Obamacare Rolls On

When this week's bit of theatre by Senator Ted Cruz was over on Wednesday, some of our colleagues in the media were almost disappointed that Cruz' absurdist performance piece was at an end. Personally, we thought both our popcorn and Cruz' shtick went stale long before he was ushered off the Senate floor. We were actually glad to see Sen. Cruz come back for an encore, when the Tea Party Senator from Texas joined his 99 other Senate colleagues in a hypocritical vote in favor of cloture - one of the things Cruz had just spent nearly a full day railing against.

Sure, folks like Ted Cruz get a lot of attention from the cable "news" channels, but the real news that caught our attention yesterday - along with that of many of our colleagues in the media - was published at midnight on Wednesday, when the Department of Health and Human Services released the latest details on what insurance premiums will look like under Obamacare - and the rates were far cheaper than anyone expected.

How much cheaper? As Igor Volsky of Think Progress noted, rates for health insurance look to be 16 percent lower, on average, than had been predicted across the nation. That average was already lower than current rate average rates for health insurance.

To say we were bowled over by that good news would be a bit much - though we had to think the extremist Republicans standing in the path of the rollout of Obamacare had to be terrified by that same information.

Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic went in-depth, outlining the details of several plans and family sizes thoroughly. What Cohn found was that not only are the costs for many plans lower, but the number and type of plans available to most Americans under Obamacare are also surprisingly large. Dylan Scott of TPM confirmed that, under Obamacare, 95 percent of Americans will be able to choose between two or more private health insurance carriers - which is more choice than many Americans have now.

While the rates for health insurance premiums vary, based on where you live, under Obamacare those rates look to be very manageable for most Americans, averaging $774 per month for a family of four that has an annual income above $94,200. For a family of four that earns around $50,000 a year, and receives subsidies under Obamacare, that monthly cost for health insurance drops to $282 or less per month in every state. Maggie Fox at NBC News even found that bare-bones health insurance for a family of four in Indianapolis could cost as little as $11 a month under Obamacare.

Many of the negative issues anti-Obamacare advocates have rumored about for months are now finally proving to be untrue, just in time for the next phase of Obamacare to click into place. As Rick Ungar of Forbes points out, Obamacare is turning out not to be a job killer after all. Further, as Rick Newman of Yahoo Finance notes, part-timers and other workers who are losing insurance through their workplaces look to be getting a better deal through Obamacare than many of them had access to through their jobs.

The fact is, the exchanges open up in less than a week, and while there look to be some relatively minor glitches as the program gets started - glitches that we're sure right-wing media will blow up into the next apocalyptic disaster - overall, Obamacare is already shaping up to be better than the system we've had.

Of course, we know at least one group that will still see this all positive news about health insurance costs as a disaster. Our recommendation to those unhappy extremists on the right is the same it's always been: Progress is rolling right toward you.

Either get with the program, or get out of its way.

Popcorn & Sympathy

As we began our discussions last night for today's commentary, our staff members had a good chuckle at the expense of Republican Senator Ted Cruz, as we're sure many people across the nation did. Cruz was foolishly yammering on about green eggs & ham and Nazis to a nearly empty Senate chamber in what some of our colleagues in the media began calling a "fauxlibuster" on Tuesday afternoon.

After all, since there was no bill up for debate on the floor of the U.S. Senate, what Sen. Cruz was doing cannot be accurately called a filibuster.

Cruz' actions, along with those of the heavily divided Republican Party, can be called many things, these days. 'Ridiculous' or 'disaster' - or if you're Steve Schmidt, former political strategist to the GOP - "asininity."As Schmidt noted in an interview this week, people like Cruz are "the freak show that’s been running wild for four years" that has hijacked both the Republican Party and the political right in America.

If America hadn't endured more than a decade of ginned up hatred, bigotry, misogyny, class warfare, at least one unnecessary war, and the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, all at the hands of the modern GOP, we might not be laughing so hard. We might even feel a little bit of sympathy for Republicans who are getting perpetually pounded these days by their own tea party partners.

The fact is, Americans have endured growing, explosive, divisive, right-wing abuse for nearly twenty years now. As the Republican Party is reduced to watching someone they hate like Sen. Ted Cruz usurp their own party's image, some Americans are content to sit back, grab some popcorn, and watch the Republican party fall apart.

