From the Gruber article: The Senate assessment on high-cost insurance plans has much to recommend it, which is why it is almost universally favored by health policy experts. It would reduce the incentives for employers to provide excessively generous insurance

"Excessively generous insurance?" Well, we certainly can't have that.

It seems like just a few months ago liberal bloggers were criticizing Republicans who claimed that the trouble was that Americans have too much insurance. Now we have liberals espousing government disincentives to "excessively generous insurance" and telling us that we can afford to pay for our government-mandated private insurance if we just cut back on vacations and such.

What the hell is next, Nate Silver or Ezra Klein telling people who live paycheck to paycheck to just get rid of their cell phones and cable so they can buy insurance?

Why does this plane incident suddenly become a media frenzy? Because it's another slow news week now that Christmas is over, Congress (mercifully) is in recess, the President in Hawaii, and there's all that 24/7 air time to fill. Thus we are treated to all the usual bloviators politicizing a problem that is not nearly as big as it has been inflated to be.

In any case, airport security is largely a joke, designed mostly to inconvenience everyone minimally and keep us all in a constant state of fear and apprehension. That it should actually catch someone up to no good really isn't a consideration because if it were the airline industry would be up in arms, and getting cleared to set foot on a plane would be an ordeal few people would want to endure. I've been through Israeli air security repeatedly, and I can assure you it is an experience not easily forgotten. But you feel secure afterwards.

VD Hanson is a mental disease.

"Iranian security forces stormed a series of opposition offices on Monday, rounding up at least 12 prominent anti-government activists in a new crackdown on the country's reformist movement, opposition Web sites and activists reported."

If there ever was a real major grass-roots opposition, which is dubious, they have ceded any higher ground they had with their repeated violence. The government will easily paint them as criminals.

Gruber's Health Bill Apologism seems to fit right in with the "Deliberately avoiding the real arguments" mode of argument Ezra Klein and Nate Silver have been involved in. This part is breathtaking in its gall:

"But there have been numerous criticisms of the Senate financing. Perhaps the strongest is that some insurance plans will be "unfairly" burdened. For example, firms with older employees may have higher insurance costs not because their plans are more generous but because the employees themselves are more expensive to insure. Thus, many claim that this is a tax not on excessively generous insurance plans but on those who happen to have high insurance costs.

But this argument misses an important point: The assessment proposed in the Senate is not a new tax; it is the elimination of an existing tax break that is provided to exactly these firms."

OK, so we have a serious issue where taxes are going to be imposed on plans because, ultimately, those plans are aimed at older people, and Gruber's argument is that it's OK to tax them because they haven't been previously.

Really.

Kinda like Klein's "Only people who aren't insured are going to be forced to buy insurance" argument.

I honestly think that the Bill's proponents constitute a lethal combination of political whores, who'll repeat whatever drivel they're fed for power and money, and a group that, in Nate Silver's sadly misplaced words, are akin to Climate Change deniers. They can't, they really can't, get over the idea that the Senate Bill makes no sense whatsoever, and that people might have serious objections to it, so they just ignore their arguments and make their own arguments in favor that ignore the realities of the bill and the danger it poses to any attempts to reform Healthcare for a generation.

The paragraph after the italicized/quoted paragraph, beginning "But this arguement" was also supposed to be quoted.

When is
DeMint going to let Obama's TSA person get to work, by all accounts he is really an expert on counter terrorism, the repubs are more interested in playing politics.How will they spin the fact that two of the planners of the would be bombers try out were released by Bush in late 2007 to go to Saudi Arabia for Art therapy!
Why don't we send all the Gitmo inmates to Art Therapy and then the repubs would be happy to release them.

Mark Shields, in regards to the healthcare reform legislation, during the 12/27 "Inside Washington':

"You don’t need sixty votes from this point forward. A conference report is privileged. It cannot be filibustered, it cannot be held up. All you need is a majority vote."

