Monday, April 19, 2010

Did John Oxendine & the State GOP take a Page out of Eugene Talmadge's Playbook?

Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine announced the other that he will not participate in the first phase of the recently enacted federal health care legislation which calls for the implementation of a temporary high risk insurance pool in Georgia. On April 2, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sent a letter to Oxendine asking him to express his interest in participating in the temporary high risk insurance program established by the new health insurance reform law.

Now this looks like a page from the Eugene Talmadge playbook. Back in 1930s Talmadge was a staunch critic of FDR & the New Deal such that he didn't implement the New Deal in Georgia during his first term as governor. It was until E.D. Rivers took the reigns of governor that the New Deal was implemented. Even Talmadge's aide Hugh Howell who was also opposed to the new deal ran for governor back in 1938 to keep the new deal from being implemented here in Ga.

ED Rivers was speaker at that time in '35 when he near the end of the legislative session when Rivers introduced a series of bills designed to enable Georgia to cooperate with New Deal programs. Talmadge who was against any thing associated with the new deal talmadge vetoed all of these measures.

Talmadge became increasingly outspoken in his criticism of Roosevelt. In one speech he claimed that the child labor amendment, the banking reform act, and the Wagner Labor Relations Act were "almost the complete Communistic form of government." (Does all this sound familiar when it came to the healthcare reform saga when staunch critics called in "a communist act, or socialism, marxist, etc?)

Just like in D.C. in which every republican officeholder was against the Healthare Reform, or anything that the president is proposing nowadays. Oxendine is taking a page right out of the playbook of Eugene Talmadge. Opposed the legislation deeming it a expansion of government, (which it is). The first phase of the healthcare reform would have created a pool of high-risk people to receive federally subsidized health insurance, backed by $5 billion in federal money, that would offer subsidized premiums to people who have been uninsured for at least six months.

He's taking a page from Talmadge's playbook when he opposed the New Deal. Of a matter of fact, the entire GOP has taken that playbook in it opposition to President Obama's aganda if you look at it.

1 comment:

Kyle Constable said...

They may have taken that "page from the playbook" because it's true...

There is no playbook to truth, until some politician decides to write a book to enlighten us about it, that is.

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