Category: Health Care

Ted Cruz Goes All Night; Vendors of Conventional Wisdom Say This Is Bad

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Readers may have noticed that I have been ignoring the ObamaCare “Don’t Fund It” dramatics, along with the “government shutdown” threat and the punditry gabfest that have accompanied it. Depending on who you listen to, either Ted Cruz is the future of the Republican Party or else Ted Cruz is the harbinger of the final collapse of the GOP.

I hate ObamaCare and like Ted Cruz, but the reason I’ve ignored all the “Don’t Fund It” drama is because it’s a legislative process story.

And I hate legislative process stories.

For an entire decade, my job at the Washington Times required me to edit legislative process stories, including the interminable debates over budget bills during the Clinton and Bush presidencies. Day after day, our Capitol Hill reporters would file their stories about the latest developments in the process — the hearings, the debate, the amendments, etc. — and I had to pay close attention to every detail of this stuff, even though it was as boring as watching paint dry.

The glamour! The excitement! The journalistic thrill of formatting another roll-call graphic on a Senate cloture vote.

The Politics of Gesture is also something with which I’m familiar, having watched Congress and President Bush enact federal law to keep Terry Schiavo alive, which turned out to be futile symbolism.

So I’m pro-Cruz and anti-ObamaCare, and therefore supportive of Cruz and the “Don’t Fund It” movement, but I simply haven’t been able to bring myself to submerge into the day-by-day coverage that would have us believe this is anything other than a legislative process story and an exercise in the Politics of Gesture.

Spare me the “What It Means” punditry. Spare me the GOP Establishment denunciations of Cruz, and also spare me Tea Party denunciations of Republicans who don’t support Cruz. Most of all, spare me those “Republican Divided” chyrons on MSNBC, and spare me the umpteenth network Sunday show roundtable discussion.

Via Memeorandum, here is your “Don’t Fund It” headline stack:

Cruz Quotes ‘Duck Dynasty,’ Toby Keith
in Night-Long Attack on Obamacare 
— ABC News

How Ted Cruz’s Anti-Obamacare Filibuster
Could Cost Him Millions<
— BuzzFeed

Reid’s office: Cruz filibuster is fake 
— The Hill

Democrats see GOP shutdown threat
as opening for 2014 election gains
—  Washington Post

So, is this a “win” for Republicans? Or is this a public-relations nightmare that will help Democrats? I don’t know, and neither do any of the pundits who are claiming to know What It Means.

The significance of such things is never apparent except in hindsight, because the future is unpredictable. Many of the pundits who are blabbering away on cable TV news are engaged in “wishcasting,” predicting the future as a way of trying to influence the future.

Far be it from me to suppose that my influence is such that anything I say about this will make the slightest bit of difference either way.

Next week, there will be another LOOMING CRISIS we’re all supposed to care about, and everyone will have forgotten this week’s crisis.

UPDATE: TC Lynch at Leather Penguin:

Listening to the timbre of his voice, he doesn’t sound gassed. And his wingman, Utah’s Mike Lee, is still there, able to give him an occasional breather by “asking a question.” He’ll probably still be going strong when Mika and Scarborough — who has hammered Cruz at every opportunity — fire up “Morning Joe.” That alone is enough reason for me to maybe tune in to that trainwreck for the first time in years. (UPDATE-6:00AM: Took a look; still a trainwreck (see Geraghty).

Speaking of Joe Scarborough, do you realize he’s like 6-foot-4?

When I met him at the National Review Institute event earlier this year, I realized that being The Big Guy is part of Scarborough’s problem. There is such a thing as “Short Man’s Syndrome” — the pipsqueak who feels a need to overcompensate — and there is also such a thing as “Big Man’s Syndrome,” the guy whose sheer size habituates him to domineering behavior. Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson, both of whom were tall guys, had this tendency, and I think Joe Scarborough’s arrogant domineering attitude has similar origins.

 

A Rare Disagreement With Thomas Sowell

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by Smitty

But, for the same reason that it makes no sense to impeach either President Obama or Chief Justice Roberts, it makes no sense to attempt to defund ObamaCare. That reason is that it cannot be done. The world is full of things that ought to be done but cannot in fact be done.

