You don't think that in light of the fact that he was the deciding vote in bringing this down, that calling him "Trump's lackey" and saying that he was kissing Trump's ass, and saying that he was taking orders from Trump, (all things you've said in this discussion) is deserving of at least a few mouthfuls of crow?
Not really, I think he made little sense in his speech re why he voted the way he did if he wanted to try and get a bipartisan effort going (as I said above). I will admit I think he made the right decision this time, but it seems incongruous with his previous vote. So I will commend him for this latest vote (enough crow), but I am still confused as to where he stands--perhaps he is as well?
Crow enough? that's all I can do right now. If he lives up to Guin's hopes of leading an effort toward a bipartisan bill, I'll be happy to eat a plateful--maybe more.
By the way Jimbo, before you get too cocky, 49 of your party voted for a bill crafted over lunchtime, that was eight pages long, drafted by a committee of 13, behind a locked door.
You should ALL be deeply ashamed of the intense desperation and kowtowing to Yertle and his Trumpanzee whipping boy that occurred by your party in "the greatest deliberative body" in the nation to strip millions of the poor, old, sick, and young from their healthcare, in order to reduce taxes for the top few percenters. Shameful.
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké
Gee, there are some folks around here who have some crow eating to do...
No crow dining here. I stand by what I said above.
McCain should have voted "NO" on Tuesday and he would have avoided last night's little bit of nastiness. Hopefully, he won't be returning after the summer recess.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
“In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among us, a greater sincerity.”
I'm not eating any crow either, the evidence doesn't support it. McCain was subject to intense backlash all over the media, both mainstream and social, for the outrageous hypocrisy of leaving his world class cancer treatment at Mayo in Scottsdale to return to D.C. and cast a vote to proceed with the disgustingly undemocratic process that the GOP has engaged in to kick tens of millions of Americans off healthcare. I can only imagine how many calls and emails his office received.
I suspect McCain's vote was grounded more in ego than in nobility, but we'll see how he goes from here forward. I suspect it will be same old, same old. I won't eat crow until I'm convinced otherwise by a preponderance of the evidence.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan
McCain's infirm excuse vanishes when you realize that the alternative was to introduce it into committee where it could be debated and amended and not send it straight to the floor.
No crow on the menu here. I said earlier that I would give McCain the benefit of the doubt for a little while longer to see what he did next, and six hours later he voted FOR a waiver that would have allowed the BCRA—as amended by Cruz and Portman—to pass without the 60 votes required to pass in that form.
It'll be great if McCain does exceed my expectations, as he did in this recent vote...but my expectations going forward will again remain EXTREMELY low: "The great thing about being a pessimist is that you're constantly either being proven right or being pleasantly surprised."*
*BTW, does anyone have any idea what is the source of this adage? I first saw it many years ago in a George Will column in Newsweek, but the way he used it made it clear that it wasn't something he himself had invented.
People who are wrong are just as sure they're right as people who are right. The only difference is, they're wrong.
— God@The Tweet of God
The John McCain the country had been waiting for finally showed up early Friday morning.
After a motion to send the bill to committee sponsored by Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington failed, McConnell held the vote open for nearly an hour, giving his people time to work on any fence-sitters. Even Mike Pence came down to join in the lobbying and, if necessary, cast another deciding vote. Pretty soon, it became obvious that McCain was going to be the focal point of all the politicking. That was when Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, did a very smart thing. She walked over to McCain and talked to him for a good 45 minutes, essentially boxing everyone out, even Pence, who tried his best. The drama kept building and Murkowski kept talking to him. She, along with Susan Collins of Maine, were the true stalwarts against the bill, voting against every attempt to demolish the ACA, and even voting against the bill coming to the floor, which is something that McCain couldn't bring himself to do. Murkowski even stood up against some clumsy—and marginally illegal—threats from Ryan Zinke, the Secretary of the Interior. She and Collins were implacable. If you told me that some of their courage rubbed off on McCain, I wouldn't argue with you.
"Those were some of the bravest votes I ever saw in politics," said Angus King, the Independent from Maine.
In many ways, this was the end to the 2000 Republican primary campaign that looms so large in McCain's personal history. It was both a flashback to, and fulfillment of, those heady days when McCain seemed to be a legitimate heir to Teddy Roosevelt's Republican party
Go read it.
People who are wrong are just as sure they're right as people who are right. The only difference is, they're wrong.
— God@The Tweet of God
Love this tweet from Anil Dash about the healthcare vote:
*John McCain holds puppy over train tracks, decides at the last minute not to throw it in front of the train*
Media: “An American hero!”
Just checking in with media after being absorbed with a video binge most of the week, and I'm disgusted to see McCain getting so much lauding for his switcheroo, while Collins and Murkowski are barely mentioned for their courage. Some things just never change . . .
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan
Going on eight years now (20 since Clinton), in all that time, it literally never occurred to Republicans to come up with a better healthcare plan, an actual better healthcare plan, for all Americans.
Never occurred to them.
Not once.
But see, here's the thing: Most of us don't care whose idea it is, we just want good, affordable healthcare.
If Republicans could do THAT for all Americans, they'd be heroes forever.
But, except for the final two sentences of the above post, I suspect he may be wrong. Here's Paul Krugman's explanation:
Believe it or not, conservatives actually do have a more or less coherent vision of health care. It’s basically pure Ayn Rand: if you’re sick or poor, you’re on your own, and those who are more fortunate have no obligation to help. In fact, it’s immoral to demand that they help.
