Tuesday, June 11, 2013

WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS AN OBAMAHAMMER...

Aiming to build opposition, foes liken immigration to 'Obamacare' 
Pointing to its hundreds of pages of legislative minutiae, opponents of the immigration reform effort are painting the bipartisan Senate bill as the policy sibling of the Affordable Care Act, hoping that conservative distaste for the law dubbed “Obamacare” will bleed into President Barack Obama’s next attempt at legacy legislation. 
See Exhibit A: A new op-ed from bill opponent Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, titled “My view: The 'Gang of Eight' bill is an immigration version of Obamacare.”
For years to come, wingnuts will scare their children by telling them the Obamacare is coming to get them.

69 comments:

  1. Jay B.2:25 PM

    The 'Gang of Eight' bill is an immigration version of Obamacare.”


    An imperfect, but ultimately slightly better response to a real-world issue than 'nothing'? Sounds like a bill I can reluctantly get somewhat behind!

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  3. shortstop3:33 PM

    I couldn't get all the way through your comment because my attention span ended at word six. Clearly, you should can the elitist crap and write shorter, more American comments that entertain me. No multiple-syllable words.

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  4. montag23:33 PM

    XG, unfortunately, it's an equation that's true these days--the complexity is designed in for lobbyists to gain advantage, at both the lawmaking and rule-making stages. I can think of no end of bills created in that fashion which turned out to be genuine disasters, including Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, etc., etc., and I think that was true, too, of the latest banking bill--which hasn't solved the problems it was purported to solve, along with ACA. ACA could have been much cleaner, much simpler, and more cost-effective, and in the case of the ACA, the complexity was intentional. The for-profit health sector was writing a shitload of that bill, and one can't tell me that they weren't doing everything possible to protect their interests. And one of the things they did to that end was make it horrifyingly difficult to read and understand. That bill is a corporate lawyer's wet dream. Even with implementation scheduled four years after enactment, it's still working its way through the regulatory process, and the court cases haven't even begun in earnest yet.

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  5. For years to come, wingnuts will scare their children by telling them the Obamacare is coming to get them.


    Just like all those Comuniss.

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  6. Jimcima3:59 PM

    Last week I attended a going away luncheon for a colleague who was leaving the coast to move to the midwest, away from California and "all that it stands for". He was leaving the giant corporation we work for to join another giant corporation with offices in Wisconsin, and he said the best thing about his job change was that he was getting out "before Obamacare kicked in". The other guests laughed and smiled and nodded knowingly, and I realized that these people, the people I work with, are cuckoo birds.

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  8. dstatton4:57 PM

    Of course. It's all clear now. Obama is Keyser Söze.

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  9. XeckyGilchrist5:01 PM

    You're right; I should be a bit more nuanced in my complaint, though that'd take a lot more words.


    You *know* the Republicans aren't objecting that the lobbyist-squid-ink property; it's pure anti-eggheadism. That's what I'm objecting to.

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  10. BigHank535:06 PM

    I guess if you live in California long enough, you could convince yourself that Wisconsin is a foreign country beyond the grasp of the Kenyan usurper. But I think you'd need some serious head trauma too.

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  11. montag25:11 PM

    "I should be a bit more nuanced in my complaint, though that'd take a lot more words."


    Well, hell, who cares about a few more words? You're not writing legislation here.


    But, yes, I agree, there's an anti-intellectual component to all such wingnutz complaints, and it's actually skillfully applied to appeal to the lowest common denominator (roughly defined as the "kill `em all, fuck `em all" group). But, for that bunch, if it's longer and denser than a Mallard Fillmore comic strip, it's lost on `em, anyway.

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  12. Derelict5:23 PM

    I guess this is the conservative expression of that ol' time religion: Investing the term "ObamaCare" with both totemic and conjuring powers.


    And conservatives wonder why normal people start edging toward the exits after two minutes of listening to them speak.

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  13. One harvest. No migrant farm workers.

