Politics Plus

Before a bill becomes law, the interested parties used to hammer out their differences and the result was called a compromise.  However, if after the bill has become law, one party claims to want to return to the negotiating table, before it can even be fully implemented, that’s a compromise that isn’t.  Or, if one party wants concessions from the other, but is willing to offer nothing in return, that’s a compromise that isn’t.  Or if it comes from Bought Bitch Mitch McConnell (R-Bitchrandistan), that’s a compromise that isn’t.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is in quite the bind these days. He’s got a troubled reelection campaign and a very real need to prove his teabaggie bona fides in a primary back home. And he’s got a kamikaze crew of 2016 wannabes trying to force him to wreck the party’s prospects—and hurt his own general election outlook—for 2014 by shutting down government. What’s an unprincipled, embattled and weakened politician to do? Try to find a compromise that he can try to sell to the crazies—delay Obamacare because it’s evil.

Aug 12 (Reuters) – Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell on Monday called on the Obama administration to delay the Oct. 1 opening of exchanges where uninsured Americans will be able to buy health insurance until the U.S. government can guarantee the protection of people’s personal data. […]

In a letter to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency taking the lead in implementing the law, McConnell said that "Americans should not be forced into the exchanges, and certainly not without these assurances" that personal and financial data will be safe from "hackers and cyber criminals."

"If you rush to go forward without adequate safeguards in place," McConnell added, "any theft of personal information from constituents will be the result of your rush to implement a law to meet the agency’s political needs and not the operational needs of the people it is supposed to serve."

…

Inserted from <Daily Kos>

If the Democrats were stupid enough to go along, hell would freeze over, before McConnell was satisfied with security.  Here’s the bottom line.  The bill is already the law.  McConnell offers nothing in return.  This comes from McConnell.  Therefore, this compromise isn’t.

At times online friends and I write on the same subjects at the same time, and when that happens, I’m pleased.  This is a team effort, not a competition.  Sometimes we even draw from the same sources.  I often humorously quip, “Great minds fall in the same ditch!”  But now, we have a case where great minds have written an article together, and these great minds are Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).  This is what happens when giants meet!

The decisions made by the next chair of the Federal Reserve will have a powerful impact on the economic well-being of every person in America.

While the largest financial institutions and corporations in this country have been bailed out and are now back to making enormous profits and rewarding their executives with outsized compensation packages, recovery hasn’t gone so well for the rest of America. Middle class families have continued to lose ground economically, the number of Americans living in poverty is near an all-time high, and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider.

The next Fed chair will have enormous power and influence over our entire financial system and the direction of the economy. The Fed is responsible not only for our country’s monetary policy, but it is also a key regulator of financial institutions. In our view, the president’s nominee for Fed chair must be committed to improving the lives of working Americans who are still struggling through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

To that end, we think any Fed chair nominee should be able to answer the following four questions:

Question 1: Do you believe that the Fed’s top priority should be to fulfill its full employment mandate?

The U.S. continues to face a major crisis in unemployment.  When Wall Street was on the verge of collapse, the Fed acted aggressively and with a fierce sense of urgency to save the financial system.  Will you act with the same sense of urgency to combat the unemployment crisis in America today, and will you make clear what specific actions you will take?  What rate do you think is acceptable and should be the Fed’s target?…

Inserted from <Truthdig>

They are spot-on, and I gave you only one of the four questions, with follow-ups,  they would ask.  Click through for the other three, as it is an education in what’s wrong with the Fed and what needs to happen there.

I would add a fifth question:

Question 5: Are you one it the Three Blind Mice?

If yes, are you Larry “Wrong Way” Summers or Timmy “The Tool” Geithner?  If the answer is either, flush immediately, and DO NOT CONFIRM.

In 2009, Republicans and pretended to want health care reform, they were stalling to tie it up in committee long enough to get to their summer town hall meetings and turn on the lies.  Chief among those lies originated from Mooseolini, who claimed that ObamaCare had death panels to kill senior citizens by withholding needed care.  See based it on the provision to cover end of life counseling coverage included in the bill.  It had been placed there at the request of a Republican.  Well, albeit slightly modified, the death panel BS is back.

