An immigrant girl from Burma holds on to her father's trouser leg in a street in a minority settlement in Mahachai, on the outskirts of Bangkok on February 25, 2010. Thai soldiers shot dead three Burmese migrant children traveling by pick-up truck on the morning of February 25 when their driver failed to stop at a checkpoint in a border province, police said. By Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images.
A reader writes:
If these Tea Party people were serious about fiscal sanity, they would boo Ryan on sight for his vote for Medicare D. They would boo Cantor on sight. They would boo Boehner on sight. They would run primary challenges against all these people, and not let them forget the sins they committed against their country.
But the Tea Party movement is not serious. It is an act of collective amnesia, for Republican voters to convince themselves that everything bad that's going on is all Obama's fault, and everything was going great until he showed up and ruined us all.
Other folks who were at that summit and complained about Medicare's finances, after having voted to bankrupt the program themselves: Boehner, Cantor, Grassley, Enzi, Conrad (a Democrat). There are a few more, too, but I'm going on memory of what I saw at the summit. These people set a ticking fiscal time bomb, and are now blaming Obama after it's been handed to him.To his credit, McCain voted against Medicare Part D. But a serious strike against him is that he doesn't publicly place the blame where it belongs. He's just another part of the anti-Obama posturing on this.
Obama, in his closing remarks, is delicately saying that Dems will move forward without Republicans. He says he doesn’t know whether the gap between Dems and Republicans can be bridged; and adds that “baby steps,” i.e., GOP incrementalism, simply won’t do.
The message is subtle, but unmistakable: Dems will move forward alone.
The fact of the summit may have helped reassure wavering House Dems to vote for the bill. The actual discussion within the summit didn't really do much of anything, although I have nothing against it at all as an exercise in democracy. Next step I guess is putting the president's compromise into legislative language, getting a CBO score, and then finally finding out whether Pelosi has enough votes. We'll know soon.
Kate Pickert gives Rep. Ryan and the Republicans points for highlighting budget gimmickry in the health care bill. Ed Morrissey is guardedly optimistic about the GOP's performance:
The risk going in to the summit wasn’t that Republicans would get trapped into a bill they opposed. It was that the media attention that follows Barack Obama would give Republicans the media platform for their own principles and proposals.
Continetti is less bashful:
Rep. Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, just launched a full-bore assault on the faulty assumptions behind the claim that the Obama health care plan will reduce the deficit. Obama didn't even bother questioning Ryan's presentation. He changed the subject to Medicare Advantage. The expression on the president's face as Ryan made his case was absolutely priceless. Simply put, he looked like someone who realizes he's met his match.
Ezra Klein shows, contra Rep. Eric Cantor, that both parties define what "essential health benefits" are when writing legislation:
[T]here is no disagreement over whether someone needs to define, in broad terms, what counts as health-care insurance. Republicans do it in their bills, Democrats do it in their bills. Cantor is creating a philosophical dispute out of something more properly understood as a practical question, and it's much harder to compromise between philosophies than over operational details.
Matt Welch was underwhelmed:
Are you the type of normal American who hasn't spent hours today watching our nation's best and brightest pretend that they're having a discussion that will ever lead to legislation, about health care? From what little I understand of it, the purpose seems to be for President Barack Obama to be able to say that at least the Republicans around the table agreed that proposed regulatory increases don't literally mean "total socialist takeover," the gist of which he has said on multiple occasions (including when asked during a break to summarize the day's events).
On the long-term outlook, the Republicans get an F, because they are still being demagogic on Medicare cuts. The Democrats get an F-, because they want to use Medicare cuts to create a new entitlement. Also, President Obama repeated the talking point that the whole issue is excess health care cost growth, when in fact the excess cost growth really kicks in big time (under standard assumptions) after 2030, by which point the U.S. government will already be unable to keep its financial promises because of the doubling of the number of people over age 65 and the big debt we already have.
Jake Simpson rounded up other reactions.
(Photo: Shawn Thew- Pool/Getty.)
No one saw this coming:
And while the City of Beverly Hills is shunning the pageant princess, she has garnered strong support from the National Organization for Marriage. "I'm not surprised that Miss Beverly Hills, Lauren Ashley, opposes gay marriage — after all 45 percent of young Californians voted for Prop 8, as did 7 million Californians generally," the organization's president, Maggie Gallagher, told us. "But I have to say, I am impressed with her courage in coming forward and for speaking up for Carrie. The elected officials of city of Beverly Hills are not demonstrating tolerance or kindness by continuing the avalanche of hatred against supporters of Prop 8."
Ashley condones the idea of putting gays to death, and Gallagher praises her courage and casts herself as the victim of intolerance. That really is quite something.
Paul Ryan earned praise from me today, but a reader reminds me he remains in fact a remarkable symbol of Republican chutzpah on the question of health care spending. Yes, he voted for the Medicare Prescription Drug Act when Bush was president, the most fiscally irresponsible measure in decades. Today, he railed against it, without holding himself accountable.
This is what drives me nuts about today's Republicans. They are like Eliot Spitzer railing against Obama for not cracking down on prostitution.
They are able to turn on a dime from big spenders to tea-partiers without ever facing up to their own central, vital role in bankrupting this country. Paul Ryan is Exhibit A. He deserves credit for proposing radical moves for future spending cuts – making him unique in the entire GOP. But until he can explain why he voted to bust the budget by a far bigger amount under a Republican president and now poses as fiscally conservative, I find it hard to trust him. Until he repudiates by name the policies of the last president, he should be thought of as partisan Republican first and fiscal conservative second.
In assessing today's summit, almost everyone agrees on who looked like the real asshole:
John McCain: From the start of his remarks around mid-day, McCain seemed on the verge of losing his temper and threw several rhetorical jabs (including one about Obama breaking his campaign promise about holding the health care hearings on C-SPAN) into his speech.
("We're not campaigning anymore," Obama shot back at McCain. "The election is over.") Later, McCain hit Obama again for the special carve out for Florida in the health care bill. Obama agreed with the McCain critique, a move that caught the Arizona Republican off guard and left him speechless. In truth, McCain's target audience today was not people in the room or the national media but rather conservative Republicans in his home state — the people he needs to beat back a challenge from his ideological right from former Rep. J.D. Hayworth.
I’m not endorsing every statement Paul Ryan makes, and I don’t like the people-or-the-government boilerplate, or the government take-over hyperbole, but I thoroughly endorse his placing fiscal discipline at the heart of this issue:
Chris Crain flags a study that found the “introduction of effective drugs against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has not changed gay men’s risk of contracting the virus during a single act of anal sex.” The risks:
The riskiest type of sexual activity was receptive anal sex with ejaculation into the rectum; each such act carried a 1.43 percent risk of contracting HIV. If a man’s partner withdrew before ejaculation, the risk dropped to 0.65 percent.
We learn this from an authoritative source. In fighting murderous Jihadist terrorists, I have to say I find this kind of surgical execution, however awful, to be morally superior to the collateral deaths of so many innocent children and civilians, as occurred in the Gaza war under the rules of conduct the IDF allowed. It's also morally more defensible than the US drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where civilian casualties are both morally deeply troubling and strategically terrible in a war that I continue to believe is essentially unwinnable.
What seemed terribly counter-productive in the Dubai case – in what one assumes was Israel's assassination – was the use of innocent people's passports as cover – many of them citizens of other Western countries. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. Bibi, like Cheney, mistakes thuggery for strategy. I can see no strategy here but more war.
"Greenscreen use in TV shows is far more extensive than you think."
The Dish 