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  14. gocart mozart5:29 PM

    I can see the similarities. Both are many pages long and contain lots of words. WORDS!

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  15. gocart mozart5:47 PM

    Nothing is denser than a Mallard Filmore strip. Well, maybe Jonah Goldberg.

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  16. gocart mozart5:48 PM

    Cruz is anti-immigrant already, Rubio is already in knots.

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  17. TGuerrant6:14 PM

    That's what prison chain gangs are for.

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  18. AGoodQuestion6:17 PM

    The greatest trick Obama ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

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  19. AGoodQuestion6:19 PM

    If he wants to avoid Obamacare why doesn't he leave the fucking country?

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  20. AGoodQuestion6:20 PM

    Shorter immigration opponents: I can't read.

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  21. I notice a strong tendency among workplace groups of conservatives like this to believe that liberals respect and admire Alan Colmes.

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  23. Gromet7:14 PM

    We've also all read Tip O'Neill's autobiography, dontcha know.

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  26. OOGAh-Boogah, chiliildren. This is Three Dog, here! Stop voting for the Enclave!

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  27. satch8:07 PM

    I'm sorry, but Obama and the Dems have only themselves to blame for the current bullshit storm over "Obamacare". They cobbled it together from the most corporate friendly components they could find, pre-emptively caved on single payer Medicare for all, passed it, and then pretty much walked away. Meanwhile, the Wingnut Wurlitzer ginned up a whole phony grassroots group known as the Tea Party to storm town hall meetings, crank up charges of Death Panels, health care rationing, and the notion that we could all be dragged off to jail if we didn't buy insurance. And when Antonin Scalia actually re-ran the Fox News talking point about how being forced to buy health insurance was like a fascist attempt to make us all buy broccoli, would it have killed someone, anyone, to point to Scalia and call him a moron? Obama and the Dems forgot the cardinal rule of politics in the 21st century: it's not enough to have good ideas, you've got to pound them home day after day after day, because the wingnuts have their own information sources that bear scant resemblance to reality, and the corporate media is more interested in covering screaming groups of idiots in tricorn hats than in listening to and parsing nuanced arguments on how to improve health care delivery. And now here we are, coming up on a mid term election, with an energized base of rabid conservatives and a progressive electorate which, if 2010 was any indication, seem poised to sit out another election oblivious to the harm that will be caused by their apathy.

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  28. JennOfArk8:11 PM

    I would have been tempted to congratulate him on his good fortune on moving out of a state where health insurance premiums have actually gone down to one where they are continuing to rise - and may rise in a much higher proportion than the majority of the states, if Gov. Fiscal Conservative When It Screws the Middle Class and Poor followed the lead of many of his teabagging peers and opted out of Medicaid expansion.

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  29. JennOfArk8:13 PM

    The Obamacare is calling from inside the house!!!!!

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  30. satch8:24 PM

    Oh, I dunno... Colmes is more of a fighter than he used to be. The only problem is that he's usually on the kind of low-wattage local radio station that sounds like a Radio Free Europe broadcast beaming into Hungary in 1956. And no conservative has listened to Colmes since Hannity ordered Fox to show him the door.

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  31. KatWillow8:43 PM

    Because everywhere he looks, everywhere he goes, he sees Socialized medicine! His only safety lies in states controlled by ALEC such as Wisconsin and Texas.

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  32. KatWillow8:44 PM

    ???

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  33. JennOfArk8:53 PM

    Sorry dude, but the only way we were gonna get Medicare for all would have been with some serious civil disobedience - strikes, the purposeful destruction of a state health insurance market or two, etc. The big money interests in healthcare are too wealthy and too entrenched, and the majority of the public too passive to force the really big changes that needed to be made. It's easy to excoriate Obama and the Dems for the half-assed insurance reform that we got, and I've done it myself, but realistically it's not like everyone had their backs. You and I, maybe, but not anything like a majority.
    The only time really big shit gets accomplished, it's because enough people are pissed off enough to put some hurt on business as usual. And it seems that too many of us have gotten lazy and flabby when it comes down to taking the risks and making the sacrifices necessary to bring the hurt.

