I've decided to swear off of criticizing Hillary Clinton. That's because of not only the glee I've heard from the right every time a Democrat (especially Barack Obama) says something negative about her, but also because I want to remind readers of this blog that while Hillary Clinton is my last choice (for reasons I've enumerated several times recently) I also wrote several months ago why I will support her if she is the nominee. I won't go into the points I made in that post here (though I thought I made them very well,) but would like to instead compare side by side Hillary Clinton's major positions on issues linked here on her website with the same issues as viewed by current GOP frontrunner John McCain from his website, linked here.
On Iraq (since this issue has formed the root of why so many Democrats who consider ourselves progressive like myself are disappointed with Hillary):
Hillary Clinton: America is ready for a leader who will end the war in Iraq. Hillary's roadmap out of Iraq, the Iraq Troop Protection and Reduction Act of 2007, is a plan to end the war before the next president takes the oath of office. But if the Bush administration won't end the war, as president and commander in chief, Hillary will.
John McCain: John McCain believes that we must not fail in Iraq. Succeeding in the cause of helping the Iraqi people build a stable, secure, representative state is essential to achieving an enduring peace in a region of the world central to American prosperity and national security.
McCain is using exactly the same words as George Bush has been using for five years in this quote, and recently said it would be fine with him if America stayed in Iraq for a hundred years.
Health Care:
Hillary Clinton: America is ready for universal health care. Hillary has the vision and the experience to make it a reality. This is a battle Hillary has fought before -- and she has the scars to prove it. She knows better than anyone how to fight and build the political support to get the job done.
John McCain: His initial blurb said nothing substantive so I had to click on the 'read more,' where he gives the standard GOP lines about promoting competition and choice (which as we know is a red herring because hospitals provide practically no information about their price structures, certainly not in time to allow anyone to make an informed decision no matter how much research they do), tort reform, and some other blather. He does suggest developing a protocol for re-importation of drugs, but that is about the only thing he said that I somewhat could support. On the other hand he plans to revise the tax structure in a way that would in effect phase out employer-provided health insurance (which would leave people on their own and leave the people with the most health issues stuck without anyone who would sell them insurance at an affordable rate-- ironic coming from a cancer survivor.)
Economy:
Hillary has a plan to help people who need help right now. John McCain proposes corporate tax cuts.
Hillary: For freedom of reproductive choice, energy independence and improving public schools.
McCain: For slashing spending (he's been against 'pork' for years, even when it does a lot of good) and praises NCLB and school 'choice' (which is a term that is traditionally used by backers of vouchers for private school tuition). The only time he ever hinted that he might support the right to an abortion was when a reporter asked him during the 2000 campaign what he would do if his own daughter had an unwanted pregancy. But he has consistently been against the right to reproductive freedom for women he's not related to.
I began supporting Richardson, and since he dropped out I've been moving steadily towards supporting Obama. But these reasons make it clear that Hillary Clinton, despite being my last choice among Democrats, is far, far better than what we will have if John McCain is ever elected President.
And what if the GOP nominee is not John McCain? Well, it's hard to see how Rudy or Mike or Mitt would be any better.
Oh, and just in case you need one more reason why we have to come together behind the nominee, even if it is Hillary: Do you really want to gamble that Justice Stevens' fragile heart (though a noble heart it has been) will hold out for another four years?
Showing posts with label Iraq withdrawal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq withdrawal. Show all posts
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Saturday, November 03, 2007
New GOP strategy is to attack Congress for inaction-- but how accurate is it?
Recently the Republicans have begun claiming that this Congress is a 'do-nothing' Congress, in an attempt to undermine the Congressmen and Congresswomen that we have worked very hard to elect.
That is however, absolutely false.
This Congress has passed and the President has signed at least three major pieces of legislation, all on issues that had been languishing and unattended to since the beginning of his administration:
1. Minimum wage increase. This represented the first increase in the minimum wage since 1998. Previous attempts in the GOP Congress had failed every single year.
2. College financial aid bill. With skyrocketing tuition costs and students leaving school tens of thousands of dollars in debt before they even have their first full-time job, this bill cuts interest rates in half and helps school boards with limited budgets recruit qualified teachers by giving college graduates a way to be forgiven of some or all of their debt if they step into the classroom for a few years, and it will cost the local school boards nothing.
