Ok, here’s an argument I am sick to damn death of hearing: Sure, HCR may have been a mess with huge bailouts and bribes given to the mass-murdering insurance companies, Big Pharma, Hospital chains and the like, but hey, it’s serious progress, because it makes healthcare a ‘right’ in America for the first time.

Christ people. Health care is now a right. I know, I know. We didn’t get to punish insurance companies and tell off the Republicans while we did it. I give up.

Wrong. Astoundingly, absolutely, ridiculously stupid and wrong.

Under the new HCR scheme, you don’t have a ‘right’ to healthcare. You don’t even have a ‘right’ to health insurance. What you have is a mandate to PURCHASE or otherwise acquire insurance, and maybe, if you’re poor enough, the government will pick it up for you or put you on Medicaid instead. Otherwise you’ll get inadequate subsidies, and if you still can’t pay, the Feds will have the IRS take a fine out of your tax return.

See the difference? I know it’s subtle. /snark

A right is something that is guaranteed to you, that your fellow citizens have to respect and your government is obligated to protect. In no way, under no conceivable logic, does this healthcare bill give you a ‘right’ to health care. At best, it protects you from being completely denied for insurance under certain criteria. That’s ok; the insurance companies can just raise the premiums to whatever they want with no meaningful oversight on rates, and if you don’t like it, tough luck. If you can’t afford the copays after the sky high premiums? Tough luck. If they deny your care after you pay their extortionate rates? You can appeal, and appeal, and appeal, and if you’re still alive when and if they get overturned, you might get your care.

Good luck with that.

Apparently Senator Webb recently felt the need to take a stand on a particularly pressing area of public policy:

White people are being kept down by the government and funny colored immigrants.

No, seriously:

I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America’s economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived.

Yes indeed, it is a tragic historical irony that the white man, once lord and master of all he could survey (and steal from the Native Americans) has become a lowly serf in his own former kingdom of ‘Merika, kept in chains by those dastardly college admissions offices and a social safety net so robust it is the envy of slackers and Communists the world over.

Wait. What?

Lyndon Johnson’s initial program for affirmative action was based on the 13th Amendment and on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which authorized the federal government to take actions in order to eliminate “the badges of slavery.” Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.

Yeah, I seem to recall that Southern Whites were particularly understanding of these policies.

Webb goes out of his way to justify the past existence of programs to aid African-Americans, and even notes their continued necessity… before calling for their elimination, in favor of some nebulous ‘aid’. Riiiiiiiight.

So, if it’s not hating on black people that’s gotten Senator Webb so agitated, what rod HAS been jammed up his butt? Turns out it’s a rising, inexorable tide of BROWN AND YELLOW PEOPLE heading to America.

*dun dun DUNNN*

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

*sigh* Ok. First of all, the United States has, as official governmental policy long claimed the ENTIRE WESTERN HEMISPHERE as its own private sandbox; it was called the ‘Monroe Doctrine’

Then there’s the matter of our very long-standing policies of economic imperialism in Latin America, setting up banana republics, toppling governments we don’t like, fueling both sides of the violent drug wars on Latin American soil, setting up an entire academy for Latin American human rights abuse and mass murder, etc. Naturally many of these policies continue to the present day.

And if all that doesn’t work, we just embargo your country, ala Cuba.

So one might, just might, be forgiven for thinking that the United States has had *some* negative influence over the lives of people throughout Latin America, over the years. Just maybe.

But it’s clearly nothing compared to what’s happened to white people here in America:

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy.

…

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America’s white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

See? Some of those funny colored people are super-smart, and they’re invading America to take our jobs, thanks to the Federal Government! Conspiracy! Conspiracy!

In support of his thesis concerning the longstanding oppression of the lowly White Man, Webb cites a study from the 70s on how many people went to college and some data on how much schoolkids got per capita during the Great Depression. (He also repeatedly confuses the concepts of religious background and ethnicity.)

This groundbreaking and ironclad research completely and forever refutes the silly notion that white people are privileged in American society.

I hope my fellow liberals are ashamed. /snark

In all seriousness, here we have a Democratic Senator going to the Wall Street Journal to vent his ugly, nativist, racially inflammatory gobbleydegook, and that’s apparently ok. We have to have a big tent, after all.

Uggh. This party deserves every ounce of the curb-stomping it’s going to receive at the polls in November.

