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http://www.crikey.com.au/

5 . Rundle: a win to Obama, but the Senate battle awaits

Guy Rundle writes:

President Obama has won a first, though hardly decisive, victory in the health care campaign, with the passage of HR 3200, the Affordable Health Care Act 2009, through the US House of Representatives.

Passage of the bill is the first stage in reforming the US non-health care system. Importantly, it contains the all-important "public option" -- a state-owned health insurer which can offer coverage at lower rates than the private carriers, thus forcing their exorbitant premiums down.

Other provisions within the 2000-page bill include a ban on excluding people with pre-existing conditions from health insurance, new controls on provider (ie doctor and hospital) charges, huge funds for integrating and computerising health care records across the country, and much more.

The bill seeks to limit the ballooning cost of health care by making cutbacks in "Medicare" -- the open-ended 65+ public care which half of the "Obamahitler" protestors are covered under -- and bringing in some controls on the ludicrous amounts big Pharma can charge the government for drugs.

However the bill only just squeaked through the House, with a majority of 5.39 Democrats voted against it, and only 1 Republican -- a Vietnamese-American from Louisiana, pretty much the unhealthiest state in the Union -- voted for it.

While getting any sort of a majority is seen as a triumph for speaker Nancy Pelosi -- the vote occurred on Saturday night after a week of near round-the-clock arm twisting -- there were serious misgivings about some of the deals that had to be made.

One in particular, which excluded abortion from public insurance or from any subsidies to private insurance, was an exceptionally bitter pill. Since non-emergency abortion is scarcely available under public provision currently, the amendment does not make coverage any worse, but it now makes termination an even more "special" case than hitherto.

Others are whackier still -- an amendment (supported by Republican Orrin Hatch and previously by the late Ted Kennedy, for negotiating purposes) that allows public funding for spiritual healing -- ie Christian Science intercessionary prayer at $20 a pop.

Mad stuff, but the bill is through, and as Mark Steyn notes -- ruefully -- that's the important thing. To get something passed in the House is further than Bill and Hillary Clinton's 1993 bill got.

Now however, there's the Senate. Pelosi had about 38 Democrats she could lose (with a 77-seat House majority), and some of them were released from the whip, so that their Big Insurance backers can be assured they got their moneys worth, but the Senate is on a knife-edge.

Ted Kennedy hasn't been replaced yet, and slimy Joe Lieberman, who usually votes with the Dems on social issues, has indicated he won't support a bill with a public option in it. He won't even support "cloture", the vote that prevents a filibuster, and allows the bill to go to a simple majority vote.

That leaves the Democrats with, at most, 58-41, against a filibuster, and needing a 60-40 split. Their best bet is to convince Maine's moderate Republican senator Olympia Snowe over, and one or two others from godknowswhere.

But that presumes a 100% Democratic whip, and that looks unlikely, with a half-dozen "blue dog" Democrats having already vowed to vote against a public option.

Should they be able to persuade the Blue Dogs to vote for cloture, and then against the bill, the bill will come to a majority vote and pass around 53-46, and the Blue Dogs' blushes will be spared.

But if they can't get them to yes on that, the Democratic leadership has another option, which is to make them perform an actual filibuster.

Currently, all you have to do to filibuster -- ie to prevent the bill from coming to a majority vote -- is for 41 senators to indicate that they would filibuster it if required.

That removed the need for senators to stay on their feet reading from cookbooks, Dickens, etc, with a series of explicit rules governing their behaviour (no leaning on surfaces, no physical support by other senators, no toilet breaks).

The automatic filibuster dramatically changed the nature of American governance, but by stealth -- the Senate became a de facto supermajority chamber, an inherently conservatising option.

However, at any time, by a simple majority vote, the automatic filibuster can be removed -- and the minority opposition would have to talk the bill out to the end of the current Senate session.

The advantage of this is that the US public would see the filibuster for what it is (the word comes from a dutch word for pirate or 'freebooter'), a mad obstruction tactic being executed by people desperate to hold back change.

Will the Dems go there? Or will they observe what has become a sort of collective Senate alignment against the House - that it is in the interest of all Senators to keep the automatic filibuster, and hence their vastly increased power within the bicamera.

