Republicans | The Bitchy Pundit - Part 5

Obama Can’t Be A Muslim Terrorist

April 28, 2010April 13, 2010 by Bitchy

According to a Harris poll that came out a few weeks ago, 57% of republicans think that President Obama is Muslim. 67% believe he’s a socialist, and 24% believe that he may be the Antichrist.

I would like to allay those fears by showing you that he can’t possibly be a terrorist once and for all. Let me show you why.

This guy,

Christopher Paul was arrested in Ohio yesterday for having ties to Al Qaeda. In 1997, he apparently received a fax from this guy

Mahmedou Ould Salahi, a gitmo detainee and suspected terrorist.

Last month, Pakistani officials claimed to have arrested this guy

Adam Gadahn, a native Californian and suspected Al Qaeda terrorist.

Is anyone else starting to see a pattern here? These guys are all just plain unfuckable. Is it any mystery why they’re all wooed by that whole 72 virgins fantasy? They clearly have no hope of ever achieving human contact with a woman in this life, so what the hell? Why not go for the jihadi brass ring which will not only get you the virgins, but it will also shorten the miserable experience of forced virginity in this life.

Think I’m full of it? Here’s more proof;

Here’s Raja Khan. He’s a Chicago cab driver suspected of sending money to Al Qaeda terrorists. And in case you hadn’t noticed, he’s thoroughly unfuckable.

And here’s KSM. It really doesn’t get more unfuckable than him, does it?

And lastly;

All 19 of the 9/11 hijackers. 19 seriously unfuckable men.Honestly, this wouldn’t even happen with someone else’s vagina!

Now look at our president.

Now this clearly the face of a man that has never had to ask a woman to sleep with him twice, which makes it impossible that he would ever be lured in by the promise of virgins. He’s clearly been there and done that many, many times. When he smiles, the legs of every woman within a 100 mile radius spring open like the jaws of life thrust into action to rescue a baby out from a mangled car. This is a man whose life is spectacular.

No amount of afterlife goodies could cause this man to fuck up the life he has now.

So please, get over your irrational fears. You’re being ridiculous!

Oh, and republican women – if you’re in a state of perpetual fear of a terrorist attack, I have a suggestion for you. Don’t waste your life cowering in fear. Get proactive. You should all go out there and look for the biggest troll that you can find and lay him like carpet. It will probably do you some good as well.

Your country needs you. God bless and go forward.

Dick Cheney Is A Scared Little Girl

April 12, 2010 by Bitchy

We’ve had it wrong for years. Dick Cheney isn’t Darth Vader. He’s a scared little girl who is afraid of his own shadow (do vampires cast shadows?). This is a belief that I’ve held for years and the more I listen to him, the more I read about him, the more convinced I am that I’m right.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top aid to Colin Powell came out last week and revealed that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush all knew that hundreds of men that were held at gitmo were innocent. Read the full article here.

None of this amounts to a shocking revelation to anyone that has been paying attention to how the Bush administration handled the “war on terror”. We’ve known for years that most of the people that landed in gitmo were turned in for a bounty. There was no intelligence gathering involved in this operation. Anyone that turned anybody in as a “suspected terrorist” promptly received a $5,000 reward with no questions asked. It didn’t take long for Afghans and Pakistanis to realize that they can make some quick cash and take care of their rivals by simply turning them in as terrorists. This was a lazy, stupid, and ineffective way to conduct a “war” (or two). This approach isn’t keeping anyone safe, it oppresses people in order to create an illusion of safety. We could eliminate nearly all drunk driving fatalities in the US if we instigated a law that would prohibit anyone from driving their cars after 9 pm. Does that sound like a good plan to anyone?

I believe that each of the top ranking buffoons that were involved in designing this approach on the “war on terror” had different motivations. I want to focus in on Cheney because he fascinates me more than any of the other players in this comedy of errors.

For the past ten years, we’ve heard nothing but dire warnings coming out of Dick Cheney. He’s afraid of of everything and everyone, and he’s trying really hard to make us afraid as well. Unlike Karl Rove, I believe that Dick Cheney sincerely believes what he’s saying. Why do I believe that? Because of the infamous underground bunker and the blurring out of his residence on Google maps. Trust me, this guy is one giant pussy with serious daddy issues!

