Daily Archives: February 25, 2010

Ask Dr. Liberal: Good Deal!

Dear Dr. Liberal,

Should I buy a used car from Barack Obama?  It is a 2005 Mazda Protege with 65,000 miles on it.  He is asking $3,000 for it.  What do you think?

Signed,
Car Shopping in DC

Dear Shopping,

Kelly Blue Book tells me that the car you describe is probably worth around $3,500.  So in the immortal words of Maya Angelou – oh hell yes.  Buy the car, but be sure to offer Barack Obama only $160 dollars for it.   When Barack Obama hems and haws at the $160 say that you were only kidding and would really only pay $60 for it.  When he says, “Okay $60 it is.”  Say, “Not so fast. I see a dent in the fender which is going to cost me $200 bucks to fix, so give me the car plus $140 and we’ll call it even.

When he hands over the $140 and the keys be sure to give him tons of attitude and act like you were thoroughly abused.

Yours truly,

Dr. Liberal

Allow Dr. Liberal to apply a poultice to your karmic sores.  Write to me in care of liberalgeek@delawareliberal.com.

The Doctor is out!

Thursday Open Thread

As of writing this, I’m still waiting for this latest snowstorm, the “snowicane” to start. It sure was nice of the snowstorm to hold off until everyone gets to work to start! Today’s open thread is a “governors behaving badly” version of your open thread. Let’s roll!

It looks like the Gov. David Paterson bombshell is starting to drop now. The first article was about Paterson’s driver who had a history of violence against women. This next article details how Paterson may have intervened in his driver’s domestic violence case:

Last fall, a woman went to court in the Bronx to testify that she had been violently assaulted by a top aide to Gov. David A. Paterson, and to seek a protective order against the man.

In the ensuing months, she returned to court twice to press her case, complaining that the State Police had been harassing her to drop it. The State Police, which had no jurisdiction in the matter, confirmed that the woman was visited by a member of the governor’s personal security detail.

Then early this month, days before she was due to return to court to seek a final protective order, the woman got a phone call from the governor, according to her lawyer. She failed to appear for her next hearing on Feb. 8, and as a result her case was dismissed.

Paterson has asked the NYAG to investigate (his political rival). Nevada governor Jim Gibbons sure is lucky some other governor is overshadowing his antics!

Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons has acknowledged that a woman to whom he sent hundreds of text messages several years ago accompanied him on his recent trip to Washington, D.C., where he attended the National Governors Association conference over the weekend.

…

On Tuesday, the governor issued a statement to the station, saying Karrasch traveled with him to the nation’s capital but the state did not pay for her expenses.

…

Gibbons told reporters he had paid for Karrasch’s trip, keeping a promise he made to take her to the conference, according to the Las Vegas Sun. He said he and Karrasch live near each other and she was given a ride home as a courtesy.

Gibbons, who is divorcing first lady Dawn Gibbons, acknowledged in 2008 that he sent 867 text-messages to Karrasch over a six-week period the previous year. The governor reimbursed the state $130 for the text messages and issued a publicly apology. He denied the messages were “love notes.”

I guess Gibbons keeps some his promises, except “love, honor and cherish until death do part.”

Rasmussen Polls Delaware

Rasmussen is a Republican outfit that skews both its sampling and its questions towards Republicans. They have just released a new Delaware poll, conducted on Monday with a sampling size of 500 (which is probably average for Delaware) but the margin of error is high (4.5%) with this poll. No other internals are available at this time for review (as to partisan or ideological breakdowns), which is a red flag in the polling world.

So with those boulders of salt, here are their results for the First State.

* President Obama has a 51% approval rating, versus a 48% disapproval rating.

* Governor Markell has a 61% approval rating, versus a 37% disapproval rating.

* Castle leads Coons 53% to 32%. 8% prefer some other candidate (O’Donnell?? Anti-Coons or Pro-Biden sentiment?) and 8% are unsure.

This feels about right to me, in that I feel the Castle-Coons race is a 50-40 race at the moment, with Castle as the favorite. I really want to see the partisan breakdown here, though.

* Coons has a 43% favorability rating, versus a 35% unfavorability rating. 22% don’t know who he is or are not sure.

