“The First Republican Debate”: The Trump Show, The Kasich Dissent And Everybody Else
I saw three shows tonight during Fox News’ Republican debate: The Trump Show, The Kasich Dissent, and Everybody Else. Among those in that last category, Jeb Bush had a good night, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had his moments, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) won more friends.
Although he occasionally disappeared from view, Donald Trump was the central figure, particularly during the first hour. I can’t do any better on Trump than MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt, who tweeted: “Everyone was asking, which Trump would show up? There is only one, and he showed up to play.”
Yes, he did. From the very first moment of the debate, when he refused to rule out a third party run, to his defense of what we’ll call boorish comments about women to his reprise of his position on immigration, it was the same Trump who has risen to the top of the GOP polls.
There are moments that could hurt him. Certainly some Republicans will resent his refusal to pledge his support for the party’s nominee (unless, of course, it is he). In answering Fox News’s Megyn Kelly on women’s issues and his past comments on women, Trump’s in-your-face reply — “I’ve been very nice to you although I could probably not be based on the way you have treated me” – no doubt went badly with some viewers, particularly women.
But Trump has been entirely immune from the usual laws of politics, so it’s possible that his supporters will just keep cheering his violation of all the political conventions and his insistence on being himself. Fox itself and conservative talk radio hosts, with their power to influence Republicans, could influence how the faithful view these and other choice Donald moments.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, playing on his home turf in Cleveland, stood out as decidedly different from all his foes. He was “compassionate conservatism” come back to life. A Republican who not only accepted the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare but actually fought for it, Kasich didn’t back away. Instead, he offered a passionate and spirited defense of the program and a description of the good it does. Praising Medicaid is something that’s just not done at GOP events.
Medicaid money, he said, allowed the state to treat the mentally ill in prisons and those addicted to drugs. “The working poor, instead of having them come into the emergency rooms where it costs more where they’re sicker and we end up paying, we brought a program in here to make sure that people could get on their feet,” he said. “And you know what, everybody has a right to their God-given purpose.”
Kasich also gave an empathetic answer when asked about gay marriage and proposed that Republicans reach out to racial minorities and others who have not felt much welcomed by the party lately.
This may not play with significant parts of the GOP primary electorate, but on Thursday night, Kasich established himself as a unique and important voice.
Among the rest, judgments are necessarily subjective, but I thought Jeb Bush, who was threatening to turn into a gaffe machine, was forceful and clear. He did what others on the stage shied away from doing, criticizing Trump’s divisiveness. Trump did not hit him back, a kind of victory for Bush. The former Florida governor showed real passion in sticking by his support for Common Core education standards.
Chris Christie has not loomed large in the post-debate analysis I have seen so far, but he made his presence felt which, given his low standing in the polls, was essential to his soldiering on. The toughest interchange of the night came not, as many expected, with Trump, but between Christie and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) over government meta-data collection.
Rubio was fluent and smooth. If there is a sub-contest going on among Rubio, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Rubio was Thursday’s winner. Cruz’s unabashed right-wing oppositionism may yet work for him if Trump collapses. For now, Trump is taking up space Cruz needs to occupy.
The day’s other winner, in an earlier debate involving the candidates who didn’t make the main stage, was Carly Fiorina. Her over-the-top attacks on Hillary Clinton play very well among Republicans, and she seemed informed and in control.
The underlying premises of the debate were so deeply conservative that I doubt any Democrats who watched were tempted to jump ship, and I am not sure how many middle-of-the-road voters were drawn the Republicans’ way, except by Kasich and possibly by Rubio. The debate was held on the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. This never came up. I wasn’t surprised. But I was disappointed.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 7, 2015
“Expand Medicare, You Damn Idiots”: On Its Anniversary, We’re Going To Start Hearing The Usual Attacks On Medicare
Every so often—okay, not very often actually, but more often than I hunt, or “take” (what a verb!), lions—I feel a little wistful about the Republican Party we all once knew. And that feeling is never stronger than when I reflect on the history of Medicare and Medicaid, which I spent part of yesterday doing, what with it being the 50th anniversary of the passage of the bill and all.
Lyndon Johnson went into the 1964 election knowing that he wanted to pass a universal health-care bill. He figured he couldn’t get full-bore socialized medicine, so he settled on socialized medicine for old people, reckoning that was a winner. Immediately upon winning election, he directed aides to get cracking, saying as I recall something to the effect that he was going to lose a little political capital every day, so the sooner the better.