I believe that Dick Cheney has always had an authoritarian personality but somewhere along the line, madness set in to compound the problem. Watch this video of him in 1994:

That is not the batshit crazy paranoiac we’re afflicted with today. Something inexplicably horrific happened to him between 1994 and 2000. 1994 Dick Cheney doesn’t have that crazy look in his eyes that 2002 Dick Cheney has.

As perplexing as the transformation is, that’s not the most confusing occurrence in this whole situation. The thing that confuses me the most is the inverted reality of the republican party. I don’t understand why everyone thinks of republicans as the “tough guys” when it’s clear that they’re all a bunch of scared little girls. For eight long years, republicans in Wyoming were crapping their pants with fear of another terrorist attack. Here’s a newsflash Wyoming; NO ONE IS COMING TO GET YOU. You’re not important enough to “get”. Terrorism is about creating the most impact with the fewest resources. You could bomb ten square miles in Wyoming and only amass a casualty rate of three. You’re simply not worth going after. Same goes for you, South Carolina, Kentucky, Georgia, and every other pussy inhabited state in middle America. I’m not trying to denigrate these states (I know, imagine how bad it would be if I was). I’m simply pointing out that as a rational person, I understand where the likely targets for future attacks are.

I moved to Manhattan after 9/11. I did so believing then, as I do now, that New York is most definitely going to suffer another terrorist attack. We’ve endured the only two foreign attacks on US soil, and we’re prepared to endure more if we have to. We understand that we are the highest of high value targets. I know many, many people that were here in New York when 9/11 happened. Guess what? They’re all still here. What’s more, 74% of us in Manhattan voted for John Kerry in 2004. 83% of us voted for Barack Obama in 2008. So why are liberals seen as weak when conservatives are regarded as tough and strong?

We have it all completely backwards. Liberals became increasingly impervious to Dick Cheney’s prophecies of Armageddon with each passing year of the Bush administration while conservatives cowered in fear.

You’re just a fucking frightened little girly man, Dick Cheney. And I hope that America wakes up and sees you for who you are because as much as you’re loathed in the world, you’re still being overestimated.

Who’s Afraid Of Virginia?

April 8, 2010 by Bitchy

Happy Confederate History Month, everyone!

Poor Virginians. Just 13 weeks into the term of their new governor, Bob McDonnell, Virginia has become the laughing stock of the country. I just want to let everyone know that it wasn’t their fault.

First, a little background. Mr. McDonnell was sworn in as the governor of Virginia on January 16th of this year. During his very short tenure as governor, he has reversed (by executive order) non-discrimination protections for gay state workers that were put in place by former governor Tim Kaine. The next item on his agenda was to proclaim that April would be “Confederate History Month” in Virginia. You can read the proclamation here. Did you happen to notice anything missing from his “celebration” of the confederacy? Whoopsie, he forgot all about that whole slavery misunderstanding. He finally apologized for his little memory lapse yesterday.

So far, Bob McDonnell’s thirteen week tenure as governor can best be summed up as an increase of discrimination and celebration of bigotry. Such a proud moment for Virginia!

As I said earlier, this situation isn’t the fault of Virginians. They didn’t vote for this. Bob McDonnell ran as a moderate whose primary focus for Virginia would be job creation. Here’s a Time Magazine article on McDonnell’s campaign from last November. Here’s another one from The Washington Post. He didn’t run as a far right winger whose focus was going to be to stir up hate and bigotry, which tells me that he knows that he couldn’t get elected to the position of dog catcher if he ran under his real agenda. He pulled a complete bait and switch on Virginians because he knew that they wouldn’t have him if they knew who he really was. In my opinion, he’s shown nothing but contempt for Virginians by playing them for fools.

If you really believe that what you’re doing is good for the people in your state, you would run on that platform. Lying about who and what you are says two things to me;

1) You don’t believe your own bullshit on any sort of intellectual level.

