Mapleberry Blog

As expected, the bought-off Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee (Senators Baucus, Nelson, Conrad, Lincoln, and Carper) killed the public-plan option in their version of healthcare reform - leaving it as a big, fat, sloppy-wet kiss for the insurance companies to whom they really owe their jobs.

I'm not going to bother sending these bozos any emails - there's no point since they've already demonstrated that they are not responsible to their constituents or to the country as a whole, but only to their corporate masters. What I WILL do is give money to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee for ads targeting Baucus and Company. Money and embarrassing publicity are the two things they will respond to.

There are a few things that Dems, as a group, could do:

1. Menendez (as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee) should withhold any campaign money from them .
2. The DSCC should back primary challenges against those 5. The Publicans do this all the time to keep the troops in line and on message.
3. President Obama should call 'em in to the Oval Office and tell 'em, point blank, "When any federal departments (DOE, DOD, HHS, Agriculture, etc) have discretion as to where money will be spent, it will not be spent in your states."
4. The other Dems on Finance should vote to kill the bill before it ever gets out of committee.
5. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should chuck Baucus's bill and bring the much better HELP Committee (Kennedy/Harkin/Dodd/Sanders) bill to the floor instead.

I doubt any of these will happen, since the swearing-in process for Democrats entering Congress or the White House seems to require orchiectomy surgery.

There was enough in President Obama's speech last night, but only barely. There was a bit of red meat and some tugged heartstrings, but I'll say this - his health plan is far too considerate of Big Insurance & Big Pharma and not nearly considerate enough of what is needed to truly reform the system.

In the President's proposal it would be illegal for people not to buy insurance from a private insurance company. In effect, he's adding a new tax, to be paid not to the government but to private, for-profit companies. Equating this mandate to the requirement to carry automobile insurance, as Obama did last night, is bogus because you can choose not to own a car but you can't simply choose not to get sick. This makes Aetna, Wellpoint, United Healthcare et al. into latter-day publicans, who've purchased the right to squeeze the populace for as much as they can. What the President laid out last night is a giveaway to insurance companies - the profits from the 30-50 million new, mandated "customers" will far outstrip any reduction in their profits due to restrictions on policy rescission and rejections for pre-existing conditions.

As the President described it, the public plan option will be there only for people who are otherwise unable to get insurance - i.e. only for those without an employer plan available to them. But what if the health insurance an employer provides sucks ass? Apparently it's "too bad, Charlie" because you can't opt out of employer insurance in favor of the public plan. It was not clear, but it appears that employers will be unable to choose the public plan when shopping for group health insurance for their employees - it will be for uninsured individuals only. This undercuts the raison d'etre of a public insurance option - to provide real, lower overhead/lower cost plans that will force insurers to keep internal costs down and innovate on the services they offer.

The health insurance "Exchanges" won't go into effect until 2013 (Why not? The Feds set up the Department of Homeland Security in mere months, and it has well over 100,000 employees) - leaving the uninsured still uninsured (except by a so-far-hypothetical assigned-risk pool that is likely to be very expensive to buy in to) for the next 4 years. In the meantime, insurers will almost certainly be raising premiums to cover the reduction in revenue from having to cover pre-existing conditions and rescinding the policies of sick people.

The President did not mention one of the most serious problems facing healthcare consumers today - the cost of prescription drugs. There's still no provision for negotiating lower prices. No re-visiting Medicare Part D to allow price negotiations. No elimination of the Part D "donut hole." And nothing that addresses the price disparity between what Americans pay for drugs and what the rest of the world pays (Canadian prescription drugs cost 35-90% less than they do here in the U.S.).

What also went completely unmentioned and unaddressed by the President was the massive waste of money on paper-pushing. Hospitals and physicians alike spend hundreds of billions each year on filing claims, requesting pre-certifications, issuing referrals - none of which add a single iota of value to the system. Health exchanges will only make that aspect worse.

The only viable solution for most of what really ails American healthcare is a single-payer plan. Despite his public support for it in the past, the President went out of his way last night to sneer at single-payer and its supporters, in what has lately become the Democratic Party modus vivendi - i.e. throw your most avid supporters under the bus while bending over backwards to try to satisfy your opposition, who will never support you anyway.

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I saw a news story today reporting that Henry Waxman (D-CA) had edged out John Dingell Jr. (D-MI), in a rather hard-fought campaign, to be the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee for the 111th Congress. An interesting story in its way - it appealed to my wonky nature, especially since it made me worry that Rep. Waxman might relinquish the Chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform - a job he has performed with zeal and distinction, holding the Administration's feet to the fire whenever circumstances demanded - i.e. pretty much all the time.

