{"id":2944,"date":"2011-05-26T20:55:31","date_gmt":"2011-05-26T20:55:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2944"},"modified":"2011-05-26T20:55:31","modified_gmt":"2011-05-26T20:55:31","slug":"americans_are_h","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2944","title":{"rendered":"Americans Are Huge Socialists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Paul Ryan&#8217;s plan to &#8220;reform&#8221; Medicare isn&#8217;t winning the hearts and minds of the people. On Tuesday, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/blogs\/itsallpolitics\/2011\/05\/25\/136629935\/democrat-kathy-hochul-wins-ny-special-election-for-house-seat\">a Democrat won a special election<\/a> to fill a House seat in a deeply conservative district in upstate New York.&nbsp; The winner, Kathy Hochul, took every opportunity to link her Republican opponent to Ryan&#8217;s plan and it clearly worked as an election strategy. Democrats are now giddy at the prospects of hammering other Republicans with the Ryan plan in 2012.<\/p>\n<p>Considering that Republicans attempted to portray Democrats as granny-killers in the 2010 election, I don&#8217;t have any ethical qualms about this strategy. And while Republicans had to actually make the effort to lie when they accused Democrats of sponsoring death panels, Democrats don&#8217;t have to fabricate anything when attacking the Ryan plan. It&#8217;s as if Republicans are doing all the work for the opposition. It&#8217;s kind of awesome when you think about it. <\/p>\n<p>Changes do need to be made to Medicare to keep it solvent, but forcing people to purchase private insurance as an alternative is wildly unpopular. I just hope Democrats can have the same success attacking GOP plans to dismantle Medicaid. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul Ryan&#8217;s plan to &#8220;reform&#8221; Medicare isn&#8217;t winning the hearts and minds of the people. On Tuesday, a Democrat won a special election to fill a House seat in a deeply conservative district in upstate New York.&nbsp; The winner, Kathy Hochul, took every opportunity to link her Republican opponent to Ryan&#8217;s plan and it clearly <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2944' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-Lu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}