2) You know that you can’t get elected by the people because your views are not widely shared.

In short, Bob McDonnell is a viscerally hate fueled coward. You’re a coward, Bob McDonnell because you were too chicken shit to show the voters who you are so that they could make an informed decision about whether or not to vote for you. And your hatred is so viscerally entrenched in who you are, that it’s completely suppressed any rational thought that you may ever have.

I say that because Bob McDonnell gave the rebuttal to President Obama’s state of the union earlier this year, which is a very clear sign that he and republican leaders had national aspirations. Those aspirations have evaporated in the twelve weeks since he made that rebuttal. There’s NO WAY to get elected to national office on an anti-gay, pro-confederacy record. Buh bye, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Any rational person regardless of ideology can tell you that you can’t win a national election with a record like the one Bob McDonnell is creating. His hate for blacks and gays has blinded him so completely that what was a bright political future a few weeks ago, is now a distant memory.

Bob McDonnell fucked himself and he fucked Virginia.

But don’t go hating Virginians for this. They didn’t know although admittedly, he had a pretty questionable background going into the election. Unfortunately, his opponent was a terrible campaigner and the Obama administration were too cowardly to support him. Thanks for that, Rahm I really appreciate it!

Fun Facts

April 6, 2010April 5, 2010 by Bitchy

I’ve been listening to republicans try and diminish the 162,000 jobs that were created last month all weekend. I find it ludicrous on it’s face, that they’re complaining that this administration hasn’t managed to clean up after their unmitigated disaster fast enough! Here’s a newsflash for John Boehner; if your party hadn’t made such a huge mess of the economy, monthly job creation numbers wouldn’t even make headline news!

But beyond the obvious absurdity of the republican reaction to the job creation numbers, there’s a history of fun facts that I thought everyone would find interesting.

Let’s start with this – George W Bush didn’t create his first job until the beginning of his second term. That’s right, not one single fucking job for 4 years. And you wanna know who he put the onus on for that? You guessed it, it was Clinton’s fault. I have audio of Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Fleischer, and McClellan all blaming Clinton for the lack of job growth. Given how they handled Bush’s poor performance, republicans naturally feel that it’s unfair for Obama to ever so much as hint at the fact that the mess we’re in now is Bush’s fault.

Here’s another fun fact; in the last 60 years, the only person that created fewer jobs than a Bush was Eisenhower, in his second term. Poppy and W were the #2 and #3 worst presidents for job creation. Here are some numbers (the numbers represent millions of jobs created):

Truman 1949 -1952 5.2
Eisenhower 1953 – 1956 2.7
Eisenhower 1957 – 1960 0.8
Kennedy/Johnson 1961 – 1964 5.7
Johnson 1965 – 1968 9.8
Nixon 1969 – 1972 6.1
Nixon/Ford 1972 – 1976 5.2
Carter 1977 – 1980 10.4
Reagan 1981 – 1984 5.2
Reagan 1985 – 1988 10.8
Bush 1989 – 1992 2.5
Clinton 1993 – 1996 11.6
Clinton 1997 – 2000 11.5
Bush 2001 – 2004 (0.1)
Bush 2005 – 2008 5.1

It’s interesting that Poppy Bush didn’t blame Reagan for his abysmal performance, isn’t it? Jimmy Carter, by the way, kicked some job creation ass!

Another fun fact; wages went up not at all under the 8 years of George W Bush. So he didn’t create any new jobs, and for those that were employed, he kept your wages stagnant.

Now let’s look at some other fun facts – spending. The numbers on the right represent the change in spending relative to GDP:

Truman 1949 -1952 -23.9
Eisenhower 1953 – 1956 -10.4
Eisenhower 1957 – 1960 -7.9
Kennedy/Johnson 1961 – 1964 -6.7
Johnson 1965 – 1968 -6.8
Nixon 1969 – 1972 -5.4
Nixon/Ford 1972 – 1976 -0.9
Carter 1977 – 1980 -2.8
Reagan 1981 – 1984 +7.3
Reagan 1985 – 1988 +11.2
Bush 1989 – 1992 +12.2
Clinton 1993 – 1996 +3.0
Clinton 1997 – 2000 -9.8
Bush 2001 – 2004 +5.6
Bush 2005 – 2008 +6.3

Can you figure out who the fiscal conservatives are?

