Well. I never thought I would see the day that the AMA followed through and supported healthcare reform legislation. I figured they would bale. I guess times really have changed. When Medicare was being debated, the AMA couldn’t fight against it hard enough. When President Clinton tried to get healthcare reform through congress, the AMA was central to making sure it didn’t happen.

Today, the AMA released the following:

AMA Supports House Passage of Health System Reform

Will work with Congress and the administration to make critical changes that cannot be addressed through the reconciliation process

For immediate release:

March 19, 2010

Washington, D.C. – After careful review and consideration, the American Medical Association (AMA) today announced its qualified support for the current health reform bill as a step toward providing coverage to all Americans and improving our nation’s health system.

“The pending bill is imperfect, but we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to something as important as the health of Americans,” said J. James Rohack, M.D., AMA president. “By extending health coverage to the vast majority of the uninsured, improving competition and choice in the insurance marketplace, promoting prevention and wellness, reducing administrative burdens, and promoting clinical comparative effectiveness research, this bill will help patients and their physicians.”

“While the final product is certainly not what we would have devised, we strongly support the parts of this bill that are desperately needed by millions of Americans who are struggling to get or keep health insurance coverage,” Dr. Rohack said. “We will continue to work with Congress and the administration to solve important issues that cannot be addressed through the reconciliation process.”

“This is not the last step, but the next step toward real health system reform,” Dr. Rohack said. “We will remain actively engaged with Congress and the administration to ensure that before Congress adjourns there are additional important changes to our health system. Congress must act to preserve access to care for seniors and military families by permanently repealing the Medicare physician payment formula that will cut Medicare payments by 21 percent next month. According to an AARP poll, nearly 90 percent of people age 50 and older are concerned that the Medicare physician payment cuts threaten their access to care.”

“Congress must also move immediately to correct problems with the Independent Payment Advisory Board,” Dr. Rohack said. “The current IPAB framework could result in misguided payment cuts that undermine access to care and destabilize health care delivery. The AMA will be relentless in our pursuit of permanent repeal of the Medicare physician payment formula, corrections to IPAB, and other important changes that we outlined in a letter today to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.”

“Every day physicians see the devastating effect that being uninsured has on the health of our patients: They live sicker and die younger,” Dr. Rohack said. “Physicians dedicate their lives to helping patients live healthier and longer, and we have an historic opportunity to do just that.”

In a sane world, this would matter and at least a few of the opposition party would peel off and support the legislation. Unfortunately, we do not live in normal times. We live in a time of obstruction and blind hatred. Still, I hope this helps a few wobbly Democrats find the courage to do the right thing and…

Pass. The. Damn. Bill.

We have always known that the so-called “tea party” movement is really nothing more than a throwback to the “Know Nothings” of the mid-ninteenth century.

The Know-Nothing movement was actually a group of secret anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant political organizations that called itself the American party. The movement, comprised principally of native-born, white, Anglo-Saxon males, came into being in the 1850s, grew rapidly, and waned almost as quickly.

Then, as now, it was people who feared change who wanted things to go back to the way they had been. Then it was German immigrants who settled communities and continued to speak their own language in them; and Irish immigrants whose brogues were hard to understand, and they were Catholic.

This generation’s version of the Know Nothings hate Hispanic immigrants and a black man in their White House.

Certain groups of already established Americans who called themselves “Nativists,” formed secret societies dedicated to stopping the flow of immigrants. The depth of nativist animosity was demonstrated in 1834 when a group of anti-Catholic laborers and townspeople chased a group of students and Ursuline nuns from their school and convent near Boston and then burned the buildings.

Minutemen, anyone? Or how about the precipitous rise in hate groups, as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center? We have more than our share, with 31 groups of militia idiots based right here in Missouri.

We have also seen religious-based violence in this country, with church burnings, a shooting by a right-wing domestic terrorist fueled by a steady diet of right-wing radio hate in a Unitarian church by a man who said he wanted to kill progressive leaders, but since he couldn’t get close to them he would kill people in their house of worship.

Right now, at this moment in time, we have Glenn Beck on a rampage against churches that practice social justice – a pillar of Catholic faith.  

And if you want more evidence that the people who comprise the so-called “tea party” movement are pig-ignorant and being led around by the nose by right-wing hate radio and corporatistss with ulterior motives, read this piece at Forbes. For a group that pretends it is all about taxes, when it comes to tax policy and tax rates,  well,  they know nothing.

On March 16 the Tea Party crowd showed up for yet another demonstration on Capitol Hill in Washington. Curious about the factual knowledge these people have regarding the issues they are protesting, my friend David Frum enlisted some interns to interview as many Tea Partyers as possible on a couple of basic questions. They got 57 responses–a pretty good-sized sample from a crowd that numbered between 300 and 500 people.

The first question that was asked concerned the size of government. Tea Partyers were asked how much the federal government gets in taxes as a percentage of the gross domestic product. According to Congressional Budget Office data, acceptable answers would be 6.4%, which is the percentage for federal income taxes; 12.7%, which would be for both income taxes and Social Security payroll taxes; or 14.8%, which would represent all federal taxes as a share of GDP in 2009.

