Move toward the light

Yes, it's easy to look on the dark side of the recent Supreme Court decisions allowing corporations to claim religious convictions and attendant relief from legal obligations. One can suspect that it's part of a progression toward full citizenship and voting rights for paper entities and perhaps even a superior status to the individual. If Subaru can claim that it builds cars with love, and a retail store chain to have religious scruples, then of course a corporation must be not only fully human in its own right, but an American citizen. More than an American citizen: a citizen not bound by the results of free elections to which we living breathing citizens are obliged to acquiesce.

Can't we see a bright side?  Perhaps now that a paper and ink 'person' can avoid obligations for religious reasons, a flesh and blood person can be forgiven for not reciting what constitutes a religious oath every morning and some evenings.  If a corporate store owner can refuse to provide insurance to pay for blood transfusions or vaccinations or indeed medical care of any kind if it files an affidavit stating such things to be a grave moral wrong, how then do I not have the right to a line item veto over my tax obligation?  There's a light at the end of this long, dark tunnel and it's the light of anarchy. Libertarians rejoice, we don't have to do anything we don't want to do.

It's not that the courts haven't made exceptions for individual moral and religious convictions in our history. Churches and Synagogues were allowed to use sacramental wine during Prohibition and conscience was allowed as an exemption from the draft, so long as one could document membership in an appropriate group. We have long given preference to group-think over individual conviction and the sun shines on little that is new.

Cynicism aside, do not the three recent decisions suggest that the problem hinges on the fact that we expect employers to pay directly for benefits to employees rather than to do as we do with Medicare: take it out of their paychecks?  Were we to pay for health care out of general revenue dissidents would have to claim the right to set their own tax obligations outside of  Democratic processes, making the shortcomings of  radical Libertarianism somewhat more apparent.  A single payer system would not overly burden certain employers and would not punish those out of work.  It would make organized sexual perversion less able to persist by calling itself Christianity while stepping on our lives.  It's time.

Cry havoc

If there's anything being shoved down our throats these days, it's the claim that health care reform is being shoved down our throats. It's all part of the game the minority party is playing by trying to make you think the Democrats won the White House by some sort of fluke and that the desire for health care reform wasn't what Obama's majority of voters were hoping for.

It's been a year now and the screaming hasn't let up for a moment, but a recent poll shows that half the country favors the Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act, whether or not you call it ObamaCare and only 43% think it's "too liberal."

It would be amusing of course if the bumper sticker bumpkins did get their "end of an error" by electing Mitt Romney who like the rest of them is giving us that old soft shoe about just how terrible the new law is because as the unimpaired remember, Mitt only a few years ago was hoping his new Massachusetts health care reform would go nationwide. It's easy to call a politician like that a whore, but it's unfair to whores and I don't want to distract from his fellow streetwalker who has been spending a fortune with TV ads warning us of the holocaust, the calamity, the apocalypse sure to wipe us from the earth if we have to have health insurance rather than hope the emergency room can cure our cancer or heart disease -- at public expense. I mean, never mind the war, conquest, famine and death -- this is health care!

Blame yourself

Was Tom Daschle (D-SD) telling the truth when he said that the health care public option Obama campaigned on was:

"taken off the table as a result of the understanding that people had with the hospital association, with the insurance (AHIP), and others,"

or was he telling the truth when he said the President really did fully support what he promised to support and that:

"The President fought for the public option just as he did for affordable health care for all Americans. The public option was dropped only when it was no longer viable in Congress, not as a result of any deal cut by the White House."

Does it really matter? Were some people right on the money in telling me that either party would, in time, do just about the same things if elected ?

While I'm not sure that "I'm a maverick/I was never a maverick" McCain wouldn't have buggered up the economy beyond recovery by caving in to every moneyed interest as he always has done, I'm not sure that Obama really ever had the ability to be the kind of People's hero his supporters dreamed of and that he presented himself as. I'm not sure anyone could have been or can ever be, because our government has become a conduit rather than a barrier between the interests of Global power and the perceived wants and dreams of the public -- and we like it that way. We want what they want. We see the government as the enemy rather than those entities behind the government which the government can no longer even desire to control.

We're out in the street supporting tax relief for the billionaires who got that way by taking our jobs abroad and importing foreign workers, legal and otherwise. We support the party that tries to block a tax cut for the vast majority and insist on keeping it for those whose wealth has grown exponentially as ours has faded away or stagnated. Hope itself has become the butt of a thousand jokes.

Since the dawn of supply side economics nothing much has trickled down but debt, no private sector employment was created and all those massive profits that were supposed to translate into more and better jobs simply trickled into hedge funds, tax shelters, fraudulent investments designed deliberately to fail; grossly inflating markets and tempting us all into massive debt. We've supported every false characterization, every fabricated and fanciful bit of data, every promise of future glory as well as every scurrilous slander designed to keep us dancing in stage managed anger on the ends of our puppet strings -- dancing to a tune we think is our own.

Lack of oversight and lack of responsibility cause one disaster after another, yet we keep insisting we need more of the same and any attempt at standing between us and rapacious global profiteers and pirates can handily be dismissed as Communism or Tyranny or Godlessness and "too much government interference." Safety inspections, food inspections, even rules against selling worthless commodities are "government interference with profits," but we're quiet about every increment of additional government power to snoop on us, track our movements, our finances and to interfere with our privacy whether it's the government itself or corporations wanting to sell us more and sleazier things. Cows want to be milked no less than we do, but only we two legged cattle see it as freedom.

