Hillary Misleads Horribly on Healthcare

One reason Hillary's poll numbers are tanking days out from the Iowa Caucuses is that Hillary lies, a lot.

Hillary's whopper from last Sunday's debate:

Well, a– as someone who– as someone who has a– a little bit of experience standing up to the health insurance industry that (CHEERING) spent, you know, many, many millions of dollars attacking me and probably will so again because of what I believe we can do, building on the Affordable Care Act, I think it’s important to point out that there are a lot of reasons we have the health care system we have today.

I know how much money influences the political decision making. That’s why I’m for huge campaign finance reform. However, we started a system that had private health insurance. And even during the Affordable Care Act debate there was an opportunity to vote for what was called the public option.

In other words, people could buy into Medicare. And even when the Democrats were in care of the Congress we couldn’t get the votes for that. So what I’m saying is really simple, this has been the fight of the Democratic party for decades. We have the Affordable Care Act. Let’s make it work. Let’s take the models that states are doing. We now have driven costs down to the lowest they’ve been in 50 years. Now we’ve gotta get individual costs down. That’s what I’m planning to do. [Time Magazine]

On Planet Reality, and c'mon this was just some six years ago, the Public Option was hugely popular and one senator, Sen. Joe Lieberman (D,I-Health Insurance Lobby) killed it, that's why 'we couldn’t get the votes for the Public Option.'

Notes Wendall Potter at the Center for Public Integrity:

The Democrats needed [Joe] Lieberman’s vote to get reform passed, and insurers knew it. Shortly before the Senate was set to vote on the bill, Lieberman said he would vote for the bill only if the public option was stripped out.

Lieberman accused public option supporters of having an ulterior motive.

 'A public option plan is unnecessary,' he told Fox News. 'It has been put forward, I’m convinced, by people who really want the government to take over all of health insurance.'

Hillary forgot to mention this bit of history, instead doing what Hillary does best: Lie on behalf of the health insurance industry and Wall Street and make $ millions in return, shafting the uninsured in the process, (Jilani, The Intercept).

So Bernie should just drop the public option now? Forget it.

Joe Lieberman Signals Support for Willard Mitt Romney

Joe Lieberman at Brigham Young, Oct 25, 2011

It's difficult to conceive of a more disingenuous, craven, and small-minded man in the modern era of American politics than Sen. Joe Lieberman.

And this designation says much as modern American politics has sunk to levels of depravity, narcissism, and self-conscious lying that would make Joe McCarthy blush.

Yet the name, Joe Lieberman, has descended to the level of Joe McCarthy as Lieberman leaves the political stage after his senate term expires in 2013, and one presumes for now that Lieberman will step down and help—in some manner—a Republican succeed his senate seat amid dropping approval numbers. But there also appears to be bigger plan for Joe: Willard.

Romney has already assemblied foriegn policy and financial backers comprising a virtual who’s who of the Amercan, pro-Likud Party establishment. And the U.S.-Israel Lobby is little more than a GOP Front Group.

ADL - 1994

As for the Chistianite right who think world Jewry is going to hell; and hence once upon of a time were identified by the ADL as assaulting tolerance and pluralism in America: Bygones.

Rather than speculate on what drives Joe Lieberman, or even substantiate why Liar Joe well deserves the McCarthy label [if it isn't clear now, you won't agree], Lieberman's latest mini-crusade is to evoke the religious test clause of the U.S. Constitution in defense of Willard Mitt Romney, to whom the GOP establishment is desperately turning even as Romney inartfully waffles his way around the country to Karl Rove's stage management, in the process managing to make John Kerry appear a man of steel and principle by comparison.

Lieberman thinks he can be an asset to the most powerful GOP political operatives with whom he already works, so his address at Brigham Young University yesterday in which he lent his wisdom on religion in the presidential campaign race signals his role in the 2012 general election.

BYU welcomed U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman to campus Tuesday where he spoke to students in the Marriott Center in a forum address titled 'Faith and the Public Square.'

Sen. Lieberman expressed a special connection to the Mormon faith and Brigham Young University because of the core principles that the university stands for. ...

'America has been from the beginning a faith-based initiative and anybody who tries to separate faith from the public square is doing something unnatural and ultimately bad for our country.'

Lieberman will appeal to religious tolerance in defence of Romney as though we didn't already have enough policy and personal reasons to think Romney would be a horrendous president. It will be a tamed-down variation of the discredited smear that if don't like Israel's human rights records, militarism and bigotry, then you are an anti-Semite. Similarly, if you don't like Romney and Mormonism, then you are a bigot.

