The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.
Well, that and the fact that socialized medicine has failed every time its been tried.
But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today:...Allen West
Allen west has only been there for a few years, and we should all be so lucky to be represented by a man who is willing to do what is necessary to save lives. For those who don't know, West was in the field in Iraq. His unit captured a coward, not in uniform, who was responsible for IEDs and attacks on U.S. service men and women. When questioning the captive he stated "I know that you can't hurt me, so I'm not saying anything." At which point West asked everyone else to leave the room, threatened the captive with a loaded weapon and went so far as to fire it next to his head. After getting the information they needed to save lives, he then went and gave that information, as well as a full account of how he obtained it, with an offer to resign his commission for breaking the rules. That man is a hero.
If it's about the lives of my soldiers at stake, I'd go through hell with a gasoline can.
A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.
A circumstance wholly avoidable if the Democrats had managed to come up with a budget...
House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"
That's total shit. Those of us with a brain didn't want to debt ceiling lifted, we want the spending cut. Perhaps if we weren't outspending our income by over double this wouldn't have been necessary.
And finally, I quit reading at this paragraph when it became overwhelmingly obvious that this guy's agenda is not to analyze the two party system, but to bash the conservative side while completely ignoring the complete whack jobs that the Dems have climbed into bed with.
It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.
I'm not a Republican and I certainly don't mind bashing both parties equally, but I can't stand people who want to pick on one side under the guise of critiquing both of them.
Shame on you for posting this ridiculously dishonest article Tas.