It was big and messy and complicated, just like Obamacare, and frankly, Johnson lied about the cost, back in those pre-Congressional Budget Office days. But it passed, and it passed in a way that wasn’t just like Obamacare at all. Thirteen Republican senators voted for it, and 17 against; and in the House, 70 Republicans supported it, while 68 voted no. In other words, almost exactly half of all voting congressional Republicans, 83 out of 168, voted for the program that Ronald Reagan at the time was warning heralded the arrival of Marxism on our shores.
Pretty different GOP, eh? Well, now check out the numbers from 1983. This was, to be sure, more of a compromise piece of legislation. The Social Security Trust fund was in trouble at the time, so the 1983 amendments raised the payroll tax while increasing the retirement age to 67 for those born in 1960 or after, with the new revenue going to Medicare and Social Security. And of course you had a Republican president then, and not just any Republican president; so if Ronald Reagan was okay with a tax increase, they were, too. It passed both chambers overwhelmingly; House Republicans backed the 1983 changes 97-69, while Republican senators supported them by 47-6. (PDF)
It’s worth recalling all this on the anniversary of this great law because soon enough, we’re going to start hearing the usual attacks on Medicare. Wait, did I say soon enough? We already are! And not from the wingnut caucus. It was the, uh, moderate, Jeb Bush, who said just last week that Medicare is “an actuarially unsound system” and that “we need to figure out a way to phase out this program.”
All right. Now I’ll grant that times have changed since 1965 and 1983, and that we’re going to see all those Baby Boomers retire in the coming years. But let’s be clear about a central fact. The Medicare Trust Fund is not in big trouble right now. A few years ago, it was; there were desperate predictions that it was going to go broke in five years, three. I remember 2017 being mentioned as the ominous year, and 2017 is pretty close.
But that has changed. Now, the experts say Medicare is stable until 2030. Now 2030 isn’t infinity and beyond, but it’s not tomorrow either. The crisis has eased, and it has eased considerably.
What changed? Some of the reasons are just too wonky for me to go into with you in any detail, having to do with things like new strategies to reduce preventable hospital admissions. But another seems to be…wait for it…Obamacare. Ever since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, per-enrollee Medicare costs have decreased a little and are rising more slowly than overall health-care costs, and somehow or another the Medicare trustees have added 13 years to the program’s solvency.
In fact, let’s go mildly wonky here. This is worth knowing. Before the ACA passed, projections of Medicare bankruptcy were pegged, as noted, at 2017. Then shortly after the ACA became law, that was pushed to 2024. Then in 2013, it was nudged to 2026. Now it’s at 2030. See a pattern here? The main reason is simple. Overall spending is lower. You might remember Mitt Romney’s famous attacks on Obama for cutting $716 billion from Medicare, which took some cheek given that a) Republicans’ own projected cuts under Paul Ryan’s budget were far more severe and b) Ryan and other Republicans used the same budgetary assumptions Obama used for all their Medicare “reform” plans.
Just remember all this, will you, as you hear more from the Republicans on this topic. They are all going to say: Medicare is a disaster; it’s broke; Obamacare has made it far worse. They’ll say things that one can hardly believe can be said by a person we’re allegedly supposed to be taking seriously, like Marco Rubio’s amazing comment that Social Security and Medicare “weakened us as a people.”
None of what they say will be true. But they’ll say it and say it, and the conservative media will repeat it and repeat it, and we’ll be in that “no, the sky is green and the grass is blue” territory that we know so well. And of course, their “reform” plans are, aside from being just mean, a total fantasy. The way Medicare works is so complicated and so embedded into our national life that the disruptions to doctors and hospitals and service providers of all kinds would be horrific. Only rich people, who don’t really need Medicare, and ideologues, who despise it, think you can do this. They might as well propose rerouting every single Interstate highway in America.
But most of all, it doesn’t need changing. Or actually it does, but in the direction of being expanded, as Bernie Sanders says. That’s probably not in the cards for the foreseeable future, although it will certainly come one day, perhaps by the time of Medicare’s own 65th birthday, when the people will surely be due for another “weakening.”
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 31, 2015
“No Longer Any Political Margin To Be Gained”: Why Republicans Won’t Object To The Return Of ‘Death Panels’
There was a lot about the period leading up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act that was ridiculous and maddening, but perhaps no episode was worse than the controversy over “death panels.” Here you had a small provision of the bill that doctors, patient advocates, and health care experts all agreed would lead to better care, not to mention cost savings. Then Republicans concocted a lie about it, spread that lie as far as they could, and finally saw the provision removed from the final legislation.
