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You know, BACK TO THE OP I think Frum is right.
I think he hits the nail on the head in virtually every respect.
I think it is a brilliant piece. Thank you for finding it and posting it, Mr. P.
"hilarious to over a segment of the population. "
very noble, and very American to un a segment of the its own population.
You know, BACK TO THE OP I think Frum is right.
I think he hits the nail on the head in virtually every respect.
I think it is a brilliant piece. Thank you for finding it and posting it, Mr. P.
Not quite true. In Texas you first must own 25 or more vehicles in order to "self insure". Secondly you must put up $55,000.
It varies some from state to state. But most are pretty much in line with this.
They changed it ? I remember hearing that when I took my prep class for my P and C license. It was a long time ago so I very well misremembered.
Political Memo: Republicans Face Drawbacks of United Stand on Health Bill
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
WASHINGTON — Passage of the health care legislation challenges the heart of the Republicans’ strategy this year: To present a unified opposition to big Democratic ideas, in this case expressed in a stream of bristling anger and occasional mischaracterizations of what the bill would do.
From a legislative perspective, the Republican strategy did not work, despite months of predictions from Republicans that the bill would fail and that that would cripple the Obama presidency.
President Obama will sign the bill Tuesday, although with the support of only Democrats. An additional package of amendments to remove some of the more politically problematic provisions is likely to become law within weeks.
In political terms, Republicans face strong crosscurrents. Polls suggest that a sizable part of the nation is unenthusiastic about the bill or opposed to it. Conservatives see it as a strike at the heart of their small-government principles, helping to explain why Republicans are optimistic that they will make gains in the midterm elections in November.
“There is no downside for Republicans,” Michael Steele, the Republican National Committee chairman, said Monday in an interview. “Only for Americans.”
But at the same time, many provisions of the bill that go into effect this year — like curbs on insurance companies denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, or the expansion of prescription drug coverage for the elderly — are broadly popular with the public. The more contentious ones, including the mandate for the uninsured to obtain coverage, do not take effect for years.
And in a week when Democrats are celebrating the passage of a historic piece of legislation, Republicans find themselves again being portrayed as the party of no, associated with being on the losing side of an often acrid debate and failing to offer a persuasive alternative agenda.
David Frum, a fellow at the American Enterprise Ins ute, the conservative research organization, said Republicans had tried to defeat the bill to undermine Mr. Obama politically, but in the process had given up a chance of influencing a huge bill. Mr. Frum said his party’s stance sowed doubts with the public about its ideas and leadership credentials, and ultimately failed in a way that expanded Mr. Obama’s power.
“The political imperative crowded out the policy imperative,” Mr. Frum said. “And the Republicans have now lost both.”
“Politically, I get the ‘let’s trip up the other side, make them fail’ strategy,” he said. “But what’s more important, to win extra seats or to shape the most important piece of social legislation since the 1960s? It was a go-for-all-the-marbles approach. Unless they produced an absolute failure for Mr. Obama, there wasn’t going to be any political benefit.”
Republicans also face the question of what happens if the health care bill does not create the cataclysm that they warned of during the many months of debate. Closing out the floor debate on Sunday night, the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, warned that the legislation would be “the last straw for the American people.” Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, proclaimed several hours earlier, “Freedom dies a little bit today.”
Yet there are elements of the bill, particularly in regulating insurers, that could well prove broadly popular, and it could be years before anyone knows whether the legislation will have big effects on health care quality and the nation’s fiscal condition. Indeed, most Americans with insurance are unlikely to see any immediate change in their coverage, and several Republicans warned that the party could pay a price for that.
“When our core group discover that this thing is not as catastrophic as advertised, they are going to be less energized than they are right now,” Mr. Frum said.
He warned that the energy Republicans were finding now among base voters would fade.
The head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, offered a similar argument. “When this bill goes into effect, and none of the things Republicans warned about begin to happen — none of the death panels, none of the government takeover, none of the socialism — Republicans will have no credibility,” Mr. Menendez said.
The final deliberations, which drew protesters from across the country, including many Tea Party activists, cast an angry tone to the proceedings that also stirred concern among some Republicans. Some Democratic lawmakers said they had been taunted with racial epithets and phobic slurs as they walked into the Capitol over the weekend to vote. Representative Randy Neugebauer, Republican of Texas, shouted out “baby-killer” on the House floor when Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, one of the most fervent Democratic opponents of abortion in the House, outlined a deal he had worked out with the White House, which he said assured that the health care bill would not finance abortions.