Video HERE with transcript to come.

~~~~

I've asked around about this and received mixed responses.

If that is true, then they could add a robust Public Option, the Medicare Buy-In, better subsidies, make the ban on denial of coverage due to a preexisting condition immediate, and fix all the other problems with the Senate bill, and they would only need 50 votes in the Senate.

???

hey Steve good to read / see you being a bit feisty today in some of your commentary instead of your usual milquetoast-ishness. always good to come across a smack down or three in your commentary. we do not think any less of you - in fact, you gain a bit of respect.

"The group said it had provided Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab with an explosive device that failed because of 'a technical fault.'"

First, how the hell would they know? Did CSI:Al Qaeda send forensic technicians to the scene? Second, do they really want the True Believers to know that holy warriors are issued defective weapons? Shouldn't they be blaming some external factor, like claiming Abdulmutallab chickened out? Or better yet, insinuating that he wouldn't gotten away with it if racist passengers hadn't profiled him. Yeah, that's what they should say.

Er, "would've gotten away with it"

Closing Gitmo won't get any easier now that the media is reporting that ex-Gitmo prisoners were behind the failed Northwest bombing.

And Obama telling the media he won't rest until those behind this attack are caught - thirty minutes before teeing off - won't help matters either.

KC, regardless of how to define "too much" insurance I suppose you can understand this argument: if an employer buys something for you, that's a form of income. You're getting paid either with cash or something you'd have to buy with cash. It's actually scandalous there was a special exemption for health insurance not to be considered "income", since you have to pay tax for a company car you could use when not working. We could debate that what the insurance companies charge these plans isn't really a valid "fair market value" for their utility - I'd love it if you'd agree with that.

People freak out about backscatter full-body Xrays because they virtually strip you. Yes, backscatter Xrays allow the whole body to be seen (gasp!). Take a peek at the people going through security at the airport. How many of them would even have a chance of exciting your prurient interest if you saw their backscatter images? I would hate that job, checking out thousands of naked obese people all day. (Hey, no offense if you're obese, I just don't want to see you nude.) If the public is uptight about it, have separate men’s and women’s lines that will be viewed by the appropriate sex (oh my, the screeners might be gay, though!). It would surely be a far better system than having to half undress to go through security. This way we could just walk on through. I’ve been through these scanners in other countries and they’re way less hassle than the hassle we go through here.

The VDH article begins with this quote:
"On the 40th anniversary of D-Day, Ronald Reagan asked of the Allied forces who had given their lives, "Where do we find such men?" A good question."

More interestingly, where did RR find that quote? It's on the last page of James Michener's "The Bridges at Toko-Ri"--though it's more likely he or his speechwriters heard it intoned by Frederic March in the movie. Good thing he wasn't Joe Biden; then he'd be a plagiarist.

Bonzo Ronnie talked about a lot of war “memories” that turned out to be movies he saw or made.

The Pakistani economy is collapsing. The economic downturn fuels popularity of the fundamentalist Sunni Punjabi in the crushing of the Shi'ites (30% of the pop.) and the eternal quest to confront India over Kashmir.
Iran is developing it's nuclear capabilities at least as much with an eye to defend their Pakistani brothers. Their threats vs. both Arab Muslims and Israel(!!) are something of sabre-rattling bait and switch.

Gruber is right on in his assessment. But why not use both the Cadillac bounty and the surtax to fund the new costs at the state and the federal level? Why not implement the surtax on incomes over $500k as well and provide grants back to the states to meet their obligations under Healthcare reform? It would disrupt the Gop, insurance and pharmaceutical efforts to sow dissent at the state level.

There has never been a year when preliminary evidence did not point to better than expected retail numbers during the holidays.
By the time the truth comes out the propaganda has done what it was designed to do.
If you doubt, check out last years raising and lowering of expectations through the month of December, and then the reality in January.

Re the terrorist and the video mentioned on HuffPo that Al Quaeda never existed... all I have to say is why don't we get serious about alternative fuels so we can stay the h*@& OUT of the middle east and away from these damn fanatics? I mean we have our OWN fanatics and I think being in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. is asking for trouble. We invaded their countries. They hate us for it.

So let's get on with alternative fuels and get out of there-- we won't need their oil (which is all we care about).

Hanson is a loon of the first order. Unfortunately, the Master Loon Cheney considered Hanson's musings to be of such significance that he arranged a dinner at his residence, prior to the Iraq invasion, where Hanson held forth before Cheney's minions on the topic of "unpopular decisions, and how they are vindicated by history."

Hanson deliberated upon Sherman's march through the South, Truman and the atom bomb, etc. Cheney then managed to persuade the brainless one, Bush the younger, that he would become vindicated by history, in spite of being vilified by his contemporaries.
Bush' span of history being fairly short, he ran out of patience with the vindication bit, and turned on Cheney. But Hanson and Cheney enjoyed a fine run, perhaps best illustrated by another Loon, Feith, who covered himself in pity remembering how he used to be a "playah."

Cheney and daughter are now working hard to blame everything bad on Obama/Clinton and everything good on Reagan/Cheney (was there ever a Bush presidency, in Cheney's mind?)
Watch how they will use events in Iran as vindication of Hanson's march of history thesis.

The US, as a polity, is beyond repair.

neil b (and by extension Mr Gruber): In what way is it scandalous that there should be a tax exemption for money spent on health insurance but not scandalous that health insurance should be subsidized for those on lower incomes? (The answer is it isn't. Neither is scandalous at all. And comparing necessary health insurance to a friggin' company car is beyond ridiculous.)

Gruber seems to think that something's scandalous just because he calls it scandalous. He's realized the "cadillac plan" logic is flawed, ridiculously flawed, because older people will find themselves automatically classed as cadillac plan users, and rather than attempt to address it has instead bastardized the rhetoric of "fairness" to pretend there's something rotten and illogical about the government not taxing something that's critically important.

Gruber and other pro-Senate Bill apologists seem to want it both ways. They argue, rightly, that healthcare is an absolute necessity, and use that as a justification for mandates and subsidies, but then pretend it isn't all of a sudden when talking about higher priced plans, which they initially support under the assumption/using the claim that these are plans that are unnecessary and provided exclusively to the rich, but are now acknowledging also apply to ordinary people, and are often going to be the only plans available to people because of circumstance, not wealth.

If there was any intellectual honesty left with these jackasses, they'd be proposing fixes, not pretending it's fair.

There's a fairly good response to Gruber in today's NYT BTW: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/opinion/29herbert.html?_r=2&hp

Apparently the logic behind supporting the "Cadillac tax" is actually more twisted than I thought. Proponents expect (and the CBO office report apparently assumes) that employers, on dropping such plans, will give employees payraises to make up for the difference between what was being paid for premiums, and what they get now.

Srsly.