Although our good friend jurassicpork graces these here pages sometimes, I wouldn't expect him to share a labor of love such as the Top 50 Assclowns of 2009. So you'll simply have to go over to Welcome Back to Pottersville to read it. It's about as comprehensive a list of worsts as you'll find anywhere, despite the absence of Carrie Prejean, William Kristol, and that guy who's on Bill Maher occasionally whose name escapes me at the moment. Read it and enjoy, and if you're so inclined, click that donate button in the right-hand sidebar. JP is one of the Great Curmudgeons of Blogtopia (™ Skippy) and deserves the support.

Labels: bloggers

It hardly seems like twelve years since James Cameron last dropped an multi-thousand-ton movie on the Christmas season. Last time, he had the audacity to not just depart from the science fiction/adventure genre that had been his movie home, but to take a well-known historical event about a sinking ship, practically rebuild the damn vessel from scratch, put a love story in front of it, and create a phenomenon.

Titanic was the first movie I reviewed, which started me on an eight-year path of online movie reviewing, a regular discipline of writing that I'd always wanted to do, but had never found what I wanted to write about until then.

It's perhaps a bit easier to understand the hoopla, and the backlash, that accompanied Titanic back then, now that the pasty-faced, brooding Robert Pattinson in the Twilight franchise is the tween dreamboat of choice. But for years, those of us who were caught up in the story that Cameron, even with all his clunky screenwriting, put on screen, found ourselves thinking, "What the hell was THAT all about?" I can't speak for the screaming teens back then, many of whom are now quite possibly Twilight moms now, but for some of us, appalled by the number of teen girls who decided to take fingers to keyboard and write about how the heroine of Titanic pined for her lost cutie forever (thereby completely missing the obvious point of the patented Cameronian Sledgehammer), it was about telling the story of that woman in the photo montage at the end. And I was fortunate enough to meet up online with an extraordinary group of women, all of whom wanted to tell that story, if for no other reason than to teach something to all those teenage girls. For at least three years, or until jobs,kids, divorces, and other demands at life required our attention, we both separately and together immersed ourself in American social history in order to tell the story of the fictional rich girl who survived the sinking of the Titanic and how she went on to live a perfectly contented life. We were from New Jersey, from Massachusetts, from Michigan, from Chicago, and even from Slovenia, and daily we sent flurries of e-mails around with links to articles online about the bohemian scene in New York City in the mid-nineteen-teens, about the early film industry in Fort Lee, New Jersey, about clothes and money and employment and all the things they don't teach you in school about history because they're too busy teaching you about politics and war.

And then Your Humble Blogger, who had never understood how people can create characters out of whole cloth, found herself coming up with her own characters. They'd come to me while gardening or doing housework. My mind would wander, and it would reach out, and there would be a character, clamoring for his or her story to be told. These characters became so vivid to me that I thought of them as unincarnated souls that came to me and begged me to put their stories on paper. But the result is one unfinished family epic of my own creation and two more that have been in my head for nearly a decade.

So for all its flaws, the biggest one being that James Cameron can't write dialogue for shit, Titanic had a huge influence on my life and my creative processes. Cameron isn't really a genius, but he does have a way of tapping cultural architypes that would make Joseph Campbell proud, and with his ability to innovate technology to serve his moviemaking, there was no way I was going to go see Avatar in any way other than the whole enchilada -- IMAX 3-D.

Avatar is at once the most exhilaratingly original, and the most hackneyed film in recent memory. Cameron may only put out a movie every five to ten years, but when he does, it's always an experience rather than just a movie. He's a director who's clearly in love with his whiz-bang, but also deadly serious about the technology behind the whiz-bang, and in his own clunky, limited way, about the storytelling that accompanies the whiz-bang. He may not be a cinematic innovator, but he's sure an innovator in the tools he used to create his cinema, and if he'd only recognize his limitations in screenwriting, he could be the genius he believes he already is.

Recently I watched a 60 Minutes segment on Bob Ballard, the Woods Hole oceanographer who first discovered the Titanic wreck in 1986. He was showing Lara Logan footage of not just the Titanic wreck, but other wrecks he's found since, and I realized that behind the spectacularly clear footage of a sea world miles below the surface were cameras developed by James Cameron's brother for the movie at which everyone now pokes fun. That the man who discovered the Titanic wreck has found his work helped and made even more impressive by technology created by and for the man who slapped a hokey love story on top of an actual tragedy just shows the kind of -- dare I say it -- focus that Cameron has. This is a director who doesn't screw around, and every innovation, every gewgaw his feverish mind came up with (and every dollar it cost to implement them) is right there on the screen.

