Few things are more irritating than stupidity.  What makes this even more annoying is knowing you are paying for it.  Congressman Eric Cantor has scheduled a vote this week repealing “Obamacare.”  His proposal’s chances of passing the Senate and/or being signed into law by President Obama are pretty much the same. Talk about exercises in futility.

The House cut its operating budget in 2011 by five percent.  More info on that can be found here.   That amounts to nearly $33 million a year.  Legistorm has information on how much each office spends on salaries for members and staffers.  One sure thing cam be said of all the offices from the big spenders to the most frugal is the source of the funding.  Paying for Eric Cantor to drag te House through this flight of fancy/political posturing at its most absurd.  No one — even Cantor himself, sees this as becoming law — at least not with the current Senate and White House.

This is shameful and not our founding fathers had in mind when they crafted our constitution.

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After both Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan threatened to eliminate Obamacare, Speaker John Boehner announced that it’s not going to happen. TPM:

The chances of a government shutdown at the end of the month keep going down.

On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner avoided one more tripwire when he rejected conservative demands that Republicans use government funding legislation to pick a fight over defunding the Affordable Care Act.

“Trying to put Obamacare on this vehicle risks shutting down the government,” Boehner told reporters at his weekly Capitol briefing.”That’s not what our goal is. Our goal is to reduce spending.”

Assuming the Senate passes its spending measure this week, the House will have to take it up and clear it by March 27 — the day the government’s budget authority expires. If Democrats support the bill in large numbers, that shouldn’t be a problem. But the question is whether House Republicans will oppose it this time around now that conservatives have endorsed using it to pick a fight over Obamacare.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab from TPM:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said Sunday that the budget he will introduce next week repeals health care reform because that under ‘Obamacare,’ “we think it’s going to look very ugly over the next couple of years.”

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Ryan explained that his budget is based on the assumption of repealing ‘Obamacare’ and replacing it with a new system. His budget also reforms Medicare for those currently under 55 years of age.

“Are you saying, as part of your budget you assume the repeal of ObamaCare?,” host Chris Wallace asked.

“Yes,” said Ryan.

“Well, that’s not going to happen,” Wallace said.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From AP:

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Wednesday denied a request to block part of the federal health care law that requires employee health-care plans to provide insurance coverage for the morning-after pill and similar emergency contraception pills.

Hobby Lobby Stores and a sister company, Mardel Inc., sued the government, claiming the mandate violates the religious beliefs of its owners.

In an opinion, Sotomayor said the stores fail to satisfy the demanding legal standard for blocking the requirement on an emergency basis. She said the companies may continue their challenge to the regulations in the lower courts.

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Here’s precisely why raising the Medicare eligibility age appears to be the only solution to keeping the program solvent: the Republican Party, which hates Medicare and always has, and the compliant DC news media, which self-consciously dittos the Republicans so as to not appear too “liberal,” say so.

And so it is.

But I probably don’t need to tell you that it’s really, really flipping stupid — times a thousand. And it’s simply designed to sabotage Medicare and the broader healthcare system.

During election campaigns the Republicans invariably pretend to be in love with Medicare, as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan reminded us this year by turning the Affordable Care Act’s Medicare savings into a cudgel to flog the president and the Democrats as enemies of the program when in fact the opposite is true in nearly every way. Not only did Romney inject the $700 billion savings into the discourse as a campaign issue, it practically became a centerpiece of his campaign — not to mention one of his biggest lies. And now the same Republicans who joined Romney in this line of attack are insisting that Medicare be one of the programs on the fiscal cliff chopping block.

The idea is a familiar one. They want to raise the eligibility age from 65 to 67, and they’re receiving hearty endorsements from the cynical, nearsighted and compliant DC press. For example, within a strikingly revealing Politico exposé about creating the DC elite, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote this:

They will also tell you Medicare, which is on pace to be insolvent in 12 years, is a much, much bigger mess and threat to long-term economic vitality — and much harder to solve. Yes, the rich need to get smaller benefits, but that is almost meaningless in terms of fixing it. Ultimately, many Americans will have to get less generous benefits that start to kick in at an older age — and those changes need to start a decade from now. Otherwise, the math simply doesn’t work.

