those benefits without raising the deficit. At last report the unemployment rate in this country stands at 9.7% and Brown wants to put their ability to buy groceries, pay their bills, mortgage or rent payments in doubt while Congress turns its attention to the deficit.

    I believe that Washington has finally turned its attention to the deficit in earnest, and that Brown’s theatrics are not necessary.  The report that bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has just been released provides outstanding recommendations for debt reduction. Holding the unemployed hostage during the holiday season is little more than political theater. Brown needed an issue to distinguish himself on, and he chose this. Nice, Senator! Pick on the unemployed. They’re so busy job hunting they won’t be paying much attention!

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    Fox News Chairman says NPR Executives are Nazis, “of Course”

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    Fox News, a News Corp subsidiary

    Honestly, I am think that Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and most at that network live in a reality that is different than mine.

    I was just pointed to an interview with Howard Kurtz in which he said that President Obama “has a different belief system than most Americans” and that on his recent travels he “told by the French and the Germans that his socialism was too far left for them to deal with.”  I don’t know if Ailes believes this or if it is part of the continuing campaign of the right to paint the President as so radically different from us that he is somehow threatening, but the statements are not simply wrong, they are absurd.

    President Obama is a capitalist and he believes in our system of representative, Constitutional democracy.  He has given no indication otherwise.  He would not have risen in the party system were that not the case and he certainly would not have got elected to the highest office in the land, either.  The Presidents differences with the the opposition are differences of degree, not belief systems.

    As for France and Germany telling him that his socialism is to far left, well that is ridiculous.  Germany, France and the United States do have differences on approaches necessary to stimulate their economies because in a global economy what is done in one country impacts the others, but the questions concern the means and scale of intervention and have nothing to do with ideology.  France and Germany are also democratic, capitalist states, but both are fundamentally more socialist in character then the US.  Both have and have had for some time, state funded systems of education, government owned rail systems, universal health care, strong labor movements, etc.

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    Hey Candidates! Just Anwer the Questions and Check Your Facts: Mid-terms 2010

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    Every election year since 1992 Project Vote Smart, CNN and prominent national leaders from both across the political spectrum survey candidates for U.S. House & Senate, governor and state legislatures on key issues facing the nation. Called the National Political Courage Test, in fact what it revealed was an appalling lack of courage and a complete unwillingness to take a stand.

    Only 17% of all 2010 candidates for U.S. House, Senate, governor and state legislatures are willing to tell voters their positions on key issues facing the nation. The rest are afraid of exposing themselves to their opponents.

    I was kind of bowled over by that number. Perhaps one way of looking at it would be the way that Richard Kimball, Project Vote Smart President did in a piece he wrote today. In fact this number demonstrates that candidates for office have a great deal of courage. It takes guts to stand in front of a non-partisan public interest group, journalists, and voters themselves, and refuse to take a position, a fortitude that is new in politics, enabled by developments in media. He writes sarcastically:

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    Frank v. Beilat, No Contest

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    The top mailing was meant to give me three reasons for firing Barney Frank, but in fact the mailings themselves were 3 reasons NOT to vote for Sean Beilat!

    When I picked up my mail today I found a magazine, a fund raising appeal, and four political mailings relating to the elections next week, three of which were targeted against Congressman Barney Frank.  According to the first mailing, Americans for Limited Government believe he “no longer represents ‘us'” and that Nancy Pelosi “has him in the palm of her hand.”  Sean Beilat for Congress sent two mailings.  The first claims that Frank “and his “rich friends… live by a different set of rules,” and  the other that provides three reasons why voters should “fire Barney Frank on November 2,” claiming he caused the financial meltdown, bailed out friends in the financial sector, and accepted vacations from the people who got federal bail out money.

    These claims are, at best, exaggerations, some of them outright falsehoods.  They are examples of some pretty intense negative campaigning and an obvious attempt to mislead the public.  Quotations are taken out of context, presented in the mailing to look like press clippings, and topped with the logos from the newspapers’ mastheads so they look like actual published news articles, when in fact they are taken from opinion pieces or editorials.  They are not objective analyses.

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    More on Truth in Political Advertising

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    Reality for Men

    One kind of truth in advertising

    In the commercial sector there are legal requirements that mandate “truth in advertising.” General principles are outlined on Business.gov, the site of the US Small Business Administration.

