I really have to wonder how many of the people who have tried to be disruptive here were on the payroll. I’m sure some of them were real people – but most were clearly just trying to raise trouble.

Keep in mind that he isn’t disagreeing with the end goal of the GOP in media and politics – to completely repeal anything and everything that President Obama does. He’s disagreeing with the TACTICS. This is an argument about strategy.

At the same time, I’d also say that Huckabee is quite aware that Ted Cruz is potentially aiming for Huckabee’s position at Fox News, so this is also a preemptive shot to defuse that.

And the really bold move by Cruz and his friends to go after the GOP Senators who voted for cloture is the one that may be the petard that hoists him. The fact that Cruz was willing to turn on Republicans in a public and nasty fashion is the straw that is clearly too much for more centrist GOP members to stomach.

The thing is that Gutfeld is trying so hard to be “provocative” and “outrageous” that it never really comes across as anything but a desperate play for attention.

Bolling is a more serious problem. His almost casual contempt for Bob Beckel and for any point of view not as far right as his can be really sinister at times. Note his pretense of not understanding Beckel’s bad joke about the “right wing conspiracy”. He knew perfectly well that Beckel was referring to the Clinton era comment about the right wing conspiracy working against them in the 90s in a far less obvious manner than the current attacks on President Obama. Bolling’s carefully studied throwaway of “Well, I don’t know what that means but…” was intended as a way to try to claim the moral high ground for himself in excusing reprehensible behavior by GOP congresspeople. Granted, Beckel made a crude comment about Ted Cruz the day before, which gave Bolling an unfortunate opening to play this card. But Bolling is certainly not above reproach in the same area.

At the same time, Beckel did a terrible job of explaining what Harry Reid was saying during the comment that’s been repeatedly played out of context by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. Bolling and the others were trying to use the position that Harry Reid was somehow hostile to children with cancer. When in fact Reid was arguing against the GOP tactic of playing one constituency off against another just to score cheap political points. And the broader point Beckel should have been making is that it’s disingenuous for extremists like Ted Cruz to be trying to feign concern about the various parts of government they have undermined when all the GOP needs to do to fix this situation is do their jobs and pass the budget without playing all these political games.

What will be interesting is the backlash against Cruz after this situation ends. How will Fox News react when other Republicans go after Cruz in the aftermath? Will they stick up for Cruz or will they toe the party line when the guys up top are looking to assign blame for this disaster? From the sounds of it, many Republicans are already moving away from Cruz as fast as they can – some in a fairly panicked mode. Does Fox News wish to be noted in the history books as sticking up for the guy who advocated a shutdown and then tried to duck responsibility for his bad behavior?

The actual numbers of the poll are alarming for the GOP, which is why they are starting to turn on each other. The fact that Cruz is willing to go after his own party members over this should be telling, and some GOP members aren’t taking his behavior lying down.

It looks to me like Fox News is trying to keep a lid on a situation that is badly deteriorating for them, while some of the GOP congresspeople are starting to panic.

And again, O’Reilly’s yearlong delay idea is not intended to help the ACA work better. It’s his way of getting the Democrats to fall for the notion that this would be some kind of a fair compromise with the GOP, and thus allowing the GOP to hold the ACA off for another year while they take a few more whacks at repealing it. Were this strategy to succeed, the GOP could get control of both houses of the congress and then get rid of it outright – preferably while President Obama is still in office so they could rub his face in it.

O’Reilly took several other shots at the ACA throughout the hour, at one point particularly announcing with authority that the ACA will be repealed soon since it’s such a bad law, as part of the normal legislative process.

I believe O’Reilly’s real issue with Ted Cruz and with the harder right people within the GOP is that he disagrees with their tactics. He agrees with their goals – the dismantling of anything and everything President Obama and the Democrats accomplish. He just doesn’t like the current spectacle, because it makes the GOP look peevish and it hands control of the debate over to his opponents. And he doesn’t like that Ted Cruz clearly took this time to promote himself at the expense of other GOP members. (One wonders how they’ll deal with each other once Cruz winds up on Fox News as a fellow on-air personality. Unless O’Reilly retires first…)

Mr. Kerns isn’t trying to suggest that Fox News, which has been cheerleading this shutdown, is just “making an observation that apparently no one else is mentioning”, is he? If he is, that has to be one of the greatest examples of subtle irony I have seen in some time. Kerns is literally pulling the “just sayin’” card.

Who said that the National Park closures were “selective” other than Fox News and some GOP politicians trying to deflect attention from their failure to do their jobs? The statement about some kind of deliberate and selective closure process has already been rebutted by the Park Service. It’s a red herring argument of the strangest kind.