After all, for those of us on the left, we've really got it pretty good right now.

Our party leader is not only the President, but is also an amazingly shrewd politician. After the Great Recession caused by his predecessor, President Obama and his economic team were able to stop the economic hemorrhaging and put the nation on a slow and steady path back to economic improvement. Even in the face of a potential shutdown and a potential debt ceiling default, investors on Wall Street don't seem to be worried about America defaulting on its bonds right now.

Some of Wall Street's corporate criminals also finally appear to be getting caught for their crimes - though that doesn't appear to have changed their arrogant attitudes yet. Universal health care is also about to go into effect for the first time ever in America, thanks to President Obama and Congressional Democrats.

President Obama may have delivered one of his most significant foreign policy addresses ever at the United Nations on Tuesday, as John Judis of The New Republic noted. America may even be on the verge of new peaceful relations with Iran, even as our nation helps restart once again the Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations.

No one is saying everything on the political left is perfect in America. Some farther left liberals still feel minimized and somewhat ignored compared to the currently dominant center-left progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Still, the Democratic Party has had some amazing successes over the past few years, mostly by having its broad variety of members work together for common goals.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party currently pushes its rising stars to audition for Fox, by pointlessly reading Dr. Seuss' rhymes into an empty Senate chamber, all while different factions of the GOP plot the rapid political demise of those same 'rising stars.'

We don't really have a whole lot of sympathy for the GOP right now, as we warned many of our Republican friends to stay away from the crazy far right many years ago, and they didn't listen. All we can do now is sit back and watch them destroy each other.

Pass the popcorn.

Going Down Swinging, Wildly

Even though much of the political media will be hyperventilating every day this week, and for the foreseeable future - or at least until both the Continuing Resolution and debt ceiling issues are settled - we honestly don't think there's that much to freak about, yet. As we noted last Friday, the Washington Post's Greg Sargent pretty much laid out the roadmap for how the CR will move around Capitol Hill this week, and so far, he's been right.

Even before the week began, it was obvious that the efforts of the arrogant, self-absorbed, Ivy League tea party Republican Sen. Ted Cruz would fail. As expected, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid began using the Senate rules on Monday to clean the CR, and send it back to the House.

Not surprisingly, neither the rules or reality stopped Cruz from wildly swinging around his ludicrous and increasingly desperate ideas to "defund Obamacare", as he did in his Monday op-ed at Real Clear Politics. Those unrealistic ideas, however, only served to give his fellow Republicans a splitting political headache that succeeded in calling even more attention to the ongoing civil war within the Republican Party.

All this wild flailing by Congressional Republicans wouldn't be nearly so bad if they were simply willing to admit publicly what other well-known members of their party like former Sen. Judd Gregg or writer Josh Barro already have: That the Obamacare "defunders" are playing Russian roulette with their own party, and Republicans still don't have a real, passable alternative to Obamacare, three-and-a-half years after President Obama and Democrats passed their plan into law.

For their part, the American people are overwhelmingly not interested in defunding Obamacare, as a CNBC poll on Monday stated - and Greg Sargent confirmed through a stack of other polls. Only the radical extremist tea party types on the far right still want to shut down the government - an action that wouldn't stop the further implementation of Obamacare even if they were successful. In fact, as Annie Lowrey pointed out Monday afternoon, a federal government shutdown wouldn't affect mandatory spending - including Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and unemployment insurance, among other government priorities.

There are a few noticeable items that would stop, though.

Unlike when the Republicans shut down the government in the mid-1990s, the military appropriations bill has yet to pass this time - so all members of the military will stop receiving paychecks immediately, if the government shuts down. They'll still be required to work - they just won't get their pay right away.

For Americans living in DC itself, the stench of a shutdown could get bad real quick, as garbage collection would also immediately shut down in our nation's capitol.

Still, as bad as a temporary government shutdown might seem, the looming battle over the debt ceiling is far more worrisome for us, and for anyone who truly understands the situation in Washington. That includes President Obama, who has made it abundantly clear that he will not be held hostage by Congressional Republicans this time over their responsibility to pay the debts Congress has already accrued - which is what the debt ceiling is.

If Republicans continue waving around suicidal actions over the debt ceiling like they'e doing now over the potential government shutdown, we'll be very worried then. For now, we continue watching fools like Sen. Cruz going down, swinging wildly, only politically injuring his own party members.