This is the common wisdom. Sadly. The only way to “fix” Medicare, they say, is to stick it to regular Americans who need it the most. There’s no other solution, they say, other than to protect the rich and screw the middle class. And that’s precisely what they intend to do. It turns out that stripping 65- and 66-year-olds of Medicare benefits will cost those people two dollars for every dollar the government saves by keeping them out of the program.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in the first year alone such a shift in the eligibility age would save the government around $5.7 billion. Sounds great! But it’ll actually cost seniors and the system more than $11 billion in the first year. Matt Yglesias wrote:

That includes $3.7 billion in higher costs for 65- and 66 year-olds, $4.5 billion from employers through company-sponsored insurance, $0.7 billion from state governments, and $2.5 billion in higher average prices for third parties once younger seniors are shifted out of the Medicare risk-pool and into the general population.

And the (very liberal) Wall Street Journal agrees that raising the eligibility age is a huge mistake.

The Republicans don’t really care because the goal isn’t savings for the system — the goal is to begin a trend in which every time Medicare reform comes up, raising the eligibility age becomes the standard fare. So it gets rolled back and rolled back, while fewer and fewer people are covered. Undermine and weaken the system by a thousand cuts. And, as an added bonus, the roll back trend make totally sabotages the notion of actually expanding Medicare or implementing Medicare For All.

Ironically, and in spite of what The Very Serious Republicans and Politicos, expanding Medicare to include everyone is one of several ideas that could actually help both Medicare and the broader healthcare system. By allowing everyone, especially younger Americans, to enter the system, a tsunami of new revenue enters the system from a demographic that’s generally healthy and would use very little of the system’s resources. Plus, Medicare operates with greater efficiency and lower overhead than private insurance, while privately doctors, hospitals and pharmaceuticals remain intact and, in some cases, prosper because everyone can receive care and pay for it.

Shy of providing Medicare For All, what about passing the public option? During the debate over the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the CBO reported that the public option would save the government $68 billion over ten years. It would further bend the cost curve and, hell, if they decided to raise the Medicare eligibility age anyway, it would at least give seniors an affordable stop gap.

Or they could simply make the Medicare tax portion of the payroll tax progressive. In other words, in the current system everyone pays a Medicare tax of 1.45 percent, regardless of income. Why not apply the Medicare tax with 1.45 percent as the minimum bracket and increase the tax for subsequently higher income brackets, while means testing wealthier Americans to discover whether they really need the same benefits as middle and working class Americans?

Of course none of this is considered to be Very Serious enough, so unless there are some loud voices telling them to cut crap, the Very Serious people in Washington appear to be moving the direction of raising eligibility age. And it’ll be a disaster.

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America IS the Duggar family.

By Bob Cesca:

If someone asks you what is the planet’s most dangerous problem, your immediate answer should be overpopulation. There are simply too many people and nowhere near the resources to adequately sustain the current population, much less the population of one, five or ten years down the road.

Here’s a cheerful thought. At some point, nature will rise up and correct the human population problem as we reproduce like cancer cells, and I don’t necessarily want to be around when that happens, either by an unstoppable global pandemic or some other worldwide calamity. The climate crisis is probably first in line to wipe out large sections of the human population, mostly in densely populated third world coastal nations. Ultimately, though, the planet will be just fine without us, but unless we intend to curb our population growth and the accelerated doubling time (the rate at which the human population doubles) nature will do it for us.

In America, however, everything is fine and dandy. It feels like we’re shielded from the overpopulation crisis, which is probably why no one here really talks about it in spite of its critical importance. Actually, the only people talking about population in America are conservatives who are worried that we’re not having enough babies — arguing that we need to increase our birth rate and population.

Ross Douthat posted a column in The New York Times yesterday perpetuating this ridiculous argument. Here’s what set him off:

Last week, the Pew Research Center reported that U.S. birthrates hit the lowest rate ever recorded in 2011, with just 63 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. (The rate was 71 per 1,000 in 1990.) For the first time in recent memory, Americans are having fewer babies than the French or British.