The fact is that the GOP politicians proposing to “investigate” might be better advised to spend their time passing the budget and not trying to grandstand. I would add that the GOP’s attempted use of World War II veterans as campaign props is shameful – and I wish that the pundits trying to play this card would apologize to the veterans and their families for this unfortunate behavior.

And now the poster continues, with the strange comment about being a Progressive. All while using the rhetoric of the right wing. Having been a Progressive for over 30 years, I can attest that it doesn’t look like what the poster has presented by any means.

The “delay” that the right wing and the GOP want to inflict on the ACA is not intended to “work the wrinkles out” and they know it. If anything, the right wing should stop talking around the truth here. The actual goal of the right wing is to keep as much of the ACA from going into effect as possible, and simultaneously to make it look as expensive as possible. Were this goal to work, the GOP could then hold the ACA off past the 2014 midterms, at which point they would hope to win the Senate back and then try for the 60th time to repeal the ACA entirely. The right wing goal was never to fix the ACA – it was to get rid of it as yet another way of trying to attack the Democrats and this President. The right wing got away with similar chicanery during the Clinton presidency when they torpedoed Hillarycare. And now they’re trying anything they can to kill health care reform under President Obama. It’s fairly transparent what they’re doing, and one wishes they would stop pretending otherwise.

As for the rant about rich Democrat politicians, I frankly don’t know what relevance that has to this debate. Having voted in a Progressive manner for years, I’ve learned to keep an eye on politicians of all sides and not issue blanket condemnations like that. It’s one thing to have an issue with a group like the hard right of the GOP voting in lockstep to attack the government. It’s another to make strange sniping comments about Democrats’ broken promises. Granted, the Dems haven’t been able to do all that they’ve promised over the years. Granted, the Dems have done plenty of things I’ve had issues with, and Progressives have voiced those time and time again. (And if you want to see evidence of that, just head over to the website for Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, or over to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and you can find a treasure trove of material doing exactly that. Of particular interest to you should be Goodman’s Election Day interview with Bill Clinton in 2000.)

But it’s strange to hear a supposed Progressive saying that he doesn’t know of any “quality Progressives of color in our party”. How about Keith Ellison? How about Barbara Lee? How about the Congressional Black Caucus? How about the Progressive Democrats of America? One wonders if this poster did ANY research in this area before putting on the mantle of the left to try to condemn them from within.

And again, the Harry Reid response from yesterday was not what the right wing is deceptively editing it to sound like. He and Chuck Shumer both responded to a gotcha question that was intended to embarrass him. It doesn’t matter who asked that question. In fact, Reid showed surprise that Dana Bash would ask something like that. But the response was in concert with Shumer, who correctly pointed out “Why pit one against the other?” Meaning, why should we be telling sick children they need to compete with veterans as to who gets funding this week? And Reid properly continued the thought with “Why would we want to do that?” Again, the correct solution to this dilemma is for the GOP to do their job and fund the government. Then you wouldn’t have any issue of one group or another being put in such an untenable position. As Reid pointed out, having the GOP pick and choose which parts of the government they feel like funding this week is no way to manage a country. To follow that path would allow a small group of extremists to dictate terms to the rest of us. And that’s not going to happen.

The giveaway here is the line about “impending cracking of our support.” This makes sense coming from a Republican. The Dems certainly aren’t in that situation – the polls clearly show that the public is quite aware of who generated this problem and whose intransigence is keeping it going. The GOP doesn’t get to cheerlead for a shutdown for months and then run away from the consequences after they take us off a cliff. The cracking of support is certainly being felt by GOP politicians who are more and more openly rebelling against the hard right in the House and against the foolishness of Ted Cruz. And if they don’t stop the bleeding fairly soon, that cracking may get a lot louder. Further intransigence by the right wing can only result in a disaster for the GOP in the 2014 midterms – something that could hurt the party far more than they’re willing to publicly admit right now.

The GOP is of course desperately clinging to the Pew outlier that shows them only 3 points down. Let’s see how they deal with the next result.

O’Reilly did call Cruz on his intransigence, but he also made it clear that he agreed with Cruz’ position – that the ACA should be gutted by any means possible. O’Reilly just disagrees with Cruz’ tactics, which sounds like a standard iteration of the non-extreme version of the right wing position being held by Fox News, right wing radio and the GOP.

Cruz is frantically hanging on to the idea that somehow he can save face in this debacle if he never personally votes to end the problem. This is the same approach being taken by most of the hard right GOP congresspeople talking to Fox. Their intention is to continue to vote in a negative fashion so they can campaign on their intransigence later. In Cruz’ case, I now believe he’s positioning himself for a post-Senate career on Fox News, probably in the weekend Huckabee slot.

