The only rational response to the now-assured passage of Barack Obama’s number one priority item is to celebrate for the millions who will benefit. And for that, we need music.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
It’s a start. With lots and lots of improvement badly needed.
I still think Reid drove the public option down a dead-end street on purpose.
But it’s a start; and that’s worth celebrating.
I hope the Dems are able to convince folks that this bill is worth it. I feel good that we were able to expand the social safety net a bit after 30 years of damage even if it’s not single-payer.
You can “celebrate” this disgrace for me.
Meanwhile, I’ll imagine future Obama speeches:
“Nuclear Holocaust: the overlooked up-side”,
“You were raped? Focus on the fact that you weren’t also murdered”,
“How I’ll Make the Best of Being a One-Term President”,
“Hoorah!! After a near-century of effort, our “democracy” produces a “major step” toward an advance other nations have had for two generations. Let’s be proud and grateful for the pitiful advance we’ve won by a hair”.
Imagine more titles. With Obama, the glass is always half full, even when it’s empty and broken: “Efficient uses of Super Glue”.
I think you would enjoy this excellent article in Harper’s Magazinehttp://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/12/0082740
It is very penetrating.
THANK YOU for pointing me to that article!
I’ve skimmed it, but shall go back and really carefully read it later when I have more time. While the insights I read at first passage aren’t what I could call “new” to me, they’re presented in an excellent way which provides the all-important historical context without which a reader might miss the real points; and, I should hasten to add that, for many people today, everything in the article certainly shall come as new, fresh and revelatory.
Brilliant! It should be required reading. It is required reading for me.
That article is terrific!— far better than I supposed in looking over it quickly.
in Hartford.
With champagne and caviar paid for from the extra gains made off “savings” which sprang from canceled policies.
The many millions of dollars spent lobbying over this legislation paid off handsomely.
But for the chief of “Change You Can Believe In”, this—-and it ain’t even done bein’ gutted yet! there’s still the conference committee where maybe they’ll adjust it so that the poorest uninsured transfer their “benefits” to Ben Nelson—is called an important advance.
You know, I read that in great part, it was mainly illicit drug-trade cash which, in the darkest hours of the recent financial crisis, kept in place what little liquidity there was in the financial system. So, who’s done more to benefit society at large since the collapse of Lehman Brothers? Congress and the White House or the heavyweights of international drug-dealing?
I think we live in the land of Irony, proximity, and your points, as always are spot on. I should have mentioned that that article in Harper’s had to do with Obamacare and the new health bill.
That was understood.
Another fantastic article, proximity, is one by myiq2xu in the following blog, Riverdaughter. It is like awesome.
http://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/failure-was-the-plan/#comment-427167
citing PUMA central, now?
Why not? they are making more and more sense.
Thanks for that, too. Your correspondant is right, I think, in most respects. As for whether things today are actually better or worse than in the 18th or 19th century, I think that depends on many important factors of each one’s set of circumstances. Many black Americans and many women are certainly better off by several important measures; by other measures, these same are worse off today. Technology has changed and with it there are certain things which make life harder or easier than it was back then.
For me, a key issue is the conditions concerning social and economic equality of opportunities and fairness in the distributions of rewards, punishments, material well-being, from the most basic necessities up to luxuries, which are relatively defined.
There’s also the matter of how our present society measures up in light of the experiences and knowledge which, by rights, we should have gained since the 19th C. In other words, in many respects, there’s no excuse for our not being a far better society than what prevailed then. To say that things were worse a hundred years or more ago–more corrupt–is not necessarily a matter for great pride.
Also, I read William Riordan’s little book “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall”
I’m glad to know of that blog you cited. It may become a needed refuge for me from this place, with its overweening emphasis on polite manners and how they make a fetish of them. While the “politeness police” here are busy making sure people’s feelings in this blog are spared, the larger world outside it is collapsing around them. The same foolishness drives the one and the other.
Thank you Booman
It IS a milestone and worth celebrating. There would be NOTHING under President MCCain.
And the other side of Hartford – the poverty level with its attendant horrors such as lack of health care is hideous. It is not all Lieberman and insurance executives here.
“There would be NOTHING under President MCCain.”
That’s right. Under McCain, we’d have nothing , not even the illusion of something which in fact is a chimera. Under McCain, whether we liked it or not, brutal facts would stare us in the face. They damn and indict us; youth, coming to understand their predicament, would curse their elders’ names.
In short, the stinging ignominy which is rightfully ours would hang upon us like the stench of a skunk.
This way, having done pitifully little (except for the immensely privileged and powerful in the insurance and corporate private health-care industries, whom we’ve spared from minor financial and administrative inconveniences) we can live in the warmth of a fraud upon the most defenseless, we can congratulate ourselves for having done something and use that as the most ready excuse to do little or nothing more.
The responsibilities of a real democracy are, above all, a genuine burden to bear. Those who couldn’t stand to face up to ugly truths certainly wouldn’t willingly accept that burden. Make-believe is easier and more fun for those who can afford it.
Wow. I had no idea that it was that useless. Maybe you should alert the Republicans in Congress so they don’t need to worry about voting for it in the next scheduled votes since it’s all just a chimera.
What? Why wouldn’t the Republicans and their ideological helper/counterparts among the Democrats vote for the bill? Why in the world would THEY view it as “that useless”?