    Advertising laws are aimed at protecting consumers by requiring advertisers to be truthful about their products and to be able to substantiate their claims. All businesses must comply with advertising and marketing laws, and failure to do so could result in costly lawsuits and civil penalties. So before you start an advertising campaign, it’s important you understand some basic rules.
    The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is the main federal agency that enforces advertising laws and regulations. Under the Federal Trade Commission Act:

    • Advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive;
    • Advertisers must have evidence to back up their claims; and
    • Advertisements cannot be unfair.

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    This means that if I were to start canning and marketing my mother’s spaghetti sauce, there are limits on what I can say to convince people to buy it instead of my competitors products.  I could talk about taste, because that is based on a subjective judgement. I could say all kinds of good things about my ingredients of cooking process.

    But I couldn’t claim It was because I use garlic grown in the ashy soils of Mount Vesuvius, if that wasn’t the case. More importantly, I couldn’t promote my sauce based purely on the deficiencies in my competitors’ products, particularly if my claims were not based on fact. I couldn’t claim those other sauces cause cancer, use rat meat instead of beef, or are owned by people with ties to organized crime if none of it was true.

    Any yet in political campaigns few such requirements exist.

    If the charges made in a campaign are reckless enough, one could be sued or prosecuted under libel or slander laws, but there is considerable time, effort and costs involved, and the bar on what constitutes those offenses is pretty high, and even more so in an election season. Obviously candidates seek to undermine the credibility of one another to some degree.  It is an election, after all. Simply lying about your opponent is not enough.  

    But it goes too far when you get advertisements like this:
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    If You Spend Enough Money, Will People Believe Your Lie?

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    "Perry pushed for a law that lets insurance companies raise homeowners’ rates without having to justify the increase." Back to Basics, --Wednesday, September 8th, 2010.

    Spending by interest groups, so-called Political Action Committees and Unions most notably, is up well over 5 times what it was in the 2006 midterms, according to an article in New York Magazine.  Spending is up on both sides of the aisle, but these third-party groups are putting most of their money behind Republican candidates by a huge margin, approximately 7 to 1, according to The Washington Post!  This was all made possible by last years Supreme Court decision saying that limits on spending were essentially the same as limits on free speech.

    I have a problem with this because I don’t think a pharmaceutical corporation should have a stronger voice than a network of cancer survivor groups just because they can spend more on campaigns, but I suppose outside spending isn’t all that different than spending by the candidates themselves.  Nothing stops a multimillionaire candidate from using his own funds to vastly outspend opponents on advertising.  In a sense this is buying the election, but legally it’s not seen that way.

    What is disconcerting is the out and out dishonesty of the campaigns.  I am not naive.  Politics has always been a dirty game.  But in this election it seems that the fact that the backers of those PACs with the patriotic names can remain anonymous has emboldened them.  Politifact.com, a non-partisan service that evaluates the claims of political discourse, evaluated 31 claims made in the advertisments of these third party groups in the current campaigns throughout the country.  Only 5 were rated “mostly true” and two “true.”

    Think about that for a minute.  31 claims were made in the political ads of third party organizations analyzed by Politifact.com.  On 16% of those were claims were based substantially on fact, on only 6% were essentially true.  All others were significant distortions of the facts or outright lies.

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    Third-Party Groups Taking Over the Election

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    The President has begun slamming campaign commercials paid for by funds from third-party independent groups that, thanks to Supreme Court decisions in January, are now able to spent unlimited amounts promoting candidates and agendas. Democrats are outraged about these groups because the GOP-leaning ones have spent $24.8 million on Senate and House ads from Aug. 1 to Sept. 20, but Democrat-leaning groups also spent $4.9 million according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group. Here’s the ABC News Report. The article is at this link.


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    This year it is Liberals who are are upset, because Conservative groups are outspending them 5 to 1! I worry about that, too. But while I’d be more comfortable about the outcome if the ratio were inverted, it would still bother me. I don’t see how unidentified, undisclosed contributions are good for a democracy. If, as Supreme Court justices have argued, spending money is a form of speech, shouldn’t it be clear who is speaking?