Thanks for contributing to the greenhouse gas problem on taxpayer dime. I'd rather you didn't, but....
"Weakened Obama heads west to raise campaign cash; Health website debacle irks high-tech high-rollers" by Matt Viser | Globe Staff, November 23, 2013
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s ability to boost his party in a time of waning political fortunes will face a big test next week as he embarks on a West Coast fund-raising swing to help congressional Democrats stock their 2014 campaign coffers.
The quest for contributions is made all the more urgent by the bungled launch of his health care law and its use as a bludgeon by Republicans trying to seize control of the Senate.
The frikkin' election is almost a year away!
Moreover, the stakes are increasing for the Democrats just as the president is getting weaker, with the lowest approval ratings of his presidency weighing him down as the midterm election cycle kicks into full gear.
He has only himself to blame.
Organizers say they are confident Obama will prove to be a strong draw for campaign dollars on his three-city tour of California and Washington, even though they have already lowered the ticket price for one San Francisco event to help ensure a packed hall.
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Highlighting the potential negatives for the fund-raiser in chief: Obama is expected to get an earful from California technology executives and other contributors who are baffled that Obama’s administration has been unable to create a functioning health care website.
Even those who are giving top-dollar donations refer to it as the president’s health care “debacle.”
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Chris Lehane, a San Francisco-based Democratic consultant, said there is still excitement for Obama, and there’s no shortage of money to be raised. But Obama will be hearing complaints about his signature health care law.
“These are people who have created the most sophisticated databases ever, and could probably figure this out on the elevator ride up to their office,” Lehane said. “There’s bafflement and puzzlement out here. Because this is doable.”
Obama’s approval rating in national polls has sunk to between 37 and 41 percent. Yet demands on Obama to help raise money to prepare for 2014 elections are strong. Democrats’ control of the Senate has been made more tenuous because of the furor....
Outrage also has focused on cancellation of health coverage for millions of people whose old insurance plans did not meet new standards of the Affordable Care Act. Obama has sought to alleviate that pressure by saying states could permit insurers to continue to offer the substandard plans, but that has caused even more confusion and upheaval.
Related: The Care of Obamafraud
Moderate Democrats in states like North Carolina, Louisiana, and Alaska are already under intense television bombardment by Republicans, pillorying them for supporting the president’s signature social policy achievement.
“Mary Landrieu cast the deciding vote for Obamacare,” said an ad that began running on Wednesday in Louisiana; it is part of a $4 million national ad campaign by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity. “Why didn’t she do her job? Protect us from Obamacare from the start?”
Landrieu has been attempting to distance herself from the most troubling aspects of the Affordable Care Act. She introduced legislation that would go one step further than Obama’s reprieve on cancellations, and require insurance companies to continue coverage under plans that do not meet the law’s minimum standards. Several other potentially vulnerable Democrats have signed on.
The health care problems came on the heels of a month in which Republican actions led to the government shutdown, giving Democrats a potential political edge. That has since evaporated. “The needle has moved over the last month dramatically,’’ said Stuart Rothenberg, a political analyst who monitors House and Senate races. “The Senate is in play and the Democrats need to change this trajectory.”
The Democrats are the most inept political party I have ever seen.
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To capture the Senate, Republicans need to gain six seats. The Cook Political Report rates four seats that Democrats currently hold as a toss-up or leaning toward Republicans: West Virginia, Arkansas, South Dakota, and Montana.
Republicans would have to win all of those races, and then make further inroads in places like Louisiana and North Carolina.
I think they will be getting them after this debacle.
The House is far more daunting for Democrats. Rothenberg lists 208 seats as safely Republican, meaning the GOP would have to win just 10 out of the 52 competitive races to keep its majority.
Also in play is the fact that a second-term president usually suffers heavy losses in the sixth year of his presidency. Add to that the fact that Americans are very unhappy and in a throw-the-bums-out again mood.
Helping fellow Democrats has been a priority for Obama, highlighting the pressures of today’s permanent campaign apparatus and the importance to his legacy of retaining Senate control. The West Coast trip follows fund-raisers held earlier this month in Dallas, Miami, and Philadelphia. He also held a fund-raiser in Weston, Mass., on Oct. 30. His western trip starts in Seattle on Sunday and ends in Los Angeles before he returns to Washington on Tuesday.
Yeah, thanks for warming up the planet over politics.