When I look at these sets of numbers I have to ask, “Where did the money under republicans go?” We saw less job growth and higher spending under republicans. Their approach is to spend more and tax corporations less. Keep in mind that when republicans talk about cutting taxes, they’re never talking about cutting your taxes. They’re talking about cutting corporate taxes. I hate to break it to you, but you’re not making “game changing” money. Adjusting your taxes up or down 3% – 6% amounts to your annual latte spending. And as they cut corporate taxes and increase corporate tax loop holes, they accomplish nothing in terms of creating jobs for you.

In Reagan’s case, all of that wild spending went into defense which created a crap load of defense jobs. Ironically, Reagan is the best example of how government can effectively create jobs.

These numbers don’t lie. I’m not an ideologue. I like living in the fact based community.

So next time you’re trapped at Thanksgiving dinner with your republican relatives, show them these numbers and help disabuse them of the mythology that they’ve been spewing for all of these years.

Code Pink Has Reached Code Red

April 1, 2010 by Bitchy

They actually reached code red a long time ago.

Here’s some video of code red at a Karl Rove book signing in Los Angeles on Monday:

Much to my dismay, after watching this I had to side with Rove. It’s hard to throw in with angry, red faced lunatics no matter what they’re saying. It’s hard for me to throw in with them, but I fear that it’s not hard for everyone. You wanna know who posted this video on youtube? Well, several people posted it, but the copy that I embedded was posted by Michael Moore. Given that Michael Moore has been prone to this type of behavior, I took his posting of this video as an implicit endorsement of the behavior contained in this video.

In my opinion, condoning this type of behavior, implicitly or otherwise hurts the message. It turns the conversation away from the facts and moves the focus to the tactics. Karl Rove’s response to what code pink did, “…this goes to show the totalitarianism of the left.” was 100% correct. There’s no arguing against the point that he made, given what everyone witnessed. They managed to turn a calculating liar into a victim. Nice job code pink. Not only didn’t anyone hear what you have to say, but you managed to make anyone else that says it into a whacko.

They should have made an attempt at civilized discourse. Ask him a question and then politely wait for him to answer it before asking the next question. I’ve watched Karl Rove twist himself into a pretzel trying to “explain” the enormous amounts of evidence against him and the Bush administration. It’s not pretty, and he’s not very good at it. He does very well when confronted by angry people. As you saw in the video, he had to summarily dismiss the downing street memos. How much more effective would progressives have been if they then followed up by asking him about Lawrence Wilkerson’s account of the Colin Powell speech, making the case for the US to go into Iraq? And then a follow up question about General Eric Shinseki’s dismissal? How many sources do you think Karl Rove would have to dismiss before sounding like a jackass? Don’t you think that would have been a more effective approach? It would have made Karl Rove the subject of the reporting. What we ended up with was yet another story about crazy extremists.

It’s a slippery slope to extremism. People don’t start off as extremists. It’s something that happens slowly over time so that people don’t realize that they’re becoming radicalized. It starts by condoning crap like this.

Don’t let yourself fall into that trap. Republicans have boxed themselves in by doing the very same thing with the tea party racists. It’s not possible to speak out against the tea partiers while remaining silent about code pink without being a hypocrite.

You have to denounce this from the inside if you have any hope of stopping it. You don’t have to support everyone that agrees with you. So go out there and comment and denounce from the rational left! Let the right deal with their own crazy. If they dismantle it on their side, then good for us! If they don’t, we need to trust that cooler heads will prevail.

