Tag Archives: voting

Health Care Facts For The Actually Interested

Who decides if YOU get health care?

While our esteemed young POTUS gets all sincereish for the cameras about this wonderful Senate bill, let’s take a pause and look at what other countries are really doing with their national health care, as opposed to the scary stories woven throughout our shoddy national debate.

One of the essential arguments conservatives use against “socialized” care is that they shouldn’t be forced to pay for someone else. This principle trumps all, even down to the welfare of poor children. After all, they’re their parents’ responsibility. I guess if they die, that just gets lazy, unproductive genes out of the genetic pool.

Socialized systems vs. free market systems is a valid debate, though, well worth having. It all depends on what you think government is “for,” and how much duty American citizens owe their “greatest country on earth,” and how Darwinian you are in your concern about the welfare of other human beings.

Do Americans have a right to a good education?

Do Americans have a right to expect bridges they drive on to be well-built and maintained?

Do Americans have a right to emergency services maintained by their communities such as the fire department?

Some argue that we shouldn’t have those things, or that they should be part of the free market. That way, Paris Hilton gets the best schooling in private schools (lord knows she seems to need it), she can use a private helicopter to just fly over unsafe infrastructure, and she can use the money she would save on taxes to hire and manage her own fire department. Or maybe her condo association would handle that or something.

Meanwhile, poor people wind up with no or poor education, sometimes die in bridge collapses, and grab a bucket if their house catches on fire and they can afford a bucket.

The American way? Continue reading →

Conan the Mighty (O’Brien on Healthcare)

Sounds about right…

“President Obama says that Congress is very close to getting a new healthcare plan, but due to compromises it ‘won’t include everything that everybody wants.’ For instance, it covers everything except trips to the doctor or the hospital.”
—Conan O’Brien

Sarah Palin Screws Over Her Fans

What a traumatic thing to happen on your first visit to a bookstore.

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American Rabble: The Pathetic State of Today’s GOP

It amazes me that anyone can still proudly claim to be a Republican these days. And, indeed, a record low number of Americans make that claim, which is a good thing, because those who still do have lost all semblance of a grip on patriotism, sound policy, rational thought, or statesmanship.

We have gun-toting buffoons showing up at presidential appearances, a congressman heckling the elected president in a joint session of Congress, legions of ignorant sheep letting Beck and Hannity and Limbaugh lead them toward the Apocalypse that many of them actually desire, a set of political values that can be summed up as (a) keep anything good from happening under Democratic rule so they can’t get credit, (b) cripple Obama’s power, and (c) do anything we can to regain our dominance so we can better serve our corporate masters.

Want to see a great example of the sort of healthy debate Republicans are bringing to policy issues now? Just watch this video, in all its glory, and see how it looks when unchivalrous, dishonorable rabble with nothing to offer get into government.

Me, I get a kick out of the “What is your objection?” “I object” exchange. With debate like that, who needs morons?

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Frank Schaeffer: On Fundamentalism, Atheism, & American Life

A fascinating interview with Frank Schaeffer, one of the founding members of the modern religious right in America, who has since recognized the dangers inherent in the worldview he once espoused.

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Hell Is For Children

From NBC Philadelphia:

Little_Soldier_Girl___Paige_in_Formation

Four-year-old Paige Bennethum really, really didn’t want her daddy to go to Iraq.

So much so, that when Army Reservist Staff Sgt. Brett Bennethum lined up in formation at his deployment this July, she couldn’t let go.

No one had the heart to pull her away.

I don’t believe in hell. But I sometimes find myself hoping it exists so that George W. Bush can fucking roast for all the children in the world who are growing up without their parents because of him.

child1

O those tea baggers and their lil white lies!

Desperate to paint their cause in epic colors, the tea baggers released this image of their protest over the weekend. Pretty impressive. Look how they swamp the national mall, like neurons in the pathways of a brain. Well, a brain possessed by someone other than a tea bagger, anyway.

crowdWell.

