If we do anything in the coming year, it will be to put a greater effort into certain things, including writing more often, and in timely fashion, with a nice balance between short comments and longer thoughts in each post, and with links to what we feel are the day's most important news. It is hard to do that consistently, and when you are talking about the news, there is often a feeling of futility because important changes are often slow in coming, with only the trivial, and the trivial interpretations of important issues, receiving the most airplay.
That said, this week has blanketed the country with snow and progress, and enough to make any reasonably optimistic person even more so. The Senate finally passed its version of a health care bill, and if you listen to the skeptics (whom, obviously, you should be discounting right about now), merging the Senate and House versions of reform will be near impossible.
That final obstacle? It's a congressional conference committee, where the Senate bill must be harmonized with the version of health legislation approved by the House in November.
The conference could be acrimonious. There are major substantive differences between the Senate and House bills. There's natural rivalry between the chambers, plus the pride of individual lawmakers who have worked hard on the issue.(Christian Science Monitor)
The naysayers have been wrong with each slow step forward, and there is no reason to imagine the Democrats will shoot themselves in the political head at the end of the process and fail in producing something. Any bill, even a flawed one, can be marketed as a great leap forward, and this is probably one of the few instances where such a claim would probably be credible. Marginal change in how health care is dispensed can impact certain individuals in a positive fashion even while larger needed changes go unexamined. One thinks of "No denial for preexisting conditions".
John McCain (in the same article) might think the compromise and horse trading is a bit "unsavory," but not nearly as unsavory as the seat of the mental chairs that hold the larded derrieres of the asses doing nothing at all. One would hope that McCain, our lovely senator here in Arizona, might stand for something, but getting off that seat is a lot more difficult and he chooses to propose the sun and the moon (as in, why don't we simply begin with Medicare reform), or a do-over, when not vigorously proposing to do nothing at all.
(Senate Republicans doing nothing, and counting on public opinion to derail doing something. Which one has the Ebeneezer face?)
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Counting on public opinion is a dubious way to govern. Generally, the public is pretty willfully ignorant about the things that affect them. If the facts do not harmonize with their own desires, they refuse to accept them. Which is why people make wrong decisions, and suffer for them.
I had a discussion with a friend who said they understood why "the public" was so angry over Obama. I said they were angry mostly because Republicans have taken the tactic of making people angry, and that the conditions touching people's lives were too complex or remote for them to even understand when those conditions were improving. You know, like the country nearing economic collapse and now the country not nearing economic collapse. It's no biggie for most people to ignore getting from there to here. It all should have been fixed in one day, and the fact that the evil banks were not allowed to collapse en masse somehow escapes their construction of a sound economic system.
My friend resorted to personal anecdote to say how they had gone for a loan at a department store and were denied. They blamed their recently received "Obama loan," saying that had they known their credit score would take a hit, they would not have gotten the loan and done something else. (News of the FICO hits were reported earlier in the year). It was pointed out to them that 1) if you didn't need the loan, and were not at risk of losing your home, then you should not have taken it and 2) if you were at risk of losing your home, then defaulting on your home loan would have been infinitely worse than any theoretical fall in your credit score. You would be homeless, and FICO'D. Future lenders need to know that you did not live up to the adjustable rate monster you signed, so having other people's cake (taxpayer or bank help) and eating it too is kinda like, "NO!"
Republicans are counting on that kind of analytical dissonance where people cannot get their minds around complexity or cost, or how certain actions taken on their behalf have actually saved them from themselves.
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Other News:
- The American Medical Association supports the new Senate bill. If you listen to Republicans it's probably because they are evil, or have evil thoughts, or evil desires. Something about the love of money and wanting better reimbursements for doctors, with such love being the root of all evil.
- Ford is giving you money to go away. That's assuming you work for them on an hourly basis and are ready to start that cupcake shop that you just know will revitalize your life.
- Movie attendance and ticket sales are up, which can be taken as a sign of recession fatigue, or a sign of actual improvement in economic activity. We see both.
- Employers are hiring MORE temp workers. This has been going on for four months. It can be semi-permanent trend that will keep people underemployed with few benefits, or, it can be a sign of an upsurge in business outlook. Again, we see both.
- New York Magazine has McCain being a hypocrite, knocking Medicare cuts while alzheimering his own more massive Medicare cut suggestions. Because, you know, a year later, and a year older, and at his age, you forget things that come out of your own head. Of course all politicians, including Obama, go back on their word, but I would rather they do that while working to improve something.
"A McCain who denounced Obama’s stimulus program as “generational theft”—and then proposed an alternative composed of almost nothing but tax cuts. A McCain who scolded Obama to his face for being “leisurely” in his Afghanistan decision—then trashed Obama’s target date for withdrawal, despite having accepted a similar “time horizon” when it came to the Iraq surge. Who declined to repudiate conservative nonsense about health-care reform leading to “death panels”—then raised that specter again last month on the Senate floor. Who, despite years of defying the GOP’s know-nothingism on global warming, has refused to join his pals Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham in working on a bi-partisan climate bill—calling their efforts “horrendous.” Who has been praised by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for having been “a fabulous team player.”
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