O’Reilly, on the other hand, is trying to sound like a reasonable guy in the middle of the road. And he’s not. He’s playing this just as sneaky as he did last week. Note that O’Reilly is calling for compromise – but only on GOP terms. O’Reilly’s idea of compromise has not changed since he first brought it up, even in the face of the GOP taking huge damage for shutting everything down. If everyone did O’Reilly’s idea, we’d see a situation where the ACA would essentially be delayed for another year – since most people would avoid dealing with any of it if they weren’t mandated to do so. We’d also see a situation where the program would go billions into debt due to losing the medical device tax as part of the great “compromise”. The GOP would then campaign on how expensive the ACA is, and would extend the delay to past the 2014 midterms. If they got their way completely, they would take the Senate and then, finally repeal the whole thing. It’s a long con, and to beat it, supporters of the ACA have to stay two steps ahead of the games that the GOP is playing.

The real compromise that needs to be reached is more likely going to be that the GOP will be forced to allow a clean CR to get a vote in the House. This will be followed by a clean increase in the Debt Ceiling, metered to carry past the midterms. Only after THAT will there be some conference committees in the House and Senate to discuss amendments to the ACA – and that assumes that the GOP really is ready to discuss amendments rather than just destroying the law. I believe that a bunch of the more extreme right wing GOP congresspeople may be facing primary challenges from the center, particularly if this standoff lasts another two to three weeks. And that may not be a bad thing.

The hard right really does need to be held accountable. They have spent five years acting like angry children, simply because they hated the President the people elected in 2008. This wasn’t a matter where the election in either 08 or 12 was in dispute, as was the case with Bush. This wasn’t a case where you had a recount showing that John McCain or Mitt Romney had actually won the crucial state involved, as was documented in late 2001 with Al Gore winning Florida in 2000 by the slimmest of margins. This was a case where the voters clearly decided they wanted Barack Obama to be their President, and the hard right simply couldn’t stomach it.

I also find it interesting that the hard right is also trying to play the game of saying that bad laws and bad judicial decisions can still be undone by Congress as part of their duty. That’s true, but we’re not talking about laws allowing slavery or the Dred Scott decision. We’re not talking about prohibition. We’re talking about an attempt to make health care affordable for millions of people who don’t have any coverage. I have issues with the ACA myself – I’m disappointed that President Obama caved on the public option. But I believe that we’ll get there within a few years and we’ll finally wind up with the Single Payer system that works in Canada and in much of the world, and this whole issue will finally be ended. Until then, the ACA will serve as a beginning step – at least acknowledging the severity of the problem.

I read someone noting correctly yesterday that the GOP’s fear about the ACA isn’t that it will hurt the country or generate problems. If they really thought that, they would get out of the way, let it go into effect and then campaign against the Democrats who supported it. It would be the best bit of politicking they could have done in the past 20 years. The real fear of the GOP is actually that it will become much more popular among Americans, essentially becoming a third wing of the major services of government, buttressing Medicare. Once people realize that the sky doesn’t fall with it, and that they can have coverage and go to a doctor without being bankrupted by one illness or problem, all the hysteria will fade – except of course for the Alex Jones crowd. Which will have exactly the opposite effect for the GOP – they’ll look silly for having opposed it, and their only recourse will be to continue to rail against “entitlements”. But that’s the corner into which they have backed themselves.

This is just another example of what appears to be a right wing panic over the consequences they are now going to face for throwing a tantrum in public and not knowing how to gracefully back out of it. Their problem is that this tantrum is having real impact, since they’ve put the entire federal government into a situation where everyone is now painfully aware of the House GOP’s unwillingness to do its job.

Trying to call this a “slimdown” is just the latest attempt by Fox News and the right wing media to try to bolster their guys and minimize the real damage they are doing. I don’t know that this is going to fool anyone.

At this point, I think President Obama and the Senate are simply going to continue to make public statements calling on the GOP to do the right thing, and they’ll be happy to wait a couple of weeks for the GOP to come around. Doing so actually makes the whole Debt Ceiling issue easier, because it will mean that the GOP will be unable to shut everything down AGAIN, thus forcing them to act like reasonable people. The real question now is whether John Boehner will be able to do his job and convince his guys to do theirs. He’s already got the record of being perhaps the weakest Speaker we’ve ever had. Another public failure could see him getting tossed out in the midterms, if his own guys don’t throw him overboard first. I do think there’s a chance you’ll see a bunch of these hard right guys getting primaried from the center.

