Fighting Back Against The GOP's Big Pre-existing Conditions Lie

Bryce will be a congressman for ALL people-- even if they wear suits

There's barely a red district in the country where the Republican incumbent isn't lying about healthcare. Regardless of their multiple votes to nullify protections for people with pre-existing conditions, they all claim the opposite. The Texas Observer noted this week that "a Texas lawsuit has put the ACA’s popular pre-existing conditions provision front and center ahead of midterms, to the chagrin of Republicans who have vehemently opposed the law for years."

“Everyone agrees we’re going to protect pre-existing conditions,” Senator Ted Cruz said in a debate this month. Yes, the same Ted Cruz who forced a federal government shutdown in 2013 to try to defund the Affordable Care Act, including pre-existing condition protections. The same Ted Cruz who has introduced measures weakening those protections and voiced support for a Texas lawsuit to eliminate them.

“I have never been for ending pre-existing conditions,” said Congressman Pete Sessions in September. On his website, Sessions boasts that he has “voted more than 60 times to repeal, dismantle, and defund” the ACA, which ensures that people with pre-existing medical conditions can’t be denied coverage or charged more-- one of the law’s most central and popular provisions.

“All Republicans support people with pre-existing conditions, and if they don’t, they will after I speak to them,” President Donald Trump tweeted earlier this month. “Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not!” he added last week. But Trump’s administration is currently suing to overturn these protections in court and just last week issued guidance that makes it easier for states to opt out of coverage requirements.

Republicans in Texas and around the country are trying to lie their way out of a problem: The ACA’s pre-existing condition protections are extremely popular and remain a dominant campaign issue with one week to go before the midterm elections. But many Republicans now in competitive races have spent years fighting these protections as part of their vendetta against the federal health care law and President Barack Obama. Now, they’re trying to erase that history-- even going so far as to claim to be the crusaders for these protections, while actively suing over or railing against the law that created them.

The conflict is particularly potent in Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton is leading a lawsuit to overturn the entire ACA, including pre-existing condition protections. The suit, filed by Paxton and 19 other Republican attorneys general in February, has been called “absurd” and “far-fetched” by attorneys and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

The issue came to a head this spring when Trump’s Department of Justice sided with Texas in declaring pre-existing condition protections unconstitutional and declining to defend the law. If Team Trump is successful, the consequences would be huge. Texas already has the highest uninsured rate in the country, and about 4.5 million Texans have a condition that could make them uninsurable without the ACA’s protections.

As a result, Republicans in races across the state are trying to wipe away their records with seemingly empty promises. Houston Republican John Culberson has staunchly opposed the ACA but said in his campaign that he also supports pre-existing condition protections. He quietly deleted mention of the ACA from his website, where he previously boasted about his many repeal votes, according to ThinkProgress.

...Asked how Cruz plans to protect patients with pre-existing conditions and how he squares this alleged support with his votes against the ACA, his office replied with a statement that didn’t mention pre-existing conditions or an alternative to the ACA. “Texans want more healthcare freedom and choice, not skyrocketing premiums, narrowing networks, and a one-size-fits-all approach to healthcare determined by Washington bureaucrats,” a spokesperson wrote.

In response to Observer questions, Sessions, noting that his son has Down syndrome, pointed to a nonbinding resolution he introduced in September saying that any health care plan should preserve pre-existing condition protections. Sessions also pointed to his bill introduced in 2016 and 2017, dubbed the “World’s Greatest Healthcare Plan,” which would preserve some protections for patients with pre-existing conditions, but eliminate the ACA’s individual and employer insurance mandates. It didn’t get a vote.

“Americans deserve a healthcare system where they have choices in insurance, where vulnerable patients are protected, and where tax credits help Americans afford coverage,” Sessions wrote in an email. That system, he said, is definitely not the ACA’s “one-size fits all mandate,” or Medicare for All. “States should have the latitude to tailor their healthcare system to achieve these ends.” Asked if he supports Paxton’s lawsuit, Sessions didn’t respond.

Clear enough for challengers running against incumbents to respond to. That tweet from Mike Siegel above is how keeps hammering how to TX-10 voters that his opponent, Michael McCaul has voted dozens of times to take away their healthcare and to end protections for preexisting conditions. But what do candidates who are running against all those Republican replacements for GOP congressmen who decided to retire this year. Let's take Randy Bryce in Wisconsin who started running against Paul Ryan, scared the hell out of him and saw Ryan announce his retirement and then replaced himself with a goofy copy of himself-- but with no voting record. This is an ad Bryce has up on the air right now. Steil doesn't have a voting record, but he's too weak and too frightened to differentiate himself from Paul Ryan and Donald Trump:



This week, Bryce was endorsed by Milwaukee's biggest weekly newspaper, the Shepherd Express. The editorial board "throughout the campaign, Bryce has fought for the little guy, stood up to the wealthy special interests and shown the spirit of independence and forward thinking that used to set Wisconsin apart as a leader in our nation on civil rights, worker representation and advocating for the middle class. We strongly endorse sending Bryce to Congress to shake up the millionaires’ club that currently has a stranglehold on Congress." Nor are they thrilled with his overly-entitled and spoiled opponent:

With House Speaker Paul Ryan retiring, the First Congressional District has a timely opportunity to reject the divisive, hate-fueled politics of the Republican majority in both Congress and the White House. Time and time again, Ryan has timidly enabled Trump and fought to take health care away from millions of people, embarrassing and betraying Wisconsin. Furthermore, the last thing Congress needs is some like Bryce’s opponent.

Bryan Steil got the Republican nomination because of his father’s connections as a prominent Republican lawyer who served as Tommy Thompson’s personal lawyer and whose law firm benefitted from millions of dollars from a massive tobacco settlement. These connections also got him a position as a staffer for Paul Ryan. Now Steil is running to replace him.

By contrast, iron worker Randy Bryce-- or, as voters have come to know him, “Iron ’Stache”-- is true Wisconsin. Like most of us in the Badger State, he didn’t have a father to open all the important doors for him. Bryce had to do it all on his own and learn from his mistakes-- and he did make mistakes. Having learned and grown, he now offers a new and dramatically under-represented voice of the blue-collar worker in a Congress largely composed of wealthy lawyers such as his opponent.

This morning the NY Times' healthcare expert, Margot Sanger-Katz, laid bare the GOP Big Lie on pre-existing conditions. Needless to say the biggest liar of all turns out to be Trumpanzee. She wrote that "In campaign speeches, advertisements and interviews, Republican politicians are showing a zeal for protecting Americans with pre-existing health conditions" and that the fake president Trumpanzee "has gone the furthest, saying not only that he will ensure protections for the previously ill, but also pledging that his party will do so more effectively than Democrats. There are many reasons to doubt these words." Yes, many. For example, "It is Democrats, by passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010, who introduced meaningful protections for Americans with prior illnesses. And Republican officeholders have taken numerous actions that would tend to weaken those protections-- in Congress, in states and in courts. The Trump administration introduced a sweeping new policy just last week that would allow states to sidestep Obamacare’s requirement to cover pre-existing conditions."

Last year, Republicans in Congress led an extended but ultimately unsuccessful effort to, in their words, “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. Although a bill passed through the House of Representatives, Republicans in the Senate were unable to agree on a particular replacement for Obamacare.

The House bill, called the American Health Care Act, had provisions that would have weakened current protections for people with pre-existing illnesses. It would have allowed states to eliminate Obamacare’s rules that health insurance must cover a standard set of benefits, like prescription drugs and mental health care, and its rule that insurance companies must charge the same prices to customers whether they are healthy or sick.

