QOTD

Comes from Rep. Barney Frank, after getting yelled at and called faggot by some distinguished gentlemen from the Tea Party Movement:

At some point... I'd like to retire. As long as I think it might make some of those people happy, I can never retire. I may have to work forever as long as they're out there.

Health Care Reform Opposition From the Left

Since the passage of the Senate health care bill, there has been quite a bit of unrest on the left over its very modest, gradualist provisions, with some even preferring to completely scuttle the bill. I tend to disagree with this line of thinking, and thought it was mainly confined to a few ardent leftwingers.

A new poll from CBS (via pollingreport), though, suggests that quite a bit of the opposition to health care reform may now be coming from the left. Here are the specific results which lead me toward this conclusion:

1) Support for the Republican approach to HCR is even lower than that of the Democrats.

2) 35% of respondents say that the reform "doesn't go far enough" in terms of expanding access to coverage to only 32% who say it "goes too far" and 22% who say it's "about right" (you could put me in the 35%).

3) A full 43% say that the cost containment measures "don't go far enough," with only 27% saying that they "go too far" and 18% saying that they are "about right." There's nothing inherently leftwing about health care cost containment, but within the context of this particular debate, the GOP/rightwing position has generally been against "bending the curve" and pro-fearmongering about death panels and other deterioration in the quality of care coming in the wake of reform.

Prayer Can Backfire

Sorry for the video overload, but this it too good to ignore. Via Balloon Juice.

This may be the most awesomest moment in C-SPAN history. What you are about to watch is a tearful teabagger, noting that James Inhofe missed a health care reform vote sick, calling in to C-SPAN worried that his prayer group from Waycross, Georgia may have killed Inhofe by mistake after answering...[Senator] Coburn’s call to pray for someone [note from slim: read: "a Democrat"] to miss a vote the other day:

Track of the Day & Health Care Thoughts

Goes out to the Congressional GOP:



Seriously, it's pretty amazing when you consider the sheer amount of poo flung during this whole process that something approaching a half-way decent bill seems to be emerging from this process. Here is but a brief list of some of the crap that got us to this point:

• socialism!!!11!!11, err, um Communism!!!11! (to be fair, these tactics had already been trotted out during the presidential election), I mean fascism or maybe Nazism!!!!!1!
• summer '09: crazy wingnuts scream at members of Congress about tyranny
• the teabag movement (copyright Fox News 2009)
• protesters literally routinely comparing health care reform to Hitler's policies and making pictures of the President as Hitler
• Max Baucus' wanktastic finance committee machinations, and then Chuck Grassley turning on him
• Olympia Snowe's grandstanding
• "They're gunna take yur Medicare!!!1!" (even though we viciously opposed and probably continue to oppose Medicare)
• Sarah Palin's Twitter feed
• the Stupak Amendment
• big insurance backed ad campaign
• Senator Eeyore
• Ben Nelson's most recent hissyfit
• DEATH PANELS!!!!!!!

A veritable gauntlet of douchebaggery.

QOTD

New York Times:

Thirty million people without health insurance stand to gain coverage under a deal announced on Saturday by Senate Democrats.

Who Will Be the Next Dumb Senator to Become Indignant Over Some Arbitrarily Selected Provision of the Health Care Bill?

So they buy off Ben Nelson (who, according to some sources, "poops through his mouth") with federal Medicaid help for Nebraska...I'm seriously thinking the Democratic leadership basically needs to take a "we don't negotiate with legislative hostage-takers" line going forward before every Blue Dog/Conservadem demands several pounds of flesh at every step in the legislative process.

Madman Theory and Health Reform

This post at LGM made me think about how madman theory, or the theory of rational irrationalism, might be relevant to understanding the current negotiations over health care reform in the Senate.

When Thomas Schelling won the Nobel Prize for Economics, the Swedes said this:

Against the backdrop of the nuclear arms race in the late 1950s, Thomas Schelling’s book The Strategy of Conflict [1960] set forth his vision of game theory as a unifying framework for the social sciences. Schelling showed that a party can strengthen its position by overtly worsening its own options, that the capability to retaliate can be more useful than the ability to resist an attack, and that uncertain retaliation is more credible and more efficient than certain retaliation. These insights have proven to be of great relevance for conflict resolution and efforts to avoid war. . .

Tyler Cowen puts it in layman's terms:

Ever see Dr. Strangelove? [Schelling] developed the idea that deterrence is never fully credible (why retaliate once you are wiped out?). The best deterrent might involve pre-commitment [e.g., the Doomsday Machine], some element of randomness [e.g., ambiguity about one’s deterrent strategy], or a partly crazy leader [e.g., a madman such as General Ripper]. I recall Tom telling me he was briefly an advisor to Kubrick.

Here's where health care comes in. Progressive legislators would like to see "optimally" progressive legislation passed, but they, at the same time, actually care about the uninsured, insurance company abuses, and people losing their insurance when they lose their jobs. Since Lieberman doesn't really give a damn about any of these factors and is really only concerned with extracting concessions from those darn liberals that were mean to him in '06, his bargaining position is strengthened to a significant extent. As Lemieux puts it:

The dilemma facing progressives on health care is simply that the indifference in the face of suffering that the Joe Liebermans of the world have greatly increases their negotiating leverage. His threats to blow up health care reform are simply going to be more credible than those of people who actually care about whether people have access to health insurance.

Since progressive members actually want something to pass because of their real concerns about actual outcomes, they are much less likely than Lieberman to simply blow up the whole process in return for a public option or a Medicare buy-in.

War Bonds & Dumb Senators

To piggyback off of Frosty's post, the recent debate over financing the war in Afghanistan has provided a good window into the complete vapidity of the median member of the United States Senate. The war tax proposal was introduced by Rep. David Obey last month. Obey basically made the argument that we should engage in the same sort of cost-benefit analyses for war that we engage in for domestic policies (cost control, deficit neutrality, etc.). Reasonable people may agree or disagree about the merits of the proposal (I think Frosty makes a pretty good case against it), but it's probably a debate worth having.

Then, enter one Conservadem Ben Nelson:

In lieu of a “war tax” to pay for a troop increase in Afghanistan, Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson (NE) is proposing war bonds.

“We didn’t have a war tax in the second World War,” Nelson said, and instead the government sold Americans bonds. “People invested in their country, in that fashion [and] made a lot of sense back then. I don’t know why it might not make sense today, certainly in lieu of jumping to tax.”

There are a couple things wrong with this. One, we actually did have higher taxes during WW2. Second...well, I'll let Wonkette take it from here:

...this is superfluous, because we already have such bonds: they are called United States Treasury Bonds, which we use to finance any sort of deficit spending! For how many years, as a child, did Ben Nelson drink paint-thinner on a daily basis?...Issuing, say, $30 billion in new “war bonds” means taking on $30 billion in new debt, plus interest. If Ben Nelson wants to be Fiscally Serious, then he should either (a) add a surtax to accumulate $30 billion in new revenue or (b) offset $30 billion in the Defense Department budget, at the expense of other things. That’s probably like four F-35s, seriously. Seriously.

Ben Nelson poops through his mouth.

Well said.

Over at TNR, Jon Chait advances a similar thesis regarding Senator Joe "Eeyore" Lieberman's recent asshattery on health care.