I’d be happy to get a bag of popcorn and enjoy the show if the House GOP hadn’t taken away the money for the popcorn.

I have to wonder if the Tea Party understands what they’ve just done to themselves or if they are completely deluded.

Since they’ve just pressed the red button and generated the problem, they’ve now put the rest of Congress and President Obama into a position where any deal that gets made will need to encompass both this issue and the non sequitur of the Debt Ceiling. So they won’t be able to play the big cards they thought they had. And by petulantly insisting once again on attacking the ACA after the fact, they’ve put themselves into a position where they can be primaried from the more moderate side by politicians who can campaign on the angle of sanity.

This doesn’t change the fact that they’ve just done damage to our economy. But they may have just done far more damage, unwittingly, to themselves.

It’s becoming clear that the closer we get to midnight, the more the right wing is beginning to panic. They can’t stop the ACA from going into effect, which means that they won’t be able to shut it down like they intended, but they’ve also walked themselves into a corner where they can’t back down without everyone seeing them cave.

And Fox News is doing its best to make sure that the government shuts down, telling House GOP members that passing a clean budget bill isn’t an option. At least, that’s what O’Reilly is telling them.

If you think about it, this entire move has been a bit more sneaky than you might think at first.

The GOP goal for this has always been to completely get rid of the ACA and thus fulfill their prediction of making President Obama appear to be a failure in the eyes of history. They’ve tried multiple times to repeal it completely, they’ve campaigned against it for office, they’ve run it up the legal system to try to get the Supreme Court to repeal it for them. None of those tactics have worked, so far.

So what do they do today? They threaten to hold up the country’s budget and shut everything down unless they can retroactively get their way again. Which they know isn’t going to happen. But what they could do is the O’Reilly idea – “let’s postpone the mandate and eliminate that tax and now we’ll have a compromise.” Right. What that means is that the GOP succeeds in partly defunding the ACA by removing the device tax – so that the GOP can campaign in 2014 about how expensive the ACA is and shouldn’t we get rid of it… And it means that with a full year delay and the GOP making the ACA as unpleasant as possible, the GOP could play this game again and delay the ACA into 2015. Which gives them the room to campaign against the ACA in a midterm election they’re more likely to win seats, and if they get a majority of the Senate, they can outright repeal the whole thing.

And if you pay attention to the tactics, that’s the endgame. Even people who have principled issues with the ACA acknowledge that they can be addressed with amendments and modifications. But the GOP doesn’t have a principled issue with the ACA – they simply want to get rid of it because it’s a signature of the Obama Presidency – something they’d like to erase or smear as much as they possibly can. So the way the President and the Democrats deal with the current issue will depend on whether they can head off the political chess moves the GOP are making.

David, this simply doesn’t make sense. You still haven’t answered what I asked of you now five or six posts back. Is it that difficult?

This is an easy matter for you to resolve. Do you think it’s okay for right wingers to engage in “the politics of personal destruction” while you castigate left wingers for that behavior? I have issues with both sides doing so. You apparently do not, which is a surprising position for you to be taking. Could you please clarify the matter for all of us here? Thanks.

Also, after you read the extensive discussion of Sarah Palin’s issues at John Ziegler’s “The Sarah Palin I Know”, would you please be good enough to explain how she is above reproach, particularly after more of her own people have corroborated Mr. Ziegler’s points? And how do you answer the fact that Ted Cruz is not the fine unblemished person you wish him to be when we look at the multiple attacks he has made on politicians with whom he has disagreed? Keep in mind that he has had plenty of time in his career to make these attacks and not just the 21 hours he attempted to monopolize the microphone and the Senate’s time during a critical moment for our nation’s budget. And finally, I’m still waiting to hear how you were able to follow every minute of those 21 hours of Ted Cruz’s moment in the sun? Did you DVR the whole thing? Did you take breaks? Or did you show solidarity with Cruz and stick it out with him for 21 hours without stopping?

Getting to your latest post, which did not address the critical questions shown herein above, I find it strange that you’re continuing with the notion of abolishing the IRS and adopting a flat tax that would never be paid by anyone but the middle class individuals who couldn’t afford to avoid it. I actually did respond to your notion when I pointed out to you that it was unworkable. Please re-read the posts to check the longer statements of my reasoning. The short version is that under your scenario, the wealthy would never show purchases more than 50K in a year, thus avoiding paying any taxes. (And they can do this via corporate shelters and offshoring of their money so that nobody can be held responsible for these purchases.) So under your scenario, you’d have almost no money coming into the treasury and a situation where there wouldn’t even be enough money to pay the refunds you’re promising everyone. Which leads us to the other question you are continuing to avoid answering: Do you believe that public servants (Mayors, police, firefighters, congresspeople, Presidents) should all work as volunteers? Or do you believe that these should be private services? And in that case, who would pay for them, and what do we do about the millions of people who would be unable to afford to do so? Still waiting for your answer on that one too.