There's no reason to go see Avatar for the story, because you've seen it before, in every movie in which a white guy experiences an indigenous culture and decides he likes it better than in his world. Whether it's Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans, Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves, Colin Farrell in The New World, Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai or even Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man, you've seen Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) a million times before. What you haven't seen before is a fully-realized indigenous culture on the planet of Pandora that exists nowhere in the world we inhabit.

I'm not even going to go into what the avatar concept is; I'll leave that up to the many fanboys and girls who are writing about this movie, for it requires a level of suspension of disbelief that I'm not sure I have. But whether you buy the idea of existing on two planes of reality at once or not, that's almost incidental to the spectacular and dangerous world occupied by the Na'vi, those ten-foot-tall blue striped ectomorphs who swing through the trees, leap catlike through their gorgeous tropical world, or ride hallucinogenic dragonlike creatures over waterfalls and seemingly bottomless canyons. Who wouldn't want to be Na'vi, with their lithe, slim bodies, their grace, their unfailing marksmanship, their long braids that literally mind-meld with other creatures and the spirits of their ancestors, their abs and buns of steel, their cheekbones so high and prominent you could grate cheese on them? Not to mention that their culture seems to be a matriarchal one, populated with Cameron's trademark kickass chicks and worshipping an obviously female deity. Combine that with their respect for ancestral homelands and their almost literal tree-hugging, and it's no wonder the wingnuts are having fits about this movie. Its too bad they can't see the recurring theme of bonding-for-life in Na'vi culture -- you bond for eternity with your ancestors and descendants. You bond for life with your flying dragon. You bond for life with your mate. Of course it's having sex makes that bond, not some hocus-pocus said over you by some authority figure, but you can't have everything. The Na'vi are a very family-values culture despite their paganism, and that's perhaps what drives people like the idiotic Ross Douthat to decide that Avatar is Cameron's apologia for pantheism, which he brands "Hollywood's religion of choice."

And that's even before we get to all the tough-guy cigar-chomping Evil Military and Corporate Guys. Nowhere does Cameron explicitly state that the military-industrial complex that seeks to plunder Pandora is American, but its squirrelly, greedy corporatista (a weaselly Giovanni Ribisi) and its R. Lee Ermey clone Military Guy™ (Stephen Lang, whose scenery-chewing could plunder Pandora all by itself) are right out of the American adventure movie genre. Yes, the bad guys are all white (and presumably Fox News viewers), but part of the archetype of the Noble Savage story, and Avatar doesn't stray from this, is that these beings who have lived here for thousands of years need a white guy who's only just learned their ways to lead them to battle. What could be more wingnutty than that? Afghanistan, anyone? Ex-Marine Cameron is clearly more comfortable writing dialogue for the toughies than he is for the softer Na'vi, and perhaps that's why Jake Sully as a character seems to live and breathe far more when he's making his video diaries than he does in a world that sometimes seems populated by descendants of Tinkerbell. It may in fact be Cameron's fatal flaw as a screenwriter that he has this manly-guy sensibility, but is plagued by also having this soft, gooey center that he's unable to express without making his romantic male leads sound like a HAL 9000 playing Heathcliff.

So much of the pleasure of Avatar is in the element of visual surprise -- the spiral flowers that collapse when touched, the swooping vistas and waterfalls, the cocoon hammocks in which the Na'vi sleep, the hallucinogenic beauty of the flying dragons. The visuals are so spectacular, and so perfectly wrought, that the 3-D almost seems superfluous. Avatar does more with 3-D than any other movie in history, and I may have kept wanting to brush away the little puffballs that so teasingly seem to fly right in front of your face, but the reality is that it's mostly in the "real world" parts of the movie where the 3-D has its biggest effect. The Na'vi world that has sprung from Cameron's imagination is so beautiful and so surprising that it doesn't even need 3-D to take your breath away. And that's why I'm not sure that Avatar is going to become the worldwide phenomenon that Titanic was, for all its female sensibility. That Titanic had an actual historical event as its backdrop and a female character whose real story took place, as Cameron showed us, AFTER the movie ended, helped ground it in reality and make the story relatable in the real world. We may all want to be Neytiri of Pandora, but we also know that she, and the world she inhabits, doesn't really exist, and so we NEED the element of surprise, the whiz-bang, the colors and sounds and the sheer beauty of this world. But like the Eden that Pandora represents, once you leave it, you can never really return.

