Hey! Is That Chuck Grassley In The E.R.?

Of course not...

Rachel Maddow: "The Democrats Are Too Scared Of Their Own Shadow..."

I Told Ya So...

I saw that headline on Huffington Post this morning. I hate to say, "I told ya so," but...

From The Hill:

Leading liberal activists are pressing Senate Democrats to forget about Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and move ahead with their own plans for healthcare reform.
Comprehensive healthcare reform legislation stalled in the Senate last month as Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) spent weeks cooped up in his office with Grassley trying to hash out a healthcare deal.

Despite frequent assurances from Baucus that he was making good progress, the Senate left town for its monthlong August recess without any deal, breaking the deadline set by President Barack Obama for passing legislation through the upper chamber.
Baucus and other Democratic members of the Finance Committee plan to resume negotiations with Grassley when they return in September, but leaders among the party’s liberal wing say that path leads to a “dead end.”
“We need to push the Senate to move and pass a bill at a time when Sen. Grassley will probably not support any bill the Finance Committee has formulated,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future.
“We are encouraging Finance Committee members and Senate Democrats to do their own bill and not compromise with a bunch of Republicans who are not going to vote with them anyway.”
Grassley, the senior Republican on Finance, alarmed liberals when he announced in a television interview Monday that he would not support healthcare legislation that does not have widespread Republican support.
“I’m negotiating for Republicans and if I can’t negotiate something that gets more than four Republicans, I’m not a good representative of my party,” he said on MSNBC. “It isn’t a good deal if I can’t sell my product to more Republicans.”

Hey, Dems: we voted you in, we voted for change. We did NOT vote for "Republican Lite." No retreat, no surrender...

Chuck Grassley Loses At Liar's Poker.

Why is it that Democrats are trying to play nice with Chuck Grassley?

From Swampland at Time.com:

You would think that if Republicans wanted to totally mischaracterize a health care provision and demagogue it like nobody's business, they would at least pick something that the vast majority of them hadn't already voted for just a few years earlier. Because that's not just shameless, it's stupid.

Yes, that's right. Remember the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill, the one that passed with the votes of 204 GOP House members and 42 GOP Senators? Anyone want to guess what it provided funding for? Did you say counseling for end-of-life issues and care? Ding ding ding!!

Let's go to the bill text, shall we? "The covered services are: evaluating the beneficiary's need for pain and symptom management, including the individual's need for hospice care; counseling the beneficiary with respect to end-of-life issues and care options, and advising the beneficiary regarding advanced care planning." The only difference between the 2003 provision and the infamous Section 1233 that threatens the very future and moral sanctity of the Republic is that the first applied only to terminally ill patients. Section 1233 would expand funding so that people could voluntarily receive counseling before they become terminally ill.

So either Republicans were for death panels in 2003 before turning against them now--or they're lying about end-of-life counseling in order to frighten the bejeezus out of their fellow citizens and defeat health reform by any means necessary. Which is it, Mr. Grassley ("Yea," 2003)?

Chuck Grassley remains a major obstacle on the road to real health care reform. He's a liar, a hypocrite and his pockets are overflowing with health industry money. It's high time Democrats remember why we voted them in and past time to freeze Grassley's ass out.

Chuck Grassley's Straw Man Is A Rich Man's Best Friend.

If you were in the richest 1 percent of households since 1979 or so, you like the looks of that graph. The other 99 percent are wondering why Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa thinks a surtax on that 1 percent to help pay for health care is "idiotic."

Grassley made that charge in an interview with the far-right Newsmax.com:

[Democrats have] got the feeling you can raise taxes on the top one percent and solve all the problems of government. That's not real. You could confiscate, let alone tax, all the income over $250,000 that people make each year, and you couldn't run the federal government for more than three or four months. So it's idiotic to think that's a solution...

As Media Matters points out, Grassley's argument is pure Iowa bullshit:

But Grassley is setting up a straw man -- and a ridiculous one at that. Nobody is talking about solving "all the problems of government," nobody wants to "confiscate" all income over $250,000, and nobody suggested that doing so would raise enough money to "run the federal government."

What some House Democrats are proposing is a surtax on the super-rich, who in recent years have seen their income skyrocket while middle-class wages remained somewhat flat. As noted by Pat Garofalo, "Between 1979 and 2006, the inflation-adjusted after-tax income of the richest 1 percent of households increased by 256 percent, compared to 21 percent for families in the middle income quintile."

Nonetheless, Bush's tax cuts gave the top one percent of earners over $700 billion in tax breaks over ten years, which didn't exactly stimulate the economy for everyone else. The proposed surtax, which would have no effect on 98.8 percent of Americans, would require them give a portion of that unearned money back, while raising significant revenues for health insurance reform.