Also see: Healthcare Horror
There are some signs Obama may not be able to attract the same level of campaign cash he has in the past. Organizers for one of Obama’s fund-raisers in San Francisco sent out messages this week saying ticket prices had been reduced, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Democratic Party officials said the price reduction was not an indication of low interest. They said they expanded the space for the fund-raiser, and offered tickets at lower prices.
Marc Benioff, chief executive of cloud computing firm Salesforce.com who is hosting an hourlong lunch for Obama at his San Francisco home on Monday, has said his company would build the government’s website for free, and run it for the next five years at no cost. At a conference Benioff’s company sponsored this week, it showed off a new platform for the site, which it called Healthcare.Love.
Now he tells us!
“We demonstrated that the government doesn’t need to spend $300 million to achieve a great new success with health care,” Benioff said. “The number one message is, ‘We’re still here to be a friend and ally of the president.’ A friend in need is a friend indeed.”
It was about doubt that so far, but who wants to quibble about a measly $300 million in this times of austerity?
Michael Czin, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said the party has not had any problems raising money as a result of Obama’s sagging poll numbers.
The primary campaign committees that Obama has tried to raise money for have taken in $163 million this year, compared with $150 million for the Republican committees.
It's corporations playing both sides of the ai$le.
“Right now we’re making the types of investments that will help us be successful next year, whether that’s bringing on key staff or making investments in data and technology,” Czin said. “Looking to 2014, we’re going to have the resources we need to get that message out.”
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So how is that website going?
"White House offers upbeat forecast for health website; Consultant says workable setup nearing reality" by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar | Associated Press, November 23, 2013
WASHINGTON — There won’t be a magic moment, but the Obama administration’s much-maligned health insurance website should be able to weather an expected yearend crush of customers, officials said Friday.
It better be!
A combination of software fixes, design changes, added hardware, and new wiggle room should provide the right combination to finally deliver a workable website, White House troubleshooter Jeffrey Zients said in an upbeat assessment. Zients is a management consultant brought in by the White House to extricate President Obama from a technology debacle that has sent his poll ratings into a nose dive....
You keep polishing that turd and telling us it smells like flowers.
More time could prevent some people from having a break in coverage on account of the balky enrollment website. That’s critical for those losing individual policies that don’t measure up under the law, and also for high-risk patients in a small federal insurance program that ends this year.
For the insurance industry, the announcement only complicated the balancing act. Every week a new edict from the administration sends the companies scrambling. More time for consumers means less time for insurers to verify enrollments and correct errors....
Yeah, don't think the bu$ine$$ interests being all pi$$ed off doesn't mean anything, either.
Other deadlines could also slip....
Then why not just scrap the whole damn thing?
Separately, the administration also announced a schedule change in next year’s open enrollment season. It will start Nov. 15, 2014, a month later than originally scheduled, and finish Jan. 15, 2015, about five weeks later than originally scheduled. The midterm congressional elections are Nov. 4, and congressional Republicans accused the administration of shifting the dates for political reasons, to hide a spike in 2015 premiums.
Everything is political with this White House.
Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, called it a ‘‘cynical political move’’ that means ‘‘if premiums go through the roof in the first year of Obamacare, no one will know about it until after the election.’’
But if next year follows the same pattern as this year, there should be plenty of information available about 2015 premiums before the election....
Then Republicans win the Senate.
The administration says the change is to allow insurers more time to prepare and submit premiums.
Then why are they so unhappy about all this?
However, there is one possible way that Democrats could benefit politically. If lighting strikes twice and the website sputters again during the next open enrollment season.
How would Democrats benefit from another website crash? That will be death of Obamacare.
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Finally, a pyrrhic victory for the Democrats:
"Democrats curtail Senate filibusters; Long-threatened ‘nuclear option’ clears way for votes on nominees; chamber’s partisan gap likely to widen" by Matt Viser and Noah Bierman | Globe Staff, November 21, 2013
WASHINGTON — Republicans objected furiously. They accused Democrats of making a short-sighted power grab they will regret the next time they are in the minority.
Yeah, like a year from now.
They also argued the maneuver was a ploy to divert attention from the disastrous launch of Obama’s health care overhaul.
I would not doubt it.
“I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this,” Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said in a speech that immediately followed Reid. “And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.”