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  34. Substance McGravitas9:37 PM

    Ha ha, Rick Santorum is late to the party:

    http://townhall.com/columnists/ricksantorum/2013/06/11/america-demands-truth-on-benghazi-n1616874

    On Sept. 11, 2012, four brave American diplomats were killed and
    10 other Americans were injured in Benghazi, Libya, by a mob of between
    125 and 150 heavily armed Islamists.
    This jarring event was a grim reminder of the continued threat to
    America that exists and should have been a wake-up call to the Obama
    administration about the deadly nature of radical Islam. But here we are
    now



    Yeah, here we are NOW and it's Obamacare again. You gonna run from BEHIND, Santorum?

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  35. i would like to hide under my covers (and not let my feet dangle off the side of the bed) with this comment.

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  36. montag210:19 PM

    Oh, hell, Santorum is a behind.

    "This jarring event was a grim reminder of the continued threat to
    America that exists...."


    Hmm, once again we are in a place that we shouldn't have been, hoping that we can bribe a bunch of crazy fuckers into becoming a reliable client state, and for reasons understandable to everyone except our own government, some of the crazy fuckers--perhaps to make a statement of intent not to become a client state of ours--killed some representatives of our government.


    At the risk of belaboring the obvious, said crazy fuckers did not come to Foggy Bottom to kill our people. We were in their neighborhood, not the other way around. And crazy fuckers like Santorum will continue this masquerade that we're entitled to set up camp anywhere we damned well please, and that the rest of the world can lump it if they don't like it.


    Sounds like a great way to keep the war rolling along to me. Fuck Santorum, he's as moronic a politician as one is ever going to find. It's no accident he got the #1 spot in the Dim Bulbs of Congress for 1996.

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  38. AGoodQuestion11:41 PM

    It's a paraphrase from The Usual Suspects.

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  39. And now here we are, coming up on a mid term election, with an energized base of rabid conservatives and a progressive electorate which, if 2010 was any indication, seem poised to sit out another election oblivious to the harm that will be caused by their apathy.



    This is a zombie lie.


    It wasn't progressives who sat at home in 2010, it was the white centrist or conservative democrats of a certain age that stayed glued to their barcoloungers.


    Blaming the leftmost side of the party is always fun, no? But rarely enlightening or productive.

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  40. Since Republican elites seem to realize that overtly shitting on Hispanic voters may not be wise, opposing the immigration bill "because Obamacare" makes a certain amount of sense. Sure, it's downright stupid, but it's better than the racist bilge the base would come up with on its own. Since the Rs seem reluctant to throw the real red meat (note how quickly Richwine was disappeared), they're trying the other white meat instead.

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  41. DocAmazing1:07 AM

    they're trying the other white meat instead


    I see what you did there...

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  42. DocAmazing1:11 AM

    Do you think you can convince the rest of your co-workers to relocate to Wisconsin, too?

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  43. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard1:20 AM

    Santorum usually runs from one's behind...

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  44. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard1:27 AM

    No way, Wisconsin is purple, tell them to move to Oklahoma or Alabama.

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  46. Aimai6:40 AM

    This is just a test to see if I can comment from a wobbly train heading from Bruges to Paris. It's like a cry for help, really. I can't quit you people!

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  47. BigHank537:08 AM

    I prefer to bury my head in the many volumes ghostwritten by Bill Ayres.

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  48. redoubt7:50 AM

    You say that as if a "wobbly train from Bruges to Paris" is a bad thing (never been to Europe).

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  49. Teresa8:37 AM

    Having health care is very very evil while not having health care is simply terrific. Today's republicans are just plain old wired wrong.

