Lil White Lies: Dodging Magic Bullets

It’s been a while since I’ve taken a look at my conservative blogging counterpart’s Bashing Blumner series: he’s only done a few posts on her, because PolitiFact has been keeping him pretty busy. This recent post takes the St. Petersburg Times columnist to task for her seemingly poor reasoning with regard to the high costs of health care. And he may be right: but she has a very good point too.

In a column dated March 4, Robyn Blumner derided the Republicans' favorite method of reducing the high cost of health care, to wit, “tort reform is the magic bullet to cost containment…” Bryan White responds to that with “Blumner apparently thought it unnecessary to provide any example of the type of advocacy with which she charges Republicans.”

So, I’ll do Blumner a favor: straight from GOP.gov are here described  the first three “steps” of their “approach to health care reform” in a PDF document entitled “The Reform America can Afford Act (H.R. 5424)”:

1.  Lowering health care premiums 20% with no other explanation -- so I guess through all these steps, lowering premiums would be the “result” of their "magic bullet" reform.

2.  Reforming high risk pools – to make insurance available to those with pre-existing conditions, which if anything would increase costs because those who would be making claims and therefore would cost the insurers more would now by theory be able to get insurance, so this is more of a give-away……

3.  Ending “junk lawsuits” through “enacting medical liability reforms”--- which is another way of saying TORT REFORM….

So, PolitiFact might give Blumner a Mostly True or Half True on that one, but it’s still true that tort reform is quite high—let’s say Number Two--on the Republican List of health care reforms.

The heart of Blumner’s article, however, is this, which Bryan terms “magical thinking”:

Sidebar: Uh, Hold That Thought (Updated)

In the latest of Bryan White’s Bashing Blumner series, he argued that it was not possible for extremism to be mainstream, because electoral politics “cannot succeed at the national level through the appeal to any brand of extremism which a majority strongly opposes.”  Please see my response in the previous post.

Now, after seeing this post, I’m distinctly getting the impression that he thinks his conservatism is not extreme, and he sees himself in the “mainstream” majority.



Arnold DID follow in steps of Reagan--he exploded government debt.  See link from his name below.



Lil White Lies: Those were the Days

Campaign messaging is different today, and Bryan White is here to first explain how it was different prior to this, in another blog entry critical of a recent column by Robyn Blumner :

“Barack Obama rode popular sentiment to his election as president of the United States. Obama ran on the unpopularity of Republicans and a message of bipartisan change that transformed shortly after election day to a message of partisan change.”

Is this a joke?! The Republicans themselves were NOT unpopular, George W. Bush was unpopular. Bryan then implies that Obama changed message from bi-partisan to partisan change once he became president. So, who’s called the Party of NO right now? Well, according to idealist and conservative *Bryan White, always Right*:

“Electoral politics is about forging coalitions. It cannot succeed at the national level through the appeal to any brand of extremism which a majority strongly opposes.”

Lil White Lies: No Way CRA Redux

Bryan White published a hurried response to my “Lil White Lies: No Way CRA” by, first off, plaintively demanding why I am calling him a liar. That’s been dealt with in another post. This post is only to respond to his CRA “argumentum ad nauseum”.

Along with that, he spent nearly half the piece going on about why John Carney could not be so conservative because he “attacked the content” of books by Mark Levin and Sean Hannity. Well, Carney may attack their books, but there’s one point they are all mostly in agreement on, which is the subject of this blog post: The CRA and its “significant” role in the subprime crisis. Levin and Hannity’s names both link to articles attesting to that.  I will admit I don't have anything on Glenn Beck in this regard, because he's gone more in the conspiratorial direction of the CRA's connections to ACORN.

Lil White Lies: No Way CRA

My "blog nemesis" Bryan White seems to revel in criticism of his local newspaper columnist, Robyn Blumner, whose credentials include having been a director for the ACLU.…Well there ya go!

At his blog there’s a *Topic of Note* section devoted to “Bashing Blumner” which includes his numerous write ups. One recently piqued my interest.

As stated by Bryan in his write up, the essence of this particular column by Blumner was that she… “perhaps once again inspired by a book from a liberal author, attempts to explain why Republicans are wrong to pin the financial crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act [CRA].” The liberal author Blumner drew from was financial expert and author of book Bailout Nation Barry Ritholtz, which  explains why the CRA was not to blame. The basis of Bryan’s contention of Blumner “buying” Ritholtz’s faulty reasoning was a critique by John Carney of Business Insider. This is the John Carney who wrote this article at the website American Conservative where he stated “We’re the backbench of a minority.”