Zoinks! We’re not salad-shooting as many babies as we did 21 years ago! Someone notify the Duggars to keep going!

Douthat argues that a healthy American population growth rate provides an economic benefit: more babies means more taxpayers and entrepreneurs. But of course we’ve never lacked entrepreneurs and the primary reason for the recent decline in tax revenue has been the supply-side Reaganomics ideas marketed by people like Douthat: tax cuts, deregulation, income inequality, and so forth, which precipitated the Great Recession. Instead of rolling back 30 years of Reaganomics favoring the wealthy, while also undermining the middle class, Douthat thinks it’s a better idea to “make more babies.”

No thanks. I can’t imagine anything more irresponsible.

America represents only four percent of the world’s population yet we consume 33 percent of the world’s resources. That’s dangerously unsustainable — not to mention totally immoral. We’re a self-indulgent, greedy culture, and yet even as we seemingly digest the planet like a Double-Down sandwich, America has the second highest rate of child poverty in the world — 23 percent — second only to Romania. We have 1.6 million homeless children. We’re 34th in infant mortality (Cuba is 33rd). We’re 13th in education, 31st in math, 23rd in science. Hell, we’re 51st in life expectancy. And conservatives suggest that should have more children?

And yet:

The average person living in the United States uses 300 shopping bags worth of raw materials every week – weighing as much as a large luxury car. We would need the resources of three planets for everyone on Earth to live as people in the United States do. [...]

The Ecological Footprint (the amount of the earth’s surface that it takes to provide everything each person uses) of the average person in the United States is about 12 times larger than the footprint of the average inhabitant of India. So the 4.1 million babies born in the United States this year will have almost the same impact on the earth as the 27.6 million babies born in India.

We’re consuming far more resources than is necessary and yet we still have a terrible record when it comes to raising healthy children. Why?

Partly because our healthcare system sucks. Douthat and other conservatives have demonized and shouted-down the expansion of programs like SCHIP, Medicaid and Obamacare, not to mention universal healthcare and a single-payer government-operated healthcare system — the very programs that contribute to higher life expectancies in nations like Canada and Japan (in Japan, for example, citizens pay just 30 percent of healthcare expenses while the government picks up the remaining 70 percent). In the world of conservatism, as Barney Frank once said, life begins at conception and ends at birth. After that you’re on your own.

How about this: instead of indiscriminately squirting out more babies than we’re capable of adequately caring for, with one in four being born into poverty, let’s make sure the children we’re birthing have a better shot at growing up healthy, happy and well-educated, and thus developing into the taxpayers and entrepreneurs of the future that Douthat is looking for. And it’s likely that with an increase in healthier Americans, fertility rates will improve.

Until we get there, until we can figure out how to do it in a responsible and sustainable way, please don’t make more babies, America. So far, we’ve really screwed it up.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From TPM:

Late last week more than a dozen Republican governors declared that they will not build the insurance market exchanges called for by the Affordable Care Act, including prominent names like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, John Kasich of Ohio, Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Rick Perry of Texas.

On Monday, Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma joined them, declaring in a statement that it “does not benefit Oklahoma taxpayers to actively support and fund a new government program that will ultimately be under the control of the federal government.”

The original deadline for states to notify the Department of Health and Human Services on whether they intend to build their own exchange was last Friday, but the administration extended it to Dec. 14. About a dozen Republican governors are weighing their options, including Chris Christie of New Jersey, Rick Scott of Florida and Terry Branstad of Iowa.

The Affordable Care Act encourages each state to build and operate its own exchange — a regulated, subsidized marketplace where consumers and small businesses can shop for insurance plans. If a state declines, the federal government has the power under the health care reform law to build one for it.

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By Bob Cesca: So this is it. In several hours we’ll know whether millions of Americans will receive affordable, portable, and, in some cases, non-profit healthcare. We’ll know whether women will retain their basic human rights and personal dignity. We’ll know whether American voters have re-elected the president or elevated a man who represents and indeed boasts everything that caused the Great Recession.