Well, now Medicare is finally doing what that provision of the ACA would have done.
Under a newly proposed rule, it will reimburse doctors for the time they spend with patients planning how they want to be cared for near the end of their lives. And just you watch: this provision that Republicans said six years ago was so horrifying? They’re not even going to bother opposing it anymore, now that doing so serves no political purpose. It’s barely going to be a controversy at all.
That’s not what everyone else seems to be predicting. All over the web there are articles about this issue, many illustrated with photos of Sarah Palin, predicting that this is going to blow up into another angry debate. But I say it won’t. Here’s why: Republicans’ opposition to end-of-life counseling was always utterly cynical, a performance enacted for no purpose other than undermining the legislation. At this point, with the law implemented long ago and the major legal challenges over, there’s no longer any political margin to be gained in shaking their fists at patients and doctors talking about the options for end-of-life care.
Let’s review a little history. This whole thing got started when conservative activist Betsy McCaughey appeared on the radio in 2009, when versions of the legislation were working their way through Congress, and said this about the one in the House:
“And one of the most shocking things I found in this bill, and there were many, is on Page 425, where the Congress would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner, how to decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go in to hospice care. And by the way, the bill expressly says that if you get sick somewhere in that five-year period — if you get a cancer diagnosis, for example — you have to go through that session again.”
To paraphrase what Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman, every word of that statement is a lie, including “and” and “the.” The actual provision stated that if a patient wanted to have a consultation about their options, including how to create an advanced directive that would lay out what sorts of treatment they wanted and didn’t want if they got to a point where they couldn’t communicate it themselves, Medicare would pay the doctor for the time counseling the patient. Nothing was mandatory, nothing would require doctors to “tell them how to end their life sooner,” and nothing required anyone to have the session again. It was all lies.
But that didn’t prevent the claim from taking off like a rocket. Sarah Palin floated the “death panel” talking point. Chuck Grassley told a crowd back home, “We should not have a government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.” Although media outlets tried to explain that the allegation was false, millions of people believed it anyway. Chastened Democrats removed the provision from the bill.
So now that Medicare is finally moving ahead with this provision, are Republicans really going to fight it? No, they won’t. I’ve been looking around for condemnations from conservative media outlets or prominent Republican politicians, and so far I’ve come up empty. There was one small item on the National Review’s blog, with no substantive objection, just a little harumphing about bureaucracy. No outraged statements from Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, no thunderous denunciations from the presidential candidates, nothing.
Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it yet, and the indignation is on its way. But I wouldn’t bet on it. In this somewhat cooler environment, it isn’t going to be easy for them to argue that patients shouldn’t sit down with their doctors and plan for their future care. And with congressional Republicans all but giving up on repealing the ACA, this isn’t a battle that offers much to be gained.
So five years after the ACA was passed, doctors will know that they can get paid for this absolutely vital service, explaining the options to their patients and making sure that when the time comes, those patients’ wishes are honored. The people like McCaughey, Palin, and Grassley who back then lied to the country in order to score a few points against Barack Obama ought to hang their heads in shame. But at least it’s finally happening. Better late than never.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 9, 2015
“The Southern Strategy Doesn’t Work Anymore”: Rick Perry Wants To Reach Out To Black People. He’ll Have To Do A Lot Better
Yesterday, Rick Perry went to the National Press Club in Washington to deliver a speech that may have seemed unusual, in that it was characterized as an effort to reach out to African Americans, but actually contained much less than meets the eye. Perry presented traditional Republican priorities — tax cuts, regulatory rollback, slashing safety net programs — as a gift the GOP wants to bestow on African Americans and acknowledged that his party hasn’t exactly been welcoming to them. But if this is “reaching out” beyond the whites who form almost the entirety of the GOP’s voters, it isn’t going to accomplish much. Here’s an excerpt:
There has been, and there will continue to be an important and a legitimate role for the federal government in enforcing Civil Rights. Too often, we Republicans, me included, have emphasized our message on the 10th Amendment but not our message on the 14th. An Amendment, it bears reminding, that was one of the great contributions of Republican party to American life, second only to the abolition of slavery.
For too long, we Republicans have been content to lose the black vote, because we found we didn’t need it to win. But, when we gave up trying to win the support of African-Americans, we lost our moral legitimacy as the party of Lincoln, as the party of equal opportunity for all. It’s time for us, once again, to reclaim our heritage as the only party in our country founded on the principle of freedom for African-Americans.