Your history of the 19th Century and of the New Deal is a bit sketchy, to use your own verbiage. The New Deal was by no means a failure other than for right wing pundits who hated the idea from the moment it was announced. (Curious coincidence that this is the same notion of Limbaugh’s desperate scream of “I HOPE HE FAILS!!!” about President Obama. Just because the right wing wishes something like this were true does not make it so.

Not sure where you’re going with the whole paragraph about big government and fear, but you’re ignoring something close to 150 years of this nation’s history. By your reckoning, having a safety net somehow stops people from taking risks. That’s an untenable notion. The point of a safety net is to make sure that people don’t wind up with nowhere to turn at all, and even with what little net we have, that’s still not an assured prospect these days, thanks to the cuts made during the Reagan Administration. The point of having regulation is that our history shows us that unregulated business and investment results in these boom and bust cycles. The cycles are driven by short-term interests of people who want immediate gratification and a quick return rather than anything that would help grow or nurture a society. After multiple cycles of this, our nation learned that regulation was necessary to keep the problem from continuing in as severe a manner as before, and to keep various unscrupulous businesses from exploiting people quite literally to death. (I refer you to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire if you’re going to talk about the good will and good nature of unregulated businesses.) And this is something that went hand in hand with organized labor, which for decades was the only opposition to a completely unchecked version of capitalism that ran roughshod over all the employees.

Your assumption about skills leaves out the point that an unregulated business (whether that be by government or by labor contract) will pay the least it possibly can for whoever it can get. The person with the skills whom you refer to would be exploited for as much as the company could imagine, and if the person were to object, the company could throw that person away and find someone who didn’t complain. This isn’t a matter of “fear”. It’s a matter of the big guy stepping on the little guy. These are quite different issues, and your assumption leaves out the crucial material that plays those issues out in the real world.

Hypocrisy was rampant in this segment, particularly with both Republicans laughably insisting they’d repeatedly extended offers to President Obama to “negotiate”. That’s a false statement, and they both knew it. What they meant to say was that they had repeatedly tried to obstruct and block the law, and when their attempt to get the law overturned by the Supreme Court failed, they’ve been trying to circumvent it any way they can. Their mock concern over “government control” is another strange notion – they have no problem with control that they agree with, such as restricting women’s access to healthcare. The reality is that they’re simply frustrated that President Obama’s ACA is going into effect whether they like it or not, and they’re having a temper tantrum while it happens.

The real question now is what John Boehner will do with his caucus today. It sounds like they’re trying to take another “gut the ACA” vote and then send the budget bill back to the Senate rather than simply approving the budget. If they do that, they will trigger a shutdown, simply because the Senate will not be able to return the bill to the House until mid-week, due to the rules about cloture, etc. The options they’re discussing are the same untenable ones that were dismissed weeks and months ago, and it appears the GOP and Fox News have not learned their lesson about them yet.

If the House votes to gut the ACA out of the budget bill again, and sends that version back to the Senate, then the Senate will likely repeat what they did this week, which will involve removing the incorrect and inflammatory language and then returning the bill to the House. Which means the House is just setting themselves up to have an identical vote in another week, which will be after the shutdown, at which point they will be forced to explain why they are behaving in such an irresponsible manner. This also leads directly into the Debt Ceiling discussion, which the House will have effectively blown due to their intransigence here. And it’s a sad fact that Fox News seems to be cheerleading this approach all the way.

I noted this in another thread, but it bears repeating. Notice what O’Reilly does in this segment – it’s really sneaky. He tries to propose a “compromise” where President Obama negotiates with the House GOP and agrees to delay the implementing of the ACA for a year for anyone who doesn’t want to comply with it. (Which basically guts it). That’s not a compromise by any means, and it’s actually a tipping of the debate toward the far right wing positions taken by Fox News and GOP politicians like Cruz. Within his “No Spin Zone”, O’Reilly is actually trying to move the playing field about 100 yards over to the right without his viewers noticing it. After all, he sounds reasonable, doesn’t he?

Except that Bill conveniently ignores that President Obama and the Democrats have spent countless days and hours discussing, debating and negotiating with the GOP over the ACA. The GOP has had countless opportunities to propose amendments and corrections. The Dems even caved on the public option, which should have been the center of the legislation in the first place. The GOP’s response was to continue to try to block the whole idea from happening, just so they could use it as a campaign prop. Not to mention that Fox News and the GOP have been desperately trying to kill the ACA as part of their attempt to write a first draft of history – and in their version, President Obama is seen as a complete failure.

