GOP’s humiliating new predicament: Why it may have to fund the law it hates!

If the budget negotiations succeed, Democrats should insist on a full-year appropriation for HHS, not just to smooth the rocky implementation of Obamacare but to restore funding to badly damaged programs and agencies like Head Start and the National Institutes of Health.

“It’s a disaster. A disaster if we continue with the yearlong sequester and continuing resolution,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Labor-H bill, on the Senate floor during the shutdown.

Failing a full-year HHS budget, Democrats should insist on restoring HHS funding to its pre-sequestration levels. Put another way, they should refuse to let the GOP use the budget process to undermine Obamacare by shrinking the entire HHS budget by tens of billions of dollars — by making the Centers for Disease Control and NIH and poor children collateral damage in their war against the Affordable Care Act.

Republicans know that as time goes on, the constituency of new Affordable Care Act beneficiaries will grow, and eventually cross a point of no return past which “repeal,” in the sense that they’ve been promising conservatives they will “repeal Obamacare,” will become impossible. After all, Republicans are in the midst of proving how politically dangerous it is to pass laws that result in people losing their health insurance.

They understand the attraction of government benefits as well as anyone, which explains why they’re attacking the law so aggressively in the early days of its enrollment period, before coverage kicks in on Jan. 1, and while its botched rollout is preventing hundreds of thousands of people from completing applications for insurance.

If the Obama administration manages to fix Healthcare.gov pretty quickly, then the story will change after the new year and Republicans will have to undertake an awkward political reversal.

At the same time, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that in most of the country, the Affordable Care Act rollout has been a fiasco. It’s probably the case, actually, that even if the errors get corrected quickly, the salient facts about the past month and the coming weeks — the failure of the federally facilitated exchanges, the millions of cancellation notices — will loom large over the program, particularly on the right, well into next year.

This will become a source of unusual tension in early January when it’s time for Congress to fund the government once again. The ironic consequence of the October shutdown is that it suppressed the GOP’s appetite for brinkmanship before the Affordable Care Act had been given a chance to make such a bad first impression.

It’s unlikely that Republican leaders will allow rank-and-file conservatives to resuscitate the defund-or-shutdown strategy, per se. But the temptation will be enormous.

The GOP’s dilemma will present Democrats an advantage above and beyond simply hoping that Republicans self-destruct again. They can use GOP leaders’ aversion to shutting down the government again to ease the strain Republican intransigence has put on the part of the budget that facilitates Obamacare at the margin.

For the next five weeks, House and Senate negotiators will try to convene around a viable budget for the rest of the fiscal year. The “grand bargain” President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner twice pursued probably won’t be struck. But it’s easy enough to imagine Democrats and Republicans agreeing to cut some non-entitlement spending (farm subsidies, perhaps), raise some non-tax revenues (user fees and sales, for instance) and ply the savings into the discretionary budget. Pay down sequestration for a year or two and send agreeable allocations to congressional appropriators.

Many of the agencies in government that administer the Affordable Care Act receive their funding from the so-called “Labor-H” or “Labor-HHS” appropriations bill. For two years now, the Department of Health and Human Services has operated without a current budget. Congress has simply renewed its out-of-date budgets every time funding has expired. Then in March, HHS’ antiquated budget had its wobbly legs cut out from underneath it when sequestration took effect.

The Democratic aides I’ve spoken with aren’t laboring under an illusion that Republicans will be inclined to do Obamacare any favors in the coming budget negotiations. But they do believe that the October catastrophe convinced Republicans that the notion of shutting down the government — or partially shutting down the government — over the Affordable Care Act is an existential liability. Democrats should use that skittishness to their advantage. And if the ACA’s early woes draw the GOP back into brinkmanship — well, that’ll be a problem for them to deal with.

Impossible like repealing the 2nd amendment or destroying the concept of marriage, you just can't do that.

"......As President Obama’s political mentor, Saul Alinsky, put it in Rules for Radicals: “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all of the angels are on one side and the devils are on the other.”

Here is another statement from Rules for Radicals: “We are always moral and our enemies always immoral.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the immorality of the opposition, of conservatives and Republicans. If they are perceived as immoral and indecent, their policies and arguments can be dismissed, and even those constituencies that are non-political or “low-information” can be mobilized to do battle against an evil party. In 1996 Senator Bob Dole — a moderate Republican and deal-maker — ran for president against the incumbent, Bill Clinton. At the time, Dick Morris was Clinton’s political adviser. As they were heading into the election campaign, Clinton — a centrist Democrat — told Morris, “You have to understand, Dick, Bob Dole is evil.” That is how even centrist Democrats view the political battle......" David Horowitz: Uniting the Right - Freedom is the idea that can bring our fractious movement together

See, I am opposed to brinkmanship. I support identifying entire departments and shutting them down. I further support developing realistic authorization bills and appropriations bills and sending them to the Senate.

That way the Democratic Party has the option of supporting a realistic bill, or no bill at all, in which case the bad departments are shut down, and the ‘good’ departments are also shut down until the Democrats act on realistic authorization and appropriations bills.

The Left needs a smooth transition into tyranny so that the gun will trump free will, at least for a time, until there is a total collapse and revolution.
The forces of liberty need enough people to wake up and withdrawal their consent for a political solution to be possible. Otherwise, the forces of liberty may have to take their chances on instability. Allowing a firm foothold for tyranny is a near guarantee of democide. It has happened over and over.

one small problem. Head Start is a useless waste of money; it doesn't work

This year I finally stopped, but I was a retired teacher doing inner city substituting. I agree that HS doesn't work, except for taking control of the kids when they're very young. The learning materials and toys they have are fantastic. The curriculum is very full. Lots of stuff is provided....free breakfast and lunch, therapists where necessary, extra classes in music, phys ed, art etc. The few days I spent in there I found to be overstimulating and mind-boggling.

So what's not to love? This is not making the parents be better parents. It's not teaching the kids to appreciate small gifts and kindnesses. It (like most day care, (JMHO)) does not let the kids have normal individual patterns for when to eat, sleep, need quiet time etc. I think it gives the kids unreasonable expectations and early feelings of entitlement.

I'd do away with it and instead have a three-hour (or so) session once a week with the tots and their parents coming in together and sharing positive experiences. That way, a headstart teacher and aide could cover two sessions in five different schools every week.

But I'm in charge of nothing.

‘What I Learned From Getting Shot’ Wasn’t Racial Profiling, Says Reporter

Left-leaning political reporter Brian Beutler was nearly killed in a shooting in 2008. He was shot three times, puncturing his lung, stomach, and diaphragm. He had to have his spleen removed and tubes in his chest and abdomen to drain fluids from his lungs and peritoneal cavity.

He wrote publicly about the experience , compelled by the debate on racial profiling.

The two men who shot him were black and wore hoodies. After the shooting, “well-wishers wondered,” he writes, “if the experience had turned me into a racist.”

Press Here

At this point, the only way to kill Obamacare is for the patriots of this country to engage in a massive boycott of the entire health care system. If millions of people simply refuse to participate, the American health industry will have to capitulate. You may feel that it will be a personal hardship to boycott the health care system, but I think you might be surprised to learn that your health will actually improve. There is good reason to believe that you will actually live a longer and happier life without doctors. You may never want to go back.
Tear up your insurance cards. Quit paying premiums. Tell the health care system to take a hike. It is time for a little rebellion!

If you agree to play the American health care system’s game, you lose your right to complain about the system you are choosing. Boycott! That’s what I’m doing.

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