The House bill created a small pool of money for states to help sick customers who might be shut out of such markets. A majority of House Republicans (217 to 20) voted for this bill.

Had this bill become law, the precise results would have depended on the choices by individual states. But the Congressional Budget Office estimated that nearly half of all Americans lived in a state that would have pursued such a waiver from standard benefits. The consequences, the C.B.O. said, would have been coverage that was unaffordable to many with pre-existing illnesses, along with holes in coverage for many serious conditions. For example, someone with a substance-abuse disorder might have lived where plans for people with that condition were very expensive and didn’t include addiction treatment.

...Trump has said he continues to back repeal efforts. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said recently that Congress would consider such legislation if Republicans retained their control after the election.

Republican Strategists Are Beginning To Realize Hillary Isn't Being Embraced By Democratic Voters

Last week, writing for The Intercept, Lee Fang reported that the Clinton campaign is stuffed full of advisors and fundraisers who were lobbyists working to kill Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. That's the Clinton Machine, her team and her allies-- corrupt lobbyists working against progressive values on every level.

Hillary Clinton is campaigning as a guardian of President Barack Obama’s progressive policy accomplishments. In recent weeks, she has called the Affordable Care Act “one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic Party, and of our country,” and promised that she is “going to defend Dodd-Frank” and “defend President Obama for taking on Wall Street.”

Meanwhile, however, Clinton’s campaign has been relying on a team of strategists and fundraisers, many of whom spent much of the last seven years as consultants or lobbyists for business interests working to obstruct Obama’s agenda in those two areas.

Consultants associated with the Dewey Square Group, a lobbying firm that has been retained by business interests to defeat a variety of progressive reforms, are playing a major role in the Clinton campaign. Charles Baker III, the co-founder of Dewey, is a senior strategist and the campaign’s chief administrative officer. Michael Whouley, another Dewey co-founder, played an early role in advising Clinton’s plan for the current campaign by convening some of the very first strategy sessions. Senior Dewey officials Jill Alper and Minyon Moore are also close advisers and fundraisers for Clinton, while at least four other Clinton officials have worked at Dewey within the last four years. In addition, disclosures show that Clinton’s Super PACs Priorities USA Action and Correct the Record have also paid Dewey Square Group for a variety of services in this election.

Dewey, for instance, worked on behalf of the health insurance industry during the health reform debate, specifically to block the changes to Medicare Advantage that were critical for financing the Affordable Care Act. Medicare Advantage, which allows Medicare beneficiaries to use plans administered by private insurers, had long served as a cash cow for the health insurance industry. By one estimate, insurance companies over-billed the government by nearly $70 billion in improper payments over just a five year period. Dewey, which had been tapped to by health insurers to block cuts from the program starting in 2007, continued during the Obama era to lobby to protect Medicare Advantage, even as such reforms became a major part of how Democrats and the Obama administration sought to finance the Affordable Care Act.

...On financial reform, Clinton has similarly tied herself to Obama’s legacy. Speaking with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last month, Clinton asserted that on Dodd-Frank, Obama’s financial reform legislation, she is one of the “many Democrats” who are “fighting to prevent it from being turned back.”

Clinton’s inner circle, however, has lobbied to help obstruct and roll back many of Dodd-Frank’s signature reforms.

The Benenson Strategy Group, the consulting firm run by Joel Benenson, now serving as the Clinton campaign’s chief pollster and strategist, was retained by the Financial Services Forum, a lobbying group for Wall Street interests such as Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Lobbying records show the Financial Services Forum has worked over the years to weaken a variety of Dodd-Frank reforms. In 2013, the Financial Services Forum paid Benenson’s firm $273,459 while it was lobbying on a number of rules that were mandated by Dodd-Frank, including capital requirements designed to prevent another financial crisis. Danny Franklin, a partner with the Benenson Stategy Group, wrote to The Intercept to say the Financial Services Forum is not currently a client of his firm, but declined to comment any further.

  Last month, Benenson convened a conference call with reporters to “deride Bernie Sanders for airing an ad that criticized Wall Street firms and the politicians who accept their donations,” according to a report from International Business Times. As IBTimes reported, Benenson has also represented JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, among other corporate clients.

...Speaking to The Hill last year, Tony Podesta said that unlike President Obama, who instituted a ban on registered lobbyists in his administration, K Street will find a more welcome home in a Clinton White House.

“I think Hillary Clinton will be the next nominee and probably be the next president, but whomever the next president is will not maintain the lobbying ban,” he predicted. “It was a good applause line for Obama, but it didn’t seem to make much sense for policy.”

Similarly, when we look at which members of Congress voted against the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (Dodd-Frank) and against the Affordable Care Act, many are Clinton surrogates or on her Leadership Teams. Most the the 34 conservative Democrats who crossed the aisle and voted with the Republicans against the Affordable Care Act were subsequently defeated for reelection by Democratic base voters who refused to turn out and vote for them in the 2010 midterms, 7 months after the Obamacare debate. We referred to it as the Great Blue Dog Apocalypse, since nearly the entire Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- a big part the Hillary support team-- was wiped out in one fell swoop. Only 3 are still in Congress-- Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL), Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN) and Stephen Lynch (MA). Lynch is on the Clinton Massachusetts Leadership Team and several of the defeated Blue Dogs-- like John Tanner and Lincoln Davis of Tennessee-- have also endorsed her. 27 Democrats voted against Dodd Frank. The only ones still in Congress are Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX), Marcy Kaptur (OH), Ann Kirkpatrick (New Dem-AZ), Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR) and Pete Visclosky (IN). Cuellar, Kirkpatrick and Schrader are on Clinton Leadership teams in their states.

When her close relationship with Establishment war criminal Henry Kissinger was exposed on national TV during last Thursday's debate-- followed by her public defense of the reviled figure-- many Democrats began to see for the first time what they are being asked to support. As David Corn reported for Mother Jones after the debate, the Clintons and Kissingers are close personal friends and spend summer holidays together in a Dominican beachfront villa owned by Oscar de la Renta. Watch the video of the Kissinger exchange at the top of the post.

What Clinton did not mention was that her bond with Kissinger was personal as well as professional, as she and her husband have for years regularly spent their winter holidays with Kissinger and his wife, Nancy, at the beachfront villa of fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, who died in 2014, and his wife, Annette, in the Dominican Republic.

Oscar de la Renta, Hillary and war criminal Henry Kissinger

This campaign tussle over Kissinger began a week earlier, at a previous debate, when Clinton, looking to boost her résumé, said, "I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time. So I have an idea about what it's going to take to make our government work more efficiently." A few days later, Bill Clinton, while campaigning for his wife in New Hampshire, told a crowd of her supporters, "Henry Kissinger, of all people, said she ran the State Department better and got more out of the personnel at the State Department than any secretary of state in decades, and it's true." His audience of Democrats clapped loudly in response.

It was odd that the Clintons, locked in a fierce fight to win Democratic votes, would name-check a fellow who for decades has been criticized-- and even derided as a war criminal-- by liberals. Bill and Hillary Clinton themselves opposed the Vietnam War that Nixon and Kissinger inherited and continued. Hillary Clinton was a staffer on the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Nixon, and one of the articles of impeachment drafted by the staff (but which was not approved) cited Nixon for covering up his secret bombing of Cambodia. In the years since then, information has emerged showing that Kissinger's underhanded and covert diplomacy led to brutal massacres around the globe, including in Chile, Argentina, East Timor, and Bangladesh.

With all this history, it was curious that in 2014, Clinton wrote a fawning review of Kissinger's latest book and observed, "America, he reminds us, succeeds by standing up for our values, not shirking them, and leads by engaging peoples and societies, the sources of legitimacy, not governments alone." In that article, she called Kissinger, who had been a practitioner of a bloody foreign-policy realpolitik, "surprisingly idealistic."