But Holy Joe will at least supply some fun as his sanctimonious impersonation of the cartoon character, Snagglepuss [my Jackie says Lieberman sounds just like him, only meaner], brings a chuckle.

By JoAnna Brooks

Yesterday, here at RD, I speculated that the Romney campaign would need to find surrogates who could speak broadly to the issue of religion in the 2012 campaign. After all, Romney told voters in Iowa late last week that he would not answer “misinformation” about Mormonism, nor would he deliver a follow-up to his 2007 address on faith. And candidate Romney is not especially suited to speaking in unscripted ways about sticky personal issues, let alone about the myriad sensationalized aspects of Mormonism. That much is clear.

The first of those surrogates may have now appeared. Yesterday, Senator Joseph Lieberman spoke at Brigham Young University, touching upon the role of religion in the 2012 race.

“The second religious controversy in the 2012 campaign is of course close to BYU,” said Lieberman. “And it is that two members of the Church are running for president. One of them, Governor Romney, a distinguished graduate of this university, may well end up as the Republican nominee. And if Governor Romney is nominated Americans will be challenged again to be true to our founding principles of equality of opportunity and the clear prohibition in the Constitution, Article 6, of a religious test being applied for public office.”

Krugman Eviscerates Kill-Medicare Pols, Ryan and Lieberman

So desperate are Republicans to kill Medicare, they have threatened to crash the economy if Obama doesn't let them gut the popular program.

Now Joe Lieberman has chimed in.

Paul Krugman shines some needed light on the kill-Medicare debate.

Below is an excerpt with a link to the Medicare discussion at The Democratic Strategist.

Writes Krugman:

Every once in a while a politician comes up with an idea that's so bad, so wrongheaded, that you're almost grateful. For really bad ideas can help illustrate the extent to which policy discourse has gone off the rails.

And so it was with Senator Joseph Lieberman's proposal, released last week, to raise the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.

Like Republicans who want to end Medicare as we know it and replace it with (grossly inadequate) insurance vouchers, Mr. Lieberman describes his proposal as a way to save Medicare. It wouldn't actually do that. But more to the point, our goal shouldn't be to "save Medicare," whatever that means. It should be to ensure that Americans get the health care they need, at a cost the nation can afford.

... Medicare actually saves money -- a lot of money -- compared with relying on private insurance companies. And this in turn means that pushing people out of Medicare, in addition to depriving many Americans of needed care, would almost surely end up increasing total health care costs.

The idea of Medicare as a money-saving program may seem hard to grasp. After all, hasn't Medicare spending risen dramatically over time? Yes, it has: adjusting for overall inflation, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose more than 400 percent from 1969 to 2009.

But inflation-adjusted premiums on private health insurance rose more than 700 percent over the same period. So while it's true that Medicare has done an inadequate job of controlling costs, the private sector has done much worse. And if we deny Medicare to 65- and 66-year-olds, we'll be forcing them to get private insurance -- if they can -- that will cost much more than it would have cost to provide the same coverage through Medicare.

Joe Lieberman the Scumbag

Fire Dog Lake's David Dayen gives a run-down on where health care reform is at courtesy of the Senator who views people as getting in the way of health insurance profits.

Ultimately, we will still get health care reform, Lieberman just wants to make sure the health insurance industry is happy and never mind the people.

The phrase most often heard around here RE Lieberman: 'I hate that ^%X8.'

Salon Rips Herb Kohl

Zap and Pow. Salon lists the U.S. Senate "knuckleheads," and Herb Kohl makes the list. From the Salon staff:

In honor of the most recent Master of the Senate, Salon presents its list of those senators who are not masters, those who have helped turn what was once the nation's foremost debating society into the corporate board of Dunder Mifflin. Meet the senators who for reasons of questionable IQ or eccentricity, because they are vapid, stubborn or ornery, can fairly be called knuckleheads. ...

Herb Kohl, D-Wisc.
Evidence of knuckleheadedness: There is little proof in the legislative record that a 'Herb Kohl' has ever been on Capitol Hill. A small, bald robot has been spotted near the Senate office (and at Milwaukee Bucks games) bearing this name and reading questions to witnesses at hearings, but it is not believed to be a fully functioning senator.

Being thrown in the same category as Jim DeMint, Joe Lieberman, James Inhofe, Tom Coburn and Jeff Sessions seems unfair.

Much as Herb Kohl has blown votes - Patriot Act, Iraq Invasion, Defence of Marriage Act and so on - Kohl has not earned the ignominy of the other U.S. senators with which he is listed.

In Defense of Joe Lieberman

Update: Hartford Courant: Secret Ballot To Decide Lieberman's Fate - "Joe Lieberman votes with me a lot more than a lot of my senators. He didn't support us on military stuff, and he didn't support us on Iraq stuff. But you look at his record, it's pretty good."
- Sen. Harry Reid

I don’t care for Joe Lieberman as a U.S. Senator.