BondageGate

April 3, 2015March 31, 2010 by Bitchy

Did you really think I wasn’t going to talk about it? This story is just too much fun not to comment on! My first thought when I heard about the head of the RNC expensing a large tab at a West Hollywood bondage club was, "Is Ken Mehlman back?" Then I realized it was a straight club, so Ken is definitely NOT back. My next thought was, there’s a straight bondage club in West Hollywood? And then my mind had to explore the horror that is wondering what Michael Steele’s safe word is. Is it Reagan? Tax cuts? WMD? After I got my mind out of the gutter (it took a while), I had to wonder what kind of moron would expense something like this? Don’t you know that the FEC looks at this stuff? And then I realized that we’re talking about republicans here. They’re self entitled and hypocritical so it would naturally make sense to engage in this sort of behavior on someone else’s dime while preaching family values to the donors that made it possible. The next thing that occurred to me is that they took what could have been a brilliant and lucrative idea and turned it into a minor scandal. Instead of spending their donors’ money on watching fake bondage, they should have given perspective donors the opportunity to make big contributions in exchange for the opportunity to flog some of their members. Think about the untapped revenue potential! I would pay untold sums of money to put a ball gag on John Boehner and then go to town on his ass with a wooden paddle. I would! And I wouldn’t care that the money will ultimately go to fund Michelle Bachman’s campaign. Four more years of Michelle Bachman, just to be able to shove a butt plug right into John Cornyn? YES, YES, it’s worth it! YES WE CAN! SIGN ME UP! You think I’m kidding, but I’m NOT. The very idea makes me happier than I’ve been in months. Screw long term thinking! I want instant gratification! And I’m pretty sure I can’t be the only one. There must be millions of people out there that would never donate to the RNC under any other circumstances, who would gladly open their wallets for this type of opportunity. They could even do an auction to ensure that they got the maximum contributions from people. And if the bids aren’t high enough, they could sweeten the pot. Think about it, how much MORE would you pay to spank a ball gagged Mitch McConnell if you had the ADDED option of nipple clamps? Don’t pretend like you’re above it all. You know you want to as bad as I do.

Bitchy’s Strategy For The GOP

March 30, 2010 by Bitchy

Not surprisingly, my advice centers around health reform. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this strategy of promising to repeal is going to be a disaster for republicans.

Let me first qualify what I mean by “disaster”. Historically speaking, the party that wins the white house loses 27.8 seats in congress in the following midterm election. Republicans could pick up as many as 50 seats this time around. I believe that they’re going to pick up around 20 seats. While that’s enough seats to declare “victory” and claim a “mandate”, it would in actuality be a disaster because it keeps them well in the minority.

Republicans are fighting a losing battle if their strategy is to run on repealing health reform during this election cycle. During the course of the next seven months, everything that is good about this bill will have kicked in. Closing the medicare prescription donut hole ensures that republicans will have lost the senior vote, which is their largest voting block. Allowing parents to keep their college students on their insurance plans wipes out that voting block. Losing those two demographics leaves the republican party crippled.

There’s not much they can do about the 2010 elections, but they can salvage 2012. By 2012, some of the ugly realities of this “reform” will have surfaced. Republicans should instead change their tone to promise to fix the problems with the bill, while predicting massive premium increases. We are definitely going to see massive premium increases over the next four years. In the past week, both the CEOs of Aetna and Cigna have already promised that they’re coming. This bill does absolutely nothing to keep premiums down. My guess, based on my experience with corporate premium increases, is that 2012 premiums are going to be 40% – 60% higher than they are today. I’m not trying to be doom and gloom Bitchy, but that’s what I believe is going to happen. If republicans focus in on the problems with the bill, they can clean up in the elections after those problems materialize.

I want to say up front that I don’t believe there’s a snow balls chance in hell that republicans are actually going to fix the cost control problems with this bill. The only means of controlling cost is to force the insurance companies to compete with medicare. Nothing short of that will do anything to chip away at exorbitant premiums. If democrats ran away from a public option with 68% of democrats and 54% of republicans supporting it, there’s zero chance that republicans will make it happen. There is absolutely NO way to bring down costs while still maintaining a for-profit health insurance system. Trust me I’ve looked closely at health insurance systems all around the world. It can’t be done.