The look-out is that they won't even let the bill come to the floor before the Senate breaks for 'the holidays', as the Christmas season is very multiculturally called. This will allow the Democratic leadership to craft a complex "trigger option" -- one where there is no public option immediately and lowcost health care is provided by non-profit insurance co-operatives effectively, big insurers pool resources to offer more basic coverage at cheaper prices, on a sliding scale that ensures near universal coverage of some description.

The problem with co-ops is that they would have no power to affect the prices health insurers set for their regular premiums so individuals and businesses continue to pay a mozza for cover. Worse, as Alexander Cockburn pointed out in Counterpunch, this would be combined with a mandating system, similar to car insurance, where you would be required to have health insurance -- effectively the state would be holding the gun while Big Insurance picks your pocket. Only in America.

The trigger option would allow for a rollout of a public option if, after three-five years, average premiums had not come down to set levels. Since they wouldn't, this is a public option by stealth. It would allow Republican Senators Snowe and Collins from Maine to support it, and one or two others, while able to save face with their constituents and soft-money corporate donors.

Should that fail, there is a final option, which is to abandon HR 3200, and roll it into the 2010 budget bill as a series of provisions -- it is then subject to a "reconciliation" vote, which is a straight majority in both houses, and guaranteed to pass. The White House could then argue that the will of the people was expressed in the HR 3200 and the Senate obstructed it -- reconciliation is then in the spirit of the original vote. Indeed, that may be the overall game plan.

Whatever the case, HR3200 is an enormous victory, the first serious universal health care bill to get through a House of Congress ever. The Senate will be tough, if not insurmountable, but this has months to run. Quite aside from the manifold improvements any sort of serious bill will offer in American life, it will give Obama a victory he can go back to his base with, and fire them up anew for the Herculean labour of making change in America.

Hat tip to Lil Treva. I thought this was worth posting here. So often I read conservatives nitpicking health care in countries with Universal Health Care. I wonder what they have to say about this example of "the best health care system in the world".

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/politics/143527/harry_reid_announces_senate_health_bill_with_public_option

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, long a target for the ire of progressives given his reluctance to express support for including a public health-insurance plan in the Senate's health-care reform bill, today surprised reporters with his announcement that the final Senate bill will contain a public option.

States will be permitted to opt out of the plan via their state's legislative process -- an escape clause, if you will, for a handful of Democratic senators who are less than keen on the notion of a public plan.

"I believe that a public option can achieve the goal of bringing meaningful reform to our broken system," Reid said, "will protect consumers, keep insurers honest, and ensure competition. And that's why we intend to include it in the bill will be submitted to the Senate."

Reid has been under relentless pressure from progressives to craft a bill containing a public insurance plan just as he gears up for what is expected to be a tough re-election campaign for 2010. Just last week, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee launched a television ad targeting Reid that asked, "Is Harry Reid strong enough?"

Most striking is that Reid's decision to include the public option assures the lack of a single Republican vote for health-care reform in the Senate, despite months of wrangling to get at least one -- that of Maine's Olympia Snowe.  So desirous was the president of having a bipartisan bill, the White House seemed ready to cave to Snowe's proposal for a "trigger" -- a sort of imaginary public option, one that would only go into effect after private insurers had a few years to reduce costs on their own. Had the insurers failed to meet a benchmark for cost reduction, then a public plan would be designed, built and implemented -- a scheme that critics, such as Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., see at best as a delaying tactic.

Just hours before Reid's press conference, the White House signaled weakness on the public option in a speech by Christina Romer, chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, who expressed a personal belief in the public option as a means of cost containment, but used qualified language to say so.

In her prepared remarks to journalists and policymakers at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., Romer cited a public option as a "potentially important source of cost containment." Romer was more definite about the benefits of two other measures for holding down costs: Medicare cost reform, and an excise tax, such as that proposed by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., on high-cost private plans -- a concept opposed by the AFL-CIO.

Asked by AlterNet why her enthusiasm for the cost-savings offered by a public option was limited to a maybe, Romer replied, "I was certainly planning to present all three of these [proposals] as important." But the broader agreement among economists, she said, was for "something like the Kerry proposal."

Up until today, the White House had signaled a willingness to accept Snowe's trigger plan. But when Sam Stein of The Huffington Post asked about any potential cost containment offered by a trigger plan, Romer said she had no evidence of such -- a harbinger, perhaps, of the announcement later in the day that the Democrats would move forward without the Maine Republican.

