Shame on me for adding for FireDogLake to my RSS feed yesterday:
I don’t know what Lynn Woolsey is really thinking, but the leadership of the House progressive caucus should not be helping the entire party walk the bloody plank towards a fascist form of health insurance without a care in the world.
Luckily, I can still read Tbogg on a separate feed.
This is Day 2 of my new Politico-free lifestyle. The 60 blogs I put on my Google reader are helping.
Pigs & Spiders
I’m beginning to think that the internet was the worst thing that ever happened to liberalism.
jibeaux
“a fascist form of health insurance”? Is there a fascist version of Godwin’s law, since everyone knows Godwin’s law by now and just substitutes “fascist” instead? Is there a word more overrused and incorrectly used in English in 2010 to date?
arguingwithsignposts
@jibeaux:
Agreed, that is an egregious overuse of the word from the Jane Hamshers of the left. /facepalm
ETA: We could call it jibeaux’s law.
dmsilev
@Pigs & Spiders:
Disagree. It’s cut way down on giant-puppet-itis, and that’s definitely a good thing.
-dms
Scott
I would totally suggest adding my comic book blog to your newsreader, but I suspect the crazies at FDL may be more entertaining than me…
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
The Jane Hamsters of the Left have really flown the coop.
Trinity
Stay strong DougJ…stay strong.
And I recommend adding xkcd.com to Google Reader.
Pigs & Spiders
@dmsilev: Sure. And clearly I jest with that comment. But the amount of crazy that comes out of some of these progressive blogs sometimes is staggering.
Zifnab
Ah, she must be confusing the proposed health care system with the current health care system.
Bottom line, I think this legislation is going to desperately need an overhaul (read: Public Option, Dammit!) in five years – maybe ten years, tops.
The insurance companies might be limited in how much they can vary rates among clients, but their base fee is uncapped. If these companies want to charge $1000 / month across the board, there’s not much stopping them. That will far outstrip the government subsidies for the poor, and either leave the government getting price gouged by the corps or leave a yawning gap among lower income people paying the no-insurance tax rather than getting coverage.
You’re simply going to need public insurance to come in and slap a virtual price ceiling on the whole scam. Otherwise, it’s just going to be another decade of run-away premiums.
Stooleo
Its like all the crazies from Talk Left flew over to FDL.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Scott:
I’ve added your blog to my favorites. I’m a big Avengers fan but I have to catch up to the last few issues of New Avengers and the current crossovers.
beltane
These people need to take their paper mache puppets and go sit in a corner somewhere. When they say “kill the bill” they are also saying to kill the tens of thousands of Americans who will end up dead if the bill is not passed. They are officially now as evil as the Republicans in my opinion.
jibeaux
@arguingwithsignposts:
I approve. You all have my blessing to begin using it.
cleek
when metaphors fight, we all lose.
Mike Kay
Leave Jane alone!
Stop with your hippie punching!
eemom
She’s sounding more like a female Glenn Beck with each passing “Yes” vote.
Wish she’d just go over to their side already and leave us the fuck alone. No doubt her buddy Grover could set her up with plenty of face time on Fox news, and her brain dead cultbots would follow right along.
jon
The liberals have always had their Trotskys throwing themselves on icepicks. Sometimes they’re the voice of reason, sometimes they’re the reason they have no voice.
I like the public option, in fact I will be demanding a public option for the distant future, but I sure as hell want 31 million people to have access to healthcare more than I want a Republican victory that will set this country further on the course to financial ruin. I want some restraints on insurance companies in the near future more than I want Medicare for all to be voted down right now.
I want progress to be made, while the “progressives” want the future right now or they’re taking their votes home. Wankers.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
OH goody. fainting Matilda resident Janebot trolls are now activated for another day of hippie tears.
Persia
@dmsilev: I was just talking to someone this weekend about how hard it is to take seriously any political message involving puppets.
clone12
Fascist eh?
So when will firebaggers start painting Hitler mustaches on Obama?
beltane
@eemom: It has become like a cult over there. What’s really funny is that anyone who disagrees with them is condemned as engaging in “groupthink”.
