COVID-19 & Healthcare

Brewer and Barton: Strange days indeed

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by David Safier

I don't know, maybe the end days are at hand. When the Brewer lies down with the Liberals and Barton is, well, Barton . . . Can someone dig up an appropriate quote from Revelations? Something better than Michele Bachman's "leaf is on the fig tree"? (What the hell does that mean anyway?)

Gov. Brewer is pleading with Republicans to leave Obamacare alone. Kill it and Arizona's economy will be crippled, she said.

“The bottom line is we need that money in our economy to save rural hospitals and jobs in the rural areas,” the governor said, as well as making sure hospitals in metropolitan areas, where most AHCCCS patients are seen, get paid. “It’s all about jobs and getting back federal dollars that our taxpayers have paid to the federal government, to bring them home.”

There's more to her calculation — I should probably say "her advisors' calculations" — than I realized. The only reason the lege was able to take people off of Arizona's Medicaid program AHCCCS was because the voter mandate said the state was only required to use "available" funds for the program. When the funds dried up, the lege was able to cut back. But now the state has a surplus.

Since [the budget crisis], state finances have recovered. It ended the last fiscal year with close to $1 billion in the bank, plus another $450 million in a “rainy day’’ fund — money Brewer said she fears a court would force it use to fulfill the voter mandate.

Brewer's people understood, if we didn't take a billion from the feds to fund the Medicaid expansion, the state might be forced to pay for the program. Kill Obamacare and you wipe out the Medicaid expansion money. Brewer may dislike Obamacare intensely, but she's gotta root for it regardless.

Then there's Rep. Brenda Barton.

Boehner Defiantly Rationalizes GOP Madness, as Stephanopoulos Presses for Shutdown End Game Strategy (video)

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by Pamela Powers Hannley

A week ago, Republican grandstanding in the House of Representatives shutdown the US government. Saying they want to "save the American people from the threat of Obamacare" Tea Party anarchists are risking the health and welfare of millions of Americans, our standing as a world leader, and our financial health as a nation, as they stall budget negotiations. This is beyond unconscionable. It is traitorous.

Bankrolled by the Koch Brothers and a handful of capitalists bent on denying affordable health care to millions of Americans, Republicans in the House of Representatives continue to use double speak lie to cloud the issues and deflect blame for this dangerous brinksmanship away from themselves.

From Esquire…

We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons. 

[Video after the jump.]

Time Magazine cover gets it right

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie: Time Magazine is still in business? Who knew. In any event, Time has the perfect cover this week on newsstands. So-called GOP "moderates" are held hostage by their radical extremist Tea Party captors, and in a classic case of Stockholm syndrome, are empathetic and sympathetic towards their captors to the point of … Read more

South Carolina and another nullification crisis

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Washington Post's Colbert King got it exactly right in The rise of the New Confederacy.

Confederale SoldiersSouth Carolina, the state that gave us the Nullification Crisis with the South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification in 1832, until Congress in 1833 passed a Force Bill, authorizing President Andrew Jackson to use military force against South Carolina ended the crisis.

South Carolina, the home of Senator John C. Calhoun, the intellectual force behind states' rights and nullification, under which states could declare null and void federal laws which they viewed as unconstitutional, and who was an inspiration to the secessionists of 1860–61.

South Carolina, the first state to secede from the United States with the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.

South Carolina, whose Confederate militia batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the first shots of the American Civil War in 1861.

South Carolina, which has refused to accept its defeat in the Civil War or to accept the post-Civil War Amendments, in particular the 14th Amendment, which forever ended any debate over Sen. Calhoun's theories of nullification and secession.

Sunday Morning Bobblehead Fail (please, just make it stop!)

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I stopped watching the Sunday Morning bobbleheads years ago. Why should I ruin a perfectly good Sunday morning watching incompetent infotainment actors pretending to be journalists? But I have relatives staying with me this weekend, and they insisted.

After sitting through the interminable torture of the Sunday Morning bobbleheads and their repetition of GOPropaganda talking points like the loyal little stenographers they are, all I can say is: "New Rule: cancel all the Sunday Morning bobblehead shows" — please, just make it stop!

I swear, American's I.Q. will increase a good 10 points after the first couple of weeks in the absence of these preening infotainment actors pretending to be journalists.

Who set me off in particular was Savannah Guthrie, who was sitting in as host of NBC's Meet The Press Gregory this week. I remember Savannah from when she was a TV news reporter for KVOA here in Tucson. I didn't think much of her then, and I think even less of her now. This morning she was the perfect little parrot for the GOPropanda talking point, "Why won't the president just sit down and negotiate with the Republicans?" (squawk!)

It's not just Savannah. I have heard the insufferable Wolf Blitzer and Candy Crowley at CNN parrot the same GOPropanda talking point all week.

Do you know who is the only infotainment actor pretending to be a journalist who answered this GOPropaganda talking point correctly? CNN's Fareed Zakaria.