After days of meetings, Reid explained, he and the two senators who produced the legislation from their respective committees -- Chris Dodd, D-Conn., of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Finance Committee -- met with White House staff to hammer out a final proposal that Reid described as a "melding" of the two committees' bills. Though tight-lipped about the result, Reid did let on that the final bill would retain the provision for a health-care co-op system contained in the Finance Committee bill.

Next up, the "melded" bill will go to the Congressional Budget Office for cost analysis of its various provisions.  Any final tweaks will come after the CBO has scored the proposed legislation. The bill will then enter the legislative process, at which point Republicans will likely try to launch a filibuster stop the bill from coming to the Senate floor for a vote.

Reid expressed confidence that he had the 60 votes he would need to stop a promised GOP filibuster of the bill -- a legislative maneuver that, if successful, would keep health-care reform legislation for moving to the Senate floor for a vote by the full body. That likely means that Reid has exacted promises out of conservative Democrats who oppose the public option, such as Mary Landrieu, La.; Blanche Lincoln, Ark.; Ben Nelson, Neb., and the independent Joe Lieberman, Conn., that although they're unlikely to vote for the final bill because of Reid's opt-out plan, they won't side with Republicans in preventing the bill from coming to the floor.

One reporter asked if the Senate Majority Leader had asked the White House to call any of the senators in question. "I haven't asked them to make any calls," Reid said. "It hasn't been necessary at this point."

Looks like we just may get health-care reform, after all.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-hickey/support-for-the-public-op_b_333325.html

Support for the Public Option Keeps Getting Stronger

“New Life for the Public Option” is the headline of Dan Balz’s excellent article in Sunday’s Washington Post.  It’s not an accident that this powerful idea has made yet another comeback.  And it is not surprising that public and Congressional support, always strong, has surged again, just as the insurance industry has ham-handedly tried to manipulate the choices of key decision-makers in the US Senate.  In the crucial next few days – and in

the weeks to come – advocates of the public option will be arguing that the principle of majority-rule democracy should be allowed to work.  And the insurance and drug industries (and Republicans) will be basing their strategy for stopping the public plan on an undemocratic procedure called the filibuster.

The public option has been part of the national health care debate since January 2007, when the Economic Policy Institute published Jacob Hacker’s Health Care for America plan.  From that moment to this, many in the media and the pundit class have periodically dismissed its chances.  But that was also the moment that Hacker, Diane Archer and I started having discussions with three essential audiences:  leaders of activist citizen organizations, Congressional leaders, and presidential candidates.  (For a record of that early organizing, click here.)  Our message:  a public insurance option is crucial to the success of real reform in America’s mixed system of private and public health insurance – especially if our government agrees to the demand of insurance companies that all Americans must be forced to buy insurance.

Those early conversations and the primary election campaign debates produced a consensus in favor of a public option, as first candidate John Edwards (in February 2007), then Barack Obama (in May), and (in September) Hillary Clinton all came forward with health reform plans based primarily on preserving employment-based health insurance for those who have it and reforming and expanding private health insurance for those who don’t.  And all three Democratic presidential candidates called for a public insurance plan, like Medicare, that would give Americans choices – and give the private insurance companies real competition that could control health care premiums.

 Even though some progressives were committed to a pure single-payer plan, leaders of many of the major organizations representing millions of Americans – unions, community networks, civil rights groups and health advocates – realized that private insurance companies would not soon be put out of business. Drawing on Hacker’s work, these groups came together around a plan for reforming the worst practices of the insurance companies, requiring all but the smallest firms to cover their employees, guaranteeing affordable coverage to everyone through an insurance exchange, and offering a public insurance option as one of many choices in the exchange.  The Health Care for America Now! coalition, now representing 1,000 citizen organizations and millions of people, was built around these principles – and HCAN has consistently insisted that if you take away one part of the plan – whether it is affordable coverage, insurance reform, or the public option – and the whole enterprise of building reform on a mixed system might just collapse and end up throwing money at the insurance and drug companies without achieving real reform or universal coverage. 