But it really set me off when the article reported that Rep. Dingell has served in the house since 1955. "That has to be a typo," I thought, "Maybe they meant 1975." But no, John Dingell has been in the House of Representatives since December 13, 1955 - 2 1/2 weeks before my first birthday and well over half a century ago!

Odder still, the previous occupant of the that Congressional seat had been John Dingell Sr, who held it from 1933 until his death in 1955, when Junior took over. So - the residents of Michigan's 15th/16th (they merged in 2002) Congressional district have been represented by a John Dingell since the dawn of the FDR/New deal era, over 75 years ago.

I am not a fan of legislated term limits, and I have no axe to grind with Rep. Dingell - but there's something about this that strikes me, in a very visceral way, as somehow vaguely un-American, and just plain wrong.

(I do have to note that Henry Waxman has himself been in Congress since 1975, when I was but a sophomore in college - even so, John Dingell Sr/Jr still have 42 years on him.)

Hillary at State? So all the news sources seem to be saying. The latest I've seen is that she has been offered the position and has asked for a little time to think it over.

Last night in a conversation I had at the South Orange "Harvest Ball" fundraiser, someone suggested an interesting and provocative scenario: Hillary Clinton resigns her senate seat to become Secretary of State, and then NY Governor David Patterson names Bill Clinton to serve out the remainder of Hillary's term.

Weird, eh? Unprecedented. But not in a bad way. I guess this could depend, at least in part, on how much the President-elect trusts the Clintons now that the election is past.

Connecticut giveth in return...


New York Times

Same-sex marriage comes to Connecticut!

So when does this happen in my home state of New Jersey? Come on, Trenton, get off your asses and get this done!

Rachel Maddow is the best thing going on MSNBC - she's funny, goofy, cute, amazingly endearing, and very, very smart. She was, for too long, the best thing on Air America Radio, and certainly the best of their home-grown talent.

But what's up with her frequent MSNBC guest Ana Marie Cox? More specifically, why is she a guest at all? Cox was often entertaining at Wonkette as a kind of Gen-X Maureen Dowd - her shtick is a Dowd-like funny (and often mean-spirited) snarkiness, but she seems utterly devoid of Dowd's (too-rarely displayed) gift for the trenchant observation. Cox has not been an especially good reporter, and as an analyst she's neither very deep nor very insightful.

So Rachel, please - find someone else for whatever role it is you think Ana Marie Cox is filling.

In this period of election postmortems, there's a lot (too much!) chatter about what happened to the "old" John McCain - the one everyone respected. To this I can only say "Get a clue, people!" That John McCain never existed - he was a creation of savvy marketing and a sympathetic press-corps.

Senator McCain was always the same creepy guy we saw this time around - the difference between then and now is that this year, he was THE candidate instead of 2000's the OTHER candidate, so the press was forced to look at him with a more critical eye. When they did (as in Tim Dickinson's damning Rolling Stone article), he responded both by withdrawing from them and by becoming bellicose. Without the day-to-day mutual wanking McCain and the press had enjoyed, reporters started to be able to see the character flaws and mean-spiritedness that had always been there.

The line of people waiting to vote, as it snaked around the Town Hall meeting chamber. At this point the wait was about an hour and fifteen minutes. Several times during the day the wait was well over 1 1/2 hours, and it was no less than 30 minutes from 6:00 AM, when polls opened, until 6:00 PM. The voters in my district, District 3, were luckier than those in District 6. Their line snaked through the hallways and out into the parking lot.

Remarkably, very few people left - no more than a dozen. But we sure could have used another couple of voting machines.

Californians ought to be ashamed.

Members of the LDS church deserve to be ashamed.


The only upside to Prop 8's passage - the demographic groups that got it passed were the 45-54s (by a small margin), 55-64 and, most heavily, the over 65's. Time will have its way, and those who voted for it will sooner or later not be with us any longer. Give it 5 or 8 or 10 years and there will be few left who think it's okay to declare their fellows less than human.

I feel like my country is my own again - for the moment, at least.

Despicably anti-American crap.

"I'm the NRA - and I don't believe in Democracy."

Gun firm head resigns over Obama support

Published: Oct. 31, 2008 at 7:35 PM

STEVENSVILLE, Mont., Oct. 31 (UPI) -- The namesake of Montana-based Cooper Firearms has been asked to resign as president of the company after he expressed support for Barack Obama.

The company said it asked Dan Cooper, founder and part owner of Cooper Firearms, to resign as president after he voiced support for the Democratic Illinois senator's bid for president in a USA Today interview published Tuesday, USA Today reported Friday.