Not everyone follows these numbers closely, and Tea Partyers may have been thinking of figures from a few years ago, before the recession when taxes were higher. According to the CBO, the highest figure for all federal taxes since 1970 came in the year 2000, when they reached 20.6% of GDP. As we know, after that George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress cut federal taxes; they fell to 18.5% of GDP in 2007, before the recession hit, and 17.5% in 2008.

Tuesday’s Tea Party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times as high as they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944.

Read the whole thing and digest it. And remember it the next time someone intones seriously that we need to reach out to these idiots and bring them into the political process because they have something valuable to say.

They don’t.

Anyone who follows the antics of Tea Partying State Rep. Cynthia Davis (R-19) is used to her endless bleating about a big government takeover. At the same time, many of us have also noted Davis’ proclivities for pushing legislation that oversteps normative bounds in terms of government intrusion into personal areas such as marriage, divorce, sexuality and choice. Yesterday, Davis, in her role as Chair of the House Special Committee on Children and Families, may have gone a little too far and unequivocally  revealed her hypocrisy about the perils of big government’s stealthy takeover tactics when she made a flagrant bid to impose her anti-choice beliefs on the rest of us by trickery.

Democratic members of the Committee assert that Davis attempted to substitute the text of one anti-abortion bill, HB1236, which had not been forwarded to her committee for action, for HB1238 which was scheduled to be heard yesterday morning. HB 1236 mandates a complex series of medical screening criteria before an abortion can be performed. The less restrictive text of HB1238 rquires evidence of informed consent on the part of a woman seeking abortion. Both bills are onerous, but HB1236 is ultimately more restrictive.

If true, not only is Davis’ behavior dishonest, it’s a violation of Missouri’s constitution. A news release yesterday (via The Turner Report) stated:

Davis’ attempt to switch bills violates Article III, Section 21 of the Missouri Constitution, which prohibits bills from being changed from their original purpose. The action also could violate Missouri’s Sunshine Law, which requires advance public notice of what legislation will be considered at government meetings.

To add insult to injury, Davis not only attempted to thwart the legislative process through deception, but she attempted to stifle discussion that might have revealed her subterfuge:

Davis allotted nearly all of the March 3 hearing to supporters and prohibited the standard practice of allowing committee members to question witnesses. After all supporters had testified, Davis allowed a mere five minutes of questioning about the bill at the end of the hearing.

One can understand that the general Republican postmodern approach to truth may have encouraged little Cynthia to believe that her ends justified her means – and since she makes no bones about taking her inspiration from David Barton, founders of the Wallbuilders, a group that has set out to rewrite American history to conform to their fundamentalist religious preferences, she may even think that she is ethically entitled to act in this fashion.

If Davis had indeed tried to subvert the legislative process, she has violated the public’s trust and is unfit for office. I’ll certainly email (Ronald.Richard@house.mo.gov) or phone (573-751-2173) the speaker of the house to inquire and ask that she be removed from her position as Chair of the House Special Committee on Children and Families. Who knows, maybe she’ll get some kind of slap on the wrist?  

Anyone who follows the antics of Tea Partying State Rep. Cynthia Davis (R-19) is used to her endless bleating about a big government takeover. At the same time, many of us have also noted Davis’ proclivities for pushing legislation that oversteps normative bounds in terms of government intrusion into personal areas such as marriage, divorce, sexuality and choice. Yesterday, Davis, in her role as Chair of the House Special Committee on Children and Families, may have gone a little too far and unequivocally  revealed her hypocrisy about the perils of big government’s stealthy takeover tactics when she made a flagrant bid to impose her anti-choice beliefs on the rest of us by trickery.

Democratic members of the Committee assert that Davis attempted to substitute the text of one anti-abortion bill, HB1236, which had not been forwarded to her committee for action, for HB1238 which was scheduled to be heard yesterday morning. HB 1236 mandates a complex series of medical screening criteria before an abortion can be performed. The less restrictive text of HB1238 rquires evidence of informed consent on the part of a woman seeking abortion. Both bills are onerous, but HB1236 is ultimately more restrictive.

If true, not only is Davis’ behavior dishonest, it’s a violation of Missouri’s constitution. A news release yesterday (via The Turner Report) stated:

Davis’ attempt to switch bills violates Article III, Section 21 of the Missouri Constitution, which prohibits bills from being changed from their original purpose. The action also could violate Missouri’s Sunshine Law, which requires advance public notice of what legislation will be considered at government meetings.

To add insult to injury, Davis not only attempted to thwart the legislative process through deception, but she attempted to stifle discussion that might have revealed her subterfuge:

Davis allotted nearly all of the March 3 hearing to supporters and prohibited the standard practice of allowing committee members to question witnesses. After all supporters had testified, Davis allowed a mere five minutes of questioning about the bill at the end of the hearing.

One can understand that the general Republican postmodern approach to truth may have encouraged little Cynthia to believe that her ends justified her means – and since she makes no bones about taking her inspiration from David Barton, founders of the Wallbuilders, a group that has set out to rewrite American history to conform to their fundamentalist religious preferences, she may even think that she is ethically entitled to act in this fashion.

If Davis had indeed tried to subvert the legislative process, she has violated the public’s trust and is unfit for office. I’ll certainly email (Ronald.Richard@house.mo.gov) or phone (573-751-2173) the speaker of the house to inquire and ask that she be removed from her position as Chair of the House Special Committee on Children and Families. Who knows, maybe she’ll get some kind of slap on the wrist?