Republican leaders dismissed any suggestion that the bill would hurt the party over the long term.
“Someone at Harvard or in San Francisco might think that, but not the rest of the country,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee.
Mr. Alexander said Democrats would soon find themselves saddled with blame by Americans whenever they ran into a problem with an insurance company, even though Democrats have made a point of criticizing the insurance industry in the debate and asserting that without legislation the nation faced never-ending increases in premiums that would make health coverage less and less affordable.
“Insurance premiums are going to go up normally, and millions of Americans are going to experience higher premiums,” Mr. Alexander said. “All this is going to be coming, and the health care bill is going to get blamed for a lot of it.”
The bill has energized the Republican base in a way that could produce a e of contributions and increase voter turnout.
But Mr. Menendez said that he was advising Democratic Senate candidates to challenge opponents about whether they would vote to repeal the bill — particularly, an expansion of prescription drug benefits for the elderly or requirements that insurance companies not deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions.
“We will challenge them,” he said. “What parts of this bill do you want to repeal?”
Gov. Haley Barbour, the head of the Republican Governors Association, said he believed that the bill was so unpopular that that line of political attack would not work.
“I would be for repealing the law,” Mr. Barbour said. “I would be for something better. There’s nobody that argues we don’t need health care reform. The argument is whether it’s good reform or bad reform.”
“I would be for something better"
Then spit out for everybody to see, or STFU.
Repugs' proposals were silly, did nothing to cover the uninsured, and did nothing to reduce costs.
The Repugs dishonest tactics are the same as for TARP. The Repugs proposed TARP, then when the Dems voted it up, the Repugs, who would have also voted for it, all voted against it, knowing it would pass and they could say they voted against it (while being for it). suckers, every last one of them.
eg, they have brought back the racist "state rights" bull , while also saying they don't want to regulate for-private insurers (can sell across state lines). This is the same scam as the credit card industry locating in a state where there are no usury laws.
States rights isn't racist.
depends on the state. hey yo!!!
I think even true 'small government' people agree that a major function of a federal government is defense. Lots of money goes to defense, and a good portion of those employees (G.I.'s, whatever) are directly employed by the government and is controlled directly by the Commander In Chief. However, the defense budget calls for large quan ies of cash to go to corporations, such as Boeing and Halliburton, and neither the states or the cons uents get to say a damn thing about it.
Granted, this new legislation compels money to go directly to the corporations instead of through tax payers>treasury>defense budget>corporations, but still, it is going to corporations. If anything, this bill cuts out the middle man.
As long as it is regulated, we as a people can deal with this. The problem comes when we have these kind of compulsionary laws without regulations.
States rights' are as states rights' does...
states rights is a racist/KKK/cracka/red-state/hate-all-govt/militiamen/"patriot" dog whistle
Vast Ring Wing Conspiracy isn't anything if not intolerantly, purifyingly monolithic.
========
David Frum, AEI SPLIT: Conservative's Position 'Terminated' By Major Think Tank
First Posted: 03-25-10 03:09 PM | Updated: 03-26-10 10:21 AM
See late updates below...
Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum has resigned from the right-wing American Enterprise Ins ute, Frum announced on his Web site Thursday afternoon -- a move which suggests the conservative movement has cut ties with Frum over the straight talk he has been providing all week.
Following the passage of health care reform in the House, Frum made waves with a column for CNN.com declaring that health care had proven to been "Waterloo" for the GOP, not for Obama as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) infamously suggested. Republican lawmakers quickly dismissed Frum, a prominent reformist conservative, as a mere "former staffer."
Then Frum said on "Nightline" that the Republican Party's lockstep with the Fox News attack machine has hurt the party, and that "we're discovering we work for Fox." That may have been the last straw for AEI.
"I have been a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Ins ute since 2003. At lunch today, AEI President Arthur Brooks and I came to a termination of that relationship," Frum wrote on his Web site. The full text of his "resignation" letter is below:
Dear Arthur,
This will memorialize our conversation at lunch today. Effective immediately, my position as a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Ins ute is terminated. I appreciate the consideration that delays my emptying of my office until after my return from travel next week. Premises will be vacated no later than April 9.
