Top Ten Uses for the Sheriff’s Red Chopper

Other uses for the Sheriff’s shiny red helicopter:

10. Rescuing kittens from trees
9. Breaking up street fights
8. Crowd control before and after Sabres games
7. Cooling people down on very hot days
6. Building it to the curb
5. Going to Texarkana and coming back with cases of Coors in just 24 hours- Eastbound & down.
4. Getting Chris Collins in touch with the people
3. Best McDonald’s run ever
2. Getting the kids from ballet to swimming
1. Burning that sweet, sweet fuel

Scoundrelatory Tactics

The reason why you should vote Pundit for Best Buffalo Blogger in the annual Artvoice balloting goes beyond facts such as, e.g., I actually blog regularly; I keep my posts shorter so that regular people can read them during their busy day; I provide you with quality posts just about every day; other bloggers often merely pick up on points I’ve already made, and regurgitate them by using links primarily to prove how well-read and special they are.

No, the reason why you should vote Pundit for Best Buffalo Blogger has to do with the fact that Chris Smith has taken to mounting a vicious, false, and nasty negative campaign, trying to persuade people to vote for him by attacking me. That tactic, obviously, merely underscores the lack of merit behind his effort.

Vote Pundit: a Working Blog for a Working Western New York.

About that Post I Never Wrote

Someone I respect and admire, who reads my site regularly but disagrees with me on most things political, contacted me a few months ago to inform me that Chris Collins was taking a few days off because he had a death in the family.

He advised me to not write any of my, “Chris Collins should drop dead” posts.

At the time, I laughed and promised that I wouldn’t. It was the easiest promise I could have made, because under what circumstances would I ever type those words?

I may think that Chris Collins is a pompous jerk whose priorities are wrong. I may think that the Sheriff is an incompetent boor. But I don’t wish them ill; I don’t wish them to be harmed or in any way stricken by disease or death.

I’ve been insulted loads of times by the best of them. Take your pick. But the “when did you stop beating your wife” suggestion that I withhold my fictitious desire that the county executive become ill was pretty insulting. I’d never post such a thing, and I’d never make light of someone’s tragedy, either. This isn’t that kind of site.

Now, maybe I could shake it off as being, itself, joking hyperbole. A ‘ha-ha, I’m so mean to Collins that I should tone it down while he’s at a funeral’ sort of thing. Fair enough. But the call was made specifically and explicitly to me at that time to advise me not to write those kinds of posts. It wasn’t an off-handed comment, it was the prime subject matter of the call.

Well, I didn’t write that Collins should “drop dead” because (a) I never would; and (b) I don’t feel that way about anyone with whom I happen to disagree politically. If that’s what you think of me, you probably shouldn’t read this blog anymore. Seriously.

Breaking Lives with Impunity

Catholic politicians who are politically pro-choice (regardless of what their personal belief is) are routinely denied holy communion.

OTOH, Catholic clergy who molest children are protected, and are permitted to continue to celebrate mass. Meanwhile, the childrens’ abuse is compounded by requiring them to sign oaths of silence.

Quite clearly, there is no excuse for the crime of sexual molestation, but frankly there’s also no excuse to beat a chorister, either.

Because the Church injects itself into political matters, it cannot remain above scrutiny or criticism for its obvious double-standard and rank hypocrisy.

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• Late Night: “Nonresponsibility,” Or, How to Set a Proper Papal Moral Example (firedoglake.com)
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The Banking Crisis: Not the Fault of Poor Minorities

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Watch CBS News Videos Online

But as usual, leave it to the rich and conservative to blame the poor and underprivileged for the problems suffered by the middle class.

How To Do It

Actual campaign e-mail from U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Orlando.

Subject: Palin Attacks Grayson; Grayson Applies Calamine Lotion to the Resulting Reddish Skin

On Friday night, Sarah Palin came to Orlando, and attacked Rep. Alan Grayson. This is what she said:

“I got to meet quite a few candidates who are lining up in a contested primary who want to take out Alan Grayson. And I think Alan Grayson — what can you say about Alan Grayson? Piper is with me tonight, so I won’t say anything about Alan Grayson that can’t be said around children. [Good one, Sarah!] But thank you, Florida, for allowing candidates in a contested primary to duke it out over ideas and principles and values, all with the same goal, and that is unseating those who have such a disconnect from the people of America. That’s what the goal is here in this race against Alan Grayson. Please fight hard, and do this for the rest of the country. Fight hard, and send a conservative to Washington, DC.”

