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I saw a woman who was eight months pregnant, and instead of wearing clothing appropriate to her new-found girth, she simply rolled up one of her pre-pregnancy tank tops, letting us all gaze upon her bundle of joy.
Apollo posted this at 2:31 PM HKT on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 as Vignettes
Came from a Texas Demcrat over the weekend. Asked whether House Democrats could support a health care plan without a “public option,” she said:
It would be very, very difficult, because without the public option, we’ll have the same number of people uninsured. If the insurance companies wanted to insure these people now, they’d be insured. The only way that we can be sure that very low-income people and persons who work for companies that don’t offer insurance can have access to it is through an option that would give the private insurance companies a little competition. The private insurance companies have been in charge so long that I think they feel that nobody else ought to be able to do it.
I heard this on Rush yesterday, and it’s been rolling around in my head since then. I’m trying to think of a better example of someone being utterly clueless about what she’s talking about, and I’m having a hard time. The best I can do is to say that this statement is to health care economics what the statement “When Brian Boitano built the pyramids, he beat up Kulbai Khan” is to historical accuracy.*
*If you google brian boitano khan pyramids, the first hit is for this post, which features another hilariously inaccurate sentence.
**For example, here in Texas I can get a hospital-only plan for $40/month, or more thorough insurance plans for $80-100/month (the plan I actually have is around $90). If I enter in Springfield, Mass., the lowest premium it offers is $220; using Massachusetts state-run website to find a plan yields a price range between $186 and $485. For Texas, I can only find one policy above $287. Do people in Massachusetts really get that much more out of their health insurance than I do?
Apollo posted this at 6:48 PM HKT on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 as Health Care, It's Economics - Stupid!
Though, apparently, can sleep together successfully. With help. On occasion.
Edit: link fixed.
Tom posted this at 8:13 PM HKT on Monday, August 17th, 2009 as Animal Kingdom Strikes Back
Ann Althouse summarizes Obama’s approach to a “national conversation”:
That’s what I call conversation — when everyone shuts up and lets me give them what they’d say they want if only they weren’t so silent.
Apollo posted this at 8:01 PM HKT on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 as Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods
Had McCain run ads like the one above—ridiculing Obama—he might be president today. (H/T)
Hubbard posted this at 9:15 PM HKT on Saturday, August 15th, 2009 as Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods, CHANGE!
Barry today:
“I just lost my grandmother last year. I know what it’s like to watch somebody you love, who’s aging, deteriorate and have to struggle with that,” an impassioned Obama told a crowd as he spoke of Madelyn Payne Dunham. He took issue with “the notion that somehow I ran for public office or members of Congress are in this so they can go around pulling the plug on grandma.”
Barry in April:
I don’t know how much [my grandmother's] hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life – that would be pretty upsetting. . . .Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.
So it’s not so much that he ran for office because he wanted to personally pull the plug on granny, it’s that he ran for office because he wanted to appoint the committee that would decide when to pull the plug on granny. In the 21st century, no one with power gets their hands dirty; they just appoint those who do.
Apollo posted this at 9:00 PM HKT on Saturday, August 15th, 2009 as CHANGE!
From Gallup: “Georgians’ Attitudes Toward Russia Less Friendly Since War.”
Thank heavens we have polls to discover these things for us.
Apollo posted this at 2:31 PM HKT on Friday, August 14th, 2009 as Those Wacky Foreigners
Ann Althouse has a fantastic post on how to attack and defend proposed legislation, and why Sarah Palin’s “death panels” shtick was perfectly in bounds:
When a big bill is dumped on us, we are challenged to read and understand the text. Usually we don’t, but the text is there, and there’s nothing scurrilous about trying to read it, calling attention to worrisome language, and putting our arguments in vivid words. A candidate, on the other hand, is not a text to be read, but there are facts about him that we may want to know. If someone asserts a fact about a candidate and says, for example, that Obama is a Muslim or Obama was born in Kenya, then the candidate, if he doesn’t choose to ignore the assertion or simply make his own flat assertion of denial, is forced to come up with some evidence, which may be difficult and may lead to a new phase of the controversy in which the evidence is challenged.
This is completely different from a controversy about a written text that people are trying to read. If the text doesn’t mean what its opponents are saying, it should be easy for the authors of the text to show how it means something good or to amend the text and make its goodness obvious. The authors of the text should trounce their opponents. If they can’t, we should fear and mistrust them.
That’s how things work in a boisterous democracy like ours, and long may it be so.
Prof. Althouse concludes by looking at the situation now that sentors have announced the end-of-life “counseling” provision is being pulled: “[W]hy didn’t Democrats argue their side? Why did they back down? I suspect it’s because they really did hope to save money by substituting painkillers for curative treatments for the old and disabled.”
I think it’s difficult to listen to all the talk of “curve-bending,” to hear Obama wax philosophic about the waste involved in replacing his granny’s hip, to see the end-of-life “counseling” language in a bill that’s supposedly designed to cut healthcare costs, and then conclude that Althouse is wrong. Whatever they said publicly, and whatever outs they may have tried to leave themselves in the bill, those who drafted it were looking to save money by not providing treatment to people who are supposedly near the end of their lives.