I have no idea what republicans can do, within the constraints of what they have become, to fix the problem. But actual solutions are meaningless in terms of winning elections. Republicans haven’t actually solved any problems for our country in decades. This is a fact that inexplicably hasn’t stopped republicans from controlling our government for the majority of the past 100 years.

Getting elected in this country isn’t about what you’ve done. It’s about what you say you’re going to do. If republicans say they’re going to repeal health reform, they’re done. If they point out real problems with this health reform bill, they have a good shot at gaining power again.

On the other side, democrats have until 2012 to get a public option through. They definitely won’t touch the issue before November. I’m not very optimistic that they’re going to move in the direction of a public option at all, but if they do, it won’t be before the midterm election. They backed themselves into a corner with this bill. While they significantly strengthened their position for the midterm election, they insured that 2012 is going to be an unmitigated disaster unless they can fix this bill.

In the meantime, we need to keep the pressure up to get a public option through. Not because I give a damned if democrats keep control of congress, but because we desperately need meaningful health insurance reform. We haven’t gotten it yet. We need to keep the pressure on democrats because we have no chance of getting it under republican control. Trust me, if I though there was a chance of getting something that would help the average American out of the republican party, I’d be out there campaigning for them day and night. Our only hope is to come out en masse to let the democrats know that they’re in big trouble unless they fix the bill. And because democrats are historically obtuse, we need to spell out what those fixes need to be for them.

Tilting At Windmills

May 11, 2010March 23, 2010 by Bitchy

I don’t know why I’m shocked by this, but the GOP is inexplicably trying to double down on health insurance reform by promising to repeal it. They have become Don Quixote.

There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that they’re going to be able to touch this bill for a myriad of different reasons.

First off, they’re going to get hammered if they try to run against this in November. By then, all of those elderly, overweight protesters that demanded that the government “keeps their hands off my medicare” will have evaporated. Why? Because all of those people will have avoided the medicare prescription donut hole that they’ve been grappling with for several years now. Every senior in America will be opposed to any candidate that runs on repealing this bill. Parents of college students are also off the table since their kids will have been on their insurance plan for several months by the time November comes around. If losing all of those votes isn’t bad enough, republicans are going to have some issues with their pharmaceutical and insurance company contributors. Those industries will never allow the huge gift that is this bill to disappear. If you think that United Health Care is going to walk away from 32 million new customers, you’re out of your fucking mind. They’re really going to have to make some appalling deals with these companies that will undoubtedly screw Americans more than the current bill does.

Republicans will be getting it from all sides if they keep going down this road. They lost and they have nothing to gain by revisiting this loss in perpetuity over the next seven months.

And then there’s the ridiculous state attorneys general that are trying to sue, claiming this bill is unconstitutional. They may not be aware of this, but our current president is a former constitutional law professor. I can understand how they may have gotten used to having a dumb president that doesn’t know anything, but that’s not what they’re dealing with anymore. Thirteen states have already filed suits claiming this bill is unconstitutional. See the story here. Let’s examine this list closely.

Florida   $1.02
South Carolina $1.38
Nebraska $1.07
Utah   $1.14
Louisiana   $1.45
Alabama   $1.71
Pennsylvania   $1.06
Idaho   $1.28
South Dakota   $1.49
Colorado   $0.79
Michigan   $0.85
Texas   $0.94
Washington $0.88

Those numbers I have next to each state represents how much money those states get back from the federal government for every dollar they contribute. Only four out of the thirteen are known as “donor states”, meaning that they pay more in federal taxes than they receive. The other nine states receive more federal funding than they contribute. Not coincidentally, the states that receive more federal dollars than they contribute are very poor states that will benefit most from the medicaid expansion in this bill. These attorneys general are willing to screw their own constituents for what they perceive to be political gain. These guys are going to get SLAUGHTERED in the next election if their democratic opponent spells out what they’re doing.

This strategy is a total disaster for the GOP. More importantly, it’s a disaster for the American people since republicans are obviously going to continue to play politics rather than to govern.

PLEASE, GOP stop tilting at windmills and start getting involved in the legislative process! America can’t be ruled by one party!

Got Hope?