"Although we all believe everyone has a right to vote and donate as they see fit, it has become apparent that the fallout may affect more than just Mr. Cooper," the company said in a statement on its Web site Wednesday. "It may also affect the employees and the shareholders of Cooper Firearms. The board of directors has asked Mr. Cooper to resign as president."

Cooper, who said he usually votes Republican, told the paper in the interview he planned to vote for Obama "probably because of the war. And also because the Republican Party has moved so far right in recent years."

Cooper said Thursday he had submitted his resignation to the board.

"There is nothing on this earth I will not do for my employees ... When the Internet anger turned on these innocent people, I felt it was important to distance myself from the company so as not to cause any further harm," he said.

It's long past time to end stuff like this.

I was going to write a rationale for my Obama support, considering that, earlier this year, I had written some not-so-complimentary things about him. He was not my first, nor even my second, choice out of the huge Democratic field that had entered the primary fray. But that doesn't matter anymore. He is, I have come to believe, truly the "Change We Need."

There are many good things I could write about Senator Obama, but I don't need to - my friend Mark at A Cautious Man has done it for me - eloquently, as always.

Don't forget to vote tomorrow - it's probably the most important vote you will ever cast.

It could happen



Don't let it.


video via Avedon at Eschaton
link via tristero at Hullabaloo

I don't remember where it was, but a couple of days ago I read a blog entry written by someone who'd been working at an early-voting location. The blogger described a family who had come in to vote together, 4 generations of them. The youngest was 18 and voting for the first time, and the oldest was 92 years old.

They all voted, but when the 92 year-old came out of the voting booth, she collapsed into a chair. The blogger went over to help, thinking the elderly woman was having some sort of health emergency, but she waved the help off. She was not ill - she was weeping. She wept because, as she said, she'd never believed until that moment that she would ever in her lifetime be able to vote for an African-American for President. Only after she left the voting booth did the monumental reality of her vote truly register, and she was overcome with the emotion of it.

Tonight at the dinner table I was telling this story to my wife. I had to stop in the middle, because I started to cry as I told it. Indeed the tears are welling up again as I write this. I am a pretty cynical person - perhaps it's true that a cynic is really a perpetually disappointed optimist - but the idea that we, the people of this nation I so often despair of, might for once look forward instead of back and toward each other instead of only toward themselves, is breathtaking.

I don't think Barack Obama is the Messiah or even the best thing since sliced bread. He may become a great President, or turn out to be a lousy one. But I believe that the very fact of his election, should he win next Tuesday( and he's GOT to, dammit!), will mark the beginning of a new, different, hopeful, energized America. Please let us all make sure that happens. Don't forget to vote, and make sure everyone you know votes, too.


As I was finishing this item up, I got a phone call from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, asking for some (more) money. I'm kinda tight right now (as aren't we all) but I swallowed, and gave - because it's THAT important that we move our government away from the place it's in now, as far and as fast as possible. If you've got a few dollars to spare, give it to Barack, to the DCCC, to the DSCC, or one of the many fine progressive Democrats running for office this year. They surely can use it.

See you at the election night celebration!

This creeps me out more than a little:

She [Palin] also thanked her supporters — including Dobson, who said he and his wife were asking “for God’s intervention” on election day — for their prayers of support.

“It is that intercession that is so needed,” she said. “And so greatly appreciated. And I can feel it too, Dr. Dobson. I can feel the power of prayer, and that strength that is provided through our prayer warriors across this nation. And I so appreciate it.”

Prayer warriors? We don't need no stinkin' elections when we have prayer warriors!

Is Joe Lieberman so supportive of John McCain because they're both white?

Just askin'.

John McCain is incredulous that Barack Obama would even suggest direct, no pre-conditions talks with Ahmedinajad. Last night, we saw why.

McCain's world view is all about anger and a short fuse - he wears his feelings on his sleeve and can't hold his tongue. It looked last night like he could hardly bear to be sitting at the same table with Obama - he probably can't even imagine sitting down with an 'enemy.'

Obama, on the other hand, is cool and even-tempered. It appears that he can listen to any amount of nonsense and vitriol, and pick out from it the points that actually need to be heard and addressed. That was how he dealt with McCain - who looked like he has more disdain and hatred for Obama than he does for Ahmedinajad.

Obama won the debates, and would 'win' (whatever that would mean, in context) in talks with Iran, because he's wired that way. McCain didn't, and couldn't, because that's the way HE is. And McCain is so buried in that angry-guy worldview that he can't fathom anything different.