Labels: movies

Chak de Punjab Bhangra Dancers at a 2008 Christmas concert:

Labels: Christmas, music

Christmas. Ur hearin it wrong:

Labels: Christmas, comedy, Marc Maron

Yeah, Santa. What DO you have to do with Jesus anyway?

Labels: comedy, War on Christmas

As Lynn says, "And they say people who believe in astrology are crazy..."

What a bunch of death-centered lunatics these end-timesers are.

And yet, despite the insanity and longing for death that some of Christianity's practitioners exhibit, there's one thing I like about Christmas, especially Christmas Eve. It's when I remember what their religion was at one time supposed to be about. I wrote about it two years ago, and in a tradition that's right up there with the Brilliant Duo's annual Christmas Eve Indian dinner, I'm linking to it again.

Labels: Christmas, Christofascist Zombie Brigade

Wow...there isn't enough tinfoil in the world for this one:

The man who was arrested with two guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition near the Capitol during President Barack Obama's health care speech in September had been an employee of the George W. Bush White House. The arrest of the man, Joshua Bowman, was widely reported at the time, but the news stories made no mention of his previous employment: For several years he worked in the Executive Office of the President, dealing with tech issues, including White House emails, his lawyer, George Braun, tells Mother Jones.

On the night of September 9, Bowman was on his way to meet Braun, a Bush administration political appointee, at the National Republican Club on First Street, SE when he was stopped by Capitol Police around 7:45 p.m.—minutes before Obama was scheduled to deliver a major address to Congress pushing his health care initiative. Bowman had driven up to a security checkpoint and told officers he wanted to park, but his lack of a permit for the area aroused their suspicions, and they asked to search his car.

The previous weekend, Bowman and Braun had gone duck-hunting, according to Braun. But Bowman forgot that he still had the guns in his car when he consented to a search of his vehicle, a Honda Civic with a bumper sticker proclaiming, "I'll keep my guns, freedom, and money.... you keep the change." The officers found a Beretta 12 gauge semi-automatic* shotgun, a .22 caliber long rifle, and over 400 rounds of ammunition in Bowman's trunk. The guns were unloaded and in their cases, according to court records. Braun says they were disassembled. The Capitol Police took Bowman into custody and charged him with two counts of possession of an unregistered firearm and one count of unlawful possession of ammunition. He faced up to $3,000 in fines and as much as three years in jail. (The case is still pending.)

When Braun—who was at the National Republican Club, hanging out with congressmen including Iowa's Tom Latham and Nebraska's Lee Terry—finally heard from Bowman, it was around 10 p.m. Bowman told Braun he needed Braun to get him out of jail, explaining that he had been stopped with guns in his car. "Don't you know that's illegal?" Braun asked. Both men were surprised when they heard the story on the radio as they left jail the next day. Braun thought the coverage was excessive. "They were making him sound like a terrorist," Braun said. "Does [Bowman] look like a terrorist? He has the élan to walk around with a bowtie."

So it would seem to be "a big misunderstanding", but with the history of the Bush family (see also: The Carlyle Group & 9/11, The Octopus, etc., it's hard to blame a person for being skeptical.

And if a bow tie demonstrates "élan", I wonder how you explain this and this.

Labels: Barack Obama, Bush family, tinfoil

(With apologies to John Lennon and thanks to Congress)

(Merry Christmas, Billy.
Merry Christmas, William.)

So this is health care
And what have you done?
Another year wasted
And a new one made of dung.

And so this is health care.
We haven't a prayer.
The near and the dear ones
Don't have single payer.

A very Merry Xmas!
The way I figger,
We've no public option,
Without any trigger.

There's actual health care...
For rich and for strong;
For weak and the poor ones
This bill is so wrong.

And so happy Xmas!
Thanks House and Senate.
The blue and red ones
Thanks for the mandate.

A very Merry Xmas!
But if you dissent,
We'll just raise your taxes
By 2.5 percent.

And so this is health care.
And what a cop out.
Thanks, Grand Old Party.
States can now opt out.

And so happy Xmas!
We hope you had fun.
For old and the young,
The struggle's just begun.

A very Merry Xmas
And a crappy New Year!
It won't be a good one
Without any cheer
Change is over
Before it's begun.

I realize that teabaggers can be so ridiculous it's funny, but this has performance art written all over it, as a C-Span caller asks Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming if he prayed hard enough for Robert Byrd to die:

If it ISN'T a joke, but a serious caller, than we are in more trouble than we realized. And even if it is a joke, Barrasso's reaction, or rather, non-reaction, to the idea of praying for someone to die, means we are in more trouble than we realized.