HCAN also formalized outreach to Members of Congress and candidates for House and Senate in the buildup to the 2008 elections – though thousands of town meetings and local accountability sessions.  By the time of the election, over half of the new Congress had publicly embraced the HCAN health reform principles.  And two candidates for executive office, Obama and Biden had also signed on to those principles.  The growing support for the public option in Congress reflects HCAN’s steady and creative organizing – writing the new textbook for a citizen majority overcoming some of the most powerful special interests in America. 

Support for the public option in the Congress has grown steadily as Members focused on the healthcare debate, and many single-payer liberals realized the public plan is the closest they can conceivably come in today’s Congress.  But the latest surge of support has come from moderate Democrats and even Blue Dogs, who have come to the realization that if they are going to vote to force their constituents to purchase health insurance, they had better make sure they have a lot of choices – including an affordable public option.  And they are realizing that if a public option can keep insurance premiums down, then the Federal government can afford to free up more subsidy funds to keep premiums reasonable for middle-class constituents, while keeping the overall cost of the health reform bill under a trillion dollars in the first 10 years.

As he overcame his conservative hesitations (and a lifetime of caution) and prepared to cast his vote for the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act, Republican Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen quoted Victor Hugo: “Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.”  And that helped get enough “moderate” votes to overcome a filibuster by Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans.  Today Republicans are marching almost completely united in the opposite direction as historic reform.  But, as the growing support for the public insurance option demonstrates, Democrats will find a way to unite in the Senate in support of the rule of democracy against the filibuster, and a strong and progressive health reform bill will pass the Senate with considerably more than a majority.

Once again, it is time to make history. 

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/politics/143460/public_option_looking_good_in_the_senate_..._baucus_ballistic%2C_according_to_abc_news

After weeks of hand-wringing over the alleged inevitability of a filibuster against any health-care reform bill that contains a public insurance plan, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid now thinks he has the votes, according to Jonathan Karl of ABC News, to bring a bill with a public option to the Senate floor, where it is almost sure to win. Karl writes:

Reid is now convinced that Democratic critics of the public option will support him when it counts – on the procedural motion, which requires 60 votes, to defeat a certain GOP-led filibuster of the bill. Once the filibuster is beaten, it only takes 51 votes to pass the bill.

And one health-care camper is said to be very unhappy: Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of Senate Finance Committee, whose bill purposefully omitted any public health plan. As Karl explains:

I am told that Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) – who worked for months to get Olympia Snowe’s support for the bill and has consistently said a public option cannot pass the Senate – was apoplectic when Reid told him he wanted to include the public option. “Baucus went to DEFCON 1,” said a source familiar with the negotiations, referring to the alert level the military uses for an imminent attack on the homeland.

http://www.alternet.org/story/143409/clear_majority_now_backs_the_public_option%2C_and_the_numbers_are_growing

A "clear majority" of Americans now support a government-run public insurance plan as a competitor to private insurance companies, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll published Tuesday.

The findings show that public support for a public option is growing. Over the last two months, the public option's support has risen from 52 to 57 percent, the poll says.

"Overall, 45 percent of Americans favor the broad outlines of the proposals now moving in Congress, while 48 percent are opposed, about the same division that existed in August, at the height of angry town hall meetings over health-care reform," the Post writes. "Seven in 10 Democrats back the plan, while almost nine in 10 Republicans oppose it.

Just 37% said they wanted a bipartisan plan without a public option. Independents favor a public option even if it doesn't have support from congressional Republicans (none have backed a government-run insurance plan to date).

In the Senate, debate over the public option is fierce. The Senate Health and Labor Committee approved a version of the legislation which included a provision for a government insurance competitor, while the Senate Finance Committee did not.

Compromise options appear to be on the table. In one plan, the public option would serve as a fallback measure -- the "trigger plan" -- whereby if private insurers didn't increase competition or lower prices by a certain amount, the government option would automatically kick in. Another plan would allow states to opt out of a government-run insurance plan.

In either case, most Americans wouldn't be able to take advantage of the public option. Those with employer-provided healthcare would be ineligible; primarily the option would be focused on individuals who are forced to buy insurance on the open market.

Health insurers are staunchly opposed, as are Republicans. Republican leaders say opening the door to the public option would eventually lead to government takeover of healthcare and drive private insurers out of business.

The poll also finds strong opposition to a Democratic plan to tax high-cost insurance plans: "Sixty-one percent oppose the idea, while 35 percent favor it."