3. Ethics reform bill. We saw the 'culture of corruption' last year in Washington, and as we've seen this year some of it still has to be rooted out. So Congress passed the most sweeping ethics reform bill since the Watergate era. Critics like to point out the loopholes that still remain. Sure, but those which remain also remained when the GOP Congress did absolutely nothing about ethics reform (other than DeLay's attempts to 'fix' the problem by packing the ethics oversight committee with his cronies).
There are also three other important pieces of legislation that haven't gotten passed mainly due to the President's veto and/or Republican-led filibusters and opposition in the Senate:
1. An Iraq bill which mandates withdrawal deadlines. The American people are quite bluntly put sick and tired of pouring hundreds of billions of dollars down this rat-hole when there are crying needs to pay for here. And on top of that, we are borrowing money to pay for it, but the GOP members of Congress won't even consider a supplemental tax to pay for Iraq, preferring instead to pass the debt on to future generations (with interest, of course.)
2. A stem-cell funding bill. Our policy restricting research in this area is just one of many examples of the administration's disdain for science and scientific research. Other examples include cuts to alternative fuel programs and backing the teaching of creationism in public schools. The result is that the pace of progress for American science, which had effectively lapped the rest of field by the end of the Cold War, has slowed down considerably so that we are now living on 'borrowed time' until the rest of the world catches up (and they are not so far back anymore.) The stem-cell bill was of course only a piece of this whole but it is the piece where the battleground was drawn with Congress. In fact, even last year's Republican Congress realized how important this was and passed a stem-cell funding bill, but the President, who seems to live in a world of his own where science plays second fiddle to dogma, vetoed it.
3. SCHIP. The GOP has been misleading about this from the get go. SCHIP is not a Federal program except for residents of the District of Columbia, but rather a bunch of 'block grants' to states (recall that is something that the Republican Congress did with many Federal programs in the 1990's). Congress must give some guidelines to make sure the money is being spent appropriately, but it sets intentionally broad parameters as to what those limits are in order to allow the states the flexibility to tailor their programs to the specific needs within their state. Keep in mind this is a Republican reform. But opponents of SCHIP renewal are now implying that it is the federal government that would be paying for it (i.e. 'national' healthcare) and quote the maximum allowable limits for any state (intentionally set high to allow states to cover high-cost of living cities like NY and SF if they exist within the state) and imply that would be the limit for everybody. Of course if you live in most places, $81 thousand for a family of four sounds like a ridiculously high limit and in most places it is, but it would not be in, for example, downtown San Francisco where even small economy apartments can run upwards of $2500 per month plus utilities. In a place like where I live that would be two or three times the typical mortgage, so there is little comparison. But count on Republicans to take a good idea like flexibility to the states which they should be taking credit for and twist it into a way to deny funding for kids health insurance (at current levels, Maine and several other states will soon begin running out of funds as health care costs have continued to accelerate rapidly).
4. Comprehensive mmigration reform. We can't get a handle on the problem without including a market based solution that addresses the reason why illegal border crossers keep coming-- our own job market (unemployment is at historic lows, so the idea that they are taking jobs from Americans is just not true.) This was one bill that the President would have signed, but it was blocked primarily by Republicans in the Senate (though with the misguided defections of a handful of Democrats.)
So on these bills, the Democratic Congress passed six out of seven, and three of those were signed. Not good enough, but certainly not the 'do-nothing' title that GOP strategists are claiming (that title would belong to the previous GOP Congress which failed even to pass nine out of eleven spending bills in 2006, virtually guaranteeing that this Congress would get off to a slow start as they had to finish last year's work.*)
What needs to be done now? Well, getting larger Democratic majorities in Congress would be a very good start, especially in the Senate where the balance of power hangs by a thread. A veto-proof majority would be nice but probably a very high hill to climb (but not absolutely impossible-- on SCHIP 44 Republicans voted to override, leaving about fifteen short.) And this should make it absolutely clear that we will need a Democratic President next year, someone who will sign these bills if Congress passes them.
*-- the more conspiratorially minded among us might even wonder, given the current assault on Congress in the right-wing media, whether this was actually part of a grand strategy that began last year to gum up the works and lay the foundation for the kinds of charges we are now seeing.
That is however, absolutely false.
This Congress has passed and the President has signed at least three major pieces of legislation, all on issues that had been languishing and unattended to since the beginning of his administration:
1. Minimum wage increase. This represented the first increase in the minimum wage since 1998. Previous attempts in the GOP Congress had failed every single year.