* Castle has a 65% favorability rating, versus a 30% unfavorability rating. 4% live in caves.

* Here is an interesting nugget about the economy and Delawarean’s personal finances: 82% rate their personal or family finances either fair, good or excellent. Only 16% rate them as poor. And 2% live in caves. Yet, 51% feel their finances have gotten worse over the past year. How is that possible? 18% feel they have gotten better, and 28% say they are the same, and 2% live in caves. I think media perception drives views on the economy. Do you ever notice commercials on TV and radio that continue to say “In tough times as these….” We are officially in a recovery, the recession is over, the economy is growing and the unemployment rate is finally falling again, and yet the President from 24 on the Allstate commercial thinks we haven’t bottomed out yet.

Fiscal Conservatives Don’t Want To Cut Spending

Conservatives do a lot of posturing about the deficit, which they only discovered the existence of on January 20, 2009. I remember the good ol’ days of the early Bush presidency when the problem was the surplus. Well, conservatives are apparently extremely upset with the deficit now, but taxes are still bad (in fact we should cut more!). They believe the solution to the deficit problem is to cut spending. So, one polling organization, the American National Election Study asked conservatives what they wanted to cut (via Salon). Unsurprisingly, almost nothing:

Very few conservatives said they favored reducing (or cutting out altogether) spending on any program. The least popular program proved to be childcare — with a grand total of 20 percent of conservatives saying they’d slash it. The most popular is highways; only 6 percent want to cut spending there. Even bugaboos like welfare and foreign aid fare well, attracting the ire of only 15 percent of conservatives. Amazingly, the survey found that, on average, 54 percent of them actually wanted to increase spending.

Everyone wants to cut “waste, fraud and abuse.” The problem is, no one can ever name what specific waste, fraud or abuse there is, unless it’s someone else’s program. Perhaps if they were serious about budget cutting they have to use the trick you use with kids (one cuts, the other picks), Democrats will agree to a program cut like Republicans claim to want as long as they get to pick it. Sounds fair to me.

NPR Destroys Republican Talking Point

The media coverage of the health care reform debate has been quite frustrating because the coverage has not covered the substance of the debate. It’s been the typical “on one hand, on the other hand” type of coverage which has allowed Republicans to get away with telling outrageous lies about health care reform (death panels!!!!). I’ve always wondered why “Republicans are lying to you” is not a media story.

The poor media coverage of the hcr debate is one reason I was so shocked this morning when listening to NPR. They were actually informing people about the reconciliation process and how it has been used in the past. They started the story with what Republicans have been saying about reconciliation:

Not surprisingly, that has Republicans crying foul. Budget reconciliation, Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) told reporters Tuesday, “was never designed for a large, comprehensive piece of legislation such as health care, as you all know. It’s a budget exercise, and that’s why some refer to it as the ‘nuclear option.'”

“The use of expedited reconciliation process to push through more dramatic changes to a health care bill of such size, scope and magnitude is unprecedented,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) wrote in a letter to President Obama on Monday, urging him to renounce the possibility of trying to pass a bill using the procedure.

BTW, I love that wording “some refer to it as the nuclear option.” Actually, Republicans coined the term the “nuclear option” to describe abolition of the filibuster. Anyway, Republicans count on you and the media to have short memories and not to call them on what they said and did just a few years ago. So, is the use of reconciliation unprecedented?

But health care and reconciliation actually have a lengthy history. “In fact, the way in which virtually all of health reform, with very, very limited exceptions, has happened over the past 30 years has been the reconciliation process,” says Sara Rosenbaum, who chairs the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University.

NPR then turns the screws a little tighter (referring to COBRA):

“The correct name is continuation benefits. And the only reason it’s called COBRA is because it was contained in the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985; and that is how we came up with the name COBRA,” she says.

The NPR lists other important health care legislation passed by like Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), CHIP and changes to Medicare (such as adding a hospice benefit).

Markos at dkos also reminds us that the Republican-led Congress under George Bush passed big legislation using reconciliation:

Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (first Bush tax cuts)
Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (second Bush tax cuts)
Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, assistance for needy families)
Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005 (tax cuts)
College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007 (student aid, loan forgiveness)