At any rate, Grassley's claim that such a plan is "idiotic" is in line with his other recent failures in bipartisanship. Earlier this week, Grassley used Sen. Ted Kennedy's brain tumor to fear monger about a public health insurance option.

That's right; it isn't beneath the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee and a key player in supposed "bipartisan" talks to politicize the medical condition of a dying Senate colleague.

It seems to me that's the real idiocy.

Drugged-Out Senators Are Killing The Public Option.

Citing an Associated Press report in a recent piece for Alternet, Bill Moyers and Michael Winship described a Washington awash in drug money. "...the drug industry's trade group PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) and the drug company Pfizer "reported spending more money than other health care organizations on lobbying in the second quarter of this year" - $6.2 million from PhRMA, $5.6 million from Pfizer.

"Including its latest report, PhRMA has now spent $13.1 million lobbying so far this year. Pfizer has reported $11.7 million in lobbying expenses for 2009."

This is part of the reason, as Alicia Mundy and Laura Meckler recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, that "the pharmaceuticals industry, which President Barack Obama promised to 'take on' during his campaign, is winning most of what it wants in the health-care overhaul."

Meanwhile, this from the Washington Post:

Senate negotiators are inching toward bipartisan agreement on a health-care plan that seeks middle ground on some of the thorniest issues facing Congress, offering the fragile outlines of a legislative consensus even as the political battle over reform intensifies outside Washington.

The emerging Finance Committee bill would shave about $100 billion off the projected trillion-dollar cost of the legislation over the next decade and eventually provide coverage to 94 percent of Americans, according to participants in the talks. It would expand Medicaid, crack down on insurers, abandon the government insurance option that President Obama is seeking and, for the first time, tax health-care benefits under the most generous plans. Backers say the bill would also offer the only concrete plan before Congress for reining in the skyrocketing cost of federal health programs over the long term.

Three Democrats and three Republicans from the Senate Finance Committee will brief Obama (today) about the progress of their sometimes arduous talks, which are now set to extend through the August recess. The negotiators are holding the details close as they continue to debate key issues, and it could be a challenge for them to meet the Sept. 15 deadline set by the committee's chairman, Max Baucus (D-Mont.), for a deal.

The bill would "abandon the government option?" PhRMA and the health insurance lobby must have spent their money well. And bipartisanship for bipartisanship's sake? That's some watered-down change I really can't believe in.

Let's Not Make A Deal.

From Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

Really bad news on the health care front. After making the case for a public option, and doing it very well, Obama said this:

“We have not drawn lines in the sand other than that reform has to control costs and that it has to provide relief to people who don’t have health insurance or are underinsured,” Mr. Obama said. “Those are the broad parameters that we’ve discussed.”

There he goes again, gratuitously making a big gift to the other side.

My big fear about Obama has always been not that he doesn’t understand the issues, but that his urge to compromise — his vision of himself as a politician who transcends the old partisan divisions — will lead him to negotiate with himself, and give away far too much. He did that on the stimulus bill, where he offered an inadequate plan in order to win bipartisan support, then got nothing in return — and was forced to reduce the plan further so that Susan Collins could claim her pound of flesh.

And now he’s done it on a key component of health care reform. What was the point of signaling, right at this crucial moment, that he’s willing to give away the public plan? Let alone doing it at the very moment that he was making such a good case for it?

Maybe there’s a way to recover from this. But it’s up to the health reform activists to stiffen the administration’s spine. Obama may be satisfied with “broad parameters” — but the rest of us aren’t, and have to make that known.

From Bloomberg.com:

Representative Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said that chamber will pass a measure that includes a public program.

“Americans overwhelmingly support a public option for health care,” Rangel, a Democrat of New York, said today in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We need competition.” Rangel’s committee holds a hearing on the legislation today.

Obama is signaling that he’s willing to compromise, and yesterday White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel carried the message to lawmakers that the president is “open to alternatives,” Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota said.

Mr. President, please don't tell us that in your quest for bipartisanship, you will negotiate a public option away. Because if you tell us that, we will have to tell you that that's not the change we voted for.

UPDATE: Sen. Conrad denies the Bloomberg story.

Non-Starter.

Bipartisanship Is A Cul-De-Sac On Capitol Hill.

Starstruck. 

Jan. 27, 2009: House Republicans surround the President after the meeting. Many of them were seeking his autograph. Every House Republican eventually voted against the bill.

     

     That caption from White House photographer Peter Souza, according to Sam Stein of the Huffington Post.

     The photograph is one of 23 Souza photos that the White House has posted as a slideshow documenting President Obama's efforts at bipartisanship with the GOP during the economic stimulus negotiations.

     I'm holding out for some steam room attendant's secret cellphone photos of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner washing Rush Limbaugh's feet as the radio fathead slips his marching orders into the pockets of their robes.