No, you poor moron, for them it’s just about everything that they wanted! They’ll vote for it (even if they pretend to hate it!) because, you see, they wrote it—or rather, their overseers wrote it for them and their selves—because they ( the Congressional backers of the watered-down non-healthcare-non-reform bill ) were bought-and-paid-for by the millions in lobbying and the fortunes in campaign contributions.
It’s average people who are the ones who, when compared to the health-care and insurance industries and what they get out of the bill in advantages, shall find this GREAT piece of democratic governance a practical disappointment.
You really needed me to explain that to you, huh? And you have the amazing nerve to mock me with sarcasm as though I can’t tell night from day?
Fucking amazing!!!!!!
Next moron, please step up!!!!
Argue all you want, but drop the name calling.
Yeah? Well FUCK you. So ban me if you like. You’ll demonstrate your true “liberal” faith in free-speech.
LOL!
Time to grow up a little?
lol. At least the teabaggers don’t hide behind keyboards to call people morons. Name calling (screeching?) on the internet – how lovely.
That’s “morans” to you.
nice.
The comment you are referecing was WAY over my head, so it didn’t offend me, LOL.
Here’s a proposition—-
To demonstrate the effectiveness of this new legislation—that is assuming, mind you, that it survives the conference committee, goes to the House and Senate and gets final passage approval there—I propose the following:
If you or your loved-one gains something in significant health-care which he or she would otherwise have surely not received, may you on his or her behalf send a brief note of appreciation to President Obama at the White House—
“Dear Mr. President,
I write to tell you that, thatnks to the newly enacted health-care legislation, my ____(friend, relative) was treated successfully for ____, (or his or her life was saved in the following way, & etc.). This is to express my deeply-felt grateful appreciation.”
On the other hand, if your loved-one, despite (if not directly _because
of) the new terms’ coming into effect, still was unable to obtain needed treatment due to lack of insurance or lack of effective insurance coverage under the prevailing terms of the legislation, may you write to inform the president—and, why not others like Senators Nelson, et al—
“Dear Mr. President,
I write to tell you that my ____, remains without treatment (or insured coverage) for _____ despite his (or her) having a policy under the terms of the latest health-care legislation passed under your administration, …
or
…I write to tell you that my _____ died today for lack of [ specify one: any or effective ] health-care covergage for… (medical condition in the instant case) & etc. In lieu of sending cards or flowers, please enact real, meaningful health-care reform for those for whom such reform would be not yet too late.
“Celebrate good times, come on” It’s time for a celebration. It’s unreal that some progressives are mad that it is going to pass…..crazy bizarro world, I still think it’s bitter Hillary supporters STILL whining about losing the election.
Your kid has just smashed his piggy-bank and taken everything he’s saved over months or a year or more(with your urging and guidance) and he now plans to go down the street where a bunch of the bigger boys are rolling dice. He’s heard about this game where he can wager his savings and maybe win even more. You always told him that what he saved would be his responsibility to use as he saw fit.
So, as your little kid heads out the door with all his savings in his pocket, about to experience an adventure in the big wider world beyond your care and protection, what are you gonna hope happens when he puts down his first bet? That he wins on it or that he loses?
Of course, as analogies go, the very idea that the nation might be compared to the position of such a child is both outrageous and pathetic. But there we are, looking rather like the kid who has no idea what he’s about to get himself into.
Then, later in life, there’s drinking alcohol, there’s offering or accepting bribes and other forms of corrupt behavior. At some point, people have to gain an appreciation for what’s a real bargain, as opposed to a phony one, and have to gain one way or another an ability to distinguish between smooth-talkers peddling pie-in-the-sky nonsense versus those who are telling them the truth.
Americans ( especially , but not exclusively ) are, politically, a nation of helpless infants. And the people with the most power and influence have lots and lots of candy to offer instead of anything that’s wholesome and nourishing—-particularly as that concerns intellectual, spiritual and moral nourishment.
And even the hardships of war haven’t done much to sober them. Instead, mainly because so relatively few Americans actually have anything to do with the hardships of war, they merely further debauched and morally poisoned by the advancing degradation that the war inflicts—even on a society which does everything to keep it at arm’s length or more away.
I supported Obama because I thought Clinton was race baiting, and because I thought Bill really fucked progressives.
And guess what? I HATE THIS BILL.
So I guess that puts the lie to your “bitter Hillar supporters” line.
You just wait: when the “reforms” start fucking families up the ass and force them to choose between paying the mortgage or paying for their mandatory junk insurance, the democrats and Mr. Obama are going to own it. People have to like the reform: I do not think many will.
we shall see: I will be the first to point the finger and say “I told you so”.
Me, too. Sort of. Well, I would’ve done the same as you and for much (though still other) of the same reasons, too.
I found Hilary just too disgusting to bear. Only Bush and Cheney made my skin crawl more than our dear Ex-First Lady. No Hilary supporter here. I figured that I would have voted for Obama had there been real need. But there seemed no chance that his campaign could fail. So I watched. And when, on the GREAT day, this GREAT man was elected, I actually felt a surge of relief, as though a disaster had been averted. I had at that time only a budding idea of just how much he was actually going to disappoint my expectations—so low had I held those.
ANYONE, ANYONE, I said to myself, would be light-years away better than McCain/Palin. And now, every night before climbing down into bed, my little prayer is,
“Please, God, don’t make me regret those words. It just couldn’t be possible!”
Is the video of REM’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” up on FireDogLake by any chance?
Good morning…
I’ve got nothing to say but it’s okay.