This Clinton lovefest with Kissinger is not new. And it is not simply a product of professional courtesy or solidarity among former secretaries of state, who, after all, are part of a small club. There is also a strong social connection between the Clintons and the Kissingers. They pal around together. On June 3, 2013, Hillary Clinton presented an award to de la Renta, a good friend who for years had provided her dresses and fashion advice, and then the two of them hopped over to a 90th birthday party for Kissinger. In fact, the schedule of the award ceremony had been shifted to allow Clinton and de la Renta to make it to the Kissinger bash. (Secretary of State John Kerry also attended the party.) The Kissingers and the de la Rentas were longtime buddies. Kissinger wrote one of his recent books while staying at de la Rentas' mansion in the Dominican Republic and dedicated the book to the fashion designer and his wife.

...When awarding herself the Kissinger seal of approval to bolster her standing as a competent diplomat and government official, Hillary Clinton has not referred to the annual hobnobbing at the de la Renta villa. So when Sanders criticized Clinton for playing the Kissinger card-- "not my kind of guy," he declared-- whether he realized it or not, he was hitting very close to home.

What did he teach her? "The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern." Or was it this? "It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination." Or was this Kissinger quote where she got her attitude? "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer." Or maybe he taught her how much money she could put in her pocket by giving speeches to groups eager to bribe her.

Although low-info Democrats still back Clinton to a great extent-- she is still ahead of Bernie in virtually all polls-- the margins are rapidly shrinking and her campaign is beginning to disintegrate. Republicans are now starting to prepare for what seemed out of the question just a few months ago-- that they will be facing Bernie Sanders, not the fatally flawed Clinton they had hoped for, in November. Friday BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski reported that a Republican opposition research firm, America Rising, has already begun compiling an opposition book on Bernie. In fact, they've already released their first video attempting to smear him:

Rich People Don't Think Less Well-Off People Need Health Insurance

On Friday, we took a look at the latest Republican Party vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act, this time in the guise of Fred Upton's "fix". I didn't mention that Upton is a parasite who has never worked an honest job in his life and inherited millions and millions of dollars from a family whose ancestor started Whirlpool. Whirlpool is embarrassing to Upton because they shipped all the jobs in his district to low wage third world countries where they could exploit starving workers. So Upton sold most of his shares in the family firm-- and bought oil stocks instead. He's now the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a wonderful perch to watch over your investments.

But the slimy Upton is far from the only congressional multimillionaire who voted to kill Obamacare on Friday. And they were't all Republicans. Here's a list of the 15 wealthiest Members of the House with their estimated net worths:

• Darrell Issa (R-CA)- $355 million
• Mike McCaul (R-TX)- $114 million
• John Delaney (New Dem-MD)- $68 million
• Jared Polis (CO)- $68 million
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)- $45 million
• Jim Renacci (R-OH)- $36 million
• Chellie Pingree (D-ME)- $34 million
• Vern Buchanan (R-FL)- $32 million
• Robert Pittenger (R-NC)-$28 million
• Diane Black (R-TN)- $25 million
• Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)- $24 million
• Suzan DelBene (New Dem-WA)- $24 million
• Chris Collins (R-NY)- $22 million
• Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ)- $21 million
• Gary Miller (R-CA)- $18 million

Every single Republican multimillionaire voted to make sure 40 million less well-off Americans do not get health insurance. No surprise there; all of them are merciless class war fanatics. But what about the rich Democrats? 39 Democrats joined the GOP in the disgraceful vote Friday. The wealthiest Democrat is the House is freshman self-funder John Delaney who generally represents the interests of his own socio-economic class, rich assholes. This year he introduced a bill that would grant a tax amnesty to multinational corporations which Wall Street loves and, predictably, he's been an outspoken advocate of using Chained CPI to cut Social Security benefits for retired people. Scott Peters and Suzan DelBene are also immensely rich New Dem self-funders who always stand up for the interests of wealthy people over ordinary working families. Both voted with the Republicans on Friday as did 2 other very rich New Dem self funders, Brad Schneider and Bill Foster, each of whom is a multimillionaire conservaDem. The other 3 Democratic members of the Top 15 Richest are progressives and they put their own personal economic interests aside and voted for what's good for the country instead. One was Nancy Pelosi. She was on David Gregory's ridiculous Beltway show, Meet The Press, and she slapped down Gregory's imbecilic zombie talking points:



Meanwhile, it's worth noting that Steve Israel is out beating the bushes for more multimillionaire, self-funding candidates to run for Congress. Congress already had FAR, FAR too many multimillionaires. The Democratic Party should be nominating ordinary men and women who understand the problems American families face, not more multimillionaires who empathize with CEOs and people who hang out at country clubs. That's what a Republican Party is for.

Did You Know The House Has A Pro-Pandemic Caucus?

When I first met Earl Blumenauer, he was proudly displaying an oversized bicycle shaped badge on his lapel. That's because he's the founder and chairman of the House Bike Caucus, which encourages municipalities to build bicycle lanes and otherwise support the idea of making it convenient for citizens to get around on bikes. There were over 180 members when I met him. Buck McKeon also founded and chairs a caucus, the House Unmanned Systems Caucus (AKA, the Drone Caucus). It encourages drone manufacturers to bribe Members of Congress. McKeon doesn't wear anything on his lapel. But he has a bulging wallet to show he's, by far, the biggest recipient of bribes from arms manufacturers and war contractors. Congress has dozens and dozens of caucuses-- from an Addiction, Treatment and Recovery Caucus, an Animal Protection Caucus and an Armenian Caucus to a U.S.-Mongolia Friendship Caucus, a Victory in Iraq Caucus and a Zero Capital Gains Caucus. They're registered with the House Administration Committee and are all supposed to abide by certain rules, although encouraging bribery isn't one of them.

One caucus that isn't registered and doesn't abide by any rules we can call the House Pro-Pandemic Caucus. Unlike the Bike Caucus or the Animal Protection Caucus, it isn't bipartisan. All 28 Members are Republicans. Monday they were out in full force, doing their best to prove that not even Michele Bachmann's Tea Party Caucus can hold a candle to them when it comes to sheer stupidity. What brought them together this week was a roll call vote on Mike Rogers' Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act of 2013 (H.R. 307), which seeks to strengthen national preparedness and response for public health emergencies. Rogers, a very conservative Michigan Republican had 5 co-sponsors: Michael Burgess (R-TX), Anna Eshoo (D-CA), Gene Green (D-TX), Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) and Henry Waxman (D-CA). No very controversial, right? It passed 370-28. All 178 Democrats in attendance voted yes and so did 192 Republicans, including their whole leadership. So who would vote against this?

Many of the names are familiar to anyone who watches with amazement-- or horror-- at the sad parade of Republican Know Nothings who vote against anything that might remotely benefit the American people, crackpots like the John Birch Society Pit of Hell lunatic from Georgia, Paul Broun (see video up top), Jeff Duncan, the South Carolina secessionist who, in a deranged rant, accused Hillary Clinton of letting the Benghazi "consulate become a death trap," domestic terrorist Steve Stockman, Hate Talk Radio host Trey Radel, and the always amusing-- in the way a 20 car pile-up on the interstate is amusing-- Virginia Foxx and Louie Gohmert. Interestingly, though, one of Boehner's main cronies in the House, increasingly unstable Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, voted with the freakshow. So did his #2 on the Judiciary Committee, Jim Sensenbrenner.