"Nearly seven in 10 say they think that any health-care measure would increase the federal budget deficit, a possible concern for Obama," it also says. "But nearly half of those who see the legislation as growing the deficit also say the increase would be 'worth it.'"

On the private insurer front, UnitedHealth announced Tuesday that their profits for the third quarter had risen 13 percent over the previous year, despite a shrinking coverage pool caused by countrywide layoffs. UnitedHealth and Wellpoint, a Blue Cross servicer, dominate the private health insurance market.

More details on the poll are available here.

http://ussc.edu.au/articles/Health-insurers-overplay-their-hand-Republicans-on-notice

Health insurers overplay their hand; Republicans on notice

14 October 2009

Lesley Russell

Late yesterday afternoon (US time) the Senate Finance Committee voted out the health care reform bill 14 votes to 9, with Senator Olympia Snowe voting with the Democrats to support the bill and give it critical momentum. 

Senator Snowe said of her critical vote: "When history calls, history calls, and I happen to think that the consequences of inaction dictate the urgency of Congress to take every opportunity to demonstrate its capacity to solve the monumental issue of our time."

A fascinating sidebar to this was an unexpected attack on the Senate Finance bill from the health insurers. Last Sunday America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) released a report which found that insurance costs would rise faster under the proposed legislation than if nothing was done. It appears that this last minute torpedo from a group which has previously supported health care reform comes because the insurers want to see stronger mandates to purchase cover. (The Senate Finance bill is estimated to cover 94% of legal residents; the House bill will cover 97%.)

However the AHIP report has been seen as a cynical overplay by the very industry whose practices have driven the need for health care reform. It's been a strategic blunder for them, and ironically has increased Democrats' support for a public health insurance option. PricewaterhouseCoopers who did the report for AHIP are backpedalling frantically.

While House and Senate leaders work to get bills ready to take to the floor of each chamber within the next two weeks, recent data and analysis highlight the variations around the nation in who has health cover and the political dilemma faced by the politicians who represent these Americans.

If the states of America are divided into red (states that have two Republican Senators and voted for McCain in the last presidential election), blue (states that have 2 Democratic senators and voted for Obama) and purple (states that split their ballots in the presidential and senate elections), then residents of blue states are far more likely to have health insurance than residents of red states, with residents of purple states in the middle.

These data are based on both private and public cover, including Medicaid, but exclude Medicare which is available to virtually everyone over 65.

Of the 150 congressional districts with the most insurance, only three are in red states - one each in Alabama, Tennessee and Kansas. Another 25 are in purple states. The remaining 122 are in blue states.

However while the uninsured are more likely to be in red states, those with the least access to insurance are in minority blue districts in these states. Of the 10 congressional districts with the least insurance, seven are in Texas (red), two in California (blue) and one in Florida (purple).  However nine of these districts (which are largely black or Hispanic) are represented by Democrats.

Thoughtful Republicans keen on getting re-elected thus face an exquisite dilemma in the upcoming votes on health care reform legislation: will they represent the needs of the people of their electorate or their ideology of their party?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/business/economy/10charts.html?_r=1&em

The Divided States of Health Care

Where do those without health insurance live?

The Census Bureau sought to find that out, for the first time, in a survey taken last year and released in September. Over all, it found that 9.9 percent of children lack any health insurance, half the rate for adults under 65.

But there was widespread variation in coverage. Children in Texas, the state with the least health insurance, are more than eight times as likely not to have it than children in Massachusetts, the state with the broadest coverage.

Those who lack health insurance now are far more likely to live in states that usually vote Republican — the states whose senators and representatives are least likely to support a law to extend coverage.

That would seem to indicate that Republican constituents are the ones who would most benefit from passage of universal health insurance coverage. But an analysis of Congressional districts within those states indicates that those without health insurance are much more likely to live in strongly Democratic Congressional districts. Many of those contain large minority populations with relatively low incomes.

In the Congressional debate now going on, Democrats have generally supported plans aimed at assuring that all Americans have some sort of insurance, while nearly all Republicans have opposed the Democratic bills, raising concerns ranging from cost to worries that providing better health coverage for those who now lack it would diminish coverage for those who have it.