Labels: C-SPAN

I've been fascinated by the psychological dynamics that seem to have been the driving factors behind our last three presidents. Until Bill Clinton, the last president who seemed to have been driven by something primal in his childhood was John F. Kennedy, with his arriviste father's drive to "belong" through the attainment of political power, his aristocratic wife, and his parade of women. Today TV therapists would call him a sex addict, but would still stay away from the far more interesting theme of "belonging" in mainstream (then read as WASP) society. I've spilled enough keystrokes on this blog already about George W. Bush's father issues.

But if Barack Obama sometimes seems in many ways to be an echo of Bill Clinton (only without Clinton's innate charm which buffered him against the slings and arrows of outrageous Republicans), there's a good reason for it. Obama's economic team are all graduates of the School of Robert Rubin (only without the 1990's result). Obama engenders the same blind, baseless hatred on the right that Bill Clinton, another centrist president did. Some of the hatred with Obama is based on race instead of the sense I had with Clinton that he's the guy who got all the girls in high school and the Republicans are the masturbators in the boy's room who are still angry about that perceived injustice. The sense I have from the right with Obama is that he's the focused black kid in the mostly white school who seems to be able to focus on a goal instead of being trapped by his background, whereas they go home to the alcoholic father and it defines who they are. The down side to that focus is that it's left him aloof, sometimes isolated, and intent on avoiding any sort of conflict, lest it interfere with his goals.

Bill Clinton was a conflict avoider too, only he came to it from the background of going home to the alcoholic father. We had the sense that all Bill Clinton wanted was quiet. I understand this mindset, I have it myself, coming from a family that experienced a fair amount of shouting fights and uproar in my childhood. When you grow up as a conflict avoider, you tend towards twisting yourself into a pretzel and jumping through hoops in a vain effort to just have some peace and quiet. It's a terrible way to live and it doesn't teach you that sometimes people will disagree and you have to learn that capitulation is not always the best way to resolve a conflict. You have to learn that your viewpoint is just as valid as anyone else's, and that you have a right to defend it.

Because of Bill Clinton, the gutlessness of Capitol Hill Democrats, and the increasing intransigence of Republicans over the last twenty years, we've come to expect conflict avoidance in the form of capitulation from Democrats. This is the main reason many of us decided not to support Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama as the primary race ran down last year. Some of it was about the war, but we also knew about the Clintons and triangulation. Yes, Hillary wasn't Bill, but in a marriage like theirs, we also knew that a certain amount of capitulation in the name of keeping the peace was part of Hillary's makeup too.

It doesn't completely surprise me that Barack Obama has turned out the way he has. I still remember the way he sat on his hands in 2004, as a new Senator, while the late, great Stephanie Tubbs Jones tried to get a Senator to stand against certifying Ohio's tainted vote tally after thousands of black voters were barred from voting after waiting up to 10 hours in the rain. I never bought him as the Great Progressive Savior, and so I'm somewhat less disappointed than some of my peers (though no less disgusted) as his timid mode of "leadership." You can make the excuse for him not wanting to rock the boat right out of the gate as a new Senator, what with that house's "protocols" and such, but that doesn't seem to bother Al Franken much.

Drew Westen wrote about this earlier this week, in a much-discussed piece at HuffPo:

Consider the president's leadership style, which has now become clear: deliver a moving speech, move on, and when push comes to shove, leave it to others to decide what to do if there's a conflict, because if there's a conflict, he doesn't want to be anywhere near it.

Health care is a paradigm case. When the president went to speak to the Democrats last week on Capitol Hill, he exhorted them to pass the bill. According to reports, though, he didn't mention the two issues in the way of doing that, the efforts of Senators like Ben Nelson to use this as an opportunity to turn back the clock on abortion by 25 years, and the efforts of conservative and industry-owned Democrats to eliminate any competition for the insurance companies that pay their campaign bills. He simply ignored both controversies and exhorted.

Leadership means heading into the eye of the storm and bringing the vessel of state home safely, not going as far inland as you can because it's uncomfortable on the high seas. This president has a particular aversion to battling back gusting winds from his starboard side (the right, for the nautically challenged) and tends to give in to them. He just can't tolerate conflict, and the result is that he refuses to lead.