Certainly there have been other elections this pivotal. 1860, 1932, 2000 and 2008 are definitely on this list. But in our lifetimes, I don’t recall another election when the stakes were higher — when the lives of millions might not only be enhanced but, in fact, saved if the incumbent president is re-elected. And, remarkably enough, we’re talking about laws that are already on the books and a Republican challenger who, as part of his agenda, has vowed to repeal those laws as his primary goal.

But there’s not much else I can write at this point to convince anyone to vote for the president. So then what have we learned?

We’ve faced a Republican Party that’s reduced campaigning to new depths of deception and cynicism. Part of the blame goes to a shape-shifting T-1000 model CEO candidate whose entire business and political record verifies his utter lack of political conviction. Sure, he might be a decent family man, but CEOs are capable of expertly divorcing their personal conscience from their business practices and Romney sure as hell knows how to feed his family: by bankrupting other families.

But beyond the candidate, the Republicans have further embossed their non-reality based Opposite Day strategy with the help of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and dark money groups that are unaccountable to voters and operate totally under the table where they can spend limitless sums of money in pursuit of infecting the discourse with lies. In the face of overwhelming objective evidence, the Republicans think there are votes in denying that evidence.

Do the list. The president doubled the deficit even though he cut it by $300 billion. Obamacare is government-run healthcare even though it’s almost entirely composed of private insurance carriers. It’s snowing in New York and that proves global warming is a myth. The Democrats gutted Medicare and welfare reform even though they strengthened both. The Democrats are the real racists. You know the lies. And they have a receptive audience because they’ve terrified half of all voters using Southern Strategy dog-whistles and horror stories about brown people, reducing too many voters into fearful, racist, pee-pants children who think Mexicans will behead them, godless gay people will destroy their joyless, sexless marriages, black people will steal their paychecks and Muslims will crash planes into their houses unless they allow Republicans to cut taxes for rich people. Or else.

The Republican Party has ceased to be an organization dedicated to core conservative values and has, instead, dedicated itself to the opposite values of whatever the Democrats say irrespective of whether it makes the Republicans appear totally ridiculous, self-satirical or contradictory.

It’s a trend that’s been developing since 1964 and the birth of the modern conservative movement but it’s only been truly perfected this year.

Worse, they’ve managed to hector the for-profit news media into capitulating to their fictioneering — offering it equal billing alongside actual science, empirical data and historical facts. Consequently, the press refused to probe the party’s ongoing voter disenfranchisement, suppression and intimidation effort, and it allowed Romney to make it to Election Day without releasing his full slate of tax returns. If anyone should’ve been forced to disclose his financial history, it’s Romney whose wealth was accumulated through similarly elusive and labyrinthine techniques — carefully slithering through the tiniest legal loopholes — not unlike the Wall Street bankers who nearly destroyed the economy. In spite of the party’s laughable denial of the climate crisis, their crusade for government-mandated transvaginal ultrasounds, their death panels, their Southern Strategy racism, their attempts to deconstruct the word “rape,” their astroturf protests, their staged non-rally rally food drives, their Jim Crow laws and their economic sabotage, the press still regards them as a very serious party deserving of respect and deference.

And so an entirely awkward and maladroit presidential candidate, Romney, was miraculously able to surge ahead in the polls after 90 minutes of solid talking on television even though he spent the previous 18 months bungling and lying about everything — a total of 20-30 lies per week per Steve Benen’s toteboard. Why? Chiefly because the press allowed him to do it. If he wins today, they will surely follow suit throughout the next four to eight years.

Yes, the Republican Party’s crap-on-a-stick cynicism will certainly live on, win or lose. But if things turn out the way I expect, reasonable, rational, sane voters will have denied the Republicans the ultimate trophy they’ve desired for the last four years — the presidential validation of their contra-reality strategy.

We’ll know for sure tonight.

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"Say, how does a fella' open this window and let some air in?"

By Bob Cesca: I’m old enough to remember quite clearly the 1992 campaign. Seeing as how I was a political science major and 1992 was the first presidential election in which I could vote, I wrote extensively for my campus newspaper in support of Paul Tsongas and, eventually, Bill Clinton. Four years earlier, I’m semi-ashamed to admit that I was a Republican and supporter of George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign (my youthful indiscretion) so I enjoyed a small bit of insight into how Republicans think and, specifically, the potential flaws in the Bush style, especially when matched up against a juggernaut underdog campaign like Clinton’s.