FormerSwingVoter
DougJ, why are you punching hippies? They’re shifting the Overton Window!
jibeaux
@cleek:
hey, it’s no skin off my stiff upper lip.
I can’t be the only one who memorized most of Bloom County, right?
Mike Kay
Typical, another day on Ballon Juice, another hippie slaughter.
eemom
ah, I see that particular post was written by ES, one of Jane’s inner circle of protective eunuchs.
themann1086
As an avid David Neiwert reader, this kind of stupid rhetoric really pisses me off. Learn what fascism actually is, and get a brain morans!
Mike Kay
I only thank God for sending us angels like Jane to look out for us.
CarolDuhart
Firedoglake reminds me of people who get a gift and are unhappy because it isn’t the exact shade and color of what they want.” I want a fuschia red wagon, not aplain red waggon dammit!”
Some may well be PUMAs who are unhappy because the Obama is about to accomplish something Hillary never even got close to. Nevermind that she’s probably happy to see it happen, that’s she in retrospect is probably glad that she’s not in the Senate as a distraction, and that she would rather be Secretary of State who doesn’t have to deal with the Circus that is domestic policy right now.
jibeaux
@themann1086:
It’s fascist because everyone needs to get health insurance so they’ll just be healthy little sticks that can be tied together to make up the axe handle of The Glorious State without giving anyone splinters, but the health of the individual is subservient to the health of the state so your doctors will now base their medical recommendations not on whether you need something, but whether the State needs you to have it. Or something. Yeah, I can’t make it work either. And frankly I can’t make the fascists’ axe analogy work either. Someone still has to swing the damn axe. I think that person is actually in charge.
Mike Kay
@themann1086: but it is fascism. Adolf Obama and his goosestepping thugs from Chicago and GOS are rounding up Americans and placing them in Big Insurance concentration camps!
Menzies
@clone12:
Relating to what someone said above about a new law to deal with “fascist” comparisons versus outright Nazi ones, the Jane Hamshers of the left would be shocked – shocked! – if anyone compared Obama to Hitler. They’re better than that!
Ailuridae
Reinstating Ailuridae.
–Doug
Menzies
@jibeaux:
To be fair, I don’t think the fascist analogy is really supposed to work, just as long as it conjures up the image of axes-and-sticks.
beltane
@Mike Kay: Yes. Jane has done all the heavy lifting on this issue. So much heavy lifting that she now has muscles like Popeye after a can of spinach. But what Jane will never do is allow herself to be force-fed a shit sandwich while confined to the veal pen.
jibeaux
@Menzies:
Ahem, I believe we’re calling it jibeaux’s law.
shortstop
At least “Woolsey” was spelled right. I’ve noticed that about 90 percent of the people trying to take her down from the left think her name is “Woosley.” I guess you can’t expect people inflamed with the cleansing passion of true progressivism to worry about shit like that.
Ailuridae
Testing.
Bruce Webb
“The insurance companies might be limited in how much they can vary rates among clients, but their base fee is uncapped.”
Wrong. Which is the God damn problem. Even the saner participants in this discussion (which doesn’t include many FirePups) don’t seem to think it is important to read the details of the bill and understand the implications.
The base fee is capped by the mandates for a minimum MLR combined with community rating. That provision which was included in the original Tri-Committee and HELP Bills was eliminated in the SFC bill and then reinserted in a temporary and ineffective way in the Reid and Pelosi versions and then at the last minute put back in the final bill by the Team of 20. It is what made a fairly lame bill back into a pretty damn fine bill but drew practically no discussion because the FirePups and others were criticizing a “fascist form of health insurance” and praising a “Medicare for All” bill that existed only in their own imaginations.