The Republican Health Care Plan... Same As It Ever Was

I hope you had the time and concentration to read today's second post (long but lots of pictures). Originally, this one was supposed to be part of it. Then I realized it was already way too long and intimidating. So... let's pick up where we left off-- the very well-articulated Republican plan to destroy democracy and, alas, America. (You realize that's the theme of the DWT blog, right?) Anyway, you may have missed Kevin Sack's article in Saturday's NY Times about how those sneaky Republican candidates' stances on health care mask their gubernatorial records.

Like the worst and most deranged of the current crop of extreme right GOP governors-- your Kachichs, Snyders, Brewers, Corbetts, Cristies, LePages... your Rick Scotts and Scott Walkers-- the current Texas governor and two former governors running for the Republican presidential nomination all want to repeal what they derisively refer to as Obamacare. Scratch the surface and they would all-- governors and former governors alike-- also prefer to wreck and replace Medicare and Medicaid, something right-wing ideologues have always seen as "socialist." As Mike Lofgren explained in his post for TruthOut Saturday, "You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. 'Entitlement' has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is 'entitled' selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them 'earned benefits,' which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them?" Ending these earned benefits is part of the Republican Party jihad against the American middle class-- or what's left of it-- something we should be referring to as what it is-- a class war.

Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?

Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular, they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower. Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid zero.

When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove" that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute payroll taxes-- among the most regressive forms of taxation. But according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a millionaire.

All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another. More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons (which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation as dogma.

And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation, including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."

But what Sack points out in his Times piece is that as governors they haven't exactly lived up to their crazy, base-and-Koch-pleasing rhetoric.

The place of health care in the Republican primaries will necessarily be defined by Mr. Romney’s skill at neutralizing criticism of his landmark Massachusetts experiment and its paternity of “Obamacare,” as opponents have dubbed the law. But each of the governors has vulnerabilities, and they have sought thus far to credential themselves less by their own past records than by their current opposition to what is officially known as the Affordable Care Act.

“They are more focused on expressing that view than showing how their health care records as governor reveal what they would do as president,” said Alan Weil, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy.

The politics of the primaries have made toxic any consideration of once-conservative concepts like health insurance mandates and marketplace exchanges, because of their association with Mr. Obama’s plan. But in a different day and environment, Mr. Romney in Massachusetts and Mr. Huntsman in Utah embraced those very devices as state solutions, to differing degrees.

Mr. Perry, by contrast, eschewed direct efforts to expand coverage in Texas and cemented its status as the state with the highest rate of people without insurance.

When Mr. Perry succeeded George W. Bush in December 2000, about 22 percent of Texans had no insurance, second only to New Mexico. After Mr. Perry’s decade in office, Texas now claims the highest uninsured rate, at 26 percent, as well as other distinctions like the lowest rate of prenatal care.


...Mr. Perry continues to pay a political price for one decision he made to impose a health care mandate-- an executive order in 2007 that made Texas the first state to require young girls to be vaccinated against cervical cancer with Gardasil. The order infuriated conservatives, and the Legislature quickly passed a bill to overturn it, which Mr. Perry allowed to take effect without his signature.

The governor, whose former chief of staff was a lobbyist for Merck, the maker of Gardasil, defended his “pro-life decision” in a debate last year. But after announcing his bid for president last month, he began describing it as a mistake.

One day before Mr. Romney signed his landmark 2006 health care bill amid pomp at Faneuil Hall, he declared victory in a column in the Boston Globe: “Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the costs of health care will be reduced.”

Mr. Romney is batting .500.

For the 10 percent of residents who had been uninsured, the commonwealth’s coverage mandate, coupled with government subsidies for the poor, has proved a striking success. A study last year concluded that 98.1 percent of residents, and 99.8 percent of children, had health insurance, leading the country. The state also found, to the surprise of some, that the share of employers contributing to their workers’ coverage (rather than accepting a modest penalty for not doing so) had risen.

But the law was not intended to make a serious assault on the state’s above-average health costs. A recent state report concluded that growth in private insurance premiums since 2006 had outpaced the increase in national heath care spending.

In pushing for the law, which features an exchange and requires insurers to cover pre-existing conditions, Mr. Romney championed an insurance mandate as the “ultimate conservative idea.” The targets of his “personal responsibility principle” were the free-riders who gambled by not buying policies and then relied on taxpayers, hospitals and the privately insured to cover the cost of their uncompensated care.

Mr. Romney could not have known then that his legacy would become such a bludgeon, with Mr. Perry, Mr. Huntsman and, impishly, Mr. Obama crediting him for the blueprint of the federal overhaul.

Tax increases have been needed to keep the Massachusetts plan afloat. But they have not been back-breaking, largely because the federal government underwrites much of the subsidized coverage. Mr. Romney is quick to remind voters that the Democratic-led Legislature overrode his veto of the requirement that employers contribute to their workers’ coverage and of benefits he considered gold-plated.

As a national candidate, Mr. Romney has argued that the law was appropriate for Massachusetts but is constitutionally prohibited as a federal solution. He does not, however, disown it.

Then there's some stuff about Huntsman but since he's only polling around 1% it makes no sense to cover him as a serious presidential candidate, and certainly not one more serious than Michele Bachmann, who the Republican Establishment and the Beltway corporate media hope to make disappear by ignoring her, the way they do Ron Paul. The person who had right-- and had it right first-- about the Republican health care plan was Alan Grayson. Remember, "don't get sick" and "die fast?" Here's the video... it's worth watching again-- and it helps explained why they spent more money on negative ads in Grayson's district than on any other district in the country:

Breaking News: New Jersey Congressman Leonard Lance Caught Lying About Taking Government-Subsidized Healthcare

If you've been following our Healthcare Hypocrites Campaign, you know that one of the Republican hypocrites we highlighted with our ads is New Jersey career politician Leonard Lance. The ad started running Wednesday on a local station, 1450 WCTC in Somerset, and after just 11 plays, Lance had staffers on the phone with the general manager to demand that the station stop airing the ads. Now, the station is owned by Greater Media New Jersey and they have a lot of stations (WMGQ, WDHA, WMTR, WRAT, WJRZ and WWTR) and aren't looking for a fight with a truculent New Jersey congressman with a reputation for bullying tactics. Lance's staffer claimed the ad was false and sent along a copy of the Health Benefits Election Form which shows Lance checked the “I do not want” box, dated in early 2009.

Something was fishy. How did he know in early 2009 before the bill was passed to turn down the government option? Did he also turn down his congressional pension and other perks? Like I said, he's a career politician-- not a clairvoyant-- and something wasn't adding up. We started asking around among other New Jersey legislators and civil servants and, sure enough, we found out that the taxpayer-funded health care that New Jersey offers-- and that Lance still uses-- is much plusher and costs the taxpayers much more than the congressional option. So not only is Leonard Lance a hypocrite, who voted both to repeal healthcare for his hardpressed, taxpaying constituents and voted against an amendment that would have allowed for transparency about who in Congress gets government-subsidized healthcare and who doesn't-- but he went the extra mile to attempt to bully the station and Blue America and to mislead New Jersey voters by covering up that he uses government-subsidized healthcare for himself. This guy is even sleazier than we thought.

Reporter Jane Roh did some great investigative journalism for the Courier Post.

New Jersey Congressman Leonard Lance successfully challenged the accuracy of a radio ad attacking him this week and got it pulled off the air.

But in doing so, the 7th district Republican may have created more problems for himself.

"I should've kept my mouth shut," Chief of Staff Todd Mitchell told the Courier-Post Friday.

The progressive group Blue America PAC Wednesday released basically identical ads hitting four House Republicans on their votes against health care reform. The ads implied the Republicans-- Reps. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Charlie Bass, R-N.H., Sandy Adams, R-Fla., and Lance-- enjoy taxpayer-funded health insurance.