Bush 41, who had already spent 12 years in the White House, had the potential to sound out-of-touch with middle class life, and, when confronted, he had a tendency to get, well, snotty. If he wasn’t careful, he could fall into such a trap and it would only bolster Clinton’s chances.

An infamous news story from 1992 illustrated Bush’s inability to connect with “regular people” — in fact, it made him seem hilariously out of touch with familiar technology. At a campaign stop, Bush appeared to be fascinated by a super market bar-code scanner. A report in the New York Times by Andrew Rosenthal described the president as “amazed” by the familiar device. How did the pretty red laser beam guess the correct price of a half-gallon carton of milk?! Incredible! Now, to be fair, Snopes has declared this story to be “False,” citing other reports that didn’t necessarily describe Bush as having “a look of wonder” flickering across his face. However, there’s videotape of the event and he certainly looks confounded by the space-age miracle price-knower food beam — something most Americans had been familiar with for years.

Regardless of the story’s veracity, it’s locked into American political canon now as a example of what not to do if you’re trying to appeal to regular people.

Yesterday, Mitt Romney’s seemingly innocuous remark about airplane windows could be slotted into the same category as Bush 41′s stupified wonderment at the check out line.

In case you missed it, Romney was asked about Mrs. Romney’s mishap in which the cabin of her airplane filled with smoke in mid-flight. Romney replied, “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem.”

He doesn’t know why “they” don’t allow the windows to be opened in the event of a cabin fire. The windows of an airplane. Ostensibly cruising at an altitude of 35,000 feet and 500 miles per hour. Yeah, why not roll down a few windows — especially if it’s raining! What could possibly go wrong? Get to work on that, airplane people!

But that’s not the only stumble from Romney in the last 48 hours. On 60 Minutes, Romney was asked about affordable access to health care.

QUESTION: Does the government have a responsibility to provide health care to the 50 million Americans who don’t have it today?

ROMNEY: Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance, people — we — if someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.

It goes without saying this is a much larger problem than the airplane windows nonsense. Sending uninsured people to emergency rooms for medical attention is a huge reason why health care costs are exponentially skyrocketing. In general, people who don’t have insurance certainly don’t have the money to afford to pay for medical attention out of pocket. So when they get the insanely expensive bill from the hospital, they have a tendency to, you know, not pay it. The hospital loses money and has to increase prices to offset the lost revenue. If everyone is insured, however, medical bills are paid and providers don’t have to jack up prices to compensate for non-payment debacles.

And you know what? Romney knows this. He’s made this exact argument against emergency room care many, many times. He just chose to lie about it on national television because he’s undisciplined, awkward and desperate to escape his own record as a health care reformer.

Furthermore, anyone who’s ever been to the emergency room because they couldn’t afford standard medical care knows that you can’t just walk in, get treated and leave without a bill. They also know, on some level, that if a hospital loses money, it has to compensate for its losses somehow. Again, Romney seems out of touch with working class Americans, not to mention basic loss mitigation in business.

In the grand scheme of things, and at a different juncture in his campaign, these remarks might be non-issues. If he were enjoying a healthier campaign, people might walk on by without a second glance. But Romney’s up to his eyeballs in his own crapola and any gaffe or glitch is going to be amplified times a thousand. People can smell the rank odor of political death from a mile away. When an all pro quarterback throws a couple of interceptions, he’s just having a bad day. When a crappy quarterback is picked off, it’s observed through a prism of other failures and they’re swept up in an inescapable vortex of disaster. And they fail. Right or wrong, there’s a perception that this happened to President Carter. It also happened to George H.W. Bush. Neither man could extricate himself from his respective crash-and-burn narratives and even the most minor gaffes added fuel to the fire.

One thing is for sure: if Romney makes similar mistakes in the debates beginning next week, he will have absolutely engaged in the political equivalent of opening an airplane window in mid-flight.

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