The accompanying graphic divides the states into red states — states that both voted for Senator John McCain in the last presidential election and are represented by two Republican senators — and blue states, which have two Democratic senators and voted for President Obama. The purple states are the ones that split their ballots in the presidential and Senate elections.

The figures show that residents of blue states are far more likely to have health insurance than are residents of red states, with residents of purple states in the middle.

The figures on insurance cover both private insurance and public insurance, including Medicaid, which is available to poor people. Since nearly all people over 65 years of age have Medicare insurance, those over 65 are excluded from the statistics shown.

Another way of looking at the figures is to imagine two Senates — one chosen by the 25 states where residents are more likely to have health insurance, and the other chosen by the 25 states where there is less insurance.

The Senate from the states with less insurance would have 30 Republicans and 20 Democrats. But the one from the states with more health insurance would have a 40-to-10 Democratic majority.

The District of Columbia, although not a state and unable to elect senators, is listed as a blue state because it generally votes for Democrats. The two independent senators — Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut — caucus with the Democrats and are counted as Democrats.

There are a number of reasons for a greater amount of health insurance in blue states. Some of those states have relatively generous child insurance programs, most notably Massachusetts, which has nine of the 10 Congressional districts with the most health insurance. (The 10th is in Hawaii, another blue state.) Some Democratic states have also been more generous in setting Medicaid coverage standards, thus providing more coverage for people with low-paying jobs that do not provide insurance.

Of the 10 Congressional districts with the least health insurance, seven are in Texas, two in California and one in Florida. Nine of those districts are largely black or Hispanic, and are represented by Democrats who faced little if any Republican opposition in the last election.

While heavily Democratic districts often have less insurance, the red states tend to have less insurance than other states even without including those districts. Of the 150 Congressional districts with the most health insurance, only three are in red states — one each in Alabama, Tennessee and Kansas. Another 25 are in purple states, with the rest in states that consistently vote Democratic.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/how-alan-grayson-and-mich_b_313885.html

How Alan Grayson and Michael Moore Changed the Conversation

It's not the answer that matters, it's the question. So when Alan Grayson suggested that the Republican's health care plan was for people to die quickly, he began a conversation that the Democratic Party couldn't lose and the Republicans couldn't win. Because then the question being debated was: Do Republicans want people to die quickly?

For the whole summer, the Republicans had managed to shift the debate from "should we reform the health care system in this country?" to "is the Democratic plan to reform health care a government takeover?" So, instead of the onus being on the health care industry and their Republican lovers to prove that we should maintain the status quo, the onus shifted to Democrats to prove that their plan was perfect.

This is an old trick of lobbyists (really well demonstrated in Thank You For Smoking). You change the conversation to a battle you can win. So, Rep. Grayson used their methods against them. And now the conversation we're having is whether the health care system is acceptable or if it leads to killing people for profit. Mission accomplished.

Michael Moore is doing the same in his move Capitalism. First, he is changing the conversation on who caused the financial collapse in the first place. Most people are acutely aware that it was the bankers, but not the Fox News audience. So, when he went on Sean Hannity's show the other night, he introduced that idea to them and then Hannity was stuck in the position of defending the bankers and blatantly blaming the victims and the poor. Instead of discussing how government was at fault, Moore started a conversation on how deregulation might have led to this mess.

But more importantly, he started a battle for the heart and soul of Christianity. He proposed in the movie and in his debate with Hannity that being on the side of the rapacious rich is un-Christian. He claimed his position is the more Christian position. For so long, the Republicans have simply claimed that they are more Christian without anything to back them up. They just shouted louder. Now, Moore is shouting just as loud.

By putting them on the defensive on how they are not good Christians if they help the rich crush the poor, he has once again changed the conversation. Are the Republicans bad Christians? It doesn't matter what the answer is, that's a question you can't lose with.

What the conservative movement has understood for a long time is sometimes it takes something a little inflammatory to change the conversation. You have to draw attention to you, so people can start discussing the topic you want.

This was perfectly demonstrated by the wild and angry town hall crowds. They were sometimes saying hideous things about Obama but they succeeded in shifting the burden of proof on to the Democrats. Now, it looks like we have a couple of guys that know how to play this game. And they have succeeded in shifting the focus back to where it should be. It's refreshing to have people who know what they're doing on your side.

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