Paul Krugman

It's nice to have Nobel Prize winners on your side. Here's what Krugman has to say about the Right's generational warfare talking point (emphasis mine):

And the rhetorical response of conservatives to the stimulus plan — which will, it’s worth bearing in mind, cost substantially less than either the Bush administration’s $2 trillion in tax cuts or the $1 trillion and counting spent in Iraq — has bordered on the deranged.

It’s “generational theft,” said Senator John McCain, just a few days after voting for tax cuts that would, over the next decade, have cost about four times as much.

It’s “destroying my daughters’ future. It is like sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs,” said Arnold Kling of the Cato Institute.

Thanks to Paul Krugman, Barack Obama has another thing to hit the McCain camp over the head with. Watch the first attempt:

What's encouraging here is that Obama continues to get the materials he needs to construct a narrative against McCain. And that's going to be very effective. According to the tracking polls, it already has been.

What Obama still needs to do to close the sale with voters is talk about his plan for the economy in nuts and bolts terms. It's not enough to talk about how bad the economy is. I don't even think it's enough to talk about what kinds of things you're going to do to fix it. What voters want to hear is, in as specific terms as possible, how these plans will help.

You know, sometimes I really have to wonder if the right-wing Republican propagandists over at Fox news take themselves seriously, because I have to believe that every time the cameras turn off the "reporters" let loose a devious "Bwaa-Haa-Haa". Check out Fox News' reaction to Sicko, and the way that they use the latest (and completely inept) terror attacks in London as a means to scare Americans away from supporting Universal Health Care

Here's the Paul Krugman article mentioned in the video: Health Care Terror.

These days terrorism is the first refuge of scoundrels. So when British authorities announced that a ring of Muslim doctors working for the National Health Service was behind the recent failed bomb plot, we should have known what was coming.

"National healthcare: Breeding ground for terror?" read the on-screen headline, as the Fox News host Neil Cavuto and the commentator Jerry Bowyer solemnly discussed how universal health care promotes terrorism.

While this was crass even by the standards of Bush-era political discourse, Fox was following in a long tradition. For more than 60 years, the medical-industrial complex and its political allies have used scare tactics to prevent America from following its conscience and making access to health care a right for all its citizens.

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What outrages people who see "Sicko" is the sheer cruelty and injustice of the American health care system - sick people who can't pay their hospital bills literally dumped on the sidewalk, a child who dies because an emergency room that isn't a participant in her mother's health plan won't treat her, hard-working Americans driven into humiliating poverty by medical bills.

"Sicko" is a powerful call to action - but don't count the defenders of the status quo out. History shows that they're very good at fending off reform by finding new ways to scare us.

These scare tactics have often included over-the-top claims about the dangers of government insurance. "Sicko" plays part of a recording Ronald Reagan once made for the American Medical Association, warning that a proposed program of health insurance for the elderly - the program now known as Medicare - would lead to totalitarianism.