PolitiFact.com (“a project of the St. Petersburg Times to help you find the truth in American politics. Reporters and editors from the Times fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups and rate them on our Truth-O-Meter…”) ran down the facts about this photo, and about the baggers’ claims of multitude:

We spoke with Pete Piringer, public affairs officer for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Department, who said that the local government no longer provides official crowd estimates because they can become politicized. That said, on the morning of Sept. 12, Piringer unofficially told one reporter that he thought between 60,000 and 75,000 people had shown up.

So, not quite a couple of million. And the photo?

“It was an impressive crowd,” he said. But after marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol the crowd “only filled the Capitol grounds, maybe up to Third Street,” he said.

Yet the photo showed the crowd sprawling far beyond that to the Washington Monument, which is bordered by 15th and and 17th Streets.

There’s another big problem with the photograph: it doesn’t include the National Museum of the American Indian, a building located at the corner of Fourth St. and Independence Ave. that opened on Sept. 14, 2004. (Looking at the photograph, the building should be in the upper right hand corner of the National Mall, next to the Air and Space Museum.) That means the picture was taken before the museum opened exactly five years ago. So clearly the photo doesn’t show the “tea party” crowd from the Sept. 12 protest.

Also worth noting are the cranes in front of the Natural History Museum (the second building from the lower left of the National Mall). According to Randall Kremer, the museum’s director of public affairs, “The last time cranes were in front was in the 1990s when the IMAX theater was being built.”

That makes the picture at least a decade old.

That means the trumpeted count, and the picture, are about as accurate as most information offered up by these people. And lying is apparently very much a right-wing value. Like greed and intolerance.

The Simple Health-Care Solution

In an editorial for the Washington Post, Sen. George S. McGovern (1972 presidential candidate who lost to Nixon, and boy that worked out, didn’t it?) offers up a simple, smart, elegant solution to our national health-care nightmare:

If we want comprehensive health care for all our citizens, we can achieve it with a single sentence: Congress hereby extends Medicare to all Americans. Those of us over 65 have been enjoying this program for years. I go to the doctor or hospital of my choice, and my taxes pay all the bills. It’s wonderful. But I would have appreciated it even more if my wife and children and I had had such health-care coverage when we were younger. I want every American, from birth to death, to get the kind of health care I now receive. Removing the payments now going to the insurance corporations would considerably offset the tax increase necessary to cover all Americans.

Medicare exists. It works. It’s beloved by its beneficiaries, who are such a large voting block that it’s beloved even by most conservative politicians, who ought to despise it as the dread “socialism” they fear so much. Why not just expand it?

We know that Medicare has worked well for half a century for those of us over 65. Why does it become “socialized medicine” when we extend it to younger Americans?

…We recently bailed out the finance houses and banks to the tune of $700 billion. A country that can afford such an outlay while paying for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can afford to do what every other advanced democracy has done: underwrite quality health care for all its citizens.

If Medicare needs a few modifications in order to serve all Americans, we can make such adjustments now or later. But let’s make sure Congress has an up or down vote on Medicare for all before it adjourns this year. Let’s not waste time trying to reinvent the wheel. We all know what Medicare is. Do we want health care for all, or only for those over 65?

Those of us who care about our fellow citizens, rather than mostly ill-educated ideals of selfishness and short-sightedness, certainly do.

The whole piece is here. Thanks go to Betsy Burnam for making me aware of it.

A Political Reality (great cartoon)

Tom Tomorrow is by far one of the funniest and wisest editorialists drawing funny pictures…

tmw

Wrong Way Wilson and The Big Lie

After months of Republican rabble-rousing and misinformation, Congressman Joe Wilson (R-Crazytown) stepped up to the plate (with the usual batting accuracy of your modern GOP politico) during President Obama’s speech to both houses of Congress the other night and shouted “YOU LIE!!!” at the president.