It doesn't seem like "socialism" to the fellow who gets his hip replaced at the VA hospital and for far less than he could even if he were employed and had insurance that didn't pass it off as "pre-existing." -- yet he thinks it is "Obamacare" when Big Brother tries to keep United Health Care death panels from denying coverage for his grandson with cystic fibrosis. He oozes platitudes like " well insurance companies have to make a living too" and he doesn't see the difference between making a living and unlimited, government protected rights to make as much as possible without a moral scruple about exploiting human suffering -- and the land, water and air that make life possible. The common good? That's Communism.

No, it's too easy to blame Government, blame Liberals, howl about socialism, 'redistribution' of wealth, chortle about Nancy Pelosi and weep idiot tears with Glenn Beck until we don't notice the shackles. Or maybe you're one of those bumper sticker bozos who think that that hopey changey stuff is just hilarious compared to the same old despair and we ought to keep on staging unfunded wars and ignoring the bill because as the Maverick said: "Debt Doesn't Matter" until, of course, it does and then you can giggle and blame it on somebody else.

Did Obama sell out? Did Congress sell out? Was it the media who told us to walk toward the light when the light was over a cliff? No, you sold out, you bought into it, you gave it all away because otherwise it would be Communism and Fascism and Tyranny. Either that or you thought a new figurehead could steer the ship on a new course. Happy now?

Inglorious bastards

I never thought the Confederacy would take health insurance reform lying down; accept it any more than they willingly endured integration, voting rights for women or their former slaves, equal rights and opportunities for "cullids" and Jee-Yews and anything else that interfered with good, old fashioned, plantation feudalism. They're against anything those Yankees do even if in the long run insurance companies will profit from it and undoubtedly show their gratitude to the Gucci shod rebels in Tallahassee and other red state Capitals.

Even though the ten thousand or so of my county's uninsured residents that now overwhelm the capacity of community outpatient clinics and emergency rooms are a liability and expense to me similar to uninsured motorists, the former are victims of Northern aggression while the latter do need to be forced to have liability insurance. Why? Well because a Yankee Democrat proposed it and Democrats did some of what the public elected them to do.

OK, it's not quite a volley of cannon fire at Fort Sumter yet, but that was then and today's attacks on the concept that the government has any function beyond shocking and awing third world countries and keeping the slaves in line are more insidious. What else would you call slipping a rider into an innocuous and popular Life Insurance bill that declares the new Federal Health Insurance legislation unconstitutional. I know, I know, that's hardly the job of the Florida Legislature, the same distinguished body of statesmen who last year balked at adding an exclusion to a bill outlawing the observation of and participation in animal sex if it was for purposes of animal husbandry, because -- wait for this -- some Representatives thought animal husbandry referred to women marrying animals. But the spirit of Southern freedom isn't about the government standing up for freedom, it's about leaving us alone in our fantasy of primitive self sufficiency where we can do as we please and damn everyone else.

Likewise the protection against being discriminated against by health insurers and protection against the public's indirect funding of health care for the uninsured must be about

"defending the rights of individuals"

as Rep. Ryan Nelson, R-Apopka told those assembled representatives of Florida Crackers, Swamp rats and toothless road-kill eaters called the Florida House of Representatives.

"every person within this state is and shall be free from governmental intrusion" in selecting health insurance coverage,

says the amendment. What nasty things might escape from that Pandora's box should this thing be passed into law! After all, keeping companies from dropping you when sick or weaseling out of legitimate claims by stalling until you die or your daughter dies is "intrusion." isn't it? Making you take responsibility for staying off the welfare rolls and clogging up the hospitals or walking around spreading TB is just egregious "intrusion." Let's give absolute immunity from the law to insurers and all in the name of individual freedom. Massa knows what's best and what's best is that you only shop at the company store.

What's more, the Florida Attorney General shall have the power to sue the Federal Government on behalf of any neo-Confederate who thinks I have to pay when his diseased ilk inflate the local hospital operating costs because he doesn't believe in health insurance - sue at the Taxpayer's expense, of course.

I don't like slippery slope arguments and I'm not saying that this will lead to revolts against mandatory car insurance or boat insurance or any kind of required liability insurance, but the principle is indeed the same: "Damn Gummint cain't tell us what to do" even if that government is elected to do what it's doing by a majority of voters who presumably still have the right to decide such things: a right not inferior to the right of corporations to do as they please. The principle is the same: government is about what we the people want, not what we the voters want. Upside down elitism and corporate feudalism at it's purest.

Yes, I'm surrounded by people who tell me that the 1861 revolt, or "the War of Northern Aggression," was about "freedom" without any sense of irony and they feel likewise about almost anything that requires any funding, except of course farm subsidies and special tax breaks for Exxon Mobil. Their revolt is about the same kind of "freedom" I guess. Sometimes that's my freedom, not theirs, since they're concerned about my heirs' inheritance taxes while theirs won't pay any, and a couple of percent more on my income taxes while more than half of them won't pay any this year. Of course their freedom to go about uninsured Makes my outrageous health insurance premiums more outrageous, but it's the thought that counts, isn't it?

Freedom's just another word

Somehow I've never been able to understand why preventing enormous and hugely profitable insurance corporations from dropping you because you kid was born with a heart defect or not covering your leukemia treatments because you forgot to tell them you had acne in high school makes us no longer a free country -- or perhaps only a "mostly free" country according to the Heritage Foundation.

