Medicare, Ryan, Romney, Medicare, Medicare

Republicans will try, every day, from now until November, to say they are trying to save Medicare from inevitable bankruptcy and destruction.

They have, of course, invented a fatal disease for Medicare, which does not threaten it. 

As Democrats, we should all emulate Gail Collins, who cannot write about Mitt Romney without including some reference to a dog strapped to the top of a car.

We must always mention Romney/Ryan want to kill Medicare and substitute Coupon Care, as if you can replace a living thing with a dead body and call it life saving.

Romney/Ryan, the Medicare Murderers. Romney/Ryan, axe murderers of Medicare. Romney/Ryan, Medicare killers.

I don't know...vote here for your favorite. But this should be not just the lead sentence, but part of their names. 

For Republicans, it's the "Democrat Party."  For Democrats it should be...What? The Medicare Killer Party?  

I'm not much with Marketing Phrases.  Help me out.

Paul Ryan--The Man Who Gave You Coupon Care

Mitt Romney's new best friend, Paul Ryan, tried to kill Medicare in the last session of Congress. 
Remember that American general from the Viet Nam war who, when asked why he napalmed a village said, "We had to destroy that village to save it"--well, his newthink is alive and well with Paul Ryan, who says we have to kill Medicare as a program which covers fully the costs of medical care, but we'll "replace" it with a coupon, say $8000 a year to help you cover your costs, should you need that coronary bypass surgery.  The surgery will run about $180,000, but hey, the coupon will help.

Can't say those Republicans don't know business.

And just wait 'till you hear what they have planned for Social Security!

Can't wait? Look up Frank Guinta on the subject.

Hint to google:  "I hope my children never have to know what Social Security is. We ought to kill it now."

Trickle Down Tax Cut Pixie Dust: How They Do

                                       Rogers--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Jackie Cilley, candidate for governor, shined her high beams on some of the Republican pixie dust last night.

For one thing, she pointed out the obvious truth which Republicans deny that when the Republicans cut taxes, they actually do not reduce taxes--they simply redistribute where the taxes fall hardest. In fact, what the Republicans do is to concentrate taxes in  some areas--property tax and business taxes--while they resist spreading out the tax burden over those who can most easily pay. 

The new Republicans--those Tea Party mutants who have taken a no income tax pledge have simply put off limits any source of taxes which Republicans think will result in votes, while leaving some taxes high.

When you press them, they will say, well property taxes will eventually come down as well, when we reduce government to the size you can drown in your bathtub.

And what does that really mean?  Well, what does government do in New Hampshire? That means reducing police protection, cutting fire and rescue, reducing spending on programs which keep poor and uninsured people out of emergency rooms, and most of all, cutting schools--"government run schools." The Republicans are against public schools--they say you should home school your kid, or send your kid to Phillips Exeter Academy, or to a religious school.

You can understand why Republicans would not want to fund schools where the public just might learn to think critically.

So, you can pay off your mortgage, just as you enter your golden years of retirement, but guess what?  Under the Republican plan, you will still pay a mortgage every 6 months to your town and state--and you'll pay more than you would in 46 other states.

Welcome to low tax Republican New Hampshire.

And now Mr. Romney has shown his hand: Paul Ryan is his new best friend. You remember Mr. Ryan--he's the man who pushed legislation to kill Medicare, to replace it with Coupon Care. The Democrats wouldn't let him do it, but Kelley Ayotte and Frank Guinta were all for it. And Mr. Guinta, being a good Republican wants to kill Social Security--says he doesn't want his kids to ever even learn there ever was such a nasty  program in this country.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are charging hard to crush rampant voter fraud (aka voting while poor, black or Democratic) and their next target, as the man says, is rampant Food Stamp abuse by pixies.

The Trouble with Democrats

Here's a case study which may offer some insights to how the Republican party--a party which exists to protect a small elite-- can win elections against a Democratic party which fights for the interests of the 99%.

Here's a case which may illuminate how the small, dedicated group can out maneuver the larger, more unwieldy and less focused group.

Every day I eat lunch with a half dozen  thirty something women at work--women with seven year old children, women who do not watch the evening news, who do not read a newspaper, who listen to music, not news on their car radios, women who refuse to listen to National Public Radio, because it is boring and it carries too many stories about places like Somalia and Syria and Afghanistan which are places these women will never go and do not care about. They care about day care and sales at Kohl's.