We know what Democrats will propose in 2016, the same thing, the same things that Democrats have proposed for decades, more government spending on more government programs. And there is a proper and an important role for government assistance in keeping people on their feet. But few Presidents have done more to expand government assistance than President Obama. Today we spend nearly one trillion dollars a year on means tested antipoverty programs. And yet, black poverty remains stagnant.
Let’s be clear about one thing: The GOP didn’t “give up” trying to win the black vote. It spent decades building and maintaining electoral majorities on the encouragement and exploitation of racism. It was a sin of commission, not a sin of omission. And the reason the party is now reevaluating the “Southern strategy” isn’t that it had some kind of moral epiphany, it’s because the strategy doesn’t work anymore.
While we’re on this topic, permit me a digression on this “party of Lincoln” business, which is something Republicans say when they’re trying to convince people they aren’t actually hostile to black people. As Antonin Scalia would say, it’s pure applesauce. Here’s the truth: One hundred fifty years ago, the Republican Party was the liberal party, and the Democratic Party was the conservative party. They reversed those positions over time for a variety of reasons, but the Republicans of today are not Abraham Lincoln’s heirs. Ask yourself this: If he had been around in 1864, which side do you think Rick Perry would have been on? If you took more than half a second to answer, “The Confederacy, of course,” then you’re being way too generous to him, not to mention the overwhelming majority of his fellow Republicans.
All that isn’t to say that it’s impossible for Republicans to turn over a new leaf and truly give African Americans a reason to consider their party. But if they’re going to be at all successful, it will take both a change in policy and a change in attitude.
A change in policy, at least outside of some very specific areas, is extremely unlikely to happen. Perry discussed the issue of incarcerations related to the drug war, and that’s one example where Republicans really are coming together with Democrats to reevaluate the policies of recent decades. They deserve credit for that. But there’s almost nothing else they’re offering, other than to argue that the things they already wanted to do, such as cutting taxes, will be great for black people, too.
Then there’s the argument Perry and others make about safety net programs: that people of color are being enslaved by them, and if we only cut those shackles then they’ll rise up. This argument — that the Republican Party wants to slash the safety net only because it cares so much for the poor — has never persuaded anyone in the past, and it isn’t likely to in the future.
And what about the change in attitude? The most fundamental reason Republicans can’t get the votes of African Americans is that the party communicates to them, again and again and again, that it isn’t just ignoring their needs but is actively hostile to them. When conservative justices gut the Voting Rights Act to the cheers of Republicans, and then states such as Perry’s Texas move immediately to impose voting restrictions that they know will disproportionately affect African Americans, it sends a very clear message.
Perry began his speech with a harrowing story of a lynching in Texas in 1916, which was surely meant to convey to African Americans that he understands the legacy of racism. But it also sends an accompanying message: that he believes racism is about the violent oppression of the past and has nothing to do with the lives African Americans lead today. And that’s another message African Americans hear loud and clear. Every time any issue of race comes up, whether it’s about police mistreatment or discrimination in employment or anything else, the first response of conservatives is always to say, “Oh c’mon, what are you complaining about? Racism is over.”
If Perry really wanted to “reach out” to African Americans and convince them that something has changed, here’s a way he could do it: He could say something about the endless stream of race-baiting that comes from the most prominent conservative media figures. If you’ve listened to Rush Limbaugh or watched Bill O’Reilly, you know that one of the central themes of their programs is that white people are America’s only victimized racial group, while African Americans form a criminal class that deserves to be constantly harassed by the police because they’re a bunch of thugs the rest of us need protection from. Day in and day out, those programs’ white audiences are told that Obama is some kind of Black Panther enacting a campaign of racial vengeance upon them. “All too often I have seen this president divide us by race,” says Perry, when the media figures his party lionizes are constantly telling their audiences to see politics through the lens of their own whiteness and nurture their racial resentments.
And Perry can tell black people that it’s welfare that’s really keeping them down, but because of his party, the first African American president had to literally show his birth certificate to prove he’s a real American. That’s just one of the things it’s going to take an awful lot of reaching out to make them forget.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, July 3, 2015
“Guns, Race, And Fox News’ Pathological Denial”: Conservative Media Desperately Searching For Political Cover
Like frantic shoppers running down a last-minute list, Fox News talkers last week desperately tried to cobble together an inventory of reasons why racist gunman Dylann Roof may not have been primarily motivated by racism.