Apollo posted this at 12:20 PM HKT on Friday, August 14th, 2009 as Health Care, Politics, Politics and the English Language
Byron York is being optimistic:
It’s a possibility many Republicans speak of only in whispers and Democrats are just now beginning to face. After passionate and contentious fights over health care, the environment, and taxes, could Democrats lose big — really big — in next year’s elections?
Ask them about it, and many Democrats will point to the continued personal popularity of Barack Obama. But that’s not the story. “I think what’s going to happen is Obama’s going to be fine, and the Democrats in Congress are going to get their a**** kicked in 2010,” says one Democratic strategist who prefers not to be named. “This is following a curve like the Clinton years: take on really controversial things early, fail, or succeed partially, ask Democrats to take really tough votes, and then lose. A lot of guys are going to get beat, but the president has time to recover.”
Most Republican hope focuses on the House of Representatives, but even there they have a huge job ahead. Democrats control 256 seats, and Republicans 178. Forty seats would have to change hands for Republicans to take charge.
On the other hand, 52 seats turned over when the GOP won the House in 1994.
The historic pattern hasn’t been that one party beats the other with better ideas; rather, it’s that one party self-destructs and the other waltzes in. Thus the collapsing Great Society lead to Nixon’s Silent Majority, which collapsed under Watergate to lead to Carter, etc.
But when the other party takes control of Congress prematurely, it’s less the kiss of death than a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for the beleagured president. In 1946, Truman’s Democrats collapsed, and Republicans took control of the 80th congress. They overrode his vetoes and, ironically, saved his presidency. Truman bounced back in 1948. Similarly, in 1994, Clinton’s Democrats were decimated, but Clinton himself was able to bounce back in 1996.
In 1978, however, Republicans made small gains, and Jimmy Carter collapsed on his own. The right likes to tell itself that Reagan won in 1980 because he was all that was right and good; I suspect but cannot prove that he won because Carter was collapsing and Reagan was able to convince just over 50% of the nation that he would do a better job.
By all means, the right needs to generate good new ideas, but they’re not going to win on them; the left will lose.
Hubbard posted this at 10:56 AM HKT on Friday, August 14th, 2009 as I have seen the future. . ., Politics, The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past
Bill Sammon uses the Way Back Machine to show us what life was like in 2002. I think he’s lying, though, since we all know that political anger was only invented last month when Nazi rednecks started lynching Democrats.
Apollo posted this at 2:32 PM HKT on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Journalism
Perhaps I’m alone, but today when Drudge had a headline that the president had said, “UPS and Fedex Are Doing Just Fine: It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems,” I briefly hoped that the president, to show that he wasn’t wholly against the free market, was going to come out for privatizing the Postal Service.
Then I found out that Obama was somehow using that as an argument for government-run health insurance (which makes no sense whatsoever). I can’t say I was surprised when I found out. Just disappointed. Even reactionaries like me aren’t completely immune from hope.
Apollo posted this at 12:22 AM HKT on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 as Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods
Dorothy Rabinowitz today is well worth reading.
The president has a problem. For, despite a great election victory, Mr. Obama, it becomes ever clearer, knows little about Americans. He knows the crowds—he is at home with those. He is a stranger to the country’s heart and character.
He seems unable to grasp what runs counter to its nature. That Americans don’t take well, for instance, to bullying, especially of the moralizing kind, implicit in those speeches on health care for everybody. Neither do they wish to be taken where they don’t know they want to go and being told it’s good for them.
Who would have believed that this politician celebrated, above all, for his eloquence and capacity to connect with voters would end up as president proving so profoundly tone deaf? A great many people is the answer—the same who listened to those speeches of his during the campaign, searching for their meaning.
I’ve complained numerous times (e.g.) that, for all the hubub about what a great speaker Obama is, the only thing he has ever persuaded anyone of is that he’s a great speaker. I can’ t say I’m surprised in the least that he cannot sell health care.
Let me be a little provacative: When Obama speaks, Americans say, “What a clever man is Obama.” When George Bush spoke, Americans said, “Let us march on Bagdhad.”
This is, of course, a gross oversimplication. But it’s also true. George Bush, for all his supposed inability to speak and all his supposed stupidity, was able to approach the American people with an originally unpopular idea and convince them that he was right. His argument wasn’t “Listen to me because I’m George Bush;” instead, it was “listen to me because overthrowing Saddam is the right thing to do.” The failure of George Bush’s second term rests largely on his decision, conscious or not, to stop trying to persuade his fellow Americans of the correctness of his ideas.
Obama’s argument, mostly, is that we should listen to him because he’s Obama. But no one in America has that sort of inate political power. We’re a spirited people who don’t take kindly to being told what to do. Obama’s inability to persuade, despite the supposed cleverness of his speeches, will continue to be the signal weakness of his presidency. And we will not again have a successful president until someone appears on the political stage with the ability and desire to persuade us that he’s correct.
Apollo posted this at 9:15 PM HKT on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 as Amer-I-Can!, Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods, George Bush Rules!, George Bush Sucks!
Hubbard posted this at 9:53 AM HKT on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 as Buffoon Watch
Oops. My mistake. This is the worst article I have read in a very long time.
That’s right folks. It is now unamerican to question your government.
Ugh.
Jamie posted this at 4:35 PM HKT on Monday, August 10th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Health Care