But every day at lunch, as they are eating their microwaved meals, and chatting about which teachers they hope their kids will get at various elementary schools in Dover or Newmarket, they also flip open their i phones or i pads and they go on youtube  for the hoot of the day, some posting to which someone sent them a link, because it was funny.

So how to reach these voters? (And they do vote.)

It turns out political scientists are well aware of this group and they have names for these people: The unengaged, the apathetic, the uninterested masses, who get their opinions from talk radio or political ads, which they don't even realize are ads, which they think of as news.
It's fine to do library clean ups and back yard barbecues for the hoi polloi in Hampton, but you won't reach this crowd.
So how do you reach them?
I proposed creating a puppet show, like Sesame Street, with puppets giving voice to the looney things Rush Limbaugh, Frank Guinta and the whole whacko Tea Party crowd say and then have some puppets react in horror to "Abortion causes Breast Cancer," and "Birth control pills cause Prostate Cancer," and "I hope my children never even learn what Social Security ever was, that it ever existed."
But, having written the scripts for these shows, I needed help filming them, putting them on line. I can write scripts, which really write themselves, or actually, are written by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck et al.
But how to get them filmed and put on line?
I started with the local Democrats in Hampton, who were polite, but uncomprehending. They knew about barbecues, but youtube was beyond them. 
They sent me to the Portsmouth Democrats, who referred me to a few seacoast Democrats. One of them played guitar and sang songs at political rallies  but he was "too busy with all I have to do," and he was not of a mind to collaborate. 
Eventually, I got sent to a media group of local talent, actors, film makers, video technicians.  But the actors/film makers  were, mostly,  politically indifferent.  

It was a case, as Dylan would say, of "It was dying and hardly yet been born."

The point is, there was no follow up. There was nobody in the local Democratic Party machine to connect "creative talent" to dedicated, politically motivated citizens and so voice was never given to this project.
Maybe it makes no difference. Maybe it would not have had much effect. But we will never know.

Can you imagine, if I had been a Republican with an idea like this...how quickly I would have been connected to people who would have put this thing into action? 

I have to believe we would have been on youtube months ago, and the project may have been escalated into an ad campaign funded by the Koch brothers.
 I would have heard from the National Party people, once the pilot episodes were on line.
But in the case of the Democratic party, there were people who just murmured, "Oh, that sounds cool," or "That sounds like fun," and they went back to their guitars, their hikes on Mount Major, their local theater productions. 
There was no real passion, no real drive, no follow up and none of the things Mitt Romney talks about as characteristic of the qualities which launch ideas into businesses.
Maybe that's why the Republicans beat the Democrats so consistently: They really are more capable--they have drive where Democrats have dreams; they have organization and connectedness, where Democrats have book clubs and walks on the beach with friends; Republicans know how to take an idea and give it form and punch. Democrats are all talk, no action.

The Second Amendment

"A well regulate Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
--The Second Amendment of the Constitution--IN ITS ENTIRETY

So, here in a single sentence, we are given the reason for the allocation of a specific right. We want the state to remain free. To insure this we need security. To secure the state we need a militia. Militias must have guns.
So this is the state of affairs in 1783. No standing army. No armories. No missile silos. No nuclear submarines. No stealth bombers. No drones. Just a bunch of guys who have houses with fireplaces and mantel pieces and above each is a black powder musket, like the ones they fired on British troops at Bunker Hill.
In his love of "the original" text of the Constitution, Antonin Scalia, and his originalist brethren on the Supreme Court find an inalienable right for eunuchoid wackos, who have so little self regard they need to hold an AK 47 in their hands to feel like men. These men need to be able to keep an arsenal of attack rifles, grenade launchers and boxes of rounds of ammunition at home. 


I don't know why they can't have tanks in their driveways and rocket launchers. 


It's all right there in the 2nd Amendment.


There may be one or two other places in the Constitution where the framers take the trouble to explain why they are granting a specific right, just to make clear the rationale and to imply there are reasons here which might someday change. But I can't bring another to mind, right off the bat.

GOP Rare Moment of Honesty: Health CareI Is For Those Who Have It

WALLACE: One of the keys to ObamaCare is that it will extend insurance access to 30 million people who are now uninsured. In your replacement, how would you provide universal coverage?
MCCONNELL: Well first let me say the first single thing we can do for the American system is get rid of ObamaCare. … The single biggest direction we can take in terms of improving health care is to get rid of this monstrosity. [...]
WALLACE: But you’re talking about repealing and replace, how would you provide universal coverage?
MCCONNELL: I’ll get to it in a minute. [...]
WALLACE: I just want to ask, what specifically are you going to do to provide universal coverage to the 30 million people who are uninsured?
MCCONNELL: That is not the issue. The question is, how can you go step by step to improve the American health care system. … We’re not going to turn the American health care system into a Western European system.