"They voted to make it tougher for you to get affordable health care," the announcer said.

"But don't worry, Congressman Lance is all set ... since his vote didn't apply to the health plan he gets as a member of Congress.

But the second-term congressman never enrolled in the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) program. Mitchell contacted Somerset-based WCTC 1450-AM, which yanked the ad Thursday, according to a station e-mail obtained by the Courier-Post.

Blue America PAC paid $3,000 for the initial 10-day buy.

Lance opposes the health care reform package on cost concerns - he's a deficit hawk - and on small-government principles. But it turns out he receives medical care for practically nothing, thanks to the taxpayers of New Jersey.

Lance receives family health coverage that is free except for co-pays, the state Department of Treasury confirmed Friday. The former state senator, assemblyman and Kean administration official qualified for retirement in 2006, his 25th year of service. He retired in January 2009, when he moved on to Washington, and enrolled in the state's free health plan for retirees.

The family plan Lance is enrolled in is the most expensive of the 10 options available. His coverage costs $1,906.42 per month, or $22,877.04 per year.

Mitchell said Lance's health coverage was a private matter and not relevant to the pulled ad.

"The issue is a partisan group ran an ad against Leonard that was factually incorrect, so much so that the radio station is pulling the ad," he argued.

"These groups have to be accountable. We can disagree on the issues but you can't just make stuff up."

Blue America spokesman Howie Klein admitted the ad could have been more thoroughly researched, but he said the spirit of what was said was accurate.

"We don't feel we got the ad wrong," Klein said. "It's a matter of interpretation. The ad we ran originally probably should have been worded better."

The group is now cutting a second ad that will accuse Lance of being a hypocrite on health insurance.

New Jersey's health insurance coverage for public employees is significantly more generous than plans available to federal workers. Gov. Chris Christie is pushing for reforms to bring the state's pensions and benefits structure more in line with that offered to him when he was a U.S. attorney.

"As an employee of the federal government … I had to pay for 34 percent of the cost of my premium. So I paid for a little more than a third and the taxpayers paid for two-thirds," Christie recounted at a Jan. 24 town hall in Chesilhurst.

By contrast, most New Jersey employees pay just 1.5 percent of their salary toward one of three plans. According to the state, 96 percent of public workers choose the most generous plan.

Christie has said the program "makes our pension system look robust."

The administration estimates unfunded liability for the state health insurance program is $66.8 billion. The state picks up 92 percent of the tab currently; Christie's goal is to move to a premium, cost-sharing, 70/30 split model by 2014.

We'd like to run a revamped version of the ad on even more stations. Can you help us with a $10 or $20 contribution here

Can the Republicans find a way to be "more civil" in their nonstop lying about health care?

[You know the drill: Click to enlarge.]

In New Era of Civility, GOP Says Obama Born ‘Near America’
Boehner Issues 'Official Republican Niceness Pledge'

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – Ushering in what it is calling “a new era of civility in American political discourse,” the Republican leadership in Congress said today that from now on it would acknowledge that President Barack Obama was born “near America.”

“It is no longer acceptable for members of our Party to say that the President of the United States was born in Kenya,” wrote Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) in a memo sent to all GOP House members entitled The Official Republican Niceness Pledge. “From now on, we will say that he was born nearish America, and perhaps even as close as Cuba.”

The Boehner memo said that the Party would have “zero tolerance” for Republicans who say that Mr. Obama “pals around with terrorists,” instructing members to say instead, “Obama friends terrorists on Facebook.”

The memo also instructed House members never to call Mr. Obama a “socialist,” and instead to use the less politically polarizing term, “sociopath.”

Mr. Boehner also warned GOP congressmen to stop referring to Mr. Obama’s health care reform bill as “The Job-Killing Health Care Reform Act,” advising them, “There are many perfectly good synonyms for ‘killing,’ such as ‘strangling,’ ‘terminating,’ ‘annihilating,’ and ‘eviscerating.’”

In closing, Mr. Boehner wrote, “You owe it to your families and constituents back home to conduct yourselves in a civil manner, just as President Obama owes it to his relatives and comrades back in Havana.”

by Ken

I had it in mind yesterday to call attention to really fine columns by E. J. Dionne Jr. and Paul Krugman.

Dionne in his customarily sly, courtly way purported to imagine what "GOP test: A civil and honest health-care discussion" might look like. But of course E.J., being a smart guy, knows perfectly well that there are no Republicans with any interest in having an actual discussion of the fact-based sort.

Krugman, meanwhile, registered incredulity over what he described as the Republicans' "War on Logic," whereby they attempt to get around the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the savings in store by such tricks as tallying costs that were going to increase without reference to any changes in the health care system, and finding excuses to ignore actual savings from the package in the form of increases in Social Security revenues and savings in Medicare costs. As our Paul pointed out, "the nonsense wasn't a slip of the tongue; it's the official party position, laid out in charts and figures."

We are, I believe, witnessing something new in American politics. Last year, looking at claims that we can cut taxes, avoid cuts to any popular program and still balance the budget, I observed that Republicans seemed to have lost interest in the war on terror and shifted focus to the war on arithmetic. But now the G.O.P. has moved on to an even bigger project: the war on logic.

Oh, it's not just logic, Paul. It's an out-and-out war on truth, and it's only relatively new. Modern right-wingers have for some time jumped the rails of fact, and the G. W. Bush regime was in fact built on the proposition that the only reality that matters is the one in our heads. But it was only with the 2008 elections that the Republicans and the Right, which had finally become one and the same thing, claimed the right to lie without shame or limit, and while they may not have won many elections that year, it turns out that they won the biggest prize: official acceptance of their License to Lie.

And no one in the political or media establishment, with the exception of the occasional crank like Krugman, shows any sign of caring. Perhaps understandably so, since the megacorporate masters who are now running the show have given them a stake in preserving the charade, so that they're all in on the fix.

And once again Andy Borowitz is our ever-reliable newsbreaker.

Andy is not, by the way, a one might imagine, spinning a fantasy about Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner taking the "job-killing" out of what was to be known officially as "The Job-Killing Health Care Reform Act." Fantastic as this sounds, ss Felicia Sonmez reported in a washingtonpost.com post this afternoon, "House kicks off debate over health-care repeal," in the wake of that unfortunate business in Tucson,

Over the weekend, there were some signs that congressional leaders have begun adjusting their rhetoric. A post on House Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) Web site described the health care law as "job-crushing" and "job-destroying" rather than "job-killing."

Set aside for a moment the fact that the New Republican Coalition of pathological lairs, nincompoops, the insane, and the megacorporate predators (and their hired stooges) knows as little about job creation as about, say, particle physics or global climate change.
As Paul Krugman wrote yesterday,

The key to understanding the G.O.P. analysis of health reform is that the party's leaders are not, in fact, opposed to reform because they believe it will increase the deficit. Nor are they opposed because they seriously believe that it will be "job-killing" (which it won't be). They're against reform because it would cover the uninsured -- and that's something they just don't want to do.

And it's not about the money. As I tried to explain in my last column, the modern G.O.P. has been taken over by an ideology in which the suffering of the unfortunate isn't a proper concern of government, and alleviating that suffering at taxpayer expense is immoral, never mind how little it costs.

Given that their minds were made up from the beginning, top Republicans weren't interested in and didn't need any real policy analysis -- in fact, they're basically contemptuous of such analysis, something that shines through in their health care report. All they ever needed or wanted were some numbers and charts to wave at the press, fooling some people into believing that we're having some kind of rational discussion. We aren't.

