Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
As we come down to the end of the debate on health care reform, I made a personal decision that I hope others will adopt who support a strong public option. It’s pretty simple – if there is no Public Option in the final bill then I will not donate or support any political campaign for anyone who voted to either water it down or keep it out. I made up a graphic that breaks this idea into a sound bite.
State Rep. Cliff Hite (R-76th District) was in the news today for a couple of state issues. While I didn’t agree with his overall comments I do give the man credit for acknowledging that alternatives for the budget issues facing Ohio would not be painless.
In an interview on WFIN’s morning show Hite said that the Republicans had ideas to help fill in the approx $900 million budget gap after the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that allowing video slot machines had to be voted on by the public. He said that one was restructuring state government by reducing the number of departments. The example he gave was eliminating the Department of Agriculture and absorbing the work into multiple departments. Such a change would lead to the loss of many state worker jobs.
Another suggestion was reducing Medicaid benefits which would hurt those who get those benefits.
Ohio Governor Ted Strickland has said he wants to postpone the 4.2% tax reduction scheduled to take place in 2009 for two years. Some Republicans are against the delay because they feel the tax cut was meant to make “Ohio more competitive for jobs.” Hite is also against a delay.
I will credit Rep. Hite, that unlike the previous guy to hold his seat, he at least acknowledges the Republican alternatives aren’t perfect.
I disagree with Hite’s view on postponing the tax cut and changing state government.
It makes no sense, when one is losing revenue, to cut your revenue further. Ohio has made massive spending cuts in the past so any more cuts will be hitting bone.
The fact is that Ohio isn’t even in the top 10 for personal income tax and the corporate tax rate is only 5.1% for those that actually pay it. The argument that our taxes are too high is not supported by the evidence. The tax cut that Strickland wants to delay was passed in 2005 before the economy tanked and was to be phased in 4% a year with this year being the last of the 21% cut.
It is good to know that Hite isn’t a plain Jane Republican ideologue. Picture Robbie the Robot waving arms and saying “Must cut spending must cut spending must cut spending must cut spending…” and ignoring reality like Mike Gilb and Lynn Wachtmann use to do.
In an article in The Findlay Courier Rep. Hite said he favored State Issue 2 which supposedly creates yet another state board to prevent groups like the Humane Society from getting laws passed in the state to protect farm animals from cruel treatment.
So smaller government is good for business unless you can use it to protect business, then it needs to be larger.
It doesn’t make sense to me either.
Like dragging ones feet across the carpet on a cold dry day and then getting a jolt when touching anything, I get to a point where some things in life and the world become so obvious to me I wonder why it seems I am the only one who sees it and why can’t I get others to see it too. When others get that way they get ulcers or fly into a rage – me? I beat my head on a wall and write about it in my blog. Here is the latest obvious crap flaking my pie crust.
1. Where’s the change I voted for? It seems even with a new administration in Washington and the bullies out of power in Congress, we were to see actual real change. I’m still waiting. The Health Care reform debate is a prime example. It’s been obvious for years that we must end the monopoly by private insurance companies who profit from the pain and suffering of their customers. We don’t tolerate it for any other industry except health insurance.
Now it seems both spineless Democrats and the GOP bullies are planning a big wet kiss to the insurance companies along the same lines as we saw when the Medicare D pharmacy plan came out – huge payments to big insurance companies for crappy coverage for those least able to afford any medical bills in the first place. Can you say Donut hole?
Republicans have lied about the reform from the beginning – just plain lied – and our fourth estate and even Democrats just let them do it.
Here are the facts 40 MILLION people have NO insurance and approx 40,000 DIE each year because of having NO insurance.
What kind of human would allow that to happen? Republicans for one and Democrats who accept money from the insurance industry.
Polls show overwhelming public support for reform and a public option, yet some in Congress let the money do their thinking for them. SHAME ON THEM!!!!
2. Passing off “talking points” as news. What boils my blood almost as much as the GOP lies about health care reform that go unchallenged is the general incest that goes on within the Washington DC media complex.
We had an election in November and the Democrats won handy majorities in both houses and have the White House but you wouldn’t know it if you watch or read the mainstream media that comes out of DC.
It seems that the Sunday talk shows and political news in print supposedly needs to have a 1 to 1 “balance” of left and right views. While it seemed on some Sundays, former VP Dick Cheney, or for some odd reason, his daughter, was allowed to basically give a monologue about his version of events when he was President and approved of the criminal torturing of human beings among other GOP centric discussions.
Do you remember tug-of-wars from your childhood? I remember the adult in charge lining up us kids by height and then going down the line, alternating which team we would be on, to ensure that neither side was unfairly stacked. That notion of balancing the sides to make things fair has morphed in modern media to this simplistic binary equation of Republican vs. Democrat. But it’s a false equivalence, because it assumes a completely valid argument on both sides, and as we chronicle daily here at C&L, rarely do we see sensible, much less valid, arguments coming from the right to make the “balance” actually informative. Instead we get death panels, socialicommunistmarxism, concern trollism over deficit spending and the Olympic Games.
The point again is this assumes that both sides have equally valid arguments and in some cases, like the health care debate, this is not even close. The lies about death panels, lack of public support for a public option, and “socialized medicine” told by the right are lies. Lies are not valid arguments.