Palin, the former half-term Governor, current-nothing and future-even-less, charmed the all-Republican audience with her folksy folksiness and her homespun homespunnery. Atypically, Palin was wearing clothes that she had paid for herself. At the end of the event, she shared her recipe for mooseface pie.
In response to Palin’s attack on Rep Grayson, Grayson actually complimented Palin. Grayson praised Palin for having a hand large enough to fit Grayson’s entire name on it. He thanked Palin for alleviating the growing shortage of platitudes in Central Florida.

Grayson added that Palin deserved credit for getting through the entire hour-long program without quitting. Grayson also said that Palin really had mastered Palin’s imitation of Tina Fey imitating Palin. Grayson observed that Palin is the most-intelligent leader that the Republican Party has produced since George W. Bush.

When asked to comment about what effect Palin’s criticism might have, Grayson pointed out, “As the Knave’s horse says in Alice in Wonderland, ‘dogs will believe anything.’” Earlier, as the Orlando Sentinel reported, Grayson said, “I’m sure Palin knows all about politics in Central Florida, since from her porch she can see Winter Park,” which is part of Grayson’s district.

Grayson said that the Alaskan chillbilly was welcome to return to Central Florida anytime, as long as she brings lots of money with her, and spends it. “I look forward to an honest debate with Governor Palin on the issues, in the unlikely event that she ever learns anything about them,” Grayson added, alluding to Politifact’s “liar, liar, pants on fire” evaluation of much of what Palin has said.

Scientists are studying Sarah Palin’s travel between Alaska and Florida carefully. They hope to learn more about the flight patterns of that elusive migratory species, the wild Alaskan dingbat.

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The Buffalo News Op-Ed Page Goes Full-Boehner Republican

The Buffalo News is vilified as a pinko outfit by conservatives, and condemned as a right-wing rag by liberals. Usually, that would be evidence of evenhandedness and equal-opportunity advocacy.

On Friday, it wrote something that was quite literally a parroting of right-wing talking points. If that editorial wasn’t ghost-written by someone like Andy Rudnick, Bob Wilmers, or some other wealthy and well-connected plutocrat, then I’m shocked. Every single bitchy little disingenuous Republican complaint about health care reform was in there.

Luckily for us, Paul Krugman disembowelled each one in the Times that same day.

The crux of the op-ed piece is that costs aren’t brought down by health care reform.

Instead, he has thrown his weight behind an expensive collection of entitlements, mandates and regulations that will only raise the deficit again. And he has turned away from some obvious steps that would reduce costs.

Increased competition between health insurance companies, by allowing them to sell nationwide, is the traditional American way to bring costs down. Medical malpractice reform must be addressed with reasonable caps on damages, so that doctors and hospitals will make costly diagnostic and care decisions based less on fears over lawsuits.

And as the debates rage despite the Democrats’ intent simply to push through the plan they want, it remains puzzling that so little attention is being paid to the health reform plan — as opposed to the health reform rhetoric — advanced by Republicans. The Common Sense Health Care Reform and Affordability Act has a lot of the things that the public is asking for and could lower costs as well.

Included in that plan are items worthy of actual debate instead of political posturing. Among them are provisions that would allow children to stay on their parents’ policies longer, guarantee that people with pre-existing health problems will be able to get insurance and not allow insurance companies to drop people if they get sick

Wow, that Republican plan seems great! Why won’t the Democrats include those things?

While those provisions also are in the Democrats’ plan, so are a slew of others — all costing a lot of dollars, which the Democrats say would be covered by an unlikely combination of scenarios including future congressional cuts in popular programs. The Republican proposal is contained in 219 pages. There are 2,000 pages in the Democrats’ bill.

In an editorial where the Buffalo News decries Democratic “posturing” on health insurance reform, it’s downright shocking to see it take up the dumbest anti-intellectual meme the Republicans have – how many pages a bill has.

Where was this editorial when massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans were passed through reconciliation during George W. Bush’s administration? Tax cuts that exponentially grew the deficit, and which still make up the vast bulk of it today.

Buffalo News:

With health care already tied to a sixth of the American economy and heading higher, that cost control is essential. The difference essentially is that the Republicans first want to control costs and Democrats first want to expand entitlements. In this case, expansion should follow cost control — not undermine it.

Krugman:

Well, if having the government regulate and subsidize health insurance is a “takeover,” that takeover happened long ago. Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated.

The only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance. And that market, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a disaster — no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick, and huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. It’s this sector, plus the plight of Americans with no insurance at all, that reform aims to fix. What’s wrong with that?

