Brett Whozits Update: Rightie Blogger Arrested

Remember I was saying that Brett Kimberlin had filed a request for a peace order against a rightie blogger named Aaron Walker? And the hearing on the request was this morning? Well, RS McCain reports that after the hearing the judge had Walker arrested.

Entire rightie blogosphere to go batshit postal in 5 … 4… 3 … 2… 1 …

The judge became “increasingly hostile” to Walker in the course of the hearing, McCain says.

Just going by McCain’s account, this is all very screwy. According to McCain, Kimberlin’s beef was that Walker continued to blog about him after Walker had obtained an earlier peace order. I’m certainly no lawyer, but I question whether a court can order somebody not to blog about somebody else as long as the contents of the blog posts don’t constitute libel, and if you stick to documented facts you can probably argue it’s not libel.

In an update, McCain says that Kimberlin claims to have received death threats as a result of Walker’s posts. What was Kimberlin’s argument that alleged death threats were directly connected to Walker’s blogging? No way to know.

The peace order conditions I found online and blogged about yesterday suggest that a peace order only prohibits one party from contacting or harassing the other. The rightie blogosphere insists Kimberlin is trying to stop them from discussing his criminal past, which is already in the public record and has already been discussed in Time magazine and a book issued by a major publisher.

One suspects we’re not getting the whole story. One also suspects the judge, whom McCain names, is about to learn the meaning of “blogswarm.” I doubt this will help Walker much, though.

Update: A copy of the court order issued today. Apparently the recent blogswarm against Kimberlin was one factor that caused the judge to rule in Kimberlin’s favor.

Update: Some Gateway Pundit commenters are certain the judge was acting on orders of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. Samples:

So now the judges rule according to what the government wants, not what the actual laws are.

Hello Banana Republic.

For good or ill, arresting someone who disagrees with this administration is now legal precedent. No longer does there need to be even a figleaf of someone being a suspected terrorist to be snatched and incarcerated without trial.

This is tyranny of the first water.

Good times. I still don’t know what Walker was arrested for, specifically, or if he was charged with something like violating a previous peace order. I suspect the latter, and I suspect he’s already out on bail by the time you read this. If so, that doesn’t exactly constitute a violation of habeas corpus.

I’m getting all information about this from right-wing blogs; I have no idea if Kimberlin or any associate of Kimberlin has posted his side of the story. Someday we may learn what’s being not said.

Republicans Don’t Do Health Care Reform

I hesitate to call any part of the Republican Party “pragmatic,” but apparently some of them have some sense that the entire American public might not see things the way they do.

So over the past several days I’ve seen news stories saying some congressional leaders want to keep some parts of Obamacare. The fix they are in is that some parts of the ACA are now in effect, and most of those parts have proved to be popular.

For example, 2.5 million young adults are now insured on their parents health care plan who couldn’t get insurance before. To date, the ACA has said Medicare recipients $3.5 billion on prescription drugs. Several hundred thousand seniors have taken advantage of the various free preventive care screenings now available to them. This summer $1.3 billion in rebate checks are going out to people who were overcharged for their insurance.

On top of that, if the Supremes strike down the ACA this summer, the Medicare system could be thrown into chaos, at least temporarily.

So, over the past few days I’ve seen several news stories saying that some congressional Republicans are planning to keep the “good” Obamacare bits. In particular, they want to keep the provision that allows children to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26; they want to eliminate the prescription drug doughnut hole; and they want to provide that insurance companies have to insure people with pre-existing conditions.

However, as soon as one of these stories comes out, another story comes out saying that other congressional leaders demand complete and unconditional repeal. No walkbacks. John Boehner seems to take both positions, on alternate days.

At TPM, Sahil Kapur writes that Republicans are being warned not to go wobbly on Obamacare.

FreedomWorks and Club for Growth, two powerful conservative interest groups that are fresh off of purging the Senate’s longest-serving Republican for insufficient fealty to the right, are flexing their muscles.

“The Club for Growth supports complete repeal of Obamacare. And complete doesn’t mean partial. It means complete,” said Barney Keller, a spokesman for the group. “We urge the so-called ‘tea party’ Republicans to keep their promises to voters and continue to fight for complete repeal as well.”

The “pragmatists,” relatively speaking, want to have a fallback position in case the ACA is entirely overturned and the benefits people had begun to enjoy from it dry up. They want to be able to say to voters that they can still have their 20-something children on their health care benefits and that the doughnut hole can still be closed.

As for insurance for pre-existing conditions, there is no way the private insurance industry can do that without the individual mandate, a complication that Republicans refuse to address. But the ideological purists don’t want to promise anything.

Dean Clancy, who leads health care advocacy for FreedomWorks, said the group “would be very concerned about bills to resurrect parts of Obamacare.”

He said Republicans should take no responsibility for the broken system that would result.

“It would be the height of folly for Republicans to say, OK, this is our problem now,” he said. “It’s not the Republicans’ fault if 25-year-old slackers suddenly are dropped from mom and dad’s health insurance policy. It’s not the Republicans’ fault if various other provisions of Obamacare are no longer on the books. … The American people need to have a chance to reflect on the fact that the Democrats basically rammed an unconstitutional bill down their throat.”

We could quibble about who is ramming what, and where.

A few days ago Jonathan Chait recalled that Republicans promised a comprehensive health care reform plan in 1993, when they defeated “Hillarycare.”

In 1993, Bill Clinton tried to reform health care, and it appeared a strong enough threat that Republicans devised their own plan in response. It was a great way to send the message “we have a plan, too.” When Clinton’s plan collapsed, he made feelers toward the GOP plan, but Republicans turned against it, promising instead to start over in the next Congress.

For the next sixteen years, Republicans did zero to advance the cause of comprehensive health-care reform.

I don’t remember them even talking about it, except to pooh-pooh people who complained about the health care system. We have the best health care system in the world, after all [/sarcasm].

In 2009, President Obama started working on health-care reform, and Republicans again insisted they really truly did want to reform the health-care system, just not in this particular way. Plan? TBD. Then they won control of the House and promised to immediately get to work on a replacement plan. Result: zero. Evidence of any progress toward said plan: zero.

Recently Rep. Paul Ryan told editors of the Washington Examiner that it would be a mistake for Republicans to offer any specific legislation before the November election. Instead, they should offer a “vision.” I take it “vision” is the new “bullshit.”

Back to Jonathan Chait:

In the same interview, Ryan says maybe Republicans will reform the deductibility of health insurance: “On tax treatment of health care, some of our folks really like deductions, others like the tax credit route.” That sounds like a possible first step. Except the Ryan budget already assumes that it will close trillions of dollars in tax deductions like that for employer-provided health care, and then it plows all that revenue back into lower tax rates. So, no money for tax credits or any other way to support health insurance.

The health care system is very complicated and made up of countless moving parts that have to work together. That’s why the ACA was so long and complicated. I think Republicans are not intelligent enough to come up with their own legislation, and I will believe that until they prove me wrong and come up with something. And at the rate they are going, I won’t live long enough to see that.