[snip]

Like most Americans I talk to, when I see the president on television, I now change the channel the same way I did with Bush. With Bush, I couldn't stand his speeches because I knew he meant what he said. I knew he was going to follow through with one ignorant, dangerous, or misguided policy after another. With Obama, I can't stand them because I realize he doesn't mean what he says -- or if he does, he just doesn't have the fire in his belly to follow through. He can't seem to muster the passion to fight for any of what he believes in, whatever that is. He'd make a great queen -- his ceremonial addresses are magnificent -- but he prefers to fly Air Force One at 60,000 feet and "stay above the fray."

It's the job of the president to be in the fray. It's his job to lead us out of it, not to run from it. It's his job to make the tough decisions and draw lines in the sand. But Obama really doesn't seem to want to get involved in the contentious decisions. They're so, you know, contentious. He wants us all to get along. Better to leave the fights to the Democrats in Congress since they're so good at them. He's like an amateur boxer who got a coupon for a half day of training with Angelo Dundee after being inspired by the tapes of Mohammed Ali. He got "float like a butterfly" in the morning but never made it to "sting like a bee."

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting everyone to get along. The problem is that everyone is not going to always get along, and capitulation is not the answer, not when millions of people voted for you to change the course from the Republican theocratic corporate agenda. And if your childhood baggage is just too strong to fight, then get help.

Labels: Barack Obama, capitulation, spinelessness

She's at it with the death panels again.

Labels: American Idiots, Sarah Palin

Sainthood just ain't what it used to be, now that they let just anyone in. Former Nazi brownshirt Pope Benedict has decided that the predecessor who looked the other way while six million Jews and millions of others were slaughtered by the Nazis should be elevated to sainthood:

Jewish leaders from around the world expressed their outrage today after the Pope opened the way for his controversial wartime predecessor to be made a saint, with some calling the possible beatification of Pius XII as "inopportune and premature".

Benedict signed a decree last Saturday on the virtues of Pius, who has been criticised for not doing enough to stop the Holocaust. The decree means he can be beatified once a miracle attributed to him has been recognised.

Beatification is the first major step towards sainthood. But Benedict, who has long admired Pius, continues to draw fire for ignoring concerns over the controversial pontiff.

Among those to criticise him was the World Jewish Congress, whose president, Ronald Lauder, said: "As long as the archives about the crucial period 1939 to 1945 remain closed, and until a consensus on his actions ‑ or inaction ‑ concerning the persecution of millions of Jews in the Holocaust is established, a beatification is inopportune and premature.

"While it is entirely a matter for the Catholic church to decide on whom religious honours are bestowed, there are strong concerns about Pius XII's political role during world war two which should not be ignored."

He called on the Vatican to immediately open the files on the controversial figure. "Given the importance of good relations between Catholics and the Jews, and following the difficult events of the past year, it would be appreciated if the Vatican showed more sensitivity on this matter," he added, referring to Benedict's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying cleric, Richard Williamson.

The incident sparked worldwide condemnation from prominent Jewish groups and individuals and placed an additional strain on interfaith relations, which were already under pressure after the pope issued an edict permitting a prayer that called for the conversion of Jews.

In France, the country's chief rabbi urged the Vatican to abandon its mission to beatify Pius. Gilles Bernheim said: "Given Pius XII's silence during and after the Shoah [Holocaust], I don't want to believe that Catholics see in Pius XII an example of morality for humankind. I hope that the church will renounce this beatification plan and will thus honour its message and its values."

This pope and Pat Buchanan ought to get together for a beer. They have a lot in common.(h/t)

Labels: Anti-Semitism, Nazis, Pope Benedict, religion

Albert King & Stevie Ray Vaughan, Matchbox Blues:

Labels: Monday Morning Blues, music

...by praying for Sen. Robert Byrd to die so that the Harry Reid's manager's amendment to health care bill would fail:

Going into Monday morning's crucial Senate vote on health-care legislation, Republican chances for defeating the bill had come down to a last, macabre hope. They needed one Democratic senator to die -- or at least become incapacitated.

At 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon -- nine hours before the 1 a.m. vote that would effectively clinch the legislation's passage -- Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) went to the Senate floor to propose a prayer. "What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can't make the vote tonight," he said. "That's what they ought to pray."

It was difficult to escape the conclusion that Coburn was referring to the 92-year-old, wheelchair-bound Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) who has been in and out of hospitals and lay at home ailing. It would not be easy for Byrd to get out of bed in the wee hours with deep snow on the ground and ice on the roads -- but without his vote, Democrats wouldn't have the 60 they needed.

