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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, July 25, 2009

I'll Take No For A Hundred, Alex 

...the question offered by the headline of this AP article is, in itself, fascinating in a perverse way:
Lobbyists the silver lining in health care storm?

Given all the forces in play and stakes at play in this whole "health care reform" debate (and that in itself is a misnomer, because what is mostly being fought over is changes to how health insurance would pay for health care), the very last thing that needs to be mentioned is just how the people who stand to gain the most from the failure the failure to include a public option are the people who are the ultimate driving force behind seeing this whole brutal process through to the end...

So I pick "No" to the prospect of lobbyists being the driving force behind seeing this thing through to the end. These aren't people who have your or my best outcomes in mind; they represent corporate interests looking to make money out of the whole health system thing, which is the fundamental problem with health care coverage in the United States in the first place. They are the people who first trotted out "Harry and Louise" 15 years ago in a successful effort to kill any sort of health care coverage for all Americans...

They are the reason that there a fundraiser being held in the area to help defray the medical costs for a kid who spent some time in the grips of the health care system recently because he was struck by lightning. They are the reason that checkout counters all across the country have had plastic jars with money slits cut in the top and a pasted-on picture of some child in need of a liver or a kidney or a heart or some radical medical treatment sitting next to the cash register. They are the reason that people that I know - and, very likely, people you know - are losing their homes because of the combined pressures of a difficult economy and major medical bills either not covered by paid-for insurance or not covered because of a lack of insurance...

The idea of health care industry lobbyists being the life-force keeping this thing on the rails suggests the prospects of an outcome that the word "grim" doesn't come close to being suitable to describe...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:38 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Kicking The Raptor Out Of The Nest 

...the fascinating thing about today's Senate vote to kill funding for further production of F-22 Raptors isn't so much the final tally (58-40 against), but the frankly weird distribution of the votes along the political spectrum. You can almost map the states in which parts and pieces of the F-22 are manufactured by looking at the way that Senators voted on the question. The outcome of this vote is, paradoxically, perhaps the first actual real-live bipartisan vote that the Obama administration has been able to garner over it's first six months...

The likes of Shelby, Lugar, Bond, Ensign, Gregg, DeMint, and Coburn voted "Yes" on the amendment, joining with amendment co-sponsor John McCain to eliminate funding for a state-of-the-art 'gee whiz' Buck Rodgers stealth air-superiority fighter that cost $40,000 an hour to fly and may suffer the delamination of its mission-critical stealth radar-deflecting coating if flown through a rain shower. On the other hand, the likes of Boxer, Feinstein, Dodd, Cantwell, Murray, and Byrd voted "No" in an effort to sustain the manufacture of a weapons system that the people for whom it is intended keep insisting that they don't want (and, yes, there is a chance that those military officials are advocating the reasoning of the current administration for purposes of job security, but the fact remains that the Pentagon has been pushing back against ongoing F-22 production for a few years now...although Rummy was involved, which raises a whole 'nother set of questions about motivations)...

Today's Senate vote was the perfect example of the power of the very military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about being actually in action on the slippery fields on which political games are played. Various components of the F-22 are cranked out in factories in no less than 44 states, and it's not hard to figure out where some of those 44 states are when one looks at Democratic votes...

There is, of course, the whole 'protection' vote that party Whips earn their street cred keeping track of, and that may well play a role in this particular moment; some of these seemingly bizarre Democratic votes are probably votes targeting further electoral success for Senator's in 'soft' seats because the count showed that the amendment would pass without specific votes. After all, it's not like that's never happened before...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:22 PM 0 comments

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