Tuesday Open Thread [4.15.14]

A new CBO report shows Obamacare will cost $100 billion less than expected while insuring more people. Run against that you Republicans, we dare you. And you spineless corporate shill Democrats, run away from it and you are done. You might as well call yourself a Republican.

Eugene Robinson:

It’s all over but the shouting: Obamacare is working.

All the naysaying in the world can’t drown out mounting evidence that the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature domestic achievement, is a real success. Republican candidates running this fall on an anti-Obamacare platform will have to divert voters’ attention from the facts, which tell an increasingly positive story. […] Why was the Affordable Care Act so desperately needed? Because without it, 54 million Americans would currently have no health insurance. Within three years, according to the CBO, Obamacare will have slashed the problem nearly in half.

Well, all Republicans have been doing is shouting, so I guess it is not over. I mean, it is not as if they were legitimately engaging in real debate and negotiation over the ACA all this time, offering real alternatives or ideas?

It’s Tax Day, so Gallup has released its ongoing research on basic American attitudes about taxes. It might surprise you.

54% of respondents say they consider their taxes fair. That’s actually down from 64% in 2003, but there’s a pretty simple reason: a plurality of Republicans now consider their taxes unfair, as do a majority of people with incomes over $75,000 a year.

Every time I drive over the Rt. 1 Bridge towards the crazy land below the canal, I see the ominous cooling tower of the Salem Nuclear Power Plant. It is a reminder that the lives of nearly all Delawarean can be vaporized in mere seconds in a meltdown. I know, I exaggerate. But this news does not help me.

Markos on the fact that Liberals have won the Culture War, and we have pretty much won the Everything Else war too:

Liberal social values are deeply embedded in our culture, from pretty much everything on TV outside the Christian channels at the fringe of the channel lineup, to any movie of note. In [this] Breitbart link above, Nick Nolte waxes about God’s Not Dead, an indie Christian film that has grossed $41 million on a production budget of $2 million. Good job! Then again, it’s a blip. Captain America has grossed nearly half a billion in 10 days, with its overtly civil-libertarian and anti-neocon message. I mean, Captain America is saying that a fear-based (read: Republican) foreign policy is not the “American Way.” […]

On economic matters, the pendulum is swinging hard against the financial elite. There’s a reason we get regular installments of “billionaire calls economic populists Nazis.” They were used to being paragons of society. Now they are the enemy. And with populism on the rise, and with talk of income inequality routine, Reaganesque “trickle down” theories are decidedly out of favor. Why do you think Republicans are afraid to roll out their “solutions” to our problems? It’s because they know their views, whether on health care or immigration or pretty much anything else, are out of touch with public opinion. Sure, there is infighting in their caucus, but it’s a fight between those who think conservatism is popular and being loud-and-proud will be politically advantageous (e.g. Ted Cruz), and those who know how to read the polls.

That’s not to say that we’ve WON won. We certainly have won the battle of ideas. But power isn’t just about ideas. It’s about wrestling the institutional levers of government from the retrogrades. Those entrenched economic and conservative interests wield power via the Supreme Court, through gross gerrymandering, through voter suppression efforts. So we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.

But if you wonder why conservatives seem to carry perpetual grievances, it’s because they know they have lost. The entire world around them has left them behind. Heck, they’ve created an entire alternate media world in which to cocoon themselves. But they know they’ve lost. They may still alternate between the “denial” (Ted Cruz) and “anger” (Bill Donohue) phases of acceptance, but the only question left is how long will it be before our government truly represents the public will. And when that happens, we’ll be truly able to ignore the perpetual tempter tantrum from the Right.