May 11, 2010March 22, 2010 by Bitchy

No, I’m not referring to the health insurance reform bill that passed last night. I do have to say, as an aside, that I didn’t appreciate being put in the uncomfortable position of being glued to C-SPAN for 10 hours, rooting for a shitty bill to pass because the alternative is much shittier.

I’m hopeful because of this.

I’m hopeful because David Frum and I don’t have much in common and yet, I find myself agreeing with everything that he said. Not most of what he said, but ALL of what he said. He’s exactly right. Republicans should have participated in the crafting of this legislation. Health insurance reform was a forgone conclusion, given the huge majority that democrats have in the house and senate. In the seven months between now and the midterm elections, republicans will have lost the vote of every senior that WON’T hit the prescription donut hole this year (that would be all of them). They will have lost the vote of every parent of a college student who, thanks to this legislation, will now have that child on their insurance plan. That’s a lot of votes to walk away from.

The republicans lost far more than they gained last night. They cemented the batshit crazy base that weren’t big enough to stop landslide victories for democrats in the last 2 elections. Good for you, Boehner! Your crazy base can now guzzle down the lithium they so badly need without fear of hitting the donut hole, so that they can live to fight another day to keep you in the minority.

Let me take a moment to go off on Boehner. Did you see him last night? He came off as the raving lunatic that he is. He was drunk, angry, and almost incoherent. America doesn’t relate to angry white (okay, burnt sienna) middle aged men anymore. He fundamentally believes that democrats have NO right to be involved in the legislative process. His disdain for democrats is irrational and impossible for most people to relate to. He and Mitch McConnell are both arrogant pieces of shit that have displayed nothing short of contempt for Americans, who voted overwhelmingly for democrats. When they talk about what the American people want, they’re forgetting the fact that they represent the MINORITY of Americans that voted for them. Hey Boehner, there’s a reminder right there in your title; house MINORITY leader! You bow down to Nancy Pelosi because WE THE PEOPLE say that you do. You would do well to remember that.

But getting back to Frum’s point, I wish that republicans had actively participated in the crafting of this bill. Look, if I had my way, we would have a system that allows every American to buy into medicare. Don’t go ape shit republicans, I said BUY IN meaning that I pay for my share of the premium cost of participating in medicare. I’m not so big on welfare programs that aren’t necessary. And as hard as I work to craft opinions that result from careful analysis of the facts, I’m acutely aware that as a human being, I am susceptible to ideologically driven tunnel vision. That’s why I need a rational opposition party to come at me from a different ideological perspective.

What we got last night wasn’t a liberal bill. It was an ideologically devoid bow to corporate America. This was SUCH a cave in to the insurance companies, that it makes a single payer system within the next 15 – 20 years a forgone conclusion. Health care costs will reach 19% – 20% of our GDP before these exchanges kick in four years from now because the insurance companies have four more virtually unregulated years to go to town on your premiums.

The biggest problem that we face in American politics today is that every single politician, regardless of party affiliation is working not for their constituents, but for the corporate interests that finance their campaigns. That being said, we were never going to get a good reform bill. But I would like to have seen republicans participate in the crafting of the final legislation.

We’re basically fucked until we start fighting for publicly funded campaigns. We’re doubly fucked in the interim, with one party completely removing itself from the legislative process. As it stands now, republicans are hoping to get elected by decimating the political process so that democrats seem less appealing than republicans do. I want a party that actively works at being a better choice. Don’t you?

I’m hopeful because one republican is starting to get it. I know that one isn’t much, but I’m a sunny optimist. I hope that one will turn into 20 million.

Ann Coulter Is What Happens When You Add Tunnel Vision To A Cauldron Of Hateful

April 3, 2015March 18, 2010 by Bitchy

Let me start off by saying that I do not believe that Ann Coulter is a stupid woman. She’s actually extremely intelligent and quite accomplished. So why does she perpetually say and write the stupidest things I’ve ever heard? Because her hateful persona mixed with her republican tunnel vision makes any sort of rational thinking almost impossible, thereby negating the intelligence she was born with.

I read her latest article here.

