Month: September 2009

Freshman Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) offered a short presentation of the GOP’s idea of health reform on the House floor last night, saying that the Republican “plan” comes down to this: Americans should avoid getting sick, and if that plan fails, they should “die quickly.”

Republicans are having a tizzy, of course.

Republicans were outraged, calling it a low-blow. This afternoon, U.S. Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., said he would give Grayson one more chance to say he was sorry about the comments.

If an apology doesn’t come, Price said he would submit a resolution to reprimand Grayson in the same way U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.Car., was formally chastised after yelling “You lie!” during a President Obama speech.

Meanwhile, House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson, D-Conn., told The Hill that Grayson should apologize, though he said Grayson’s comment did not stack up with Wilson’s remark.

Republican Party Chief Michael Steele weighed in, too, calling it a “calculated scare tactic and smear.”

Republicans, of course, are blind to their own hypocrisy, so it is not surprising that they have forgotten that just two months ago Republican Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite of Florida went to the well of the House and said, “Last week, Democrats released a health care bill which essentially said to America’s seniors: ‘Drop dead.’ Despite their promise to care for our seniors, Democrats have decided that it’s too expensive to care for my senior constituents and everyone else’s constituents.”

Soon afterward, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina also wen to the well, and with cameras rolling, said that the Republican plan — which no one has seen because it doesn’t exist — unlike the Dems’ proposal, “is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.”

The difference here, of course, is that Brown-Waite and Foxx were lying, and Grayson is telling the truth. Republicans have no plan other than desperately clinging to the status quo. And right now in America 45,000 people die every year because they don’t have health insurance.

Update: Republicans have drafted a resolution condemning Grayson, but he has refused to apologize.

In an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric last week, Glenn Beck refused a viewer’s request that he explain a phrase he used in July when he proclaimed Pres. Obama to be a racist.

As a refresher, here’s what Beck said on Fox & Friends:

“This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” Beck said. “I don’t know what it is.”

Following up on Beck’s ridiculous claim, Fox’s Brian Kilmeade pointed out that Obama is surrounded by white advisers like David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs and Rahm Emanuel.

“I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people,” Beck said. “I’m saying he has a problem. He has a — this guy is, I believe, a racist.”

(It’s strange that Kilmeade brought up Obama’s advisors but failed to note that Obama was raised in white household for most of his life.)

In the Couric interview, the viewer asked Beck to define what he meant by “white culture,” but he refused. Why? Because while “white culture” can refer to any number of things in our society — including the funny site Stuff White People Like — the term is most closely associated with the white supremacist movement.

In fact, “white culture” is what the Klan and the Neo-Nazis say they are ready to protect using any means necessary, up to and including bloodshed.

When confronted with his own words, Beck squirms as he tries to outmaneuver Couric with cameras rolling because he knows he’s been found out. As has been clear from the outset of this scandal, when Beck called the president a racist, he was projecting.

The problem here, of course, is that Beck is a mess. In both the Fox & Friends and Couric interviews, he comes off as a big, stammering dumbass. But is that who he really is, or — as is more likely — is he sending dog-whistle messages of solidarity to the Republican racist base?

Here’s the transcript of the question from the Couric interview:

COURIC: A twitter question is, adrianinflorida: what do you mean by white culture?

BECK: Um, I, I don’t…

COURIC: You said he had a deep-seated hatred for the white culture, what is that? What is the white culture?

BECK: I guess it’s…gosh. I’m so tempted to make news here today.

COURIC: No no, I’m just curious, this was actually adrianinflorida.

BECK: What to do? What to do? Adrian, Go to glennbeck.com. Listen to it. You can hear all of it.

COURIC: No, but you didn’t really address white culture, I think, in your explanation about President Obama, I haven’t seen the whole show, but can you? Just for our purposes?

BECK: Just for your purposes? So this will be a little secret between us?

COURIC: No, for this show, can you explain what you mean by the white culture? Because some people say that sounds kind of racist.

BECK: Really? It’s amazing to me that, for the first time, I think in history somebody can ask a question and say, “Don’t you think that maybe we have several pieces here?” We have several pieces; George Bush says my grandmother was a typical African-American that had, that had her views bred into her. You don’t think maybe we would ask questions about that comment? How is it that the first time I think in history, you should check on it, somebody says, “Hey. There’s some red flags here maybe we should look at?” … How am I? How am I the target for asking questions?

COURIC: People just want to know. What is white culture?

BECK: I’m going to see if I can play your game. People just want to know.

COURIC: You know, well, Adrian wants to know.

BECK: That’s good for Adrian.

COURIC: No but I mean it’s fine if you make a statement though, shouldn’t you be able to defend exactly what you mean by it. I’m not –

BECK: Katie, how many times have you said, how many times have you said something where you’re like, “I didn’t think. What’s white culture? I don’t know. What’s the white culture?”

What? What is the white culture? I don’t know how to answer that that’s not a trap.

COURIC: Mhmm.

BECK: You know what I mean?

COURIC: Yeah I’m not, I’m just, I’m not trying to trap you, I’m just, I think people wanted to know what that meant exactly.

BECK: Well we know Adrian does.

COURIC: Yeah, and you’re not going to answer her?

BECK: I’m not going to get into your sound bite gotcha game which we already are. We already are.