Buffalo News:

It is unclear whether the president is willing to get to the heart of the matter. Already, he has consumed 13 months on aggressively pushing health care as a top priority when the public, during a difficult recession, is concerned first about jobs. This is neither good political thinking nor good decision making.

Economies bounce back. Health insurance is still beyond the reach of 40+ million Americans – a number that grows each year, and is made worse by recessions.

Buffalo News:

If the sound economic approach in a time of huge federal debts and deficits demands health care cost control, do that first. And do it without saddling a new bill with a thousand pages that crushes real reform by expanding entitlements without really figuring out how to pay for them.

Finally, there is a difference between health insurance and health care. The latter is important not only from a cost standpoint, but also from the standpoint of quality delivery of medical care in this country. The president loves to talk about how excellent the care is and how low-cost the price is at the Cleveland Clinic and other such superior medical facilities. If that is the future he aspires to, where is the action to get there?

This obviously is no simple task, but if the president and the Congress would accomplish this improvement along with cost reduction, they will have advanced the public’s well being far beyond what has been presented so far.

Krugman:

The second myth is that the proposed reform does nothing to control costs. To support this claim, critics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.

Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.

And it gets better as we go further into the future: the Congressional Budget Office has just concluded, in a new report, that the arithmetic of reform will look better in its second decade than it did in its first.

Furthermore, there’s good reason to believe that all such estimates are too pessimistic. There are many cost-saving efforts in the proposed reform, but nobody knows how well any one of these efforts will work. And as a result, official estimates don’t give the plan much credit for any of them. What the actuary and the budget office do is a bit like looking at an oil company’s prospecting efforts, concluding that any individual test hole it drills will probably come up dry, and predicting as a consequence that the company won’t find any oil at all — when the odds are, in fact, that some of the test holes will pan out, and produce big payoffs. Realistically, health reform is likely to do much better at controlling costs than any of the official projections suggest.

And to the Buffalo News’ general Republican talking point that the whole thing is fiscally irresponsible, Krugman:

How can people say this given Congressional Budget Office predictions — which, as I’ve already argued, are probably too pessimistic — that reform would actually reduce the deficit? Critics argue that we should ignore what’s actually in the legislation; when cost control actually starts to bite on Medicare, they insist, Congress will back down.

But this isn’t an argument against Obamacare, it’s a declaration that we can’t control Medicare costs no matter what. And it also flies in the face of history: contrary to legend, past efforts to limit Medicare spending have in fact “stuck,” rather than being withdrawn in the face of political pressure.

So what’s the reality of the proposed reform? Compared with the Platonic ideal of reform, Obamacare comes up short. If the votes were there, I would much prefer to see Medicare for all.

For a real piece of passable legislation, however, it looks very good. It wouldn’t transform our health care system; in fact, Americans whose jobs come with health coverage would see little effect. But it would make a huge difference to the less fortunate among us, even as it would do more to control costs than anything we’ve done before.

I don’t mind the Buffalo News taking a political stand that differs from mine. I do mind the Buffalo News acting as stenographer for FreedomWorks and the Republican National Committee, repeating half-truths and outright lies about a reasonable bill that probably doesn’t go far enough to expand insurance coverage to all Americans.

Maybe Stan Lipsey and the union guys who write editorials at the News don’t have to worry about how their medical care gets paid for. But a lot of working poor and middle-class people in Buffalo do. For the city’s only paper to advocate against insuring them based on make-believe concern trolling is sickening.

Drop

Courtesy Marquil at Empirewire.com

Paterson

Courtesy Marquil at Empirewire.com

Dear Chris Lee,

I know you adore the telephone town-hall meetings, but let me tell you why they’re pretty lame and inconvenient.

Now, I’m really happy that you hold anything at all. Some representatives don’t. But invariably, you hold your “town halls” at 5:40 pm. At 5:40 pm, I’m just getting home from work and scrambling to help get dinner ready. Or I’m helping with homework. 5:40 literally couldn’t be less convenient for regular working families.

Move the time to 6:30. Give us a chance to take a breath after a long day at work.

And more to the point, on the one occasion I stuck through a few minutes of a telephone town hall meeting, the one comment that got through was merely parroting your current position. I rolled my eyes and figured that the calls were being screened so as not to be too contrary to your stated position. Now, admittedly that may not be the case, but it was the impression I got.

How about this. Your district isn’t all that big. Maybe 60 miles across at its widest? How about holding genuine, in-person town hall meetings throughout the district, and do them at times when working people can attend. 6:30 is about right.

Thanks,

BP