Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Conservatives Believe in Feudalism
Cons believe in Feudalism -- one Lord of the Manor and everyone else reduced to being a collection of serfs and vassals locked in life-long service to the local Baron. Every law and every tax code change advocated by the Cons is designed to achieve a medieval society for the USA. They are against Social Security, Medicare, minimum wages, labor unions, income taxes on the wealthy, Health Care reform which would provide coverage for 45 million uninsured Americans, etc. Naturally, Cons want this society to be faith-based and fact-free. I'm surprised they don't want to abolish the Post Office.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Paul Krugman Blasts Conservative "Zombie Ideas" on the Health Care Public Option
By PAUL KRUGMAN - New York Times
Published: August 23, 2009
"The debate over the “public option” in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.
Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.
Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.
Let’s talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.
First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the “magic of the marketplace” were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn’t happen.
To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third its growth over the previous 27 years.
Moreover, most of whatever gains ordinary Americans achieved came during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.
And then there’s the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s.
There’s a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came.
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. “We know now that it is bad economics.” And last year we learned that lesson all over again.
Or did we? The astonishing thing about the current political scene is the extent to which nothing has changed.
The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance — which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer.
But it’s much the same on other fronts. Efforts to strengthen bank regulation appear to be losing steam, as opponents of reform declare that more regulation would lead to less financial innovation — this just months after the wonders of innovation brought our financial system to the edge of collapse, a collapse that was averted only with huge infusions of taxpayer funds.
So why won’t these zombie ideas die?
Part of the answer is that there’s a lot of money behind them. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, I would add, his campaign contributions — “depend upon his not understanding it.” In particular, vast amounts of insurance industry money have been flowing to obstructionist Democrats like Mr. Nelson and Senator Max Baucus, whose Gang of Six negotiations have been a crucial roadblock to legislation.
But some of the blame also must rest with President Obama, who famously praised Reagan during the Democratic primary, and hasn’t used the bully pulpit to confront government-is-bad fundamentalism. That’s ironic, in a way, since a large part of what made Reagan so effective, for better or for worse, was the fact that he sought to change America’s thinking as well as its tax code.
How will this all work out? I don’t know. But it’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn."
Published: August 23, 2009
"The debate over the “public option” in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.
Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.
Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.
Let’s talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.
First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the “magic of the marketplace” were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn’t happen.
To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third its growth over the previous 27 years.
Moreover, most of whatever gains ordinary Americans achieved came during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.
And then there’s the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s.
There’s a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came.
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. “We know now that it is bad economics.” And last year we learned that lesson all over again.
Or did we? The astonishing thing about the current political scene is the extent to which nothing has changed.
The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance — which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer.
But it’s much the same on other fronts. Efforts to strengthen bank regulation appear to be losing steam, as opponents of reform declare that more regulation would lead to less financial innovation — this just months after the wonders of innovation brought our financial system to the edge of collapse, a collapse that was averted only with huge infusions of taxpayer funds.
So why won’t these zombie ideas die?
Part of the answer is that there’s a lot of money behind them. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, I would add, his campaign contributions — “depend upon his not understanding it.” In particular, vast amounts of insurance industry money have been flowing to obstructionist Democrats like Mr. Nelson and Senator Max Baucus, whose Gang of Six negotiations have been a crucial roadblock to legislation.
But some of the blame also must rest with President Obama, who famously praised Reagan during the Democratic primary, and hasn’t used the bully pulpit to confront government-is-bad fundamentalism. That’s ironic, in a way, since a large part of what made Reagan so effective, for better or for worse, was the fact that he sought to change America’s thinking as well as its tax code.
How will this all work out? I don’t know. But it’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn."
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Time to Cut Through the Crap on Health Care Reform
"I said during the campaign that the best offense against lies is the truth," President Obama said. "And so all we can do is just keep on pushing the truth."
"Winning the election is just the start," he said. "Victory in an election wasn't the change that we sought."
While the White House insists Obama is still looking for Republican support for a comprehensive health care bill, Democrats privately are preparing a one-party push, which they feel is all but inevitable.
Polls show slippage in support for the president's approach, although respondents express even less confidence in Republicans' handling of health care.
"Winning the election is just the start," he said. "Victory in an election wasn't the change that we sought."