COURIC: No we’re actually, this is completely unedited so if you felt like you wanted to explain it, you have all the time in the world.

BECK: Mhmm.

COURIC: No? Don’t want to go there?

BECK: Nope.

COURIC: But basically, you stand behind your assertion that in your view, President Obama is a racist.

BECK: I believe that Americans should ask themselves tough questions. Americans should turn over all the rocks and make their own decisions.

A political brawl rocked the California Republican Party state convention in Indian Springs this weekend. On the griddle was Meg Whitman, former former eBay exec and current candidate for governor. The issue was Whitman’s failure to vote, or even register, for the first 28 years she was eligible. Making matters worse, she often did not bother to vote after she finally registered.

The news first broke in August when Debra Saunders, a conservative writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, reported that after Whitman moved to California in 1998, she waited four years before registering — and even then she registered as independent. Saunders also revealed that after she registered, Whitman skipped the vote to recall Gov. Gray Davis in 2003 and didn’t change her party registration to Republican until 2007.

Whitman responded in a statement:

“Voting is a precious right that all Americans should exercise. I have repeatedly said that my voting record is inexcusable. I failed to register and vote on numerous occasions throughout my life. That is simply wrong and I have taken responsibility for my mistake.”

One of Whitman’s two opponents, Steve Poizner, the state insurance commissioner (and the only Republican state officeholder other than the governor), pounced:

“Reporters have uncovered the facts that Meg Whitman has been desperate to hide: She never voted – never voted once – before 2002. Yet she continues to try to deceive the public, even when confronted with the facts. Worse, Meg Whitman and her campaign team are refusing to answer simple questions and deliberately lying to cover up the facts…

It is clear she should step aside and allow the Republican Party to select a nominee who can win and start to turn California around.”

When a reporter asked the Whitman campaign to say where and when Whitman had registered to vote before 2002, a spokeswoman replied tersely, “Go find it.”

The Sacramento Bee did just that. Its reporters investigated voting records in “six states and a dozen counties, including towns and counties in Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, New Jersey, Rhode Island and California where public records indicated that Whitman lived, worked or attended college” but turned up nothing.

On Thursday, the day before the convention, the paper reported that prior to registering in California in 2002, Whitman had never registered to vote anywhere — ever. She turned 46 years old that year.

This is extra problematic because at another party convention earlier this year, Whitman told delegates that she had registered in 1998. At a news conference on Saturday, Whitman offered this bit of understatement: “I did not vote as often as I should. I didn’t register as often as I should…”

At the convention, reacting to the Sacramento Bee’s revelation that Whitman had never voted, Poizner piled on:

“There’s never been a person elected governor anywhere in this country with a voting record like hers … I mean 28 years of not voting at all, not even being registered to vote — meaning she had no intention of even voting — is something that will make her really not qualified.”

The third opponent, former state budget officer and form Rep. Tom Campbell, who is currently an economics professor, chose not to attack Whitman’s record. Instead, he mocked both Whitman and Poizner for their campaign promises to resolve the state’s multi-billion budget hole by simultaneously lowering taxes and cutting spending.

Among the three, it’s Whitman who has the party establishment’s support. She has been endorsed by national GOP leaders John McCain and Mitt Romney and by former Gov. Pete Wilson. But at the convention this weekend, Poizner drubbed Whitman in the straw poll. He received 78 percent of the vote while she got 14 percent and Campbell took 8 percent.

Straw polls are usually pretty useless but if Poizner’s 64 point advantage over Whitman offers insight into the thinking of the party faithful, it appears they don’t like what the Los Angeles Times called the “civic indifference” in Whitman’s record, and that they did like Poizner’s aggressive response.

And who knows, maybe it means California Republicans are tired of taking bad recommendations from Pete Wilson — whose campaign in the early 1990s for Proposition 187, the anti-immigrant initiative, ruined the party by driving away Latinos quite possibly forever, and who was an early endorser of Schwarzenegger, their great disappointment, in the 2003 recall election.

Let’s hope not.

The dust has barely settled on the Tea Baggers’ Summer of Hate and yet a new poll suggests the right wing’s month-long tantrum in August has had little effect on the debate.

According to a CBS/New York Times poll released late last week, 72 percent of Americans want a government-run insurance plan as an option for people with low incomes or who insurance companies refuse to cover. Just 26 percent agree with the Baggers that government-run health care programs like Medicare are jackbooted socialism.

In June, before the start of the Bagger rage, the same poll [PDF] found that 20 percent opposed the government option.

So let’s recap. After a summer-long campaign in which insurance companies spent millions buying off pols in both parties and millions more on astroturf consultants … after all the death panel lies … after the town halls where elderly beneficiaries of government health care fell into spittle-spraying rage over a plan to provide government health insurance to younger people …

After all the barely concealed racism … after the comparisons of the president with bloodthirsty tyrants like Hitler and Stalin — men who deserved nothing less than death … after armed goons showed up at public forums threatening to “water the tree of liberty” with the blood of duly elected public officials … after the Baggers’ implicit threat that they would ignite civil war for no loftier goal than to protect the insurance industry’s annual $200 billion-plus in profits …

After all that, the health-insurance lobby and its pay-to-play caucus in Congress only managed to raise approval for protecting its profits among normal Americans by six points.