But more confusing and more difficult to reconcile than quantum mechanics and relativity is the idea that allowing warrantless wiretaps and other unconstitutional government abuses don't have the same effect. Seems that President Ford was comfortable with giving the FBI discretion on whether or not to seek a warrant for probable cause for wiretapping on the advice of his Attorney General William B. Saxbe. That's a long time before the Patriot act that cemented the "almost free" condition into law - a law that the Democrats haven't yet repudiated. Silly of me that this might have interfered with my freedom nearly as much as an extra 2% on what I might make over a net $375,000. Freedom's just another word for profit.

Is it the threat to monopolistic and feudalistic aberrations of free-market Capitalism that make us almost free or is it things like restrictions on civil rights? I think the answer is obvious. Freedom isn't at stake when Exxon-Mobil payed less in income tax last year than a minimum wage worker did, but the minimum wage itself is a threat to freedom and a harbinger of a Communist takeover. But don't ask me to explain. Ask some other millionaire from the kind of "think-tank" funded by the oil cartel.

Because that's exactly who is telling us what freedom means. That's who would rather you didn't think of it in terms of freedom from want, fear, privation - or the FBI rummaging through your life looking for anything they like. There's little profit in privacy -- in your privacy anyway. There is big profit in usury so our freedom hasn't suffered by finance companies that can charge 200% and ask for more, but it's damn near communist tyranny to ask Exxon to pay what my gardener pays.

No, Obama is a tyrant and he's made us less free, not for the things he's done or hasn't done to force responsibility on Wall Street, not for failing to undo constitutional infractions or abuses of executive power, not for actually give most of us a tax cut, but for giving some of the protection we've been asking for against financial ruin, against having to choose between feeding our kids or dying of a curable disease.

I'm glad we have people like the Heritage Foundation around to explain things like freedom to us. We might have gone on thinking that being able to vote, to use public facilities, to be served in restaurants and hotels, to buy property wherever we can afford it, to get a job if we're not white or protestant or male or young or to send our kids to school had something to do with being free -- all those things that such grand sounding patriotic spokesmen like the Heritage foundation assure us are nothing of the sort. Without them we might have forgotten how free we were years ago when we had slavery, segregation, race laws, male suffrage, restricted housing, poll taxes and lynching parties. I'm glad they continue to keep up the good fight.

Health Care Reform: The Morning After

Guest post from Barbara O'Brien at The Mahablog

Many politicians and pundits warned us that the health care reform (HCR) legislation that just became law will destroy America. Government bureaucrats will take over health care decisions, we were told. The old and infirm would be hauled away by death panels. Everything about the way we receive our medical care will change, and change drastically, they said.

Medicare recipients have been frightened by stories that their benefits will be cut. Middle-age people are worried they will lose their jobs when the law’s dreaded regulations, or taxes, or maybe regulations with taxes, would destroy their employers’ businesses.

The truth is, very little will change for most people. If you were insured by employee benefits before HCR, you will be insured by exactly the same policy in exactly the same way after HCR. You will have access to the same doctors on the same terms. “Government bureaucrats” will no more be involved in your health care than they were before.

And the same is true of Medicare, which of course is a government program, although many of the people who opposed the HCR bill don’t seem to know that.

Here are the “cataclysmic” changes to health care that are now in effect, or which will go into effect within the next six months for people who are already in group insurance plans:

• The law says you can’t lose your insurance coverage because you get sick. Before, in many states, if you were stricken with a severe illness such as mesothelioma cancer that would be expensive to treat, your insurer could use just about any excuse to cancel your coverage. That is over.

• HCR has ended lifetime limits on coverage. As long as you are receiving medical care, your insurer pays the bills.

• Your children can be covered on your existing policy until they are 26 years old.

• In six months, insurers cannot refuse to insure people under the age of 19 because of “pre-existing conditions.” This provision will go into effect for everyone in 2014.


And if you are on Medicare, you will be asked to struggle with the following:

• You get a free annual checkup.

• The co-pays and deductibles on many preventive care services are eliminated.

• If you are in the Medicare D “doughnut hole,” you will get a $250 rebate check in a few weeks. The hole itself will be closed gradually and will be gone by 2020.

But what about all those terrible regulations and taxes that are about to drive businesses out of business? Um, there really isn’t much to report. Oh, wait, here’s one — a 10 percent tax on indoor tanning services that use ultraviolet lamps will go into effect July 1. That’s about it.

However, beginning this year a tax credit will be available for some small businesses to help provide insurance coverage for employees.

Soon the politicians and pundits will start trying to frighten you about the provisions that will go into effect after this year. I assure you they are about as scary as the provisions that go into effect this year, but I will discuss them in a follow-up post.

— Barbara O’Brien

And who is my neighbor?

Look out your window, baby, there's a scene you'd like to catch
The band is playing "Dixie", a man got his hand outstretched
Could be the Führer
Could be the local priest
You know sometimes Satan, you know he comes as a man of peace.

-Bob Dylan-

It hard not to think of the parable of the good Samaritan when you read about the anti-health care reform protesters in Columbus Ohio. Seems that Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH) is still undecided and so competing groups showed up outside her office Tuesday last to express their opinions as loudly as possible.

A wrinkled, kneeling man holding a stick crawled up to a group opposing the effort with a sign saying he has "got Parkinson's" and needs help, say Raw Story's David Edwards and Sahil Kapur. Will any of us be surprised at the reaction?

"If you're looking for a handout you're in the wrong end of town," one man yelled at him.

"Nothing for free over here, you have to work for everything you get."

