Open Left - change.gov

change.org continues "progressive" bait and switch on public option

lambert — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:53:43 GMT

I was indulging in the luxury of a Reuben at my local sandwich shop when I overheard a change.org organizer's pitch when he came in to talk to the staff*. This was the key part of the conversation:

[ORGANIZER] ... a government-run public insurance** option.
WORKER: Like Medicare?
ORGANIZER: Exactly like Medicare.

In reality, the "public option" -- or "plan" -- or, now, "public insurance option" -- is means-tested, firewalled, and if you've got employer-based insurance today, like Wal-Mart's junk insurance your policy will be grandfathered (Matt Taibbi), so you'll see no improvement, but won't be able to get out from under it. That's not "exactly like" Medicare. It's nothing at all like Medicare, which is available to all citizens when they reach 65. Period. And if "public option" is "exactly like" Medicare because it's government run, well, so is the Mars Lander "exactly like" Medicare, because it's government run, too.

Just unbelievable, that "progressives" would leverage the genuine popularity of Medicare -- and cream off all the effort of those who are pushing a genuine Medicare for All effort on behalf of a pissant so-called option that can't even be shown to work. Although it's "creative," I grant you. The "bait and switch" continues!

NOTE * Actually, he said that he really wanted to talk to the owner, and if they got 200 small business owners to sign the petition, they'd take it to our local Congressperson. Good idea, and worthy of a health care reform plan that would actually work, and wasn't sold through bait and switch tactics. Anyhow, since this is a family blog, I won't use the words "lying weasel," but feel free to think them...

NOTE ** So much for health care reform, eh? The rhetorical shift having been signaled by Obama himself, IIRC.

NOTE Which reminds me: There are those who view asking the question "What strategy would you use for single payer?" as the unsanswerable trump card. It now occurs to me that one possible approach would have been to give field organizers a script that bore a more than passing resemblance to reality.

Don't Let Them Get Away With It

Daniel De Groot — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:41:22 GMT

The conventional wisdom is that Bush and Cheney will slip into the night on January 20th, facing no further serious consequence for their actions. After all, it will eat up too much political capital, be too divisive, and piss off too many villagers to do anything else. Well, conventional wisdom is always right, until it's not.

Digby notes an effort spearheaded by Ari Melber to promote a key question about this on Change.gov. Here's what you do:

Voting remains open:
1. Sign in at change.gov/openforquestions
2. On the left menu, click "Additional Issues." Bob Fertik's question will appear at the top.
3. Look right for the checkbox, mouseover it so it goes from white to dark, then click to cast your vote

Similar questions are also listed, and highly ranked under "National Security" and "Foreign Policy." Go help them out.
I think some people are somewhat complacent about the torture thing because it seems a fair assumption that none of it will be sanctioned under Obama. This is about what comes next.

There will be future Republican Presidents, and going from Watergate, to Iran-Contra to pre-9/11 illegal domestic spying and then post-9/11 torture and secret gulags they demonstrably will not refrain from breaking core societal ethical norms absent serious legal ramifications (and if the laws against torture and wiretapping are not enforced, then they aren't laws, just some nice things written down somewhere, much like those lists of silly laws still on the books but never enforced).

Further, airing out what really happened on this is what will create the political impetus for another round of Watergate style reforms that adequately check the executive and perhaps revitalize the subservient legislative branch. The general populace is not paying much attention to this issue, but trials have a way of getting their attention, and I have no doubt there is enough salacious and depraved details to explore so as to occupy cable news.

Crimes against humanity were committed as part of formal US Government Policy. Changing the policy to stop doing it just isn't enough. Especially not when the next Republican will just change it back, and will have the strength of the "precedent" Cheney and Bush left him to normalize it to a large segment of the population.

Obama can start that snowball rolling downhill, but he will need a lot of encouragement to do so. Yes, he can.

Comments on Change.gov's "Your Seat at the Table"

masterplaid — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 21:36:44 GMT

EDIT: Forgot to add that this is cross-posted to my own blog too!

I spent some time looking through the Your Seat At the Table feature at the Obama transition team's website. YSAT is a document dump where the transition team releases copies of every letter or policy proposal sent to them by third parties during the transition. There are currently over 4000 documents here, from an open letter from the Mayor of Charleston to recommendations from the Coalition for Space Exploration to a letter from the American Bar Association.

My first impression when I saw this document dump was that it amounted to a nice symbolic gesture towards transparency, but nothing more. It's good that the transition team realizes that special interests need to face more public scrutiny, since the government is ultimately supposed to be accountable to the public and not to the special interests. So this is a good symbolic break from the practices of the Bush Administration. But of course, nobody from the public is actually going to read through thousands boring policy papers, so there won't be any actual oversight here, it's just a nice idea.

Then I looked at the comment section, and felt some of that elusive "hope" that's going around nowadays. It turns out that people are reading these papers, and commenting on them. I think the average document has about ten comments, ranging up to near 100 for contentious issues like health care. And the comments are generally pretty worthwhile.

Civic engagement! It's wonderful to see! This is just some random backwater on the Obama team's website, but it gives me hope for our country. My only suggestion would be to require the organizations that submit the documents to respond to the commenters. I recall seeing a few instances of this happening, but there's no reason why everyone who submits a policy paper to the transition team shouldn't have to discuss it with the people who elected the team as well.