HR676 was a joke. And the original Reid Bill had some serious flaws on the cost control side. But it seems that no one was actually willing to read the bill language and discuss it. People take Kucinich seriously only because they have not actually read the legislative language of the bill he was pushing. The bill was clearly intended to be purely aspirational, a vision of what single payer would look like if progressives ruled the world, which we don’t, it could not have ever been passed into law. In large part because it literally could not have been scored by CBO, none of its three new sources of revenue was actually specified by number, it proposed a new tax on the top 5% without giving a rate, an across the board “modest and progressive” increase in payroll tax without giving a rate, and if you are still with me a “small” tax on stock transactions without, you guessed it, giving a rate. Which wasn’t even the weakest part of the bill. Yet I saw a bumper sticker saying “HR676 Now”.
Shortest verse in the Bible: ‘Jesus wept’
The inclusion of a minimum MLR at any level guts the current business model of the insurance companies. Right now you get maximum profits by signing up a pool of healthy adults that you expect to make no claims. Under the bill as written that pool leaves you bankrupt. And exploring the mechanism that makes that happen is kind of fascinating. But mostly the discussion did not get there.
Mike Kay
@beltane: How dare you make fun of her. Why do you have to resort to sexism! You’re just jealous that she’s so attractive and sweet and smart. Don’t you realize she’s only standing on principal!
BenA
@jon:
It’s more than just that. I’m a independent consultant, and “luckily” I have COBRA right now, but it would make far more sense tax wise for me to switch to purchasing insurance flat out from an insurance company… Why I don’t? Rescission.
jibeaux
@Menzies:
Well, no wonder they didn’t make it, with sorry-ass analogies like that.
I forgot to mention how health care reform also forces all the men to go off to war and the women into one of those baby-making labs like on post-war Caprica in BSG. Little noticed provisions outside of FDL, but really quite fascist.
Mike Kay
@BenA: you’re only thinking about yourself. what about the rest of us, who want free medicine provided by surcharges on the rich.
beltane
@Bruce Webb: There was a DKos diarist, jim bow, who would discuss these issues in great depth and who received nothing but grief for doing so. However, I learned a lot more about the various bills from his diaries than from any of the front page stories, which were often misleading.
Sentient Puddle
@jibeaux: If we’re naming corollaries to Godwin’s Law, I call dibs on the law of right-wingers calling social ism(?). We’ll call it Puddle’s Law.
PeakVT
The 60 blogs I put on my Google reader are helping.
I suggest replacing FDL with FAILblog.
gwangung
@Bruce Webb: Might be worth it to set this up in a macro until there’s substantive discussion of the bill’s provisions…
(meaning, I think it’s going to take a while…)
Jay in Oregon
Let me get this straight. You attempted to detox from Politico by reading FireDogLake?
Isn’t that like switching from hard liquor to wood grain alcohol?
les
@Bruce Webb:
Thanks. Minimum MLR is, to me, tops among several important improvements the bill will make; yet it’s scarcely ever acknowledged. If congress separately junks the insurance co. antitrust exemption, in an arena where insurance cos. can’t simply compete for the healthy, we might have a decent start.
themann1086
@Jay in Oregon:
“From this day forward, I will never drink alcohol again!”
*later*
“Peter, what are you doing?”
“Smoking crack.”
“What the F*CK?!?”
Patrick
Jeez, you just now gave up Politico? I haven’t seen that site in more than a year, starting very soon after the inauguration. It’s really a far more stress-free lifestyle. I used to keep tabs on The Corner at NRO and redstate etc. It’s just not worth it.
Ed Drone
@jon:
Actually, Leon Trotsky was murdered with an ice axe, not an ice pick.
From Wikipedia:
Ed
IM
But that means…
Single payer at long least!
It is following the finest liberal tradition too: After all Roosevelt imported in thirties a fascist form of old age insurance.
If only…
Kirk Spencer
Jane’s group is a perfect example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. They want a perfect bill. Worse, they want their particular perfect bill. Anything less is unacceptable.
If they win, I won’t have insurance for several months. Last year I earned below the poverty line, but it was too much for medicaid. If I pick up an employer with insurance this year, I’ll still be some time before I get insurance as I (and my family) have “pre-existing conditions”.
This bill would end both those situations.
“Hi. I know you’re hungry, and I’m fighting to get you steak. I won’t let anyone give you those hot dogs they’re offering because they’re not steaks, so bear with the hunger for a while. OK?”