Something smells bad in Columbus and I don't think that stench is called Christian values.

Of course the health care reform under consideration isn't about handouts, it's that some people's greatest fear is that not only will someone get something he himself isn't getting, but that it might cost him some money. Insurance, by nature is about dividing risk amongst participants and so those who suffer losses will be covered while others pay a smaller amount. This seems to be fine with Republicans as long as some third party is skimming off 40% while keeping those at greatest risk out of the pool. This seems to them perversely to be Communism when individual risk is minimized by maximizing the pool and cost minimized by self administration by public ownership.

Is it a coincidence that people who don't seem to get this are the same people so mean spirited that they will mock someone with a terminal and debilitating disease and tell him to "work?" Is it that such people fear someone who could challenge their own self-pity that they must hate those really deserving of it? God knows who the Christians in Columbus are, but no one else seems to.

Even so, health care reform isn't about being a good Samaritan, it's about the most economical and efficient method of minimizing the burden on any individual participant by making us all participants, so whether there is a God who punishes nasty, malicious, selfish greedy bastards or some other principle of Nature that punishes the intellectually unfit and self defeating Conservative, it may be time to get out of Columbus and not look back.

The more we lie, the truer it gets

What happened never happened and the election that ousted the Republicans from office all around the country had nothing to do with public sentiment and even if it did, that sentiment did not include a desire for sweeping reform of health care in America. Or so says Sarah Palin, trying to emulate the rest of the Republican flim-flam artists and voodoo historians like Karl Rove and the dynamic Cheney Family Circus. True to American form, being the worst of them at this game, she may have the most followers.

Please ask yourself: who will be left behind? And who will decide – what kind of panel will decide – who receives the health care that government will obviously have to ration?

Yes, although every reputable source including this one insists that there is nothing in any way suggestive of rationing or "death Panels" as she used to call it, in the House or Senate health care reform bills, she goes on as though there obviously are and as though nobody ever asked for reform in the first place and as though all we ever needed was protection for doctors against malpractice suits.

Palin reveals in her Facebook page, which after all is a fine place to self-publish things no reputable source will touch, that yes, America is wildly against reform and the "Democrat" cabal is forcing it all into one orifice or another against our collective will -- and of course there are death panels and rationing and all kinds of other evil things lurking in that huge document she hasn't got round to reading yet. It takes so long to sound out all those words, you know.

Rush lives

Whatever the cause of Rush Limbaugh's chest pains, they haven't been as fatal as some have reported but whether or not angina is involved, we can be sure they weren't pangs of conscience. His web site thanks us for our prayers ( if only he could hear mine) and is, as always, jam packed and bloated with fear mongering, dire predictions and apocalyptic warnings that if we don't "fight like hell" our country will be changed forever. Let's hope.

I recently read that only about 5% of those admitted to hospitals with chest pains die within a year, so one important and very needed change is probably not going to happen -- all the more so since most billionaires can not only afford health insurance but can afford to do without it. If you or I had rendered ourselves uninsurable through a lifetime of belly bustin' burgers, cigars, uppers, downers, pain killers and beer we might have a rather different experience and a bit less cause for optimism.

Yes, we have to fight like hell to stop this "buffoonery" says Rush about Bob Menendez' call to set aside ideology, turn off Limbaugh and pass the legislation that most Americans want. But Congress is ignoring the will of the people -- or at least the minority of the people he represents, says Rush. Public health insurance will change America forever -- forever! Government will "take over" health care just the way it took over all those plans you made for retirement. ( huh?)
Just the way Veteran's benefits took over - well whatever they took over and medicare helped keep exploding profits from eating up every last dime retired people have set aside.

It's a tenet of Buddhism, and a nice bit of wisdom, that change is constant and suffering is universal when we refuse to accept it. It's too bad in this case that Rush's refusal to let go of failed 19th century ideas will cause more suffering for everyone else than it will for him. We have been changing from the outset in terms of making the US a better place to live for more of its people and Rush has been a major clot in the artery of truth and justice and decency.

No, I'm not going to descend to his level and wish him an immediate death, in fact I hope he lives long enough to see that not one dire thing he has predicted has materialized and that he's been pretty much wrong about every thing he's said -- and until that happens, I hope those pains continue to hurt like hell.

A day in the life of Ivan Cornysovitch

I guess Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) is trying to cornhole us again. I imagine that he woke up early one morning and realized there was another absurd, extreme, preposterous, shameful, ridiculous and grotesque simile he hadn't used yet to vilify any health care reform that doesn't appeal to the corporate overlords he serves. We've already heard about 'death panels' and how extending the program that Cornyn benefits from to the rest of us, is just like Pot's Killing fields and Hitler's death camps. Somehow he'd overlooked Stalin's Gulag Archipelago and it's important we hear about it right away.

You see, the problem is that the Democrats aren't accepting "input" from the Republicans although it's pretty clear that the only "input" he or they have offered is to drop the damn subject. Still it's hard to understand why Tex himself isn't trying to escape from that death camp of Federal Employee insurance that just might kill him at any time now.

Rape, racism and Republicans

A friend of mine used to have the job, back during the Vietnam war, of flying a helicopter over dangerous areas so as to draw fire from hidden gun emplacements, flushing out the enemy so that we knew where they were. Barak Obama has been a bit like that and sad to say, I've now identified far too many enemies, some that I thought were friends.

