What’s all the fuss about? After all the noise over Democrats’ push for a government insurance plan to compete with private carriers, coverage numbers are finally in: Two percent.
That’s the estimated share of Americans younger than 65 who’d sign up for the public option plan under the health care bill that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is steering toward House approval.
The underwhelming statistic is raising questions about whether the government plan will be the iron-fisted competitor that private insurers warn will shut them down or a niche operator that becomes a haven for patients with health insurance horror stories.
Some experts are wondering if lawmakers have wasted too much time arguing about the public plan, giving short shrift to basics such as ensuring that new coverage will be affordable.
I was actually thinking about this on the flight home yesterday- when did I first hear about the public option? I couldn’t decide, but I am thinking it had to be sometime this spring or this summer. I certainly know no one was using the phrase “the public option” during the campaign last year, so for me, at least, it was a recent development.
At any rate, it is kind of amusing that the public option, a part of the debate that was, to me, at least, a new part of the debate very recently, has become the bitterest battle, and when you look at it, it really is kind of not that big of a deal. We already offer public insurance for many things, but for some reason or another, this has been the line in the sand for the moderates. Just weird.
Or maybe the public option has been there all along and I just wasn’t paying attention.
You know the thing that I find most amusing about the NY race is that what they are basically telling every moderate Republican across the country is that it doesn’t matter if you’ve been a loyal Republican for decades, it doesn’t matter if you know the district and the people, it doesn’t matter if you fit the district, and it doesn’t matter that you have given decades to the party. It just doesn’t matter. If the teabagging wingnuts and the shrieking lunatics like Malkin don’t like you, high profile crackpots like Palin and Dick Armey and others are going to swoop in and back some clown who doesn’t even live in the district and then shit all over the area’s voters, telling them their interests are “parochial.”
Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.
When you get right down to it, this (via NoMoreMisterNiceGuy) is ultimately more benign than uniting Christians for the coming holy war with Islam, though the apostrophe here makes the holiday look a little more Islamic:
The Vatican issued the warning through its official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, in an article headlined “Hallowe’en’s Dangerous Messages”.
The paper quoted a liturgical expert, Joan Maria Canals, who said: “Hallowe’en has an undercurrent of occultism and is absolutely anti-Christian.”
Parents should “be aware of this and try to direct the meaning of the feast towards wholesomeness and beauty rather than terror, fear and death,” said Father Canals, a member of a Spanish commission on church rites.
I really wish Steve Gilliard were here to share his opinions on the Hoffman Surge in NY-23. There is a war between the native NYCers and the appleknockerscowhumpers upstaters with at least 200 years of history behind it, and the Ankh Morpork Big Apple team has all the good snarksters.
I am not superstitious but I am a devout animist, and this worked for the first game:
Finally home with both animals back. Apparently I have the kids that can not behave outside of the home. Lily whined and was generally super needy the whole time I was gone, and according to Tammy, Tunch refused to use the litter boxes and in a fit of pique shit on her pumpkin table display.
Why do all the kids in the At pack have to say things like this?
Hoffman has harnessed several shoots of energy, including anti-incumbent sentiment, conservative opposition to liberal Republicans, and the iatropic excitement that’s generated when conservative activists suddenly coalesce around a candidate.
Make no mistake about it, Pete Sessions and the NRCC must shoulder most of the blame and responsibility, with Michael Steele and the RNC coming right behind them. They did not listen. They would not listen. They posited themselves as the smartest people in the room.
And we’ve cleaned their clocks.
Now? We should be magnanimous in victory — and whether Hoffman wins or loses, as long as Dede Scozzafava loses it is a victory — but we should demand accountability, we should demand a reckoning, and we should demand a purge from the party establishment of those people most responsible for the Republican disaster in NY-23.
Well, I’m sad to say that I was not selected as one of the ten finalists for the WaPo next great pundit competition. It’s probably just as well, because I wouldn’t want to spend the next six months living in a house with nine people I’ve never met before.
Here are the winning essays. They’re about what you’d expect: three full-tilt concern trollings, a couple MoDo/Double X style gender pieces, a pointless piece about that college kid who’s hiring a personal assistant, a snoozer about good government (which does make a good point), a predictable rant about cable news, and one thoughtful piece about health care.
I guess I’m just jealous that mine didn’t make the cut.
It goes without saying that whatever happens in NY-23 on Tuesday, it will be good news for conservatives. If teabagger Hoffman wins, it will signal a profound political realignment, the likes of which have not been seen since the days of Ronaldus Magnus. If the Democrat Owens wins, it will still be amazing that Hoffman came out of nowhere to make the race so close; this will probably be true no matter what the vote totals are, though there is also the possibility that Hoffman will lose by so much that it will turn out that he wasn’t a true conservative.
I have some serious question here. First off, what benefit does all the good news, here and elsewhere, actually bring conservatives? Is it really a smart tactic to claim that everything that happens is good news for your political movement? The only parallel I can think of is communism where good economic times for capitalist countries meant that capitalists were getting fat and lazy while bad economic times meant the workers were getting ready to rise up. Is this a fair comparison? And was it smart for communists to spin things that way?
In a huge development in the NY-23 special election, Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava has announced that she is suspending her campaign, citing an inability to win in light of recent polls and a lack of money—leaving this race as a vote between Democrat Bill Owens and Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, and a strong message that the Republican Party can no longer nominate moderate candidates, or else face a right-wing revolt.
Think that this one taste of blood will satisfy the birthers, supremacists and Christianist extremists who fuel the teabagging movement? Wingnut, my friends, has not yet begun to peak.
Before moving on to something else, take a moment to sympathize with coalition builders like Newt and David Frum, no doubt tearing their hair out at the runaway success of Sarah Starbursts’ insurgent crusade.
Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.
As much as I love the professional climatologists who write RealClimate, they rarely let the anti-science crowd bait them into the kind of high dudgeon that makes PZ Myers or Tom Levenson so much fun to read.
Part of the reason for their patient tone is that most denialists are either too limited (e.g., Inhofe) or too mercenary (TechCentralStation, George Will) to absorb any correction. Since the debate opponent won’t even acknowledge that you exist most of the time, real climate scientists usually write for interested third parties. That is what makes the response from RC to the pseudo-denialist authors of Superfreakonomics (in truth, contrarians of the vanity kind that DougJ writes about), professionals with credibility to defend, so worthwhile to read.
I have very much enjoyed and benefited from the growing collaborations between Geosciences and the Economics department here at the University of Chicago, and had hoped someday to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. It is more in disappointment than anger that I am writing to you now.
I am addressing this to you rather than your journalist-coauthor because one has become all too accustomed to tendentious screeds from media personalities (think Glenn Beck) with a reckless disregard for the truth. However, if it has come to pass that we can’t expect the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor (and Clark Medalist to boot) at a top-rated department of a respected university to think clearly and honestly with numbers, we are indeed in a sad way.
No more excerpts. The whole post is great so go read it.