Specifically:
1.Health care, even the most essential care, is a privilege, not a right. If you can’t get insurance because you have a preexisting condition, because your income isn’t high enough, or both, too bad.
2.People who manage to get insurance through government aid, whether Medicaid, subsidies, or regulation and mandates that force healthy people to buy into a common risk pool, are “takers” exploiting the “wealth creators,” aka the rich.
3.Even for those who have insurance, it covers too much. Deductibles and copays should be much higher, to give people “skin in the game” and make them cost-conscious (even if they’re, um, unconscious.)
4.All of this applies to seniors as well as younger people. Medicare as we know it should be abolished, replaced with a voucher system that can be used to help pay for private policies – and funding will be steadily cut below currently projected levels, pushing people into high-deductible-and-copay private policies.
This is a coherent doctrine; it’s what conservative health care “experts” say when they aren’t running for public office, or closely connected to anyone who is. I think it’s a terrible doctrine – both cruel and wrong in practice, because buying health care isn’t and can’t be like buying furniture. Still, if Republicans had run on this platform and won, we’d have to admit that the public agrees.
But think of how Republicans have actually run against Obamacare. They’ve lambasted the law for not covering everyone, even though their fundamental philosophy is NOT to cover everyone, or accept any responsibility for the uninsured. They’ve denied that their massive cuts to Medicaid are actually cuts, pretending to care about the people they not-so-privately consider moochers. They’ve denounced Obamacare policies for having excessively high deductibles, when higher deductibles are at the core of their ideas about cost control. And they’ve accused Obamacare of raiding Medicare, a program they’ve been trying to kill since 1995.
In other words, their whole political strategy has been based on lies – not shading the truth, not spinning, but pretending to want exactly the opposite of what they actually want.
People who are wrong are just as sure they're right as people who are right. The only difference is, they're wrong.
— God@The Tweet of God
This all reminds me of how Senator Phil Hart of Michigan became oh-so-principled after he learned he had cancer and would not live to stand for election again.
Burning Petard wrote:This all reminds me of how Senator Phil Hart of Michigan became oh-so-principled after he learned he had cancer and would not live to stand for election again.
Why is the zombie slayer labelled "Murkowski" calling him "Rick", when his name is John?
Or does the apostrophe indicate she is calling him a prick and just dropping the 'P'? -"BB"-
Yes, I suppose I could agree with you ... but then we'd both be wrong, wouldn't we?
rubato wrote:Krugman is spot-on as he usually is. And I have said this in this forum before as well.
Actually, it bothers me quite a bit that I often see Krugman (and you too, of course) doing to Republicans, conservatives, and "the right" something that I (in another thread) just complimented Andrew Sullivan for NOT doing to liberals/leftists/progressives.
Lord Jim wrote:
Econoline wrote:I note with approval that he refers specifically to “the authoritarian left”, “some on the left”, and “the far left” instead of just throwing all liberals/leftists/progressives together and referring to us collectively as “the left”. That’s important.
The sorts of qualifiers and distinctions that, (you may have noticed) I also generally use...
Whenever I agree with Krugman (which is fairly often), it should be understood that I am, in my own mind, implicitly supplying myself with whatever qualifiers and distinctions that he should have made explicit. This--and NOT his opinions on economics and politics--is my major criticism of his columns, blog posts, and op-ed essays. He doesn't always do this, but he does do it way too often.
People who are wrong are just as sure they're right as people who are right. The only difference is, they're wrong.
— God@The Tweet of God
Oh, look: Krugman is spot-on — AGAIN(and this time I don't even have to supply my own qualifiers and distinctions ):
Heritage On Health, 1989
Every once in a while people make the point that much of what eventually became Obamacare came from, of all places, the Heritage Foundation – that is, the ACA is basically what conservatives used to advocate on health care. So I recently reread Stuart Butler’s 1989 Heritage Foundation lecture, “Assuring Affordable Health Care For All Americans” – hmm, where have I seen similar language? — to see how true that is; and the answer is, it really is pretty much true.
First of all, this wasn’t just one guy at Heritage writing: Butler referred to his proposal as “the Heritage plan”, referring to a monograph that lays it out and does indeed present it as the institution’s policy, not just his opinion.
Second, while the Heritage plan wasn’t exactly the same as ObamaRomneycare, it was pretty close. Like the ACA, it imposed a mandate requiring that everyone buy an acceptable level of coverage. Also like the ACA, it proposed subsidies to make sure that everyone could in fact afford that coverage. That’s two legs of the three-legged stool.
Where the plan differed was in the handling of pre-existing conditions. Butler opposed community rating, viewing it as an indirect tax on the healthy – but called instead for big subsidized high-risk pools to cover those private insurers would otherwise shun.
I have real doubts about whether this would have been workable. But two things about it are notable. (1) The Heritage plan would have required bigger, not smaller, government spending; that is, on-budget outlays would have been larger. (2) The piece of the ACA that Heritage didn’t want was the part that’s actually most popular with the public.
Overall, what’s striking about the Heritage plan is that it’s not notably more conservative than what Obama actually implemented: a bit less regulation, a substantial amount of additional spending. If Obamacare is an extreme leftist measure, as so many Republicans claim, the Heritage Foundation in the 1980s was a leftist institution.
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People who are wrong are just as sure they're right as people who are right. The only difference is, they're wrong.
— God@The Tweet of God