I got another e-mail this morning, from someone I would hardly call a redneck: a northeasterner, ex military intelligence with a long career at the Pentagon. "I despair for the country" was the title and it had a link to a YouTube video wherein the President confesses to being a Muslim. It's an obvious cut and paste job that wouldn't fool anyone who didn't want to be fooled -- and there's the rub. Too many want to be fooled and bask like pigs in the warm and stinky deception. The hate and fear of our President long preceded his election and for some it preceded his birth. The closeted racists of America desperately need such insultingly stupid stories as a defense against the obviously true accusations of racism.

I grew up in the 1950's and I'm no stranger to segregation or blood in the streets for that matter, but still I'm amazed at the breadth and depth of the long concealed and highly fermented racial and ethnic hatred that's been lurking in the jungle and is emerging like tracer bullets whose dotted line shows the way, right to their source.

I can't count the outraged e-mails and comments I've seen about the recent California schoolyard rape, which of course has allowed the haters to vent their paranoid fear and loathing of Hispanics. It was of course a Hispanic girl who reported it, not a "regular" American as Archie Bunker would have said, but no matter. Hate has its own sort of statistics and only needs an example to declare it "typical." Indeed, it doesn't even have to be true if you have even a mediocre shareware video editing program.

In its own way, this sick and disgusting incident seems not to be out of context of what is happening in many disparate groups, even of white, Anglo-Saxon protestants, marching in the streets for lower taxes as though Obama had actually raised them; showing pictures of Nazi death camps as though any sane person connects piles of murdered bodies to a government administered health plan -- the people who call the Democratic health care bill "Obamacare" but never think to call Social Security Roosevelt Retirement or identified the GI bill with Communism or call the public library the Socialist Book Store -- or identify the recession with Republican economic policies. These things and more are part of the Us against Them view where the government is "them," the 15% fringe element and the corporate lobbyists are "We the people," the government is the enemy and only illegitimately exercised authority is legitimate.

The twenty or so witnesses to this crime, if they had any compassion at all, were prevented by the entertainment value and hatred of police and the Maverick mentality from doing anything or reporting anything. The criminals are The People, the cops are not and the law is the enemy because it interferes with our freedom to commit crimes ad libidum. Is that really different from not caring how many innocents are killed abroad in a war started and continued under false pretenses and appeals to fear and patriotism? Is that different from not giving a flying damn how many millions die, how many sick children clog the emergency rooms and drive up the cost of insurance and spread disease, or how many lives are ruined by insurance companies? Its them against us and 'them' are the unfortunate, the minorities, the sick the old and unemployed. Who wants the damned law and the government to help them even if it protects us too?

Perhaps you find the connection tenuous or even far-fetched, but I don't. There is no "us" in the US any more unless it's in the context of us against them and that miserable, militant and malicious group who flatter themselves with the stolen title of 'Conservative' are as much to blame as anyone for the rape that is our for-profit, cartel run health "system." Anyone who brings the government in is a "snitch."

Oh no, it's those liberals who insist any criticism of the President is racist and we're not racist at all - it's just that he's a foreign born, Marxistnaziterroristracist who "hates white culture" (whatever the hell that is) and murdered his grandmother and wants to murder yours. It's because he's trying to reconstitute the Auschwitz death camp by giving us health insurance, not because he's a Ni - I mean black.

Hey, we're not responsible for not reporting a vicious and nearly fatal rape, it's because we can't trust the cops, the cops are the problem, the government is the problem and we want less government, you know.

Deep in the Cornyn hole of Texas

I got an e-mail from Texas Senator John Cornyn this morning. Somehow I had the urge to take another shower. In the relentless crusade to mock, rebuke, deride, insult, sneer at and taunt the "opposition" Cornyn is an endless cornucopia of crepuscular reasoning and shady opinions, such as his assertion that the "delays" in supplying Texas and the United States with hundreds of millions of H1N1 vaccinations argue against the public option in health care reform.

"These delays and limited access make me question whether the government, which cannot run existing public health programs competently, should be trusted with even more responsibility – such as running a new government health plan. " [italics mine]

Of course Cornyn doesn't give examples of how the government can't run health care, either from Medicare, the Veteran's Administration or indeed from the Government health care Cornyn and his cronies enjoy. Of course he doesn't have to, he's preaching to Republicans -- a faith-based group who never seem to question the tenebrous tenets of that faith. The Government just can't do anything right: Reagan said so and the Republicans are hell bent for leather to make sure it's self-fulfilling.

Perhaps John can explain what the failure of the oil industry that supports him to end oil shortages and give us 29 cents a gallon gasoline again argues for or against, or why we shouldn't say that Exxon can't run anything properly, including keeping tanker captains sober. One offensively stupid argument deserves another, I should think, and the argument that the Government can't do anything and so shouldn't be allowed to do anything is a stupid argument and an annoying one coming from someone who is part of the government and is stalling, obfuscating and sabotaging health care reform -- right after having supported Bush's massive increases of unaccountable executive power and failed wars for 8 years.

No, A public option for health care is a

"Trojan horse that will ultimately lead to a government takeover of our health care system. "

says John Cornyn: another way of invoking the slippery slope fallacy. If we allow A we'll allow A+B and if we allow A+B, we'll allow A+B+C. . . Of course any truth to this is no more than accidental because none of these steps compel the other, That's why we call it a fallacy, but again, he's arguing to Republicans and Lone Star Republicans at that, not exactly a constellation bright enough to light up the sky. Funny that he didn't argue that an invasion of Iraq would lead to a "government takeover" of the world or that warrantless surveillance and the end of Habeas Corpus would lead to a police state.