I actually followed Felicia Sonmez's link and visited the Speaker Sunny John's website. You don't know whether to be more appalled or scared, considering the power the man now wields.

You look, for example, at this:

Destroy American jobs. A CBO report says ObamaCare "will reduce the amount of labor used in the economy by … roughly half a percent" -- meaning hundreds of thousands of jobs lost.

Now I don't even have to look at the actual CBO report to see, from the form in which this "quote" has been butchered, that it has been stripped of its sense. It is carefully followed by an undoctored quote from the Heritage Foundation. Heritage Foundation quotes don't have to be doctored to serve the interests of the megacorporate oligarchy -- who do we think pays for Heritage Foundation quotes?

I assume that what the butchered CBO quote is referring to is certain kinds of jobs that will be lost in the interest of cutting health care costs. Is it not obvious to anyone with a working brain that a huge part of the bloat in megabloated health care costs takes the form of salaries paid to hordes of people now employed in the modern non-health care industry, a growth industry that has essentially nothing to do with health care except to make a fortune off it while providing as little of it as they can get away with.

How else would anyone imagine any serious dent could be made in the economy-killing plague of skyrocketing non-health care costs?

Bearing in mind that now-conventional wisdom that every word out of the mouth of every Republican is a blatant lie, have you noticed that in all the waves of budget-cutting they've engaged in, and are contemplating, there's never any concern about the job-killingness of their slash-and-burn tactics? Why, "job killing" is more than anything what Republicans are about -- it's just that they don't give a damn about the jobs they're killing, jobs like police and firefighters and teachers and, yes, snow-clearers, jobs that produce actual public good.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU REVERSE
"HEALTH CARE KEYNESIANISM"?

As it happens, I was just talking about this very subject, in connection with the once-riveting and now-safely-forgotten Washington Post investigative report "Top Secret America," which chronicled the rise of an entire segment of the economy that has sprung up with virtually unlimited government spending to pretend to make the nation more secure while not only not doing so but in many ways probably making us less secure -- by bankrupting us, for example.

Imagine for a moment the possible consequences if there had been any political will in the health care "debate" to legislate actual health care reform, of the sort that, for example, Howard Dean was talking about. We would have been talking about a fairly quick dismantling of the non-health care industry, which would have been stripped back to the manageable (and affordable) dimensions of an actual health care industry.

Now that would have been way too threatening to much too powerful "special interests," and so the most sensible reform, a single-payer system, was taken off the table before it was ever on it, and eventually even the pathetically limited "public option," the only remaining wedge for enforcing some kind of responsibility on the health insurance giants, had to be killed.

But again, imagine the consequences if there had been the political will to enact real reform. There would, as a direct result, have been large-scale unemployment. Here's some of what I wrote in that New Year's Day post, on the subject of "national security Keynesianmism":

[S]uch a significant portion of the economy is now tied up in this activity that it's a serious question whether we would dare dismantle those industries even if we could. . . .

That phrase that came into our vocabulary with the tottering of our major banks, "too big to fail," has perhaps larger significance in other areas of the economy. Think back -- yes, again -- to the debate-that-wasn't over health care "reform." Along with the financial services industry, the health care industry has been, I'm guessing, the new power industry of the U.S. economy. Neither produces much of actual use to real people. Despite protestations to the contrary, the financial services industry contributes hardly anything to real economic activity, and the health care industry produces appallingly little actual health care for the megabucks it swallows. Still, the health care industry in particular provides a lot of employment.

Imagine if there had been a real debate about the insupportable (and still soaring) costs of our health care, recognizing how little of the money we spend actually goes into health care, the obvious target would have been the health insurance companies and all the wildly overbuilt health care "campuses." Of course the political clout their financial clout commands guaranteed that such a discussion never took place. But imagine that the existing delivery system had been magically replaced by a lean, efficient system that focused on the actual delivery of health care. Just think what a cataclysm would have resulted in terms of job losses.

If all that "new" money suddenly became available, there's so much that could be done to restore the country's quality of livability to the competitive level we used to expect. Again, Ian's little list is a handy starting point. But again, think of people like John Boehner and "Miss Mitch" McConnell, and who bankrolls them and the lesser pols who put them in positions of authority. For that matter, throw in the whole of Congress. Do you see any of these people turning their backs on their masters?

No, me either.

But on the apparent theory of a modern equivalent of the Romans' "bread and circuses," they're happy to give us a "debate" on repealing the health care package. Oh, there was plenty wrong with that package, but they're not interested in fixing what was wrong. When you get right down to it, as Paul K suggested, they're desperate to "fix" what was right. about it.

#

200 Years Of Human History In A Thrilling 4 Minutes + Paul Krugman Exposes Boehner And Ryan As Callow Frauds... Again

My old friend Dan Levitin, a professor at McGill and author of This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science Of Human Obsession and The World In Six Songs: How The Musical Brain Created Human Nature, turned me on to this spectacular 4:47 video of Dr. Hans Rosling explaining the past 200 years of world progress using an animated and utterly fascinating graph. It speaks for itself-- and so much more energetically and eloquently than I could possibly hope to explain it-- so do yourself a favor and watch it. Watch it as pure science or as history or as a wonder of technological achievement.

It certainly reminded me of something. While I was in Morocco last month, I kept hearing a distant but persistent drumbeat from across the ocean, one that had the Conservative Consensus insisting that Social Security is now safe to start dismantling because well, because we live so much longer. Dr. Rosling doesn't get into that depth of analysis in the video above. But the relationship between wealth and health in the basis of his entire presentation. Life expectancy is rising, but it's arising among the rich, not among the poor, not in China-- as he does show-- and not in America, which you'll just have to open your eyes wide enough to see for yourself.

I hope Paul Krugman gets a chance to watch the clip as well. Yesterday he approached the Conservative Consensus Fraudulence in regard to health care from another angle: entirely predictable GOP political overreach; Paul Ryan, enemy of mankind, strikes again. "It’s worth actually reading the House Republican attack on the CBO’s health reform estimates," writes Krugman, "just to get a sense of the utter, deliberate fraudulence of the whole thing. Here’s the key picture:

So, let’s look at the pieces of the adjustments that allegedly turn a deficit-reducing policy into a deficit-increasing policy.

1. The doc fix: this is childish stuff, blaming the health reform for costs that will happen whether or not the reform happens.

2. Alleged “double-counting” of Medicare savings; actually, there’s no double-counting involved. Savings are savings. It’s true that some people have spoken loosely as if the gains to the Medicare trust fund and the reduction in the deficit are separate and additive, but the CBO never has, and all of that is irrelevant to the 10-year estimate.

3. “Appropriations”-- that’s administrative costs, of which the great bulk would be incurred even without the bill.

4. Social Security taxes-- I think they mean Medicare, but anyway, additional tax revenue does reduce the deficit, regardless of what trust fund it’s allocated to.

5. CLASS Act: this will reduce the deficit over the next 10 years, but will have some long-run costs. But if you’re going to talk long run, you should do it everywhere-- and health reform gets better, not worse, over time. In fact, the main reason repeal costs more than the original estimate of savings is that moving the window forward a year makes the benefits of reform bigger.

So, of the five claimed “gimmicks”, three are nothing of the kind-- GOP claims are fraud, pure and simple. Of the other two, one (appropriations) is mostly fraud, the other involves tricky play with time horizons.

And all of it is dressed up with out-of-context quotes from various people.

I know I should be accustomed to this sort of thing by now, but it’s still something to behold.

