Tag Archives: Romney

Political Rants

Crying thief.

My guess is that Marco Rubio is speaking now as I write these lines, serving up a fitting introduction for the nominee – or Rominee – of last resort for the Republican party. A speech filled with platitudes about freedom from, I don’t know, the tyranny of a pension or reliable health insurance in your old age, spoken by the son of escapees from communist Cuba. As Ryan put it on Wednesday night, the present-day G.O.P. sees everything to the left of Ayn Rand as sclerotic socialism, including legislative initiatives – like the individual mandate and cap and trade – that they themselves invented only a handful of years ago. (Ryan himself couldn’t even stick to his Randian creed for three minutes, decrying a nanny state where “everything is free except you” then paying tribute to the Medicare his mother purportedly depends on.)

I don’t know about these guys, but that “everything free” part probably sounds pretty attractive to a lot of Americans right now. While they equate Obama with Castro, Barry is much, much closer to them than he is to the bearded one in Havana. Would that he had put his shoulder behind expanding Medicare instead of this republican inspired, Heritage Foundation formulated health insurance scheme they call “Obamacare”. Would that he had committed himself to full employment along the lines of what Robert Pollin is recommending, among others. Those are positions worth defending. The problem Obama has right now is not the Republicans … it is his own flaccid liberalism, hopelessly compromised from the first stage of negotiation.

In truth, the Republicans, led by millionaire Romney, should be easy as hell to beat. They have zero credibility on the economy, no track record to speak of. Obama at least had the Clinton years – what does Romney have? The Republicans crashed the economy; now they want the driver’s seat back. They nearly destroyed the empire it took decades of rapacious interventionism to build. They have an ex-president, a mere four years out of office, that played no role in their convention. Did anyone mention him even once? They appear to think that by disowning the historically incompetent Bush/Cheney and pretending not to remember their tenure that they can induce amnesia amongst the rest of the body politic. They believe that by pointing elsewhere and crying “thief”, they can rob again.

Now that the balloons have fallen on Romney/Ryan (and we have been treated to the spectacle of evident dementia-sufferer Clint Eastwood rambling aimlessly on national television), it’s fair to respond to that question they always ask four years into an opponent’s presidency – namely, are you better off than you were four years ago. Four years ago, we were in free fall, the credit system of the world’s largest economy was shutting down, and hundreds of thousands were being thrown out of work. Four years ago, Bush’s war of choice in Iraq was still killing young soldiers by the dozen. Unless you’re as demented as Clint Eastwood, you probably remember all that.

Yes, we’re better off than we were in 2008. Still not good, but it takes a lot of work to get out of a hole as deep as the one Romney’s party dug us into.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

American taliban.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Rep. Todd Aiken is some kind of outlier or “knuckle dragger,” as Boehner might put it. He represents the core of where the Republican party is on women’s reproductive rights today. The tea party-fueled G.O.P. has been on a mission about abortion since they took power in January of last year, advancing radical anti-abortion legislation on both on the federal and the state level. The 2011 “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion” act – HR3 on the docket, meaning this is literally the third bill they got to since taking power – included in its original form a redefinition of rape that established the somewhat dubiously defined category of “forcible rape”. The final version would ban federal funding of abortions in cases of “statutory rape”, meaning that rape victims would have to undergo some kind of audit to avoid bringing the child of their rapist to term.

The motivation behind this is pretty obvious. Attempts to ban abortion have always run into three exceptions that block an outright ban – rape, incest, and saving the life of the mother. Of these three categories, anti-abortion fanatics see rape as the least problematic to game. They keep trying to find ways around that exception, resorting to narrowing the definition of “legitimate” rape, junk science theories about female reproductive biology, and so on. Aiken got his theory from a crackpot preacher that served as a surrogate for Romney during the last election.  This same guy has met with both Romney and Ryan this year.

The Republicans do not want to have this conversation. But the simple truth is that they are committed to this notion of no abortion, no exceptions. They are becoming the American / Christian version of the taliban, adding a “no exceptions for rape or incest” anti-abortion plank to their national party platform just this past week. They are running away from it, but it is not going anywhere, and if you dig deep enough, you will find plenty of true believers like Aiken who will say what they believe, no matter how extreme. And this is an extreme position by any measure – the most extreme advocated by a national party on the subject of abortion since it became a national issue in the 1970s.

Extremism has gone mainstream. This should be an interesting convention, if it doesn’t get washed out by that hurricane.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Ryan’s express.

So it’s budget guy. Interesting choice, governor. At least we know where he stands (even if your position is still a little vague). We’ve apparently reached a pass in American politics where an unapologetic acolyte of Ayn Rand can be put forward as a candidate for vice president. This may have been unthinkable a year ago, when the Occupy Wall Street movement was in full swing, at least in terms of media coverage. Now that the “austerians,” as Tom Tomorrow calls them, have once again found their full-throated voice, Ryan can be seen as a serious contender for high office. Though they are backing away from the details of his Medicare proposal like it’s a live grenade, concentrating instead on Medicare reductions in the Affordable Care Act – reductions that are included in Ryan’s budget, incidentally.

My favorite dodge, though, is the one about sparing current retirees and near-retirees from painful cuts. Everyone 55 and over will keep the same system as current law, they claim; people younger than that can expect a voucher. Maybe that will buy some time with the elderly, I don’t know. But it seems to me that they’re risking pissing off people in the 45-55 bracket (namely, people like me), who have been in the private health insurance market their entire lives and have seen the magic of the marketplace at work first-hand. After decades of that, I can tell you that the notion of being handed a voucher when I’m finally allowed to retire is unacceptable.

Let’s take a closer look at Ryan’s competitive healthcare marketplace that will somehow work for seniors now better than it did prior to the advent of Medicare in the 1960s. The fact is, we’ve had competition in health insurance basically forever with respect to people under 65. Has the price gone down at all? Next question. If competition results in skyrocketing premiums for younger, relatively healthier people whose healthcare costs tend to be  more manageable, what will happen with elderly people who inevitably incur higher costs due to deteriorating health, age-related illness, palliative care, etc? That’s the reason why Medicare was created in the first place as a government guarantee of coverage for elderly people. Pushing more of its costs onto the people it’s supposed to be protecting is hardly a solution.

Same deal with Ryan’s Medicaid brainstorm. The super-genius wants to whittle that down by replacing it with block grants and reducing it by a third. People hear Medicaid and they think poor people (and, therefore, get apathetic about it). But when it comes to being elderly and needing nursing home care, practically everyone is poor… poor enough to need Medicaid. That’s where a good deal of custodial care funding comes from. Ask someone with elderly parents or someone who has done basic estate planning. Only the Romneys of the world need not rely on some kind of insurance support in their dotage.

This is a good conversation to have, frankly. Let’s have it, and make certain the elderly and the near-elderly understand what’s at stake before the November election.

luv u,

jp