As the conservative media anxiously and collectively searched for political cover, Fox News hosts and guests offered up an array of illogical explanations: Maybe the Charleston, S.C. church killing was an attack on Christians. Maybe it was an attack on South Carolina. Maybe political correctness was to blame. Or “diversity.” Maybe pastors should be armed. (In any case, Fox Newsers agreed, President Obama was being very, very “divisive” regarding the matter.)
On and on, the alternative explanations were offered up in the face of overwhelming evidence that Roof allegedly had set out to kill as many black people as possible because he wanted to start a “race war.” Period. And the way Roof allegedly chose to do that was to open fire, and then reload, in the basement of the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, killing the pastor and eight parishioners.
Like so many Americans, Fox News has been reeling in the wake of the massacre, except reeling in a different way. While Americans recoiled from the raw hate behind the gun rampage, Fox News wrestled with bouts of pathological denial.
Indeed, for Fox News and much of the conservative media, the horrific killings in South Carolina represented a political challenge because the act of mass murder revolved around two topics Fox News has long insisted don’t really afflict America, or don’t require pressing action: Racism and gun violence. That denial has made it nearly impossible for Fox to address the shooting in any coherent way.
For years, Fox News and conservatives have routinely tried to underplay gun violence and even horrific bouts of mass murders — like the Sandy Hook school massacre — insisting the issue represents a “distraction” or a “red herring” touted by liberals to shift the nation’s attention away from truly pressing problems, like the national debt.
But the “distraction” spin is absurd. As Chuck Todd noted on Meet The Press, “50 Americans since 9/11 have been killed in terrorist attacks. We’re up to nearly 400,000 people since 9/11 have been killed by firearms.”
Meanwhile, if current projections hold, for the first time modern American history more people will die in 2015 from gun violence than from automobile accidents. Roughly 20,000 Americans kill themselves each year using firearms. And as Bloomberg News reported, the financial cost of U.S. gun violence in terms of lost work, medical care, insurance, court costs and pain and suffering amounted to nearly $175 billion in 2010.
Despite the avalanche of data, Fox News has led the charge to dismiss the importance of addressing gun safety, and has been especially ruthless in attacking advocates trying to pass new legislation. That hardened political opposition helps explain why the cable channel has been desperately searching for ways to explain away the shocking South Carolina mass murder.
Fox and conservatives have been even more adamant over the years in insisting that Democrats, liberals and minorities over-hype the issue of racism. For instance, on his Forbes.com blog, Peter Ferrara of the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based conservative think tank, reported in 2013 that “racist attitudes” no longer “have any power or influence in American society.” Indeed, The Wall Street Journal editorial page last week casually announced that institutionalized racism no longer exists.
Racism, like climate change, is denied as part of the larger conservative political reality.
Like Prohibition and the Wild West, racism apparently represents a distant chapter in America’s past and is now filed under “archaeology,” as Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin dismissively put it last year while attacking Obama for addressing the issue at all. (Rubin claimed Americans are “held prisoners forever in a past that most Americans have never personally experienced.”)
Why the rising chorus of racism deniers under Obama? It fits a larger, right-wing political agenda. “Some on the right are deeply invested in the idea that anti-black racism is no longer much of a problem in the United States, and certainly not a problem on the scale of false accusations of racism,” wrote Michelle Goldberg at the Daily Beast.
Added Zack Beauchamp at Vox last week: “basically, the fact that America’s got a Democratic, black president means Republicans have grown more skeptical that structural racism is a huge, enduring problem.” The result? “It’s very difficult for Republicans to talk about racism as a serious, enduring problem without alienating a real part of the base.”
The same, of course, goes for Fox News and not wanting to alienate its loyal viewership base. And so in recent years we’ve heard Bill O’Reilly announce, “We are not a racist nation. […] Fair-minded Americans should be deeply offended, deeply offended that their country is being smeared with the bigotry brush.” Steve Doocy declared, “I don’t know that Barack Obama could have been elected president if he was living in a racist nation.”
And there was this from Fox’s Eric Bolling [emphasis added]:
It’s getting tiring. We have a black president, we have black senators, we have black heads of captains of business, companies. We have black entertainment channels. Where — is there racism? I don’t think there’s racism. The only people perpetuating racism are people like this gentleman from the NAACP, are the Al Sharptons of the world. Let’s move on. Let’s move on.
Let’s move on? Tell that to the people of Charleston.
By: Eric Boehlert, Sr. Fellow, Media Matters for America; The Blog, The Huffington Post, June 22, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 