It’s crucial that O’Reilly be called out for this kind of behavior because, again, it’s really sneaky.

It’s not just that Ted Cruz is brazenly lying about the ACA and the reasons for his publicity stunt. (And he is demonstrably lying. He’s misstating pretty much everything except his own name. And since he knew he wouldn’t be accomplishing anything, it’s obvious that the real reason for this display was for him to grandstand and promote himself. Sadly, this may pay off for him after his Senate term or terms end and he winds up in Huckabee’s weekend slot on FNC.) It’s not just that Fox News and the GOP have so much hatred for this President that they can’t see anything he does in any light other than disastrous for the country. And it’s not just that the rhetoric has been strangely amped up over the past month while the GOP once again tries to blackmail the rest of the country.

What makes all of this a little sick is that Fox News has been trying to use the current situation to tilt the debate in a really sneaky way. At the extreme end of this curve, you have Hannity openly cheering Cruz on for his obstruction and Cavuto happily citing untrue talking points. But then on O’Reilly, you have Bill sagely intoning that there are extremists on both sides and the best course would be for President Obama to negotiate with the right wingers and for them to find a compromise in the middle – say, by delaying the ACA for another year. Notice what O’Reilly just did there? He’s pretending that the middle of the road here is to give the GOP some of what they want by gutting or delaying the ACA long enough to give the right wing time to find another way to kill it before it goes into effect. That’s not the middle of the road. That’s midway up the far right part of the road! Middle of the road would be what several Democrats have suggested – let the GOP make positive suggestions of adjustments that can be made, and the Congress can act accordingly, as they do with all such laws. But that’s not what the right wing wants. They are desperate to keep the law from being implemented, even though it’s already funded and will go into effect whether they like it or not.

O’Reilly’s supposedly “balanced” approach ignores that the Democrats have repeatedly attempted to work on the ACA with the GOP, during the period of its drafting through to the present day. The GOP responded not with honest efforts to work on the law but instead with every bit of obstruction and stalling they could muster. Again, as Anthony Weiner correctly noted in 2009, the GOP’s intent was to obstruct, obstruct, obstruct so they could delay, delay, delay. And the purpose of that was to prevent the law from being passed and/or enacted. So they could say with authority during an election campaign that President Obama had failed even when it came to the signature legislation he’d promised to get passed. Now that he’s succeeded in getting a modified version of it through, the GOP seems almost suicidal in its fervor to kill the law after the fact. O’Reilly’s “balanced” solution just gives the GOP support and ammunition in their attempts to chip away at it and get rid of it.

Even smarmier was the approach taken by Greta van Susteren in her Friday night interviews with Cruz and Michelle Bachmann. At one point, van Susteren actually pondered aloud why Harry Reid didn’t congratulate Cruz for bogarting the microphone for 21 hours. Somehow, Reid is considered “uncivil” by van Susteren for expressing the truth – that Cruz wasted 21 hours of the Senate’s time on his showboat, to no avail. I’m hoping that Ellen has preserved that moment from Greta’s show – it’s one that actually got me to laugh out loud. And again, it’s a subtle attempt to tip the discussion into the right wing side of the road. In this world, somehow the options range from the far far right wing approach of just killing the law completely by repealing it to just the far right wing approach of trying to cut off its funding. And frankly, the idea of Michelle Bachmann as a reasonable party here is almost as laughable as the notion of Harry Reid being uncivil.

I don’t know that I believe that chain letter. It sounds like a typical attempt to scare people without giving the reasons why someone’s premium could go up. It’s very possible that this letter is partly describing a situation where someone had very minimal coverage which would leave the rest of us holding the bag when the non-covered areas happened.

The point for nearly everyone who has coverage through their employer or through their union is that their plan isn’t going to change. I’m covered through the excellent plan of my guild. There will be slight tweaks to the plan to get it to comply with the law, but nothing that I’m going to see in terms of costs.

For people who were refusing to have any coverage, yes, this will wind up costing them some money. Because they were using the Emergency Room as their health insurance coverage, and making the rest of us pay for it.

I’m not a huge fan of this law, since it doesn’t include the Single Payer component that will wind up being the only way we can control the increasing health costs for everyone. But this will at least get us a lot closer to the goal of having everyone covered and it will help start to alleviate a problem that’s been building up for decades. It won’t solve the problem – Single Payer will do that. But it’s a small step toward the solution.

