Taibbi on Health Reform

I am a big fan of Matt Taibbi, especially his take on financial reform, he simply tells it like it is. Well, Taibbi comments on reconciliation today, and again he doesn't pull any punches.

Taibbi comments today on an Op-Ed produced by no other then David Brooks of the NYT. Matt has been consistently hammering Brooks for the past number of months, on just about everything.

This is what Taibbi had a problem with, Brooks writes.

Reconciliation has been used with increasing frequency. That was bad enough. But at least for the Bush tax cuts or the prescription drug bill, there was significant bipartisan support. Now we have pure reconciliation mixed with pure partisanship.

Of course we have heard this argument before by the GOP and their supporters like Brooks, and the others. But as Taibbi points out Brooks is flat out lying.

He writes.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t one of the Bush tax cuts only passed when Dick Cheney broke a tie in the Senate?

We’re going to hear an awful lot of hand-wringing in the next few weeks if the health care bill sneaks through the House and ends up passing in the Senate via reconciliation — as though using reconciliation were somehow immoral, or cheating.

I’m not sure I get what the issue is here. No Republican Senator is ever going to vote for the health care bill under any circumstances. It could have a rider in it mandating biblical readings up through the junior college level and you still couldn’t get even a very God-fearing Republican like Tom Coburn to vote for an Obama health care bill. Chuck Grassley wouldn’t vote for it if you moved the U.S. Naval Shipyard to an Iowa cornfield. They’ve locked arms on this bitch like soccer players on a free kick.

From the start, the only way this was going to pass was with 100% Democratic votes. So if there are 60 Democrats, you can do it without reconciliation. If there are 59, you have to use reconciliation. “Sympathy” has nothing to do with this; it’s math.

Like I said, He doesn't pull any punches. I can't wait to hear his commentary on the Dodd Financial Regulation Bill. Especially the part where the new Consumer Protection Regulator is housed inside The Federal Reserve. Could anything make less sense then that?