Like most of the misinformation and realpolitik offered up by the Right these days, the specific information he was calling a lie (that illegal immigrants would not be eligible for free health care) is demonstrably true. It’s typed into the language of the health care bill in plain English, and should be easy to understand even for an obvious buffoon like Wilson.

In this video, Keith Olberman shows the evidence (the actual text from the bill), and points out that Wilson’s greatest sin wasn’t the awesome breach of traditional protocol that besmirched both him and his party, it was the fact that he, himself, was simply screeching a Republican lie.

Why the Right Was Afraid of Obama’s School Speech (cartoon)

A hilarious cartoon by Carolita Johnson at Huffington Post:

carolita

Bush’s Third Term? You’re Soaking In It.

There’s an unfinished entry on my blog’s dashboard page called “Obama Lies!!!” in which I, a devoted progressive who despises Bush and Cheney with every fiber of my being, and who happily voted for Obama, was taking him to task for his spots of disingenuousness and his failure to stand up to the Right and do the things he said he would do and needs to do.

I wrote quite a bit, but burned out on the piece and never completed it. Now, happily, I have something to share that is much better than what I was crafting.

At TomDispatch.com, David Swanson (founder of AfterDowningStreet.org) has an essay that in great detail compares the Obama presidency thus far to what we might have expected had Bush been granted a third term. It’s sobering stuff.

It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can’t you just picture it?…

The full piece is here. There is a short introduction by the site’s founder, Tom Engelhardt, and the actual essay by Swanson is a bit down the page.

Now don’t get me wrong. While I’m troubled (in some cases quite troubled) by much of what Swanson covers, I’m still glad to have a smart, sort-of liberal guy in office now instead of the war-mongering corporatist dullard we had. Obama may fuck up, but we’ll still be better off than we would have been with a literal continuation of Bush’s policies.

I Hear From Real America

And now “David Allen C.E.O.” will give the Republican response to my earlier political rant:

Your [sic] just another sanctimonius [sic] leftist asshole thats [sic] out there painting Real Americans with a broad brush. Trouble is you [sic] paint has been proved transparent. Forgive me for painting back.

We are out there working hard to keep your type from tossing whats [sic] left of our country off the bridge.

What can I say, really, that I haven’t already in the rant? I certainly can’t argue with his logic.

Bill Maher Issues Warning On Birthers: They Can Take Over “Like Crab Grass Or Cirque Du Soleil” (VIDEO)

Insightful and bitingly funny as usual…

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“Livin’ the Lie” (aka “The Republicans’ Pants Are On Fire”)

pantsonfire_2

A Rant. I say mean things about Republicans. If you’re a Republican friend of mine, rest assured I’m not talking about you. Or at least I hope not.

♦

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (Ron Suskind, NY Times, quoting a senior Bush administration official in summer 2002)

We all know that politicians lie. Left, right, up, down, didn’t have sex with that woman, Iraq was involved in 9/11, God hates the gays (except, maybe, the ones getting head from self-righteous congressmen)…liars. All of ’em, to some extent. Continue reading →

Don’t Let The Fearmongers Screw You Out Of Improved Healthcare

[UPDATE: The original video went away, so I found another source. The link to it is below.]

You may not know who to listen to in the healthcare debate. But I’ll tell you who not to listen to: anyone who is obviously and cravenly feeding you bullshit in order to scare you.

LINK

How stupid do you have to be to buy into this nonsense?

So. Who’s Speaking For YOUR Political Views, hmm?

It’s nice to have folks out there representing your side who make you look all rational and intelligent and stuff…

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Bill Maher Says What I’ve Been Thinkin’

I am sad to say I agree almost entirely with what Maher has to say here. Obama needs to pick up his game.

Tom Tomorrow: How ARE Republicans Controlling The Debate?

Jon Stewart, National Treasure

Jon Stewart at his best, taking conservatives to task for the escalating hissy-fits they’ve been throwing since they legitimately lost an election (as opposed to illegitimately winning one)…

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