democrats: the gang that can't shoot straight. unless they're aiming the guns at themselves...

while there's a way to go, it's a safe bet that the democrats will not benefit from whatever "healthcare reform" bill they manage to pass. most of what i've read about the plan indicates that it won't help all that many people and it seems to have been conceived to simply force some large number of citizens onto the rolls of for-profit insurance companies. sure, those same companies have been making a lot of loud public complaints, but i get the feeling it's just for show. there's no reason for them to fear any democratic legislation. even if the insurance companies are forced to take on some folks with pre-existing conditions, that'll be offset by all the healthy young people who'll have to enroll in some kind of insurance plan or face a fine.

so the democrats had a chance to do something decent and they dropped the ball. what a surprise. i guess they figured that they couldn't exactly give us a reprise of '94, where it was obvious to anybody who watched the process that the dems had no interest whatsoever in really changing anything. no, this time they're going to loudly trumpet their "victory" and all the people who voted for the democrats in '08 hoping that they'd really do something about the healthcare crisis are going to look into the particulars of the bill and ask themselves "what the fuck are they talking about?"

much as it happened in '94, disappointed democratic party voters will not bother to vote in the upcoming mid-term elections. media commentators will attribute this to an obama backlash and since obama is as much to blame as anybody else, this will not be entirely incorrect. but the nattering nabobs of the media will be wrong on the details. this is the second time in recent history that the democrats have come to power thanks to voters who really expected something from them. and the second time that the democrats will have failed miserably to deliver on what those people were expecting. while a fair amount of the blame in both cases can be laid at the feet of conservative 'blue-dog democrats' who consistently derail liberal initiatives, that excuse only goes so far. the democrats could form a tighter, more disciplined caucus and stop allowing conservative democrats to wield undue influence on policy decisions. the republicans certainly don't put up with much dissension among their ranks. as repulsive as they may be otherwise, the republicans are a model party when it comes to enforcing unity of message among their members. to any sane observer, it should be crystal clear at this point that the democrats no longer want to address populist concerns in any substantial way.

republicans are lucky, in a sense. they've come up with a strange method of taking corporate-friendly policies and making them appeal to common folk. the democrats have a much more difficult tightrope to walk: the dems still run based on (vaguely) liberal-populist policies, but thanks to the influence of corporate money, they rarely act on their supposed commitment to those policies. the democrats didn't get cast into the political wilderness a few years ago because of the "unpopularity" of liberal ideas. they lost power due to the entirely astute perception among the voting public that they don't stand for anything.

that, alongside their pathetic excuse for "healthcare reform" is why the mid-term elections in 2010 will be a bloodbath for the democrats. the only possible chance the dems have is if the extremist 'tea-party' sector of the republican party continues to grow and scare the hell out of normal people. otherwise, the dems are toast. i find it hard to give much of a fuck.

HR 3548

president obama will sign the UI extension bill today. it's a victory for the republicans though. they managed to hold the thing up for a month by insisting on the inclusion of a number of wholly unrelated amendments. and the bill being signed will, thanks to the republicans, have one of those amendments still attached: the controversial homebuyer's tax credit. controversial because of the fraud associated with it and because it's basically been acknowledged that it isn't spurring anybody to buy a house. nearly everybody who's benefitted from the credit would have bought a house anyway.

it's a victory for the republicans because they were able to hold the bill up for a month using a bunch of frivolous amendments to do so and most of the mainstream media let the story pass without comment. do you remember the coverage during the bush administration on the rare instances when the democrats occasionally slowed down the legislative process? the republicans spend most of their time in the senate nowadays preventing the democrats from getting things done. where's the reporting on this? it's deliberate obstructionism. the republicans held up a bill for UI extensions and as each day passed, more and more unemployed people found themselves with no source of income. where's the outrage? meanwhile, the crazies who are comparing obama to hitler because of the dem healthcare plan get quite a lot of fairly credulous coverage. remember how the anti-war movement lost face with the media after the move-on dust-up where someone submitted an anti-war ad that compared bush to hitler? that came up over and over again. why doesn't it happen with obama's virulently insane critics? why isn't the entire movement discredited based on the prevalence of extremists within it? because the supposedly liberal media has allowed itself to be boxed into a corner regarding conservatives and republicans. republicans have loudly complained about liberal bias in the media for so long that it's now accepted as the truth. as a result, the media is simply loathe to do honest reporting when conservatives are involved. and conversely, they're delighted when they can report scandals that make the democrats look bad, because they can use that coverage to disprove their liberal bias. and of course it doesn't work, because there's always something else that, according to cons, proves how liberal the newsmedia is. and on it goes...