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  50. satch9:16 AM

    In 2012 I was overjoyed to see the voters in states which went to great lengths to restrict the vote line up for hours to prove that they would not be intimidated or discouraged. Those weren't white conservative or centrist Dems of a certain age, they were progressives and people of color excited to be voting. And those are the same voters who, unfortunately, are harder to motivate in an off-year election which has local candidates with low national profiles, but which can have a huge impact on government. Since conservatives aren't really interested in governing, they have, smartly, realized that they don't really need a wingnut president, they just need to elect enough rabid Teabaggers to block legislation, stall appointments, and bollix up the budget process so nothing gets accomplished. If Obama didn't exist, they'd have had to manufacture him, since he serves as a shining example of how they're just ever so oppressed, and the only way Obama can ruin their plans is to fight hard and often for progressive positions, while realizing that some fights are worth having even when you might lose.

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  51. Helmut Monotreme9:20 AM

    California transplants are always welcome in Wisconsin. They prop up the emergency rescue and tow truck industries. And with ALEC and the Koch brothers, we're getting used to out of state interests controlling our legislature. Sigh.

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  52. BadExampleMan9:31 AM

    Which was a paraphrase of Baudelaire.

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  53. BadExampleMan9:33 AM

    Is that what you kids are calling it these days?

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  54. mgmonklewis9:45 AM

    Anything denser would approach a singularity of Stupid.

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  55. Ellis_Weiner11:46 AM

    No they don't. Conservatives don't wonder anything. What we call "normal people" are, to them, communist/socialist/Murka-hating traitors. Either that, or they're the negligible part of the population you just accept you're going to lose when you're running the big con.

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  56. KatWillow12:49 PM

    We had a Dem president, Dem majority in Senate and the House, yet the Dems still allowed the repugs to control everything. Nothing useful got done. The Health Care plan sucked, no repugs criminals were prosecuted, in fact Obama KEPT a lot of the repugs in the Justice dept. I think a lot of people thought "what's the use of voting Dem if the dems won't do anything?"

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  57. That "Dem majority in Senate" needed 60 votes to overcome a Republican minority that had vowed to filibuster any bill they didn't like. Democrats didn't have those votes because of people like Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Olympia Snowe, et alia.

    The healthcare plan sucks except for the people already benefiting from it, then it's probably not so bad and maybe better than 'eat shit and go to the emergency room.'

    "Dems won't do anything" is another zombie lie, propped up by the chronically under-reported fact that Republicans, since the election of Barack Obama, have filibustered more bills than any congress in history. As for lack of prosecutions of bankers and war criminals in the previous administration? We all have our list of Obama disappointments.

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  58. Goldberg is so dense, light bends around him.

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  59. Halloween_Jack4:47 PM

    I'm flabbergasted with the fact that, with all the things that this administration has done that it is and should be criticized for, there are still those who think that single payer could realistically be a thing.

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  60. Gabriel Ratchet5:09 PM

    When it bends around him, it really bends around him ...

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  61. satch5:33 PM

    I mentioned single payer not because I thought it was a possibility, but because, as I said above, some fights are worth having even when the odds are that you'll lose. And the main feature of single payer, that it would have been the greatest boon to the "Small Businessman"(tm) AND the corporate behemoth ever conceived by government, since it would have relieved them of one of the biggest costs of doing business they have, was never emphasized. If you're worried about things that could "realistically happen", then we can forget about most of the progressive agenda, since it will never happen without a fight.

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  62. Matt Jones6:50 PM

    If by "a version of Obamacare" Sen. Lee means "a weak-ass, watered-down solution that uses methods originally suggested by the GOP but will still cause teahadis and assorted RW loonballs everywhere to shit their pants", then he might be onto something... ;)

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  63. Halloween_Jack10:09 AM

    some fights are worth having even when the odds are that you'll lose.


    In other words, you're siding with the perfect rather than the good. Got it.

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  64. Well, good has to actually be good first, and perfect is never perfect.

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  65. billcinsd11:49 AM

    why can't one try for the best and compromise to the good rather than start with the OK and compromising to the mediocre? Manicheanism is bad politics

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  66. Because some people are already campaign-managers in their heads, hedging the bets, I guess.

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  67. Only the toes knows...

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