The reasons for making ever possible effort to defund ObamaCare, as I see it, are:

  • It’s an economic wrecking ball.
  • Fighting now, even if Ted Cruz is a modern Leonidas, plants the seeds. After the wrecking ball has made its rubble, the “Vote your way out of this” cry can arise. But where is the voice for that if the GOP isn’t trying now?
  • From a negotiating standpoint, if you don’t stake out your strongest position, how can you hope to compromise usefully, e.g. a one-year stay of swinging of the wrecking ball?
  • The sheer mendouchious twatwafflery of Nancy Pelosi accusing the ” target=”_blank”>GOP not arguing in good faith would be kinda funny, if there were not so much at stake.

Read the whole thing, which is a typically great Sowell column.
Whether or not the swing of the wrecking ball is delayed, though, 2014 will be a referendum on whether or not six years of no-talent rodeo clown governance was a swift idea.

Mrs. Malkin Misapprehends: The Underside Of The Bus *IS* Your Healthcare Plan

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by Smitty


It’s kind of a bummer to see #OccupyResoluteDesk so misinterpreted:

See, you’re going to have a plan that you can keep. All of the angst hinges around you learning to LIKE the thing. And that’s where the American people have really let our no-talent rodeo clown down. For some strange reason, we have refused to internalize the concept of rank incompetence and thuggery as the new excellence. Clearly the problem lies with us.

Via Instapundit, the fact that numbers are all morally equivalent helps soften the blow that ObamaCare will only insure half of the number previously taped to the shuttlecock down at the badminton court on Martha’s Vineyard. Pay no attention that, as with unemployment numbers, the actual values will likely prove significantly worse, once the value of deceiving people has diminished to the point the truth leaks out.

And so Harry ‘the Cadaver’ Reid is going to defend ObamaCare as though it were Greece, and our federal government the EuroZone.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) declared Thursday that any government funding legislation that takes away money for Obamacare has no chance of becoming law.
“In case there is any shred of doubt in the minds of our House counterparts, I want to be absolutely crystal clear,” Reid said at a news conference. “Any bill that defunds Obamacare is dead. Dead.”

And if anybody in DC is intimately familiar with rigor mortis conditions, it’s Ol’ Harry.

But let’s have none of that scurrilous, old-fashioned equality-before-the-law talk:

On Tuesday Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) indicated on the floor of the Senate he was “open to having a vote” on Senator David Vitter’s (R-LA) amendment to eliminate the Obamacare exemption for members of Congress, according to a Breitbart source on Capitol Hill. [Friday], however, he and his Democratic colleagues are singing a different tune, and the lyrics come straight from that timeless phrase used by hypocrites throughout American history: “What’s good for thee is not good for me.”

My thought, given the state of the slow-motion train-wreck, is that after suitable theater, Congress delays the ObamaCare debacle a year, and tries to get some of the infrastructure more ready. I doubt that the Democrats have any regard for ObamaCare itself; it’s never been more than a stepping stone to Single Prayer, anyway. As long as it’s achieving its purpose of being a Cloward-Piven wrecking ball, why would the Democrats care?

The danger to the Dems, as the sleeping giant of liberty continues to awake, is that a delay permits drags the economy down, and more information about how diabolically false the entire undertaking to circulate. That could affect the 2014 vote.

Suggestion: hire John Cleese for a series of PSAs at NFL games, trying to sell “ObamaCareTross” and/or “CrapNados”:

Past The Hooplah, One Hopes The GOP Replacement Proposal Gets A Review

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by Smitty

This is interesting:

Conservatives representing nearly three-quarters of the House Republican conference unveiled their proposed replacement for President Obama’s healthcare law Wednesday, delivering on a long-delayed GOP promise.
The bill from the Republican Study Committee would fully repeal the 2010 law and replace it with an expansion of health savings accounts, medical liability reform and the elimination of restrictions on purchasing insurance across state lines.
Authors of the proposal said they would push for a vote on the House floor, although they acknowledged the bill stands no chance of passage with Obama in the White House and Democrats controlling the Senate.

