Tag Archives: Ryan

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

Political Rants

Rights and wrongs.

G.O.P. congressional fiscal policy wunderkind (somehow) Paul Ryan was talking about rights on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos the other day, and he said this:

We [Republicans] disagree with the notion that our rights come from government; that the government can now grant us and define our rights. Those are ours. Those come from nature and god according to the Declaration of Independence.

I’ve heard similar stuff emanating from the heads of various conservatives over the years, of course. It just amazes me, though, that this creature they present as such an intellectual heavyweight in the area of legislative statecraft can seemingly lack the knowledge a pre-teenager might glean (between naps) from civics class. Rights are given to us by god and nature just as food and water are; which is to say, not really at all. Rights exist; we may (or may not) be aware of their existence. But they are not “given” to us in any respect.

Government is, at its best, an imperfect guarantor of rights; that is one of its primary functions. If people are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, what of the African Americans owned by the very man who penned the Declaration of Independence? Were they not also handed the gift of freedom by the almighty at birth? I think not. They were chattel, for chrissake; uncounted millions were born into forced labor and indeed died therein. It took a civil war, fought for other purposes, to abolish institutionalized slavery, but the fight for freedom was far from won when the guns fell silent.

The civil rights struggles of the 20th Century carved out some basic rights of citizenship that were then encoded in federal law and implemented and enforced by federal authority. No miracles there. No, the government doesn’t hand you freedoms; neither does god, nor business. We scratch for every inch, and if we’re persistent (and fortunate), the government can assist us in holding on to our gains. Or it can throw us under the bus, with the wrong people at the helm. The only role any god might play is if s/he gives us enough brains and enough strength to fight.

All I can say is, if Ryan is the best thinker they have … they’ve got some thinking to do.

luv u,

jp