Lieberman went right along with the obscenity of the Iraq Invasion and the Patriot Act, among other imbecilities.

I don’t care for Joe Lieberman as a public man.

Even among elected officials in Congress, Lieberman stands out as a lying propagandist.

Lieberman used Republican talking points and lies in his failed attempt to prop up John McCain’s candidacy that would have been devastating to a reeling economy and a shredded American Constitution.

And Lieberman veered right up to and past neo-McCarthyism questioning the patriotism of those not sharing his discredited militarism.

But let’s look to history.

Did the Democratic Party attempt to marginalize and punish Senator
Henry "Scoop" Jackson in 1977, for example, the dedicated militarist of the 1960s-70s who shared with Lieberman the sanctimonious commitment to state violence?

No.

Because to cast out Jackson would have been to indict a whole generation of Democratic leaders without whose dedicated support and lies the Vietnam Invasion would not have been waged.

If we take seriously the arguments to sanitize by sanctioning Lieberman after the Democratic Party’s electoral victories in 2008, more than Joe Lieberman need to stand and account.

The effort to punish Lieberman smells of scapegoating.

We just had an election. What are we going to do, punish Vice-president Biden, Clinton and Kohl for their historically horrendous votes and sometimes unsavory politics?

Of-course not.

Obama has it right. Let’s look to the future.

Joe Lieberman Looking out for Terrorists

Via Crooks and Liars, The Havana Note reports that "Joe Lieberman will seek a pardon for a convicted terrorist who led a bombing spree across Manhattan."

From The Havana Note:

Cozying up to Cuban-American extremists in South Florida has been a part of American political culture for decades. It is an unseemly ritual that has nevertheless persisted because of the dysfunctional peculiarities of our Electoral College that grants Florida 27 votes, exactly 10 percent of the electors needed to win the White House.

John Hagee and Joe Lieberman: Friends in War and Hate

Update: Obama Far More Popular Among American Jewry Than Lieberman

One of John McCain’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders and top campaign surrogates, Sen. Joe Lieberman, will address a controversial, militaristic conference sponsored by an organization founded and led by the bigoted Pastor John Hagee tonight, Christians United for Israel (CUFI).

The Christians United for Israel (CUFI) group will hold its Third Annual Washington-Israel Summit in Washington, D.C. beginning today.

McCain had sought out and received Hagee’s endorsement before renouncing him earlier this year. “I’m very proud to have Pastor Hagee’s support," said McCain before repudiating Hagee.

Hagee’s anti-Catholicism and homophobia and whacky statements on blacks and women had caused an uproar on the internet, but it was Hagee’s statement on Judaism that finally saw McCain break with Hagee publicly in May.

A late 1990s sermon by Hagee was made public in which Hagee stated that Hitler was fulfilling God's will.

The group, Activist Dems, launched an internet campaign to Tell Sen. Lieberman to immediately withdraw his commitment to deliver the keynote address at Hagee's Israel Summit on July 22.

Christians United for Israel (CUFI) echos neocon foreign policy prescriptions regarding Iraq, Iran and the Middle East, with an emphasis on stopping "Islamofascism," positions and language repeated by McCain and Lieberman on the campaign trail.

Tell Sen. Lieberman to immediately withdraw his commitment to deliver the keynote address at Hagee's Israel Summit on July 22.

Tell Sen. Lieberman to immediately withdraw his commitment to deliver the keynote address at Hagee's Israel Summit on July 22.

Activist Dems are delivering a petition to Joe Liberman who is desperate to prove that the is more of a whack than we would have thought.

The Forward's Fein: Huffington Post Is Anti-Semitic for Criticizing Joe Lieberman’s Endorsement of John McCain

Joe Lieberman is a lying, militaristic Neocon who campaigned in 2006 on a pledge to endorse a Democrat for president in 2008.

[See Lieberman: "I want to elect a Democratic president in 2008."]

That kind of talk makes one an anti-Semite in the mind of The Forward's Leonard Fein. Writes Fein:

Trust me on this. Do not, even in idle curiosity, look at the postings on The Huffington Post regarding Joseph Lieberman’s endorsement of John McCain. Or, if you disregard my very sober advice and do have a look, bear in mind that all the antisemitism and anti-Israelism you will see expressed there is all there is. Every raging antisemite in the nation has now had his or her say, all the Israel-bashing has been spent, and we can go on. ...

Fein and Lieberman are whacks, no need to trust or put your faith in anyone or anything on this assessment, just your reason.

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