Nice. But then, Coburn is a C Street House frat boy and "Family" member, and their perversion of Christianity is all about their own wealth and power, and has nothing to do with the teachings of Joshua of Nazareth.

Now I don't much care for this health care bill in its current form. I don't like purchase mandates without industry price regulation. I don't like throwing women's health care under the bus. And I don't like that there's no requirement that insurance companies actually pay claims. But when people who make their reputations on preaching about morality are praying for others to die, I think we have to call them out for the beasts that they are.

Labels: Republican id-driven two-year-olds, right-wing hatemongers, scumbaggery, Tom Coburn

What a cynical exercise this entire health care reform debate has been.

Now we have a situation in which Joe Lieberman, who rakes in cash from the insurance industry and whose wife is a lobbyist, and others stuffing their pockets with insurance company cash, are holding hostage real reform on the backs of those who can't afford insurance.

Today Paul Krugman joins the "Pass it, it's better than nothing" side:

At its core, the bill would do two things. First, it would prohibit discrimination by insurance companies on the basis of medical condition or history: Americans could no longer be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, or have their insurance canceled when they get sick. Second, the bill would provide substantial financial aid to those who don’t get insurance through their employers, as well as tax breaks for small employers that do provide insurance.

All of this would be paid for in large part with the first serious effort ever to rein in rising health care costs.

The result would be a huge increase in the availability and affordability of health insurance, with more than 30 million Americans gaining coverage, and premiums for lower-income and lower-middle-income Americans falling dramatically. That’s an immense change from where we were just a few years ago: remember, not long ago the Bush administration and its allies in Congress successfully blocked even a modest expansion of health care for children.

Bear in mind also the lessons of history: social insurance programs tend to start out highly imperfect and incomplete, but get better and more comprehensive as the years go by. Thus Social Security originally had huge gaps in coverage — and a majority of African-Americans, in particular, fell through those gaps. But it was improved over time, and it’s now the bedrock of retirement stability for the vast majority of Americans.

Look, I understand the anger here: supporting this weakened bill feels like giving in to blackmail — because it is. Or to use an even more accurate metaphor suggested by Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, we’re paying a ransom to hostage-takers. Some of us, including a majority of senators, really, really want to cover the uninsured; but to make that happen we need the votes of a handful of senators who see failure of reform as an acceptable outcome, and demand a steep price for their support.

The question, then, is whether to pay the ransom by giving in to the demands of those senators, accepting a flawed bill, or hang tough and let the hostage — that is, health reform — die.

Again, history suggests the answer. Whereas flawed social insurance programs have tended to get better over time, the story of health reform suggests that rejecting an imperfect deal in the hope of eventually getting something better is a recipe for getting nothing at all. Not to put too fine a point on it, America would be in much better shape today if Democrats had cut a deal on health care with Richard Nixon, or if Bill Clinton had cut a deal with moderate Republicans back when they still existed.

I respect Paul Krugman, and I do understand his points. But I am cynical enough that the idea of "cutting a deal" holds no weight when you have a bunch of miscreants like today's Republicans, for whom "cutting a deal" means "doing it their way or not at all."

I also question the assumption that just because history shows that social insurance programs improve over time, it will remain that way in the future. This is the first major health care debate that has had not just the 24/7 cable news echo chamber, but the 24/7 internet. This is the first major health care debate that has a cacophony of faux-"grassroots" astroturf group fronts run by major corporations that use falsehoods and half-truths to influence a population too busy working or too frightened about not working to research the veracity of their claims. This is the first time that Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine" has been applied to mainstream journalism, so that facts and utter horsepuckey have been given equal time, and the very notion of "alternative facts" is even part of public discourse. History may have shown that social insurance programs improve over time, but as the financial giants say about your "investments", "past performance is no indication of future performance."

It may very well be that this is the best we can get (and with so many amendments flurrying around, a simple read of S-1679 doesn't necessarily reflect reality), but my skepticism lies in the reality that just as with the current insurance system, there is absolutely no requirement that I've seen so far that actually requires the for-profit insurance companies to actually pay claims. It's easy to provide "coverage", because "coverage" involves issuance of a policy and the collection of premiums. But with no mandate to actually pay out claims for covered procedures, we have very much the same kind of system we have now, in which in many cases, payment is contingent on just how hard you want to fight with the person in the headset in a cubicle whose job it is to make you beg for actual payment of claims.

And if you want numbers about what the real impact of this gift to the insurance companies is going to be, Marcy Wheeler has 'em.

Labels: health care