House Republicans Eager To Waste Time On A Symbolic Vote To Take Health Coverage Away From Millions Of Americans-- Guess Which Democrats Are Onboard

When the House finally passed a watered-down, corporate-friendly (some would say "sellout") version of the healthcare bill in early November 2009, 39 Democrats voted against it-- along with 176 Republicans, all of them except Ahn Cao (R-LA). Most of the Democratic NO votes were a gaggle of mangy, corrupt Blue Dogs pigging out at the same Medical-Industrial Complex trough as the Republicans. Justice was served a year later when all but 13 of these anti-family conservatives were defeated as Democratic voters stayed away from the polls and let them strangle on their own abysmal records. Hopefully we'll never hear from cowardly conservatives like John Adler (NJ), Allen Boyd (FL), Bobby Bright (AL), Travis Childers (MS), Artur Davis (AL), Lincoln Davis (TN), Parker Griffith (AL), Suzanne Kosmas (FL), Frank Kratovil (MD), Jim Marshall (GA), Walt Minnick (ID), Glenn Nye (VA), Gene Taylor (MS) and the rest of them again.

The Republicans, of course, are counting on rounding up the 13 renegades to join them next week in passing a symbolic bill to repeal healthcare. No one quite understands why-- other than his family name-- Dan Boren (OK) is still officially a quasi-Democrat, but predictably he was the first of the 13 to run to Fox and reassure reactionaries that he would vote for repeal. The new Energy and Commerce Committee Chair, Fred Upton (R-MI), predicted that a "significant number of Democrats" would vote with the Republicans. So far, though, it's only Boren. Conservatives Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN) and Daniel Lipinski (IL) voted against it but have both publicly stated they won't vote to repeal. That still leaves freaks like Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC), Jason Altmire (Blue Dog-PA), John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA), Ben Chandler (Blue Dog-KY), Larry Kissell (NC), Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT), Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC), Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR) and a couple of others who tend to vote more frequently with the Republicans than with their own party, especially on substantive, high-visibility legislation.

For all the House Republicans' crying last year that they couldn't be bipartisan because big bad Nancy Pelosi wasn't allowing them to tack a billion frivolous amendments onto legislation, now-Majority Leader Eric Cantor announced in his first press conference in his new capacity that no Democratic amendments would be allowed to be voted on with the repeal bill. Oh, I'm so surprised!


UPDATE: The First Vote Of The 112th Congress

Every Republican voted for John Boehner to take the Speaker's gavel. Nineteen arch-conservatives, mostly scumbags from the shriveled up Blue Dog caucus that was overwhelmingly repudiated at the polls by Democrats and Republicans in November, voted against Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party choice. Eleven voted for the Blue Dog choice, Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC)-- besiders himself Jason Alrmire (Blue Dog-PA), Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK), Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN), Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN), Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA), Larry Kissell (NC), Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC), Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT), Mike Michaud (Blue Dog-ME), and Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR). Blue Dogs John Barrow (GA) and Gabby Giffords (AZ) each voted for John Lewis, Barrow so he can tell brag to African American primary voters in 2012 while going to whites in the general and ranting about how he opposed Pelosi. Giffords is an imbecile and it's pointless in trying to figure out what's going on in her fevered imagination.

After voters wised up to their sleazy and corrupt politics mixed with right-wing policies and the drubbing that ensued left only 26 mangy, pathetic Blue Dogs in the House. Blue Dogs voting for Pelosi today included Joe Baca (CA), Leonard Boswell (IA), Ben Chandler (KY), Henry Cuellar (TX), Jane Harman (CA), Collin Peterson (MN), Loretta Sanchez (CA), Adam Schiff (CA), David Scott (GA), and Mike Thompson (CA). Here's the roll call for posterity.

No, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn't OWN the federal gov't. It's more like a time-share deal

President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue: master of the hardest-core opposition on health care and financial reform, and master of the money-raising "ask" -- wouldn't you give this man a million dollars?

"In 2009 the Chamber doled out somewhere in the area of $120 million on lobbying alone, five times what its nearest cohort, Exxon Mobil, spent. Much of that money went to an advertising and grassroots blitz attacking the congressional health care legislation, making the Chamber very likely the biggest spender in the debate."

-- from James Verini's "Show Him the Money," in Washington Monthly

by Ken

As I note periodically, I'm a sucker for "nuts 'n' bolts" stories -- the kind that give us a glimpse into the inner workings of our crazy world, focusing on the details that tell us who exactly is doing what and how they're doing it, often including how the bastards are getting away with it. So I devoured this Washington Monthly piece by James Verini about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its proprietor, I mean president and CEO, Thomas J. "I Need a Million Dollars" Donohue.

Just to complete the thought begun above:

In the weeks leading up to health care's passage in March, it was spending $800,000 a day trying to defeat the Democratic legislation. Livid that the law went through, the Chamber has now pledged to funnel $50 million -- more than twice as much as the entire cash holdings of the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee put together (as of late May) -- into an estimated forty House races and ten Senate races this fall. About eight of every ten dollars of Chamber political donations go to Republicans.

Then the author says something that surprises me: "With such torrents of Chamber money raining down on the political process, it's rather ironic that many Americans believe the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to be part of the government. " Did you or anyone you know ever think of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as part of the government? I can't remember ever thinking that. However, I can remember thinking, and possibly still tend to think, that it's some sort of glorified civic booster outfit. Oh sure, pro-business, but concerned with the general welfare, albeit from that pro-business mindset.

Uh-uh. Verini finds the erroneous belief that the Chamber is part of the government "fitting," because --

With its legions of lobbyists, policy analysts, economists, and attorneys, its own rapid-response media center and law firm, its hundreds of international chapters and steady stream of officials, legislators, and foreign potentates flowing through its immense bronze-relief doors on H Street, the Chamber does act like a federal agency -- or like a third political party on permanent campaign. "The Chamber views itself as a shadow-government policymaking body," a former Chamber economist, Lawrence Hunter, said.

All that infrastructure, Verini notes, has in recent years been aimed rather singlemindedly at the policies of the Obama administration, which we lefties may think of as about as pro-business as an administration can get, but which the Businessmen's Businessman, Chairman Donohue, regards as a dagger aimed squarely at the heart of American capitalism. Not surprisingly, given the absolutism of the Chamber's official positions, its "success" rate against the administration doesn't look great. Verini cites the health care package adopted, and the Senate-passed financial reform bill, and the awkwardness of its anti-environmental-legislation position requiring it to question "the exigency, even the existence, of climate change."

But of course the health care package could hardly be much industry-friendlier, and while there are prospects for some useful elements in an ultimate financial reform package, the opposition has surely succeeded in neutering vast and crucial chunks of it. If these are the worst "failures" the Chamber has suffered, it seems to me they're doing alarmingly well.

Besides, as Verini points out,

under the curious rules of Washington lobbying, losses can be as good as wins. "The worst thing to happen to Tom is to have an issue resolved, even to his own favor, because then he can't raise any more funds on it," says John Schulz, a former editor at the trade journal Traffic World, who's covered Donohue for twenty-five years. "There's nothing he can't make a dollar on."

And don't kid yourself about the stakes Chairman Donohue is playing for. Here's how Verini opens his piece:

Thomas J. Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has a well-developed talent for self-promotion. He makes a point of being the last person on any stage, and he leaves no detail to chance. The Chamber's event staff is famously fastidious: one of Donohue's parties involved corralling a Clydesdale horse into the Chamber's lobby. Such grandiosity is of a piece with how Donohue treats his station. He travels in a chauffeured Lincoln and a leased jet, and his salary, $3.7 million last year, makes him the sixth highest paid lobbyist in the country.