“The solution to this problem is at the ballot box,” he added. “We look forward to having a great election in 2014.”
Republicans also warned that Thursday’s provocation would spill over into other issues, preventing cooperation at a time when major budget and key defense issues are on the agenda.
The filibuster option remains in place on legislative issues, meaning that Republicans could still block Democratic priorities, as they did with gun control measures earlier this year.
Democrats said the immediate trigger for Thursday’s vote was a Republican filibuster of three of Obama’s nominees in recent weeks to fill vacancies on the US Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia....
Related: Revolt in Republican Ranks
“I realize that neither party has been blameless for these tactics. They developed over the years,” Obama said in the White House briefing room. “But today’s pattern of obstruction, it just isn’t normal. It’s not what our founders envisioned. A deliberate and determined effort to obstruct everything, no matter what the merits, just to refight the results of an election is not normal.”
We are so far from what the founders envisioned, and as for the result of the last election all we did was let you keep the job. That doesn't mean bad law has to be shoved up our asses.
I'm really getting sick of this guy.
Several times in recent years there have been other moves to use the “nuclear option,” but each time a deal was cut at the last minute....
The rule change has the potential to radically alter the dynamics in a Senate that considers itself the world’s greatest deliberative body, a sanctum where the rights of the minority party — indeed, even individual senators — to exercise power are institutionalized in arcane rules.
But in recent years the sense of decorum that accompanied those traditions has faded, particularly as Republicans have stood in lockstep opposition to Obama’s nominees.
Even with the removal of the filibuster option, there are still other ways for senators to delay judicial nominations, such as an old practice that allows home-state senators to block action on a nominee by not returning blue slips of paper containing their opinion on the nominee’s suitability to the Judiciary Committee.
Related: Sunday Globe Special: Courting the Senate
The filibuster was first used in the 1800s and formally enshrined in Senate rules in 1917.
Its use was portrayed in the movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” when Jimmy Stewart, playing a senator, holds the senate floor to prevent a vote to build a dam on the site of a proposed boy’s camp. Such “talking filibusters’’ are exceedingly rare now.
So is a decent politician like the one Stewart played.
Still, the practice of using rules to block Senate action has been integral in the Senate’s identity, described by George Washington as the saucer that cools the hot tea of the House.
Filibusters were used only in the most extreme circumstances for decades, but that began to change in modern times and reached historic highs after Obama assumed office in 2009.
Republicans said taking away the filibuster for most nominees may give Democrats their way in the near term, but it would force each party to become even more entrenched.
“The last time the Democrats decided they were going to do something all by themselves it was Obamacare,” said Senator Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican. “And I’m pretty sure they regret doing it that way and my guess is they’ll regret this at some point too.”
But Reid said there have been 168 filibusters of presidential nominees in history; half of those have come under Obama.
In addition to judicial nominees, Republicans have blocked nominees for the consumer protection board. They also recently blocked a vote on Representative Mel Watt, a North Carolina Democrat nominated by Obama to be the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency....
Fifty-two Democrats voted to upend the filibuster; 45 Republicans and three Democrats opposed it. Both Massachusetts senators, Elizabeth Warren and Edward J. Markey, supported the move.
“The Republicans tried to win the presidency. They lost,” Warren said in an interview. “The response has been to block up or down votes on vital nominees, not because the nominees are unqualified, but because they don’t like who is president.”
Warren said “of course I’m worried” about what would happen if Republicans recapture the Senate majority and will be in a position to bypass a Democratic minority. But she said senators have a responsibility to “advise and consent’’ on the president’s nominees under the US Constitution.
“Every senator takes an oath of office promising to support and defend the constitution,” she said. “No senator takes an oath to protect the filibuster.”
It would be nice if you guys remembered that once in a while.
Markey, who served nearly 37 years in the House, said the Senate was beginning to resemble the House, with its “Tea Party instincts.”
“I’m afraid it has seeped into the Senate and my hope is we can restore the Senate to its traditional role,” he said.
Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, said the minority should have even fewer rights to block legislation.
“We all have heard the story of President Washington saying the Senate is a cooling saucer, but never was the Senate intended to be a deep freeze,” Merkley said. “Yet that is what it has become.”
Good, because every time you guys do something you make things worse.
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See you in the minority in 2014, you idiotic fools.
Also see: GOP provoked filibuster move, but Senate’s woes run deeper