Republicans are masters of framing the debate--if they believe something they know will be unpopular, they are slippery enough to say something they think will lead to an applause line. So taxing billoinaires becomes thwarting the "job creators," and playing Russian roulette with the economy. Now, when asked whether the Republicans care about the millions of uninsured Americans, Mitch McConnell says, that's not the point. The point is we don't want to do what those pinko commie European semi socialist nations (like Great Brittain) have done and allow government to take over the world's best medical care system (which would surprise Sweden, Norway, the UK, France and Germany to learn--all of whom have better systems than we do.)

What's wrong with this on a political level?  Nothing, actually, most Americans, about 300 million out of 330 million have health insurance and don't particularly care about those who do not.

What's wrong with this on a policy level?  Those 30 million uninsured are dragging the system down. Our system is failing because of those uninsured, who flood our emergency rooms and wind up flooding our hospital wards and driving up costs for the 300 million.

We are being penny wise and pound foolish--just as the Greeks discovered when they stopped paying for free sterile syringes for drug addicts. Nobody likes drug addicts, let them die. But then those drug addicts reused syringes, shared them and HIV and Hep C rates skyrocketed and spilled over to infect the general population, filled the wards and cost way more than a few sterile syringes would ever have cost.

Stupid policy makes waste, something the Republicans with their insistence on bad government are teaching us year by year.

Wanted: Democrats with Bite

At the onset of the Civil War, the South had negligible factory capacity to produce cannon, too little land under cultivation for crops (though lots of land devoted to cash crops), no navy to prevent a blockade of ports, a population about 1/3 that of the north, and no functioning central government. The North had all the advantages of numbers in people, factories, food and wealth. All the South had was, as Rhett Butler observed, cotton, slaves and arrogance.

That war should have been over in 4 months, not 4 years.

But as they were fond of saying in the South, "It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog." 

The South had two things: 1. The capacity to reframe the argument.  2. Good leaders: leaders with daring, who were not afraid of a fight.

When it came to the argument, well, slavery was not a great policy. Only a small aristocracy actually owned slaves, and the South would need all of its men to fight; it would need to bring on board  the 19th century equivalent of Joe Sixpack. So, the fight would be about "states rights."  Everyone had to like the right of states to do what they wanted without some Big Government in distant Washington telling them what to do.

When we think about how the Republican party of today has managed to recruit to its ranks so many who are not in the top 1%, it has used the same technique: reframe the argument. This election is not about economic fairness, it's about Big Government. 

Aren't we all just appalled by Big Government?

We might like Medicare and Social Security and the internet and the cohesiveness it took to beat Hitler, but Big Government? Hell, that's something we can all agree to hate.

And as for leaders: Consider the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell who, when given the unenviable task of making a case for continuing tax cuts for the billionaires comes up with the brilliant remark that to change the tax code now, in this precarious economy would be like playing Russian roulette with the economy.

Russian roulette, oh, that's bad.  You point the gun at your own head in that game.

And who do the Democrats have to respond to this?  Why, Casper Milquetoast himself, with that wispy little voice, that walking apology, Harry Reid, who says, oh, well, no, actually, we are not trying to hold a gun to anyone's head, we are just concerned about the current economic situation, so sorry to upset you.

It took Lincoln a few years to finally find some generals to match those of the opposition. And they were flawed men: Sherman was a depressive and Sheridan was ruthless and Grant was said to be a drunk. Lincoln said he'd like to find out just exactly what it was Grant drank, so he could supply it to his other generals. As Lincoln  summed it up, "He fights."

We need a Grant and Sherman and a Sheridan now, in the Democratic party, to turn the tide of the war. We are clearly losing to a "cause" which is no more worthy than that great Southern  Cause.  We have lost important battles: The election of 2010 lost the House of Representatives to the Tea Party Frank Guintas and Paul Ryans who want to destroy Social Security and Medicare. In the state house in Concord we have the same lunatic core of Republicans who want to sent us back to the 19th century, to an agrarian state which spurns the idea of community and cooperative effort.

I'm still looking for a dog with some sizable fight.