This requires funding, which Donohue secures with exceptional skill. Among his office decorations is a desk plaque that reads, "SHOW ME THE MONEY." "He used to pound his fist on the desk and say, 'Show me the money!'" a former Chamber lobbyist recalls. "He got his rocks off on it."

He leads fund-raising seminars. The same lobbyist recounted what he learned. "Donohue said, first, you walk into the room with the CEO and you hit the key issues," said the lobbyist. "Then you sit in closer to them. And you make 'the ask.' You look right into their eyes and say, 'As a result of what the Chamber is doing for your industry, I need a hundred thousand dollars.' Or, 'I need a million dollars.' And then you smile and you shut your mouth. Your instinct is to start talking because you're nervous. Don't. Just smile and stare. And wait." The lobbyist, who'd been trained well by Donohue, leaned forward and stared at me as I sat listening. I became nervous. I shifted in my chair. I started laughing, then stopped. He just stared. After a long pause he leaned back and said, "I tell you, there were people in that room who pissed in their pants."

In the article we get to see Donohue close up, both in interview and in action, and let me tell you, it's not to be missed. Most of the detail really isn't terribly surprising, except perhaps in the naked effrontery of the power-grabbing and manipulation.

Even Verini is surprised when Donohue, asked "what, exactly, the Chamber does," offers "two fundamental things," the second of which -- after "we're advocates" -- is what the chairman describes as being "the reinsurance industry for individual industry associations and state chambers of commerce and people of that nature." By this what he means is that the Chamber can go where its clients, er members, can't, offering as an example the all-out, all-media war the Chamber waged against the movement for financial reform -- a take-no-prisoners campaign of vilification that the clients, er members, couldn't dare sponsor directly. Verini fills in details of the similar campaign against health care reform. As he puts it:

a large part of what the Chamber sells is political cover. For multibillion-dollar insurers, drug makers, and medical device manufacturers who are too smart and image conscious to make public attacks of their own, the Chamber of Commerce is a friend who will do the dirty work. "I want to give them all the deniability they need," says Donohue. That deniability is evidently worth a lot. According to a January article in the National Journal, six insurers alone -- Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Foundation Health Plans, UnitedHealth Group, and Wellpoint -- pumped up to $20 million into the Chamber last year. [Emphasis added.]

Again, don't deprive yourself of Verini's wonderful reconstruction of both Donohue's and the Chamber's past, and how they became not-at-all-inevitably intertwined to form the lobbying juggernaut of today.

I do want to call attention to a fascinating point Verini raises:

Many of the Chamber's efforts are undoubtedly good for certain businesses. Wall Street would prefer to avoid further financial regulation. Oil companies would prefer to avoid further environmental regulation. Whether the Chamber -- which counts as members everyone from Goldman Sachs to British Petroleum, Microsoft to Wal-Mart, PepsiCo to General Motors, and hundreds of thousands of more obscure businesses in between -- is good for business as a whole is another matter. With unemployment, statistical and personal, on the mind of every officeholder up for reelection this year, Republicans and Democrats claim to agree on one thing: small business will be the engine of job growth after the Great Recession. But while the Chamber has as legitimate a claim to representing this sector as any organization around -- 96 percent of its members have fewer than 100 employees -- it is also beholden to a cadre of multinationals whose interests are often inimical to those of small business. In 2008, a third of its revenues came from just nineteen companies.

This sort of conflict doesn't appear to bother Donohue. One lobbyist at a trade association that shares many members with the Chamber describes Donohue's tack as "imperial." "If you don't like it, you can leave. That's their approach to members," he says. Not all members, though. If there's a consistent pattern to how the Chamber operates, it's that it follows the money. [Emphasis added.]

And in the end, again not surprisingly, the money seems to be what the operation is all about. Presumably, all of Donohue's clients, er members feel they're getting value for the money they kick in, and in, and in -- bearing in mind those formidable "ask" talents of his. But they also surely understand that their priorities are only partly the chairman's priorities. Also that the chairman's priorities are going to be heavily weighted toward who's paying for the highest consideration -- and that at his discretion the Chamber's activities can easily work against individual members' interests. And not just financial interests.

While I talked to many local chamber heads who said they rely on the Chamber's resources, I also spoke to many who are coming to resent Donohue. "Their stances have occasionally alienated local businesses," says Tim Sink, president of the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce in New Hampshire. In Sink's region, the Chamber ran health care attack ads targeting Congressman Paul Hodes, a popular legislator with bipartisan support who's now running for Senate. "It put the local chambers in an awkward situation, I can tell you that."

Verini documents a range of complaints against the chairman, from every imaginable direction. None of it seems to concern him. And in the end, it turns out that, apart from his own personal financial interests, the chairman's overriding interest is --what else? -- his standing in the Village:

What becomes clear from observing Donohue's record is that, for all his opposition to federal oversight, he is a quintessential creature of Washington. Like the head of any bureaucracy or agency, he measures his success far less by results than by the size of his budget. That's why the Chamber's agenda hews so closely to that of its largest contributors. It's also why, even in front of dues payers such as Birmingham business leaders, Donohue is happy to trumpet how much money the Chamber is taking from them. Those funds don't need to lead to accomplishments; they are the accomplishments.

I doubt that Chairman Donohue includes that in his sales pitches, or his pep talks, or his fund-raising arm-twistings. You'd think the businessfolk on the other ends of those transactions might want to take it into consideration, though.


THE CoC IS JUST ONE REGIMENT IN THE ARMY
OF AGGRIEVED ANTI-NEW DEAL BUSINESSMEN

On the listserv on which the Washington Monthly piece on Tom Donohue and "his" U.S. Chamber of Commerce was brought to my attention, my friend Mark quickly followed up with a book recommendation. I'm almost embarrassed to say that I know such people, but I should warn you that Mark has the eccentric habit of reading books because he hopes to, you know, learn stuff, maybe even stuff that might be, you know, important. What are you gonna do with people like that? It's as if they didn't understand that our civic leaders -- including, perhaps especially, the religious ones -- in collaboration with our Infotainment News media can be counted on to tell us everything we need to know!

Mark describes Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Dealby Kim Phillips-Fein as "pretty close to a must read in my opinion." It "spans the 1930's into the 1980's," he says, "and does a deep dive into how business leaders and resources drove political agendas." He thinks it deserves wider attention, "especially as it was published in Jan of this year and seems to have received very little notice." (He does note that Invisible Hands was the subject of a Firedoglake book chat, and he directs us to the Barnes & Noble website, which has a couple of reviews including this one from Publishers Weekly:

Looking beyond the usual roster of right-wing Christians, anticommunist neo-cons and disgruntled working-class whites, this incisive study examines the unsung role of "a political movement of businessmen" in leading America's post-1960s rightward turn. Historian Phillips-Fein traces the hidden history of the Reagan revolution to a coterie of business executives, including General Electric official and Reagan mentor Lemuel Boulware, who saw labor unions, government regulation, high taxes and welfare spending as dire threats to their profits and power. From the 1930s onward, the author argues, they provided the money, organization and fervor for a decades-long war against New Deal liberalism -- funding campaigns, think tanks, magazines and lobbying groups, and indoctrinating employees in the virtues of unfettered capitalism. Theirs was also a battle of ideas, she contends; the business vanguard nurtured conservative thinkers like economist Friedrich von Hayek and his secretive Mont Pellerin Society associates, who developed a populist free-market ideology that persuaded workers to side with their bosses against the liberal state. Combining piquant profiles of corporate firebrands with a trenchant historical analysis that puts economic conflict at the heart of political change, Phillips-Fein makes an important contribution to our understanding of American conservatism.

Under the heading of "knowing our enemy," it sounds like Invisible Hands is an important book. I've squeezed it in near the top of my reading list.

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