2. College financial aid bill. With skyrocketing tuition costs and students leaving school tens of thousands of dollars in debt before they even have their first full-time job, this bill cuts interest rates in half and helps school boards with limited budgets recruit qualified teachers by giving college graduates a way to be forgiven of some or all of their debt if they step into the classroom for a few years, and it will cost the local school boards nothing.
3. Ethics reform bill. We saw the 'culture of corruption' last year in Washington, and as we've seen this year some of it still has to be rooted out. So Congress passed the most sweeping ethics reform bill since the Watergate era. Critics like to point out the loopholes that still remain. Sure, but those which remain also remained when the GOP Congress did absolutely nothing about ethics reform (other than DeLay's attempts to 'fix' the problem by packing the ethics oversight committee with his cronies).
There are also three other important pieces of legislation that haven't gotten passed mainly due to the President's veto and/or Republican-led filibusters and opposition in the Senate:
1. An Iraq bill which mandates withdrawal deadlines. The American people are quite bluntly put sick and tired of pouring hundreds of billions of dollars down this rat-hole when there are crying needs to pay for here. And on top of that, we are borrowing money to pay for it, but the GOP members of Congress won't even consider a supplemental tax to pay for Iraq, preferring instead to pass the debt on to future generations (with interest, of course.)
2. A stem-cell funding bill. Our policy restricting research in this area is just one of many examples of the administration's disdain for science and scientific research. Other examples include cuts to alternative fuel programs and backing the teaching of creationism in public schools. The result is that the pace of progress for American science, which had effectively lapped the rest of field by the end of the Cold War, has slowed down considerably so that we are now living on 'borrowed time' until the rest of the world catches up (and they are not so far back anymore.) The stem-cell bill was of course only a piece of this whole but it is the piece where the battleground was drawn with Congress. In fact, even last year's Republican Congress realized how important this was and passed a stem-cell funding bill, but the President, who seems to live in a world of his own where science plays second fiddle to dogma, vetoed it.
3. SCHIP. The GOP has been misleading about this from the get go. SCHIP is not a Federal program except for residents of the District of Columbia, but rather a bunch of 'block grants' to states (recall that is something that the Republican Congress did with many Federal programs in the 1990's). Congress must give some guidelines to make sure the money is being spent appropriately, but it sets intentionally broad parameters as to what those limits are in order to allow the states the flexibility to tailor their programs to the specific needs within their state. Keep in mind this is a Republican reform. But opponents of SCHIP renewal are now implying that it is the federal government that would be paying for it (i.e. 'national' healthcare) and quote the maximum allowable limits for any state (intentionally set high to allow states to cover high-cost of living cities like NY and SF if they exist within the state) and imply that would be the limit for everybody. Of course if you live in most places, $81 thousand for a family of four sounds like a ridiculously high limit and in most places it is, but it would not be in, for example, downtown San Francisco where even small economy apartments can run upwards of $2500 per month plus utilities. In a place like where I live that would be two or three times the typical mortgage, so there is little comparison. But count on Republicans to take a good idea like flexibility to the states which they should be taking credit for and twist it into a way to deny funding for kids health insurance (at current levels, Maine and several other states will soon begin running out of funds as health care costs have continued to accelerate rapidly).
4. Comprehensive mmigration reform. We can't get a handle on the problem without including a market based solution that addresses the reason why illegal border crossers keep coming-- our own job market (unemployment is at historic lows, so the idea that they are taking jobs from Americans is just not true.) This was one bill that the President would have signed, but it was blocked primarily by Republicans in the Senate (though with the misguided defections of a handful of Democrats.)
So on these bills, the Democratic Congress passed six out of seven, and three of those were signed. Not good enough, but certainly not the 'do-nothing' title that GOP strategists are claiming (that title would belong to the previous GOP Congress which failed even to pass nine out of eleven spending bills in 2006, virtually guaranteeing that this Congress would get off to a slow start as they had to finish last year's work.*)
What needs to be done now? Well, getting larger Democratic majorities in Congress would be a very good start, especially in the Senate where the balance of power hangs by a thread. A veto-proof majority would be nice but probably a very high hill to climb (but not absolutely impossible-- on SCHIP 44 Republicans voted to override, leaving about fifteen short.) And this should make it absolutely clear that we will need a Democratic President next year, someone who will sign these bills if Congress passes them.
*-- the more conspiratorially minded among us might even wonder, given the current assault on Congress in the right-wing media, whether this was actually part of a grand strategy that began last year to gum up the works and lay the foundation for the kinds of charges we are now seeing.
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