/spit
PTirebiter
Who knew? Now I have a reason to figure out the RSS thing. I’m assuming Chrome accommodates.
kay
@CarolDuhart:
Not having Clinton in the Senate has really hurt prospects for reform, in my opinion. She’s a great advocate on health care, she works her ass off, she has a completely devoted fan base, and media would have invited her on again and again in the hopes they’d stir up division.
She’d be great right now, because she’s the absolute best rebuttal to Republican’s claim reform can wait. She was goddamn right, and they were wrong. We should have gotten started.
We really, really would have benefited had she been around, particularly with Kennedy dying.
There is no real passionate single individual who is a health care advocate in Congress. The issue needs a single individual, and Clinton and/or Kennedy would have been that person. I’d take either one, but together they’d be unbeatable.
moe99
@Bruce Webb: Thank you for your information. Good to have in one’s back pocket to pull out and brandish before rabid firepups!
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Jay in Oregon:
Fix’t.
If you are going to read FDL, get roaring drunk. No, it won’t help you understand what they are howling about but if you drink enough you won’t give a shit.
Jane and the Hamsters, a shrill, off-key version of Alvin and the Chipmunks. It’s what happens when angry stupid people breathe pure helium for too long.
Uloborus
I think I understand the ‘fascist’ reference, actually, guys. It’s a combination of two things.
1) Bear in mind that the driving belief of True Progressive Liberals that don’t want this bill passed is that it is nothing but a bailout for the insurance companies, since it has no price controls and forces poor people to buy insurance they cannot afford. Since they sincerely believe that because it just can’t be possible for anything but a strong public option to cut costs, this bill is a demonstration of government collusion with big business strongarming the common man into something he doesn’t like. Ergo, it *is* kinda fascist. We tend to focus on the populist side, but a union of government and business was a part of it.
2) Message coordination. We all know that conservatives have better messaging. Since Jane has realized that just because we hate the right wing doesn’t mean we can’t work together on common ground, might as well make sure everyone’s rhetoric is mutually feeding.
Tim I
WTF were you thinking! FDL has twenty different kinds of crazy on just the front page alone.
They are celebrating the fact that they raised $12,000 to help Kucinich fight off primary opponents. Now even if we accept their view of St. Dennis, they would have to be crazy to think that $12 K is going to frighten off SEIU.
4jkb4ia
Good for you, DougJ. Another example of Politico smarm was trying to make a big deal out of Robin Carnahan not showing up for the McCaskill fundraiser. Robin Carnahan has not run an Obama-centered campaign since day one. Remember that with all the Obama push, he still lost the state.
(Did Jane write “fascist” or was that somebody else?)
(Tonight, St. Louis U in the CBI! So cute!)
4jkb4ia
@eemom:
That was definitely too dumb for Jane. Also it was in a Late Night post so sober analysis was not the thing called for.
Socraticsilence
Can i just point out how angry the Firedoggers would probably be if Tomorrow, the president stripped the mandate from the bill (which he can’t do obviously) but also stripped the ban on screening for pre-existing conditions? Its like these people don’t get that the two are connected.
Socraticsilence
Quote from the thread:
“Nothing” also means that people will continue to be pissed, and will demand something”
This basically summarizes the attitude- put it this way I don’t think many people on the thread are on medicaid, or have been denied coverage due to a pre-existing condition.
PTirebiter
@Uloborus:
Better messaging? More properly stated an ability to amplify a message through party discipline. And because their message is still, well, their message, The utility of their vaunted messaging has been reduced to obstruction, and nothing more. So Jane has belatedly discovered the forward pass, It’s of little use without receivers. As the Republicans have discovered, no matter how often or hard you throw the fascist and thug balls, very few are willing to catch it. So where’s the progress?
Other than some potential for greater obstruction, tell me again where the so called common ground is. Jane may succeed in furthering Norquist’s agenda, but her success ends there.
jon
@Ed Drone: Are you saying I can’t trust indie rock? Darn them! Darn them to Heck!