The reason the GOP and Fox News is fear mongering about this isn’t because they think it will hurt the country. It isn’t because they really think that everyone’s premiums are going to skyrocket. It’s because they’re angry that President Obama and the Democrats were able to pass it in the first place. The GOP plan was to call President Obama a failure and to obstruct every single thing he did to prove themselves correct. Since the ACA is the one major legislative achievement during his term, the GOP has been fervent about trying to kill it. But they failed to kill it. They tried to block it through all the parliamentary tricks and it still passed. They tried to get GOP-controlled states to refuse to apply it, and they’ve failed in that area. They tried legal action to get the Supreme Court to throw it out, only to see the law held constitutional.

So now what do they do? They try to selectively fund government programs. Somehow, their new solution is to offer to fund the government – at least everything except the ACA. In other words, they’re trying to break the law and they’re trying to pick and choose which parts of the government they wish to have continue. Aside from being a childish maneuver, the GOP is opening up a can of worms I don’t think they’ve figured out yet. Because there are plenty of government programs the left would be happy not to fund – say funding for military contractors, funding for Dick Cheney’s various enterprises, funding for companies like Blackwater. Is the GOP ready to put all that on the chopping block?

As for Ed Henry, he’s been trying these gotcha questions for years. His entire MO at the Obama White House has been to try to embarrass the President or his spokesperson at every turn. The question about coverage was a cheap shot, but a typical one for Henry. It lines up with plenty of other ones he’s taken, such as last year when he would regularly present Mitt Romney statements as questions on various topics to try to force Jay Carney to answer them. And pretty much every time, Carney would school Henry on the fact that Fox News was acting as an advocate for Romney rather than asking anything approaching a legitimate question.

Penny Lee has made some good points on Fox News before, but this is only the latest example of her trying to be more conciliatory and agreeable when confronted with hard right intransigence on Hannity’s show. It’s moments like these that make me wish that we could see a real leftist on Hannity’s show – someone like Amy Goodman or Jeff Cohen or Norman Solomon or Larry Bensky. Someone like Dean Baker or Joshua Frank or Doug Henwood. But Hannity won’t have people like that on his show. He has had Cornel West on occasionally, but has barely engaged with him.

There are two harsh truths that need to be acknowledged here. First, this isn’t a competition between which side of the aisle can demonize the other one more. If it was, the right wing would win the race by a good mile or two. The right wing has regularly accused Democrat Presidents of murder, has regularly tried to trump up charges against them, and has regularly made the most inflammatory statements possible without being held to any account on Fox News. This site serves as an archive for many of the most ridiculous statements made on the air – including angry, hateful displays by Michelle Malkin, Katie Pavlich and many others. Pavlich tried without success to peddle the phony “Fast and Furious” matter into a media career for herself, including trying to use the death of a Border Patrol Agent as a stepping stone for herself. People need to remember that Pavlich has no credibility after that, regardless of whether she and Hannity would like that discussion to be forgotten. Malkin has regularly shouted some of the most unbelievable personal attacks I’ve ever heard on the air.

Contrast that with the left wing making statements of justifiable concern about the aggression of the Nixon, Reagan, Bush and W Bush presidencies. The left never said what Ann Coulter did about invading Middle Eastern countries and converting their populations to Christianity. The left simply noted that it was the same group of cabinet guys working in all those presidencies who were enriching themselves at everyone else’s expense. The left didn’t support invasions and assassinations – they opposed such behavior on principle, while the right openly salivated about engaging in that behavior. I would agree that there are posters of all opinions on message boards who have stooped to a low level of personal attack, but that’s frankly not the driving idea in left wing media like Pacifica Radio. And right wing pundits, including those who are sheltered on Fox News, know this well – something they regularly acknowledge by the smirks they make while making their claims.

The second truth, which is arguably more important, is that right wing opposition to the ACA has nothing to do with some all-encompassing concern about “damage to the economy”. It has nothing to do with the right wing really caring so much about the rule of law, or about helping out the middle class. This is about the right wing’s anger and hatred toward President Obama. They’ve hated him since before he even declared his candidacy for President for 2008. The right wing convinced themselves there was no way Obama could win the 2008 election, and they even told their constituents and radio/television audiences that he couldn’t win. And they doubled down on this idea in 2012. When Obama won both times, the right wing was outraged. So rather than deal with the man, they took the childish route – they made a decision to fold their arms, stomp their foot and yell “NO!” every time President Obama and the Democrats tried to get anything through Congress.

