Taking a Straw Man to Its Logical Conclusion Leads Down a Slippery Slope
Dan Riehl is in the cross-fire between Alan Colmes and MEDIAite over a rather bizarre argument: I'm not sure I quite understand this, given that cost is so important as a burden to taxpayers when it comes to health care. If Democrats want so badly to abort babies because of it, why are we bothering with someone who has a broken ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 14, 2010 08:50
Petraeus New Hampshire Speech: Presidential Campaign Underway?
Reports that General David Petraeus is giving a speech at Saint Anselm College's New Hampshire Institute of Politics on March 24 is ginning up speculation that he's running for president. Mark Ambinder: News that Gen. David Petraeus is venturing out of his Centcom comfort zone late this month to the state of New Hampshire is catnip for a certain ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 13, 2010 08:45
Reconciliation and the Public Option
Democratic leaders have claimed that they would have had a government run health insurance alternative (the so-called "Public Option") if only those mean Republicans weren't there to filibuster. But Glenn Greenwald believes this was a sham. But all those claims were put to the test -- all those bluffs were called -- once the White House decided that it had to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 12, 2010 10:28
Reconciliation, Health Care, and History
Political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein argues that, contrary to Republican claims, the reconciliation process is neither illegitimate nor rare. Reconciliation was intended to be a narrow procedure to bring revenues and spending into conformity with the levels set in the annual budget resolution. But it quickly became much more. The 22 reconciliation bills so far passed by Congress (three ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 8, 2010 10:04
Health Care Summit: Seven Hours and a Cloud of Dust
When President Obama invited Republican Congressional leaders to join him for a televised health care summit, they reasonably feared it was "a trap" in which the contrast between the contrast between a smooth talking Commander-in-Chief and Podunk legislators would make them look small. Clearly, Obama intended it as a PR gambit that would showcase him at his best and bully ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 26, 2010 09:56
Obstructionism + Nihilism = Nil
While John Cole agrees with the substance of my mild criticism of our food stamp policies, he thinks "we can’t do anything about it." I’m sure the House could pass a bill containing a small stipend for Americorps volunteers- in fact, I bet it would get a good bit of support. Likewise, I bet almost all the Democrats and even some ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 11, 2010 14:43
Obama’s Stealth Revolution
While progressives are kvetching and conservatives are chortling over President Obama's failures to enact his most visible policy initiatives, he's quietly ratcheting federal control of society up to unprecedented levels. In a lengthy TNR feature, John Judis details how "Obama has reinvented the state in more ways than you can imagine." Obama’s three Republican predecessors were all committed to weakening or even ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 2, 2010 09:46
USA Parliamentary Democracy?
National Journal's Ron Brownstein sees the recent bout of gridlock in the United States as a sign of a more fundamental shift in how our government operates. Obama's first year demonstrated once again that in this deeply polarized political era, big legislative crusades aimed at big national problems produce only big political headaches. President George W. Bush learned that when his ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 22, 2010 15:09
Scott Brown’s Win and Healthcare Reform
[caption id="attachment_46357" align="alignright" width="400" caption="Republican U.S. Senator-elect Scott Brown holds up a copy of the Boston Herald announcing his victory over Democrat Martha Coakley in Boston, Massachusetts January 19, 2010. REUTERS/Adam Hunger "][/caption] There was talk over the last few days, from Nancy Pelosi and others, that the Democrats might use parliamentary tricks and outright chicanery to ram a ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 20, 2010 10:32
Obama’s Approval Under 50 Percent
Barack Obama's approval ratings are now firmly below 50 percent, with the CBS poll as the latest data point: President Obama's job approval rating has fallen to 46 percent, according to a new CBS News poll. That rating is Mr. Obama's lowest yet in CBS News polling, and the poll marks the first time his approval rating has fallen below the 50 ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 12, 2010 10:33
Harry Reid Racist Obama Comments, Sagging Polls
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is in trouble. Among the juicy revelations in the highly touted 2008 tell-all by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin is that Reid made some borderline racist comments about then-candidate and Senate colleague Barack Obama. He was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 10, 2010 09:59
Cadillac Tax Hidden Time Bomb
Opposition to the Democrats' health care reform plan has created some strange bedfellows, with the Hard Left and the Hard Right frequently working together. Here's on that I didn't expect: NYT columnist Bob Herbert attacking the plan from the Right. There is a middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate’s version of President Obama’s effort to reform health care. The bill ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on December 29, 2009 09:44
Health Care Reform: How Bad is It?
One of the most-linked posts on Memeorandum this morning is Cornell lawprof William Jacobson's post explaining why he hates the health care reform bill that we're one step closer to enacting into law. Yes, it is that bad. The Democrats are about to put in place the legislative, regulatory and bureaucratic infrastructure for a complete government takeover of health care. Just ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on December 20, 2009 09:26
Senate Health Reform Bill Secured?
[caption id="attachment_45266" align="alignright" width="400" caption="Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) (R) wipes his eyes as he and Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) (L) address senate health care legislation at the US Capitol in Washington December 19, 2009. U.S. Senate Democrats reached a compromise on Saturday with holdout Senator Ben Nelson that secured the 60 votes they need to pass the broad ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on December 20, 2009 08:09
Why Raising Tax Revenue is Hard
Reuters blogger Felix Salmon contends that our tax system encourages income inequality because it generates more revenue for the treasury. [W]hen you have a progressive tax system, especially when there are surcharges on people making seven-figure incomes, you also have a system where for any given level of national income, the greater the inequality, the greater the government’s tax revenues. And ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on December 4, 2009 09:51