I have had many fruitful years at the American Enterprise Ins ute, and I do regret this abrupt and unexpected conclusion of our relationship.
Story continues below
Very truly yours,
David Frum
While Frum has been willing to speak out on Republican failings, he's hardly become a liberal since leaving the Bush White House. In a column published Wednesday night, he recommended that Obama either ignore the issue of immigration reform or encourage "self-deportation."
But the conservative movement has a tendency to excommunicate anyone who breaks ranks, says Bruce Bartlett, who was fired by the National Center for Policy Analysis, another right-wing think tank, for writing a book critical of Bush policies. "In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, D.C," Bartlett wrote in the wake of Frum's resignation.
Bartlett, who served as a domestic policy aide for Ronald Reagan and a deputy assistant Treasury secretary under the first President Bush, claimed Frum told him privately a few months ago that conservatives on AEI's payroll had been "ordered" not to speak to the media about health care reform "because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do." Frum himself certainly violated that order.
[UPDATE: Supporting Bartlett's claim, Paul Krugman points out that a 2003 health reform proposal from the Heritage Foundation, a think tank considered more right-wing than AEI, looks a lot like the bill Obama just signed.]
[UPDATE 2: Frum tells Mike Allen that "donor pressure" related to his "Waterloo" post was indeed responsible for his termination. Frum claims "the core of the story is the kind of economic pressure that intellectual conservatives are under" -- meaning AEI couldn't risk displeasing its base by keeping Frum on after he criticized the Republican Party. "[T]he elite isn't leading anymore," said Frum. "It's trapped."
Earlier, Frum told Greg Sargent he and AEI parted ways over money, not ideology -- they offered him the chance to continue on at a salary of zero -- and that his criticisms of the Republican Party were "welcomed and celebrated" at the conservative think tank.
Allen reports that AEI is standing by their earlier story that it was Frum's decision to leave.]
Krugman:
March 25, 2010, 5:21 pm
David Frum, AEI, Heritage And Health Care
David Frum* has been fired by the American Enterprise Ins ute; one has to assume that this is a response to his outspokenness about the Republican failure on health reform.
In discussing the Frum firing, Bruce Bartlett asserts that AEI has muzzled its health-care experts, because the truth is that they agree with a lot of what Obama is proposing. I find this quite believable; back in 2003 Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation, which is supposedly harder-right than AEI, proposed a health care reform consisting of … drumroll … an individual mandate coupled with subsidies to make insurance affordable. In short, Obamacare.
I was struck, by the way, by Butler’s recommendation that we
Provide support to people to obtain health care based on their need, not where they happen to work, or their eligibility for welfare, or their military record, or their age.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need?
11th Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican
The biggest thing here is "THE ECONOMIC PRESSURE THAT INTELLECTUAL CONSERVATIVES ARE UNDER".
That is what may eventually create a third party of 'intellectual conservatives', moderate democrats and independents, none of whom can conitnue to accept the extreme, non-thinking wings of either party.
Or maybe that is just wishful thinking on my part.
Welcomed and celebrated.
Your pay is zero. There's the door.
Of course, the failure of Republican obstructionism is solely due to the guy who pointed out its failure.
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/w...03/26/frum_aeiIn March 2003, he wrote a feature for National Review en led "Unpatriotic Conservatives," which amounted to an argument for why neoconservatives deserved supremacy within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Frum tiptoed right up to calling "paleoconservatives" like Pat Buchanan fascists, and ended on this note:
They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.You won’t find much of a defense of Buchanan or the paleoconservatives here, but that kind of bombast -- "war is a great clarifier" -- sure doesn’t look great in retrospect. Frum and his allies weren’t just trying to drum some unsavory types out of the movement. They were also working at making it impossible for a Republican to oppose the party line on the crucial issue of the day -- an issue on which they turned out to be disastrously wrong themselves.
War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen -- and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.
Now that Frum is the right wing's victim, rather than its enforcer, he's easy to sympathize with. But it seems that the fundamental problem is more in the idea that conservatism has to be a monolith at all times. For a movement that has become obsessed with warding off the evils of socialism, the right wing does dearly love a purge.
Assuming that the linked article is true (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), is this a 'what goes around comes around' moment?
Partly, yes. The article recaps Frum's career as a pundit.
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