As has become the custom with unconscionable, anti-liberal acts perpetrated by the Obama administration, one of Obama’s steadfast defenders in the lefty blogosphere steps up with a half-baked, pathetic attempt to whitewash the offense. This time it’s the unfathomably stupid decision to fire Shirley Sherrod, and the man at bat is Josh Marshall:

Forty-eight hours ago the story was another bad apple found on Obama’s cart. By yesterday morning it was another black eye for Obama and Tom Vilsack for rushing to dump a blameless woman on no good evidence and cravenly or cowardly or pusillanimously running for cover because Breitbart, Roger Ailes and whatever other gods of The Crazy said boo! For progressives mad at their president, at some level, that’s understandable. They have no relationship with and expect only the worst from the Breitbarts and Fox Newses of the world. But with Obama they expect more. And it’s personal.

Still, you just have to back up from that and realize that as disappointing as Tom Vilsack’s first crack at this was, the idea that he or Obama is the bad guy in this story is not only preposterous but verging on obscene. It’s like the NYPD as the bad guy in the Son of Sam saga because they didn’t catch David Berkowitz fast enough. Or perhaps that the real moral of the story is that the woman with the stalker should have been more focused on personal data security. Not for some time has something so captured the essential corruption of a big chunk of what passes as ‘right wing media’ (not all, by any means, but a sizable chunk along the Breitbart/Fox/Hannity continuum) and the corruption of the mainstream media itself as this episode.

Josh should be glad he’s not taking his SATs because that analogy is one of the worst I’ve ever seen.

First of all, the Obama administration isn’t the NYPD in this analogy; they didn’t try to STOP the egregious offense in question, rather they legitimized it and then savagely added injury to Breitbart’s idiotic insults. Marshall doesn’t just try to hold Vilsack and his superiors blameless for firing a woman based upon lies spread by a professional media con artist; he paints them as avenging angels trying to stop it.

Utter madness.

A far better construction would paint the administration, or at least Vilsack, as Berkowitz, and Breitbart as the demonic dog that ‘made’ him do it. No matter how much Breitbart preens for attention, like a misbehaving child, he can’t *make* anyone overreact.

So a self-promoting, right-wing race-baiter of the first degree unleashes another ’story’ on our pathetic national media. Vilsack, whether pressured from above or not, forces an employee of the US government out of her job based on heavily edited, misleading video pushed by said race-baiter. He doesn’t investigate, he doesn’t find out the facts, he doesn’t obtain the unedited video, even after the ACORN ’scandal’ evaporated into thin air.

No; Vilsack heard a voice telling him to do something, and he did it.

Then you have the White House. What’s their role in this? Hard to say, as of yet. One thing’s for sure: Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina was bragging about what a great job they did canning an innocent woman to avoid media attention:

One source, who is unhappy with the administration’s handling of the incident, paraphrased Messina’s remarks: “We could have waited all day – we could have had a media circus – but we took decisive action and it’s a good example of how to respond in this atmosphere.”

Vilsack claims the firing was his call alone and that he fell down on the job; the White House seems to agree and seeks to avoid blame themselves. Both have offered their worthless apologies. Will there be any accountability?

Nope.

Gibbs maintained that the White House didn’t order Sherrod’s firing. He said President Obama was first told about the situation yesterday, and was briefed again today.

He also said that Vilsack’s job is safe.

Recap: ACORN fraudster Breitbart peddles another phony video. Vilsack fires an innocent woman; the Obama White House crows about what a great thing the administration did. After the full video is inevitably released and clears Sherrod, both Vilsack and the White House backpeddle furiously. Other than Ms. Sherrod, nobody’s lost their job. Despite being shown to be completely and utterly useless, Vilsack gets to stay.

Somehow, for Marshall and others in the O-Bot camp, that only reflects badly on Breitbart. What an accountability free world they live in.

This is one of the most appalling and despicable things I’ve ever read in my life. From the Fiscal Times interview with David Obey, by way of The Washington Independent:

We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change.

Yes, that’s right. Rather than cut a sliver out of Arne Duncan’s blackmail fund used to bribe the states into enacting his pet projects, the administration apparently suggested cutting the money that desperate families need to EAT.

I don’t want to hear one goddamned word defending these people anymore. I just don’t. They use shock doctrine tactics to attack public school teachers in a recession, then turn around and try to take food from poor families’ tables to keep dangling prize money over frantic, desperate states who are trying not to lay off what teachers they have left. These monsters make me physically ill.

I hope they all rot in hell. As an atheist, I wish I could believe they would.

I guess someone’s criticism of Obama got under his skin yet again, because the esteemed Mr. Cole went off on a tear again about how nobody gives President Obama any ‘credit’:

And when you point that out, you are hippie-punching or just an O-bot and not a critical thinker. And he managed to do all this without ANY help from the Republicans and minimal help from the Blue Dogs, all while dealing with a childish media (Is he smoking? Does he hate the womyn folks because he won’t shoot hoops with them? Is he angry enough?) and a left-flank that thinks teaming up with Grover Norquist and echoing Republican talking points is moving the fucking Overton Window.