No, we're not on a slippery slope toward invading Ireland, the US Postal Service isn't going to take over DHL or UPS or FedEx and none of those could handle a minute fraction of the envelopes, post cards, advertising fliers or periodicals the USPS delivers. No, the public schools aren't going to take over the private schools and the Social Security Administration isn't going to take over your pension. The County Hospital or the VA hospital isn't going to take over the private hospitals. It isn't the "Government" producing the vaccines and if we had to depend on the profitability of doing that to induce the pharmaceutical industry to do it, we'd have far greater shortages and tens of millions who wouldn't get any and couldn't afford it and would help the disease spread because of it. Of course I'm sure Tex Cornyn will get his vaccination, one way or another. He'll get it for free. He gets all his health care for free, so why should he give a Texas damn about you?

It's a cream puff!

Would you buy a used car from this man? That used to be a popular phrase back in the Nixon years when we were asked to buy his "secret plan to win the war." The secret was that there was no plan, but never mind, there was nothing to win and we didn't win it.

It's the first thing that comes to mind listening to the last ditch effort by Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who is still telling us the public option will kill us all, although you can see he's having a hard time keeping his face straight while doing it. It's a prodigious effort of course, since he and his henchmen all have government health care just like the French and the Norwegians and the Germans and everyone else and all too many of them live to really ripe old ages because of it.

"I think if you have any kind of government insurance program, you're going to be stuck with it and it will lead us in the direction of the European style, you know, sort of British-style, single payer, government run system, and those systems are known for delays, denial of care and, you know, if your particular malady doesn't fit the government regulation, you don't get the medication. And it may cost you your life. I mean, we don't want to go down that path."

Yes, we do want to go down that path -- the majority of us anyway -- and it's an argument dependent on American ignorance of what the rest of the modern world enjoys and benefits from and chooses to have. There is no slope here, it's only his logic and his grasp of truth that's slippery. The problem with our health care cartel system is exactly the problem he tells us we will have if we abandon it and the coverage we have to buy now isn't even available to millions and millions. It may cost you your life and it's cost millions of lives already.

No, I wouldn't buy a load of fertilizer from this man and that's what he's selling and no matter how many times the truth is flung back at him, he'll continue. He's paid handsomely to continue and he's got a great health care plan as well which isn't known for denial, delay or enormous annual price increases like the one we have if we're lucky, young, in a good job and haven't ever been sick.

It's the old Republican song he's singing -- the corporate song, the best money can buy: I've got mine and screw you.

With some whores, at least you get sex

From others you get beat up and robbed blind by the pimp and you thank them for it all the way to the emergency room.

You remember Betsy McCaughey, the blond gun for hire who went on the Daily show with a huge bound volume purporting to be HR3200, the proposed health care reform bill. She's the one who thought she was smart enough to shut Jon Stewart up by referring to a mysterious clause on page 418 and was stupid enough not to realize that Stewart had read it and had a copy right there.

She all but slunk out of the studio to a chorus of jeers and allegations that she had received a good deal of money from Cantel Medical Corporation for lying about older people needing to face a "death panel" soon surfaced. She resigned her board of directors position within hours of her humiliation on the Daily Show. ABC News credited McCaughey with launching this lie about death panels on the Fred Thompson radio last July and Stewart is not Thompson. He can, and bothers to read and has more than enough wit to skewer a media whore like McCaughey.

I still hear a lot of echoes from the brainless who pick their opinions up from the pavement with a shovel like the guys who used to follow horses, of her earlier article "Deadly Doctors" in the New York Post. It lies about Ezekiel Emmanuel, Rahm Emmanuels's brother the doctor, claiming he wants physicians to forget the Hippocratic oath and focus on “social justice” rather than healing patients. That's code for Communism of course and of course it's another lie and another dollar for Betsy.

She has a long history of lying about health care. Back in 1994 she wrote an article for The New Republic that did a lot to kill the Clinton health care reform effort and which was later retracted by the magazine as being full of lies. The The Atlantic magazine ran a story further debunking her statements. Crooks and Liars yesterday reported that Rolling Stone will soon report her torpedoing of the Clinton plan was bought and paid for by Philip Morris, the Tobacco corporation along with Republican think tanks and the right wing medial.

Of course the people who need to hear this don't hear anything but Beck and the Fat man and like most victories over ignorance and falsehood, it's Pyrrhic, still it makes good reading while you wait for the charity doctors to fly in to treat your pancreatic cancer.

Shame

Palm Beach County, unlike counties in some other places, exhibits a huge disparity amongst residents and the bottom of the barrel is more visible and more in contrast with the upper strata. Stark poverty exists, sometimes within a short walk from breathtaking wealth. The Byzantine palaces of Boca Raton, the Hilton sized seaside abode of Rush Limbaugh can remind the viewer of Monopoly houses dumped at random on the board. Some residents have the chauffeur drive the house keeper to the drug store to pick up their drugs under assumed names, others can't afford medicine without which they have a short time left to live.

