On health care reform, Florida Congressman Allen Boyd is doing no favors to citizens. ""What's the sense of getting a health care reform that, when we go down the road six or eight or 10 years, you've got a worse problem than we've got now?" the Monticello Democrat said Wednesday. "If we're going to do this, we need to get it right." (Florida Today, July 28, 2009)
But the Blue Dog Democrats are making no sense, as Paul Krugman points out in the New York Times. ("An Incoherent Truth", July 26, 2009) "Maybe they’re just being complete hypocrites. It’s worth remembering the history of one of the Blue Dog Coalition’s founders: former Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana. Mr. Tauzin switched to the Republicans soon after the group’s creation; eight years later he pushed through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, a deeply irresponsible bill that included huge giveaways to drug and insurance companies. And then he left Congress to become, yes, the lavishly paid president of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry lobby. One interpretation, then, is that the Blue Dogs are basically following in Mr. Tauzin’s footsteps: if their position is incoherent, it’s because they’re nothing but corporate tools, defending special interests. And as the Center for Responsive Politics pointed out in a recent report, drug and insurance companies have lately been pouring money into Blue Dog coffers."
For the 2010 election cycle, Congressman Boyd already has $1,589,000 on hand, compared to challenger state senator Al Lawson, with $38,000. You have to give credit to the other side: they know an opportunity when they see it. The eight members of the Blue Dog Coalition are playing right into the hands of the so-called "fiscal conservatives" who crashed the economy onto the rocks of the worst crisis since the Depression. Here is a way to send a message to Congressman Boyd: call his Tallahassee office: (850) 561-3979 the Blue Dogs are needed most in Alaska, where Sarah Palin is looking for retrievers.
2 comments:
Please, don't get me started on Sarah Palin.
Left this comment with Krugman's article, the NYT's editors refused to post it.
Mr. Krugman, with your Nobel Laureate's grasp of the world's realities, can you truly not see the most inconvenient of truths. The Democratic Party can win an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives, a filibuster-proof 60 seats in the US Senate, and the Presidency and there will be no fundamental change in this country. The US will remain the only developed industrial nation without health care for its people. The US run gulag at Guantanamo will not be shut down. The US military will not leave Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. And US taxpayer dollars will continue to be shoveled into the \"zombie banks\" you used to talk about, banks that are still insolvent, still dead as a doornail.
There will always be some obstacle to change, some excuse. Blue-dog Democrats, Committee Chairs like Max Baucus who are in the pocket of the industry like Billy Tauzin was until he just went directly to work for them, former Goldman Sachs employees shepherding US tax dollars to the banks. There is no Democratic or Republican Party, there is only one ruling party. Big business calls the shots.
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