The GOP opposition to the ACA had nothing to do with a principled issue, since President Obama had triangulated them by using Romney’s plan from Massachusetts as its basis. (And the left’s issue with the ACA has always been that the real solution to this problem is Single Payer, which we’ll eventually get, but which the ACA postpones for another decade or so.) The GOP was offered carrots in this law time and time again, most egregiously when the Democrats agreed to remove the public option. (And I would argue that the GOP only wanted that out so they could encourage opposition on the left.) But the GOP never had any intention of voting for this legislation. Their entire purpose, as Anthony Weiner correctly pointed out at the time, was to obstruct, obstruct, obstruct so they could delay, delay, delay, so they could continue to obstruct, obstruct, obstruct. The GOP was hoping they could kill this legislation just like they killed the Clinton health care reform in the 90s. If they could have delayed it another month or two, they could have gotten it off the calendar and forced it into the 2010 Election. Instead, the Dems got the bill passed in spite of all the obstruction, and President Obama signed it into law.

So the GOP threw bigger tantrums, including somewhere around 30 meaningless votes by House GOP members to repeal the law. They mounted lawsuits against the law with the clear intent of getting it before what they believed would be a friendly Supreme Court during the 2012 Election. Except that the Supreme Court ruled that the law was constitutional, handing the right wing a crushing defeat and denying Mitt Romney a talking point he was desperately hoping to use in his doomed presidential bid. So what does the GOP do now? They try a phony parliamentary ploy to simply refuse to fund a constitutional law that they don’t like. If this kind of ploy actually worked in the real world, there must be at least a hundred areas that the left wing would prefer not be funded in the government. And the GOP knows this ploy won’t work – all of the latest behavior is just grandstanding and showboating by Ted Cruz and friends.

I would argue that Cruz knows he won’t become President as a result of his behavior here. His intention isn’t to get him a higher office. His intention is to get a lucrative media contract for himself after he serves one or two terms in the Senate. He’s clearly hoping to become a Fox News personality like Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin. And from the looks of it, his plan will succeed.

When it comes to GOP behavior in the Congress, we frankly must keep in mind that threatening a shutdown has become the GOP’s regular tactic. They do this every single time a budget comes up for a vote, and every single time the debt ceiling comes up for an increase vote. They take every one of these situations right to the brink, to repeatedly test the Democrats’ resolve and to repeatedly attempt to embarrass and obstruct President Obama. The GOP has tried this tactic under every possible permutation, including trying to do it during the Christmas holiday break. It’s pretty clear that their intent is to make the Obama presidency as unpleasant as they can. Something tells me that history will have a much harsher judgment of them once all the facts are known in public another ten years. Which is why it is so vitally important that propaganda efforts by outlets like Fox News be challenged and debunked as quickly as Ellen can catch them. Fox News is trying to write a biased first draft of history. It is crucial that the record show that the Fox News version of events is actually an opinion rather than a fact.

I would like to think that O’Reilly could actually have a good debate with Robert Reich. But this has gotten personal, which always makes for a disastrous result with O’Reilly. O’Reilly would likely feel that putting Reich on his show would be viewed as him “caving”. And if he did agree to put him on, it would be to engage in a shouting match akin to what happened when he threw his tantrum at Barney Frank.

Here we go again with another vicious Jesse Watters attack segment. Essentially, Watters was there not to ask questions but to try to embarrass, mock and shame the conventiongoers. He wasn’t interested in what Muslims think about any of these issues He just wanted to catch a few people off guard and make them look foolish for his segment.

If he wanted to know about recent Christian terror attacks, he could have looked up the 2011 Norway bombing and shootings by Anders Breivik. He could have done a two minute google search to see that Adam Lanza and his mother were Catholic churchgoers before Lanza shot up Sandy Hook Elementary. Or he could have asked about John Zawahri, who shot up Santa Monica in June this year. And how about James Holmes, who shot up the movie theater in Aurora last summer – he was Lutheran. As a sidenote, there’s Jared Loughner, who shot up Gabrielle Giffords and a crowd of people in Tuscon. He identified as Jewish, so that’s not the same thing, but he’s not a Muslim either.

The point being that Watters’ entire premise is wrong-headed. The fact is that everyday people of every religion condemn the acts of terrorists. There are extremists in pretty much every group, and the sad fact is that it is not that hard for these people to get their hands on guns or explosives and do a heck of a lot of damage and killing before they are stopped. And before Watters or his supporters try to play the card that all the Muslim terror attacks are prompted by their religion, I note that Breivik was most certainly prompted by hatred of other races and religions, and that the killings by both Loughner and the Boston Marathon brothers were prompted by politics more than religion.

O’Reilly’s blanket approach to these matters, and Watter’s smarmy way of discussing them, are unfortunately more indicative of Fox News’ bias than the guys may have intended.