Like many third world countries where the mega-rich watch medical relief teams treat the poor from their comfortable adn beautiful estates, Palm Beach County will soon host Remote Area Medical caregivers to treat an estimated treat 4,000 to 5,000 people who don't have medical insurance. According to the Palm Beach Post, RAM's Stan Brock

"will travel to South Florida in a World War II era C-47 cargo plane. It will contain at least 40 dental chairs and the equipment necessary for several dozen Florida-licensed ophthalmologists, optometrists and opticians to examine hundreds of patients and make glasses on the spot. "

Things like dental extractions, fillings, prostate tests mammograms, pediatric exams and H1N1 flu shots and other essential things not available in Emergency Rooms will offered for free, no questions asked. Of course it's embarrassing, or should be, to patriots fond of calling any criticism or negative assessment of our proud country to be so easily compared to Haiti or Honduras. It's also far from being enough to occasionally offer relief from pain and disease to the peasants on an occasional basis, but as long as we're talking about shame, isn't it time to heap some of it on those who are too afraid that the most profitable corporations on Earth might have to operate with profit margins of less than 35% unless we maintain a sick and suffering underclass? What about politicians that can look at the will of three quarters of the population and dismiss it in favor of the corporations that pump billions into their bank accounts?

I'm embarrassed for my country when I see that this is the best we can do and more so when I listen to the excuses: that complete government withdrawal will fix it without leaving millions and millions to die, that a government administered guarantee of insurance coverage will lead to Socialism or Communism aren't more credible fears than the bogus Death Panels when we already have real ones at Cigna and Fortis and Humana. Will some illegal be able to scam the system? Sure, people scam any system, some people buy booze with food stamps, but that doesn't argue that we let a million children starve. The fear that someone will get something for free when we have to pay for it seems all out of proportion to the risk and the risk can be controlled.

No, there is no guaranteed right to health care in the constitution, nor is there to police protection, free public education, public libraries, national parks or municipal fire departments. Certainly no right to Social Security, unemployment or disability insurance. None of those things turned us into Communists, none of them destroyed capitalism, made us less competitive in the world market, stifled entrepreneurship or made any of the hackneyed warnings into a reality. All of them are tokens of civilization and have made us a better country. Single payer health insurance won't do those things either. If we had had it a few decades ago, you might still be driving a Chevy or Chrysler instead of something from the Pacific rim where workers have government health insurance.

He lied -- no he didn't

As though on cue, the South Carolina courts have upheld a $10 million dollar award to Jerome Mitchell who purchased health insurance from Fortis in 2001 when he was 18. A year later, when trying to donate blood, he was told he had HIV. Fortis decided he had lied on the application where it asked if he'd been diagnosed with immune deficiency and rescinded his policy.

As we know, although some won't admit it, Insurance companies pay bonuses to their death panels who reject claims and rescind policies, but I'm sure whatever they paid was a drop in the bucket in comparison. The court didn't mince words in upholding Mitchell's claim and upheld $10 million in punitive damages.

"We find ample support in the record that Fortis' conduct was reprehensible ... Fortis demonstrated an indifference to Mitchell's life and a reckless disregard to his health and safety"

and Mitchell was fortunate enough to be young enough to survive long enough to be vindicated. His life expectancy without very expensive treatment would have been 4 years, according to his suit. Older patients often die before they can get their day in court or before the inevitable appeals process winds down. The death panels love it when that happens. I think it happens rather frequently.

Do we need a public option to tame this kind of swashbuckling? Not necessarily, but we need something and we needed it a long time ago.

Bye Bye Norma Rae

You remember Norma Rae, although her name was Crystal Lee. Sally Field played the Union Organizer from Burlington North Carolina in 1979 and won an academy award for the performance. Ms. Field who presumably is financially secure, is still with us but Crystal Lee, who wasn't, isn't. She got brain cancer she couldn't afford to treat, she had to battle her insurance company to live up to its contractual obligation, they stalled and she died Last Friday.

Sarah Palin is right, Death Panels are real and the Health Insurance companies all have them, practicing 'delay and deny' tactics that resulted -- intentionally -- in the death of the 68 year old Crystal Lee Sutton. Her insurance company interfered between her and her doctor, she couldn't afford Chemo on her own and some employee likely got a bonus for saving the company money.

Like Most Republican arguments, the Death Panel idea illustrates the principle of projective accusation. if your president was guilty of more lies than any other in history, you start accusing the opposition of lying and if you're lucky you can find a mote in his eye and gleefully use it to deny the giant sequoia in your own. Thus to protect the insurance companies that profit by interfering in the doctor-patient relationship, dictate and deny treatment and let people die unnecessarily they accuse a system designed to stop it of doing the same thing. Americans are stupid enough to buy it.

Death Panels are real and death panels are inevitable because corporations are beholden to their stockholders, not to their insured clients. Actual panels of actual people get salaries and bonuses for obfuscating and delaying claims until it's too late, or for scouring your life for some unreported case of acne or the flu to justify denying your cancer claim. A large part of your premiums go, in fact, to pay for these Death Panels and to keep the stockholders happy.

Perhaps someone will chime in here and deny it. I hope so because I'm dying to say You Lie! I can't wait to tell the inevitable troll who will insist that just like Public Schools, Public Libraries, National parks and the National Guard, Government claims administration is Socialism! You lie!

Joe Wilson's Word

“You lie!” he shouted at the President in response to Mr. Obama's attempt to debunk the Republican shouting point that his health care reform plan would give free health care to illegal immigrants. My reading of HR3200 ( and everyone else's) indicates that this is true, but South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson hasn't read it or doesn't care or just likes to shout insults in his official capacity as a Republican congressman and bar brawler.