Thus, no one can reasonably say that the GOP is purely obstructionist here. The House’s action sets up the (more realistic, let’s face it) possibility of delaying ObamaCare another year, and turning 2014 into a referendum between a despised train wreck and the Republican Steering Committee idea, which could retain some flavor of traditional American liberty for our future.

It’s worth noting that even the staunchest ObamaCare advocates wouldn’t mind additional time to actually get some of the infrastructure developed for the program. Scream and holler though they will, the additional schedule slack would be a boon for them.

Hayward notes at Human Events:

Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor made a point of supporting President Obama’s quest for military strikes on Syria because they thought it would earn them some reciprocal goodwill. Then they got to watch Obama take the stage, just hours after a shooting rampage at the Washington Naval Yard, and launch slash-and-burn partisan attacks against them. Perhaps that influenced their decision to go all-in on ObamaCare repeal. Maybe they got tired of trying to shake hands with someone who keeps hitting them below the belt.

Nice fable, John, but we’re talking about the kind of a guy who lets one Ambassador twist in the wind in Benghazi, then sends another Ambassador to urinate down the public back while talking about the video that precipitated the tragedy. Our President is a lying, no-talent rodeo clown of such magnitude that you’d require a lobotomy scar of Kerry proportions not to notice. Still: good try.

via Human Events

Is Obama Pivoting From Jobs To Syria To ObamaCare Like A Rodeo Clown Ballerina?

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by Smitty

The only way to make this any worse would be to give it full animation and “Dancing Queen”, by ABBA, for a soundtrack.

I guess if Syria isn’t proving enough of a distraction, or the IRS scandal, or the Benghazi scandal, then #OccupyResoluteDesk is just going to have to hit the road and whack the people with his rhetorical bludgeon to keep them from noticing the debt ceiling negotiations (emphasis mine):

The White House is mapping out a strategy to deploy the president, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Jill Biden in what will be their most coordinated effort yet to sell Obamacare, senior administration officials said.
A burst of activity will coincide with the October opening of the insurance marketplaces, but the West Wing views this next phase as something more akin to a political campaign’s push for early votes. Over the six-month enrollment period, the White House will use the Obamas and Bidens strategically, tracking the turnout for the exchanges in key states and sending them into weak markets to boost numbers.

This promises to be rich. I can’t wait to see the Potemkin villages, with their Potemkin marketplaces, on this Potemkin tour.
Then there is a question over whether there is enough hush money for the unions:

A few weeks ago, I discussed the fact that labor unions have been increasing vocal about their objections to certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare will “shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class,” wrote three labor leaders in July. Now, according to a report from InsideHealthPolicy, the Obama administration is considering offering insurance subsidies—intended for the uninsured—to labor union members who already have employer-sponsored coverage.
…
Now, according to Rachana Dixit of InsideHealthPolicy, the administration is “working on regulations to address the issue” that people covered under Taft-Hartley plans aren’t eligible for subsidies. But it’s not an “issue” in the sense of being a glitch or a mistake; union leaders are seeking special treatment, and additional taxpayer subsidies, that other participants in employer-sponsored coverage don’t get.

Assad aside: let no one think the U.S. would be so crass as to undertake unilateral action:

The United States can always look to Bulungi for support.

via Rare
and Rare
and Breitbart

Medicare Expansion Set To Dilate A Budget Near You

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by Smitty

I had already planned to take a long weekend when I heard about Americans for Prosperity’s Hands Off My Healthcare rally in Richmond.

It was a drizzly affair, with roughly 500 in attendance from all over the state. Speakers included Delegate Steve Landes, who dared to ask questions like “Aren’t we already broke?” and Dr. Clara Belle Wheeler, who did not exactly characterize the existing Medicaid program as an Oldsmobile Delmont 88 with submarine dreams, but certainly expressed misgivings:
Follow the links above for more details, stay tuned as I work through the rest of the video, and above all: STAY ENGAGED.