On Sunday, CNN’s State of the Union invited Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus to offer what turned out to be little more than a dump of Republican talking points opposing the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare is “European, socialist style-type health care,” Priebus told CNN. He even claimed that Republicans — who have now voted to repeal Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting conditions 40 different times — are the true defenders of people who are unable to obtain health insurance without health reform. And then he dropped the death panels line — “what people don’t want are government panels deciding whether something’s medically necessary.”…

…Priebus’ decision to drop this line without any context whatsoever represents an innovation in Republican messaging against providing health care to millions of Americans. The “death panel” smear originally emerged on former half-term Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R-AK) Facebook page [Mooseolini delinked], and was widely viewed at the time as an attack on a bipartisan proposal to enable Medicare to cover voluntary end-of-life counseling. After that proposal was dropped from the bill that ultimately became the Affordable Care Act, several Republicans — including Palin once again — retconned the term “death panels” to refer to a cost-cutting measure known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board or IPAB.

Although the IPAB is empowered to take some measures to bring down Medicare costs if those costs grow faster than a certain rate, it is expressly forbidden to take any action that might qualify as rationing care…

Inserted from <Think Progress>

The ObamaCare deal panel rumor was thoroughly debunked years ago, but Republicans love to use projection to blame Democrats for what Republicans and those they represent do.  How many times have  you heard about people dying because they could get no coverage or because Big Insurance death panels decides a completely unrelated preexisting condition was a good enough excuse not to provide care?  There are other death panels, consisting of Republican politicians.  People are dying, because Republicans, at the state level have refused federal money to expand Medicaid.  Before the Brewerstan Death Angel, Jan Brewer caned in on Medicaid expansion, she cut the program to give a tax cut to millionaires.  In so doing, she cut at least two people, already scheduled for life-saving transplants, who subsequently died.  Now how many times have you heard about lives being saved, because ObamaCare outlawed those Big Insurance abuses?  Lots, I bet!RepubliCare, not ObamaCare, is the health policy with the built in death benefit: Pay or Die!

I have not become very involved in writing about the surveillance issue, because I am not comfortable taking stands on issues I know very little about, and the problem is that there is so little transparency that the people who want to know more, can’t.  I do have some thoughts on the matter, and what I think will be a good starting point.

With the conviction of Bradley Manning and asylum granted to Edward Snowden in Russia, it may be time to turn attention away from the controversy over their actions and toward the government—specifically, the intelligence community. Whatever ultimate judgment is leveled on Manning’s or Snowden’s actions, they have raised real questions about the ways that the United States gathers, uses and classifies information.

The first order of business is to restore a semblance of democratic order within the government itself. Somehow amid the hunt for Snowden and the trial of Manning, the misconduct of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has seemingly been excused. But if the actions of Manning and Snowden required prosecution, then what Clapper did deserves investigation and censure at the very least.

Testifying on surveillance by the National Security Agency last March, Clapper appeared at a Senate committee hearing where Senator Ron Wyden asked: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

“No, sir,” Clapper replied. The he added:“Not wittingly.”… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Truthdig>

Rachel Maddow covered the surveillance in her opening segment.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I agree with Obama concerning the Olympics, but I support moving them out of Russia.   I agree with him on health care and immigration reform, except that both need to go further.

I agree with him that the unPATRIOT Act needs to be changed. I agree that the FISA court needs to be reformed. However, Congress must make those reforms, and this Republican House may not do so.

On drones, I respect that he will not answer questions about why certain terrorists were targeted.  Whatever they were doing that gave them away, it’s best that Al Qaeda not be told what is was, so they can stop doing it.

I understand that, if Obama does not use the national security tools the law has given him, a national security failure would result in Republicans taking power, and they would convert the US into a totalitarian Regime like North Carolina, aka McCrorystan.  Therefore. we must change the law.

I do want more evidence that these powers are not being abused.  Although I tend to think that Obama is not knowingly abusing them.  Some of his appointees and/or nonpartisan career employees may be, and I have no doubt that a Republican President would.  Clapper did abuse them.   He intentionally lied to the Senate of the United States, when asked for transparency. He and any other federal official found to be abusing the law should be immediately terminated, and the abuse investigated.