Almost everything that she says here is a fantasy. I can’t tell if she’s genuinely ignorant of the facts, or if she’s making a concerted effort to mislead. In either case, I’m going to set the dumb bitch straight!

But let me start by giving her credit for making a good point; insurance shouldn’t have an antitrust exemption. These exemptions kill competition and give business an advantage over consumers that they shouldn’t have.

Okay, enough of that. Now on to ripping her a new one.

Let’s start with this statement;

"The very next sentence of my bill provides that the exclusive regulator of insurance companies will be the state where the company’s home office is. Every insurance company in the country would incorporate in the state with the fewest government mandates, just as most corporations are based in Delaware today."

This is a little vague. Is this a federal regulator? This would be nonsense if it were a state regulator, so I have to assume that she talking about a federal regulator. A FEDERAL REGULATOR? She wants to regulate insurance in a federal level? Interesting. Where have I heard that before?

Let’s move onto this little nugget of stupid:

"That’s the only way to bypass idiotic state mandates, requiring all insurance plans offered in the state to cover, for example, the Zone Diet, sex-change operations, and whatever it is that poor Heidi Montag has done to herself this week."

Does Ann really think that your premiums are high because your insurance company assumes that you’re going to get a sex change tomorrow? How much does she think premiums will go down by if you assure your insurance company that you like the parts you came with and have no intentions of rerouting the plumbing? This is where she obviously knows better, but needs to make shit up in order to make a point. Insurance doesn’t cover sex changes or plastic surgery. She would have had that Adam’s apple removed a LONG time ago if it did!

I really LOVE this little morsel of obtuse;

"Much as I admire Obama’s use of terminally ill human beings as political props, let me point out here that perhaps Natoma could have afforded insurance had she not been required by Ohio’s state insurance mandates to purchase a plan that covers infertility treatments and unlimited OB/GYN visits, among other things. It sounds like Natoma could have used a plan that covered only the basics — you know, things like cancer."

Insurance contracts are already entirely too complicated for most people to understand. I know, because I assess and design corporate insurance plans so my friends naturally come to me with questions about their coverage. Their eyes generally start to glaze over before I’ve even made a dent in answering their questions. How does Ann think health insurance contracts are going to look when you start to increase the already growing slew of exclusions? She wants more language to the already overly complicated insurance policies? Seriously? And does she think that maybe, MAYBE an explicit exclusion for cosmetic surgery may also exclude skin cancer treatment for example?

This one definitely tops the list of partisan, nonsense bullshit in Ann’s article;

"The third sentence of my bill would prohibit the federal government from regulating insurance companies, except for normal laws and regulations that apply to all companies."

Yes Ann, because deregulation has worked out SO well for us with the financial industry. Let’s spread the joy around until it metastasizes into your lymph nodes and kills you due to an inability to get treatment!

She goes on and on about some nonsense about pre-existing conditions, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t read anything that looked like a solution to this problem in her lunatic ravings, so I’m not even going to waste time on it.

I do want to address one more thing. This republican "nirvana" of tort reform. They’re completely full of shit when they offer this up as being the solution to all of our health insurance problems, and they KNOW it.

Texas passed a law limiting malpractice awards to $250,000 several years ago. Today Texas has the honor of being the state with 3 of the top 10 most expensive cities in America to purchase insurance in (McAllen, Harlingen and Corpus Christi). Now keep in mind that Texas is also one of the top 10 most obese states in the country, so I think it would be fair to conclude that cutting pork without cutting out the bacon isn’t really going to help solve our health care cost issues! But still, this is hardly a ringing endorsement for the power of tort reform to impact much of anything. In 2004, the Congressional Budget Office released a report estimated the cost of medical malpractice at 2% of the total health care spending. Again, 2% doesn’t sound like a game changing number to me.

Republicans know all of this. I sincerely wish that they would come up with a fact based solution of their own. As a citizen of this country, I hate to be put in the position of having only one party working to solve our problems. I think that having several fact based approaches, coming from different points of the ideological spectrum isn’t too much to ask for in the "greatest country in the world".

Come on republicans, apply yourselves!