Category Archives: Politics

Sen. Whitehouse: There Will Be A ‘Reckoning’ For GOP’s ‘Desperate, No-Holds-Barred Mission Of Propaganda’ | TPM LiveWire

Here is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island calling out the GOP and telling some truths. Primarily that, should the health care bill pass, Americans will finally know that Republicans have been lying to them.

Here are some highpoints:

For some reason, one poignant piece is missing, and it may be something that progressives may be ashamed of. I don’t know why. I think it is the finest bit of his speech.

Concerning Republicans, particularly the most odious ones:

“They are desperate to break this president. They have ardent supporters who are nearly hysterical at the very election of President Barack Obama. The birthers, the fanatics, the people running around in right-wing militia and Aryan support groups, it is unbearable to them that President Barack Obama should exist. That is one powerful reason. It is not the only one.”

To see the whole of Whitehouse’s segment, try around 1:16 at the follow video, which of course has since been pulled.

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill

Evan a bad health care bill is better than the crap we’ve currently got according to the numbers.

Nate Silver breaks it down in clear dollars and cents.

Josh Marshall questions the sanity of those who want their pet bill or nothing at all.

And Ezra Klein points out that even if, and maybe because, insurance companies are in the running to make a ton of money from this bill, the advantage of having rules finally put in place still counts as a benefit to all of us.

Hey, I would LOVE to ditch my current plan and put my family onto a public plan that doesn’t spend my money to lobby Republicans or douchebags like Joe Lieberman or Max Baucus to do their bidding. But I can’t, but I’d love to be able to see my Mom get some health insurance.

It isn’t everything I want, but it is what millions of folks need.

FiveThirtyEight: My Last Words on the Public Option

Nate probably isn’t actually done with the subject, but here’s a good article about it.

He’s right of course. The public option, much as I’d have loved to move my family to it, was already neutered and restricted for use from nearly all of us. Losing it in favor of providing Medicare coverage for some old uninsured folks is probably all we’re going to get this time around, but that’s still a damn lot more than we’ve currently got.

Bush can turn us into a nation of aggressive warmongers overnight, Reagan can kill our economy and break up the family in just a couple months of trickle down economics, but it took decades of workplace violence to get a 40 hour week. It took the Great Depression to give us Social Security, it took losing dozens of college kids, JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr. to get close to starting to have racial equality in this nation. We just had a pretty bad recession and hopefully we’ll get some kind of health care reform out of it.

It sucks. It really, really sucks how easy it is for men to do evil and how hard it is to just get in the ballpark of doing things right. But when your opposition is a pack of racist Talibangelical hypocrite blowhards in the employ of wealthy capitalist shitheels, sometimes you unfortunately have to take what you can get.

Meet the Billionaire Brothers Funding the Right-Wing War on Obama | | AlterNet

Here are a couple of the rich white racists that are paying for poor white racists to form angry mobs to protest health reform, climate change laws and other things that would otherwise improve their lives.

I hope the Koch Brothers burn slowly in a hell of their own creation. And I hope the idiots that believe their bullshit burn quickly because they were too stupid to realize that helping your fellow man (and even yourself) live better, not to mention stopping Man from destroying Creation actually are the essence of Christianity, not to mention all religions.