The outburst last night certainly shocked not only the left side of the house but the side that had been rolling their eyes, smirking and looking offended at every clear elucidation of what the plan would and would not do. Although I'm constantly reminded by Republicans at how the entire concept of hatred and irresponsible rhetoric originates in the "Liberal" domain, nobody can seem to remember such an outburst, not even when Nixon told us he was not a crook or when G.W. Bush told us whoppers about Atomic bombs and uranium deals and mobile chemical weapons labs and Saddam Hussein being behind the 9/11 attack. He lied and anyone who said so was called a traitor and an ally of the "terrorists."

It's a new kind of game out there now. Disruptions, threats, thuggery, Glenbeckery and outbursts like this aren't part of some spontaneous culture change. I think it's deliberate and it's deliberation born out of desperation. A majority of us want some government administered option like Medicare.

Of course it came as an excellent counterpoint to the President's hints that gratuitous obstructionism was going on and that wasn't lost on the right side of the aisle. Wilson had to call the White House to apologize. Republican leaderSenator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told the NY Times

“I think we ought to treat the president with respect”

and I'm sure other Republicans agree - particularly when he's telling the truth.

WTF?

I really hate the proliferation of telephone keypad abbreviations like "WTF?" It's childish, and pointlessly vulgar and grossly overused. That weakens the use of the full phrase which in rare but important cases demands the full response: WHAT THE F*CK?

“I believe what we’re seeing is an orchestrated attempt to radically change this country from what the founders had in mind,”

said Dallas, Texas "pastor" Stephen Broden yesterday on Glenn Beck's dementia fest. What the F*ck? I'm not sure which "founders" he's talking about since many of them favored slavery and few would have advocated any system wherein Broden could speak with any kind of authority -- even the authority of Paranoid dementia. What is this man raving about? why it's about health care of course, the most frightening thing there is to the anarchists and corporate feudalists who pay Beck's salary and own the broadcast network that blares his madness to the world. Perhaps it's so frightening since "conservatives" have fought every effort to grant civil rights of any kind to minorities in our history. There is little ground left to hold in the name of "the founders."

Maybe Beck is desperate since his monstrous lies which include calling Obama, Justice Sotomayor and others racists, have cost Fox some big sponsors, but instead of backing off the "invasion from Mars" rhetoric, he's provided more disreputable and despicable sources to back him up. Broden thinks that advocates of abortion rights are only trying to get rid of Blacks. He thinks that Marxist radical racists like Barack Obama are trying to destroy our culture and wants to launch hit-squads to murder minorities. Never mind that countries with government sponsored or provided insurance options seem to be free of any of these predicted outcomes much less Marxism. We don't need to show you no steenking evidence, we're "conservative."

As Andrew Belonsky writes at Gawker, Beck may be trying to assert that he he himself is not a racist because he's found a black man as demented and racist as he is and

"Certainly he can't be called a racist, because he's black."

So if a black and therefore not racist guy agrees that Obama is a fascist, socialist, Marxist, genocidal maniac like Hitler and Saddam Hussein, Beck, ipso facto, is not a racist.

WTF?

Heck of a job

"Which patients should get a share of limited resources, and who decides? What does it mean to do the greatest good for the greatest number, and does that end justify all means? Where is the line between appropriate comfort care and mercy killing? How, if at all, should doctors and nurses be held accountable for their actions in the most desperate of circumstances, especially when their government fails them?"

These are the questions asked in the New York Times Magazine article about New Orleans' Memorial Hospital. You'll remember that, abandoned and without power with high winds and rising water making evacuation impossible, some patients, perhaps as many as 17 were given lethal doses of morphine and sedatives as an alternative to letting them suffer and die of heat, dehydration, starvation, drowning or from the failure of the machines keeping them alive. While the times appears to be asking questions about personal responsibility, the timing makes it vulnerable to being boarded and looted.

Rightly suspecting the imminent hijacking of this story by anti-health care propagandists, Hanna Rosin writes "pre-emptively" at Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish that

"this story shows the opposite of what would happen under government mandated health care reform. The reason the hospital staff got stuck having to make all these terrible decisions is because they were abandoned, and on their own. There were no established procedures, no regulations, no guidelines. There was just them, exhausted and overwhelmed, and a few dozen very ill patients unhooked from their respirators."

Would an HMO or a privately owned, for-profit facility have been better prepared or better able to get National Guard helicopters to the scene ipso facto? We can expect to hear that this is a logical conclusion. It's not.

I'm sure Rosin is right and that this, like any other pieces of flotsam that can be dragged out of the flood and into the argument will be used to show that the Government is poison and corporations are the antidote. In fact, that the government was unable to help in this circumstance owes much to the lack of planning and disdain for taking responsibility that has followed upon decades of Reagan-inspired sabotage of our institutions. Since there never really has been real evidence for the Reagan theorem that Government is the problem because it is the government and Government has no solutions and Government should give way to private, for profit management, the Republican controlled administrations have been forced to manufacture a scenario by insuring impotence, corruption and incompetence in almost all areas, including most obviously FEMA.

The Dish quotes an unidentified staff member as saying:

"This was totally against every fiber in my body.” But “we were abandoned by the government, we were abandoned by Tenet, and clearly nobody was going to take care of these people in their dying moments.”

and I'm sure this will be picked up on as though the failure is intrinsic to government itself and not to a government that was Rightie-rigged and Brownie led against adequate response.

Regardless of whether the euthanized patients could have been evacuated or should have been left "in God's hands" none of this makes a valid argument against public health care, but we're not used to validity or even honesty in this fight and this struggle to make us believe that the government of the people, by the people should be sold off and all decisions about individual life, liberty and pursuit of happiness be determined by how much profit it makes for someone else.