You point out the fact that this is the most successful Democratic Presidency in my lifetime and all you hear is but, but but… He didn’t get single payer!

This after Cole posted a lengthy comment about all the supposed achievements of the Obama administration, getting the health care fiasco passed, the stimulus bill, his Fierce Advocacy on gay rights or on behalf of BP victims, etc. Why, oh why, the Obama-bots ask, won’t we give him any credit for these enormous legislative achievements?

Answer: because, and I’m truly sick of saying this to Obama supporters, LIFE DOES NOT GRADE ON A CURVE.

Let’s just take one example from the list, the stimulus bill, and thus evaluate Obama’s overall work on the economy.

Why don’t I give Obama credit for the stimulus bill? Because it didn’t work. It didn’t work, his own advisors knew it wouldn’t work, prominent economists like Paul Krugman said it wouldn’t work, and he pursued it anyway, knowing it was too small, because he thought it was good politics.

Did it do some good? Yes, in the same way that pouring a single bucket of ice water on the fire consuming your home does good. Did it come anywhere remotely close to solving the problem? No. Absolutely not.

Here are some handy facts about life post-stimulus, sports fans:

–Long-term unemployment is at record levels, with over 4.7 million Americans looking for work for over a year.
–An astonishing 22% of children in the United States will live in poverty this year. That’s right; 22%.
–Since the start of the Second Great Depression, Americans’ personal income has declined by a shocking 500 billion dollars, even as exports and corporate profits soar.
–In 2009, Fortune 500 profits tripled to 391 billion. That’s right, 391 BILLION dollars. Profit. Simultaneously, they fired 800 thousand people.
–Gross Domestic Product is off by approximately 1.3 trillion, that’s trillion with a ‘t’, dollars. That’s counting the much-vaunted stimulus bill, and gives you a good idea how inadequate it was.
–Unemployment is now forecast to rise to 9.9% in early 2011, by the esteemed, and thoroughly bailed out, Masters of the Universe at Goldman Sachs.

So let’s recap: according to Obama supporters, we should give him lots of credit for a stimulus bill that prevented the recession from getting worse… only it’s apocalyptically bad, and in fact, projected to get worse yet. Almost five million Americans have been looking for a job for a year with no luck, and the unemployment rate overall is at the astronomical level of 9.7%. Worse, it’s projected to go up another .2%. Things aren’t getting better; they’re getting… worse.

Meanwhile, corporate profits are through the roof and hey, the banks got bailed out at 100%, including Goldman.

This, right here, is the root cause of my greatest frustration with Obama supporters. They think that they’re arguing with us when they go on about how successful he is, when in fact, they’re arguing with the cold and indifferent universe itself, and that’s an argument you just cannot win. No matter how many times you say black is white, it doesn’t become true, and no matter how many times you claim otherwise, the stimulus bill DID NOT WORK.

And Obama knew it wouldn’t. He knew, and pursued a failed policy anyway, with bold speeches and fierce advocacy.

Over and over throughout the Obama presidency I go back to a post by Ian Welsh about what he calls the ‘American Death Wish’, which also aptly sums up Obama’s repeated pursuit of inadequate half-measures, from the wars to the economy to health care, climate change and financial reform. The choicest bit:

Sometimes the world doesn’t grade us on a curve. You need to jump a fence, and you can’t. You need to climb a rock face, and you aren’t good enough. You’re running away from a bear, and you don’t run fast enough. And now you’re dead. You wanted to get into a good grad school, but you don’t have the grades or test scores. You’re in a fight, and the other guy wins, and you wind up on the ground and he puts the boots to you and you’re crippled for life. You tried “your best”, but you lost and you’re going to pay the price for losing for the rest of your life. Maybe you lost because he fought dirty, and you’d rather take a chance of being crippled for life than kick someone in the balls. Maybe you lost because he trained harder than you, and you’d rather go have a drink with your friends.

Or maybe you needed to pay for health care, and you didn’t have the money, and someone you loved died. And they died because you didn’t have the money, and because your country didn’t have universal health care. And maybe you always worked as hard as you could, and you campaigned for health care with all your heart. It doesn’t matter, your child, your wife, your husband—they’re still dead. Your best wasn’t good enough.

I don’t give Obama undue credit, or praise for half-measures, because if this is his best, his best isn’t good enough. He’s the President of the gods-damned United States; if his best isn’t good enough, then nobody’s is. We’re not getting better as a nation until more people stop praising the perpetual mediocrity machine that is the Obama Administration, endlessly pursuing legislative compromise with the Republicans while struggling to make the universe conform to its wishy-washy corporatist centrism.

Up isn’t down. Black isn’t white. Obama’s efforts to change the world to suit his views have failed. Recognize that fact and move on.