Only a few years ago if you dissented against the President your words were treasonous and you should be “sent to Gitmo” or worse, where regular people wearing T-shirts saying “Bush Sucks” were detained by police when they showed up to protest Bush in public. Since November if you bring a gun to an event the President is appearing, it’s called “free speech” and you want to “take back your country” from a black guy and his uppity ways.
It kind of has an Orwellian “doubleplusgood” ring to it all.
3 Finally, who the hell is Kim Kardashian? What has she done to merit any mention in the press? I had to look her up in Wikipedia and just as I guessed she is famous for no real reason. She didn’t land a plane in the Hudson, she didn’t cure a disease, and she doesn’t contribute to society in any memorable way.
If she was someone of substance I could see why she would be newsworthy but unless I missed her winning an Oscar recently then her celebrity worth is very small compared to the amount of press she gets.
I’m just fed up with narcissism being passed out as something important. I don’t care about her or any other “celebutante” and I’ll now have to spend time scrubbing the taint from this blog. UGH!
And THAT is this edition of my Obvious rant….
The one thing about current political debate or any kind of debate is the need for “talking points”. These are buzzwords or short phrases that quickly make a point and say more than the number of words used. Usually the person or group who come up with the quickest talking points can frame the debate. It is kind of like a gun fight – the quickest draw wins. Some of my conservative friends have told me during the current health care reform debate that “Obamcare is socialized medicine” or “Medicare is clogged with waste and fraud”. I needed some place to go to rebut some of the classic “government is bad” arguments from the right and I think I found it.
Some years ago on an e-mail list I use to be on, a guy came on spouting Libertarian arguments hard and fast. Many times I didn’t have a quick way of refuting the classic arguments even though I knew he was wrong. Then I found the A Non-Libertarian FAQ which allowed me in some cases to cut and paste answers to his arguments like “Social Contract? I never signed no steenking social contract. ” etc….
With the right media bias currently, the political arguments today get framed by conservative talking heads with little to no counter arguments from people on the left side of the spectrum. Most times the host – like David Gregory of Meet the Press – just lets the conservative spew their talking points like it was a press conference rather than a political show.
I needed a place that had some good rebuttals I could use when I had my own debates with friends who like to parrot talk radio.
Government is Good is recent addition to my bookmarks as it offers a quick way to answer the arguments from the right about how bad government is. For example:
When the Republicans took over Congress in the mid-1990s, one of their first priorities was to “reform welfare” along these lines. In a landmark 1996 bill, welfare was declared to be no longer an entitlement, and strict time limits and work requirements were imposed on recipients – all designed to discourage people from staying on welfare and forcing them onto the job market. This legislation has come to be celebrated by conservatives as one of the most successful policies coming out of that period. They point out that between 1996 and 2003, the number of people on the welfare rolls dropped by over 60%.
This is pretty impressive. But unfortunately, the effect of this reduction of the welfare rolls on the poverty level was not what Republicans had predicted. If welfare was actually a major cause of persistent poverty, then we should have also seen a dramatic decrease in poverty as millions of people were forced off welfare and onto the job market. But this is precisely what did not happen. The poverty rate did not fall by 60% or 50%. Not even by 40% or 30%. Not by 20%, nor even by 10%. It fell by a measly 8% — from 13.7% to 12.5% from 1996 to 2003.
How can this be explained? It is simple. Conservatives were wrong about poverty being largely caused by government welfare programs. First, they ignored the fact that most poor people aren’t even on welfare – and that many of them work already. Second, as many scholars of poverty have pointed out, the major causes of poverty in this country are mostly in the economic system. Most people are poor for two reasons: (1) there is a chronic lack of jobs, and (2) many low-level jobs pay wages below the poverty level.
So if you are looking for some backup in your own debates with people who claim government is bad for us then check out the website.
In case you missed it several thousand people gathered in Washington on Saturday to protest everything they hate about the current administration. The theme, egged on by their talk radio puppet masters, seemed to be that Washington was stealing money from middle-class Americans and giving it to undeserving people – ie. poor people. Glenn Greenwald writes that such thinking is peasant thinking.
It wasn’t the poor or illegal immigrants who were the beneficiaries of the Wall St. bailout; it was the investment banks which, not even a year later, are wallowing in record profits and bonuses thanks to massive taxpayer-funded welfare. The endlessly expanding (and secret) balance sheet of the Federal Reserve isn’t going to fund midnight basketball programs or health care for Mexican immigrants but is enabling extreme profiteering by the very people who, just a year ago, almost brought the global economic system to full-scale collapse. Our endless wars and always-expanding Surveillance State — fueled by constant fear-mongering campaigns against the Latest Scary Enemy — keep the National Security corporations drowning in profits, paid for by middle-class taxes. And even health-care reform — which supposedly began with anger over extreme insurance company profiteering at the expense of people’s health — will be an enormous boon to that same industry, as tens of millions of people are forced by the Government to become their customers with the central mechanism to control costs (the public option) blocked by that same industry. That’s why those industries are enthusiastically in favor of reform: because, as always, they will benefit massively from it.
If Fox News, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh were truly opposed to expanded government power, where were they when George Bush and Dick Cheney were expanding federal power in virtually every realm, driving up the national debt to unprecedented proportions, destroying middle-class economic security in order to benefit the wealthiest, and generally ensuring government intrusion into every aspect of people’s lives? They were supporting it and cheering it on.
Who are the undeserving “others” benefiting from expanded government actions?