While the White House insists Obama is still looking for Republican support for a comprehensive health care bill, Democrats privately are preparing a one-party push, which they feel is all but inevitable.
Polls show slippage in support for the president's approach, although respondents express even less confidence in Republicans' handling of health care.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Barney Frank -- A Democrat With Balls
By Chip Berlet -- Researcher and Author covering civil rights and civil liberties.
Posted: August 19, 2009 10:22 PM
Barney Frank Slams LaRouchite Fascism at Healthcare Meeting
Right-wing demagogues have gotten a lot of mileage comparing universal health care to government “national socialism,” but when a woman castigating Congressman Barney Frank held up a sign comparing President Obama to Hitler, Frank did the right thing. The woman holding the LaRouchite manufactured sign -- depicting Obama with a cowlick and Hitler mustache -- confronted Frank by saying of Obama’s healthcare reform, “This policy is actually already on its way out. It already has been defeated by LaRouche. My question to you is, why do you continue to support a Nazi policy... as Obama has?"
But Barney Frank recognized the tiresome neofascist LaRouchite protestors for what they were. He glared at the LaRouchite and asked "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" He then turned serious. "You stand there with a picture of the President defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis," said Frank. "It is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated." Then, with his classic biting wit, Frank said: "Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table, I have no interest in doing it." See video here.
Right Wing hacks and demagogues immediately filled the Internet with denunciations of Frank for abusing a constituent. Congratulations. We await their apologies. Inadvertently, these pro-Republican stooges were siding with a racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic, neofascist cult. It is reminiscent of the Nazi rag Der Stürmer. See some images from Der Stürmer: here.
Are the LaRouchites really fascists? You bet.
Jewish organizations across the political spectrum have called LaRouche not only an anti-semite but also a “small-time Hitler.” The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) warned against ignoring the "infiltration by the neo-Nazi elements of Lyndon H. LaRouche," and worried that too often, especially in the media, "the LaRouchites" are "dismissed as kooks….In an age of ideology, in an age of totalitarianism, it will not suffice for a political party to be indifferent to and ignorant about such a movement," said Moynihan. Ironically, when the New York Times covered Moynihan's speech, they showed cowardice by repeatedly substituting the softer term "fascist" wherever Moynihan had said "nazi."
Dennis King’s book on the cult was titled Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. Read it online here.
I have written popular and scholarly studies identifying the LaRouchites as neofascists. You can find the details here.
So the Republican spinmeisters, right-wing radio and TV demagogues, and insurance company hacks have a tough decision. They can denounce the odious LaRouchite neofascists who have allied themselves with the right-wing populist protests against health care reform; or they can continue to lie in bed with these strange bedfellows who are heirs to Nazi propaganda techniques complete with the big lies, antisemitism, racism, and “vile, contemptible” claims.
Thanks Barney, for setting the record straight, as only a proud gay Jewish Democrat with an urban accent could. That's why he gets getting elected by a diverse constituency... he stands up, talks plain, and does the right thing. We could learn a lesson here.
Posted: August 19, 2009 10:22 PM
Barney Frank Slams LaRouchite Fascism at Healthcare Meeting
Right-wing demagogues have gotten a lot of mileage comparing universal health care to government “national socialism,” but when a woman castigating Congressman Barney Frank held up a sign comparing President Obama to Hitler, Frank did the right thing. The woman holding the LaRouchite manufactured sign -- depicting Obama with a cowlick and Hitler mustache -- confronted Frank by saying of Obama’s healthcare reform, “This policy is actually already on its way out. It already has been defeated by LaRouche. My question to you is, why do you continue to support a Nazi policy... as Obama has?"
But Barney Frank recognized the tiresome neofascist LaRouchite protestors for what they were. He glared at the LaRouchite and asked "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" He then turned serious. "You stand there with a picture of the President defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis," said Frank. "It is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated." Then, with his classic biting wit, Frank said: "Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table, I have no interest in doing it." See video here.
Right Wing hacks and demagogues immediately filled the Internet with denunciations of Frank for abusing a constituent. Congratulations. We await their apologies. Inadvertently, these pro-Republican stooges were siding with a racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic, neofascist cult. It is reminiscent of the Nazi rag Der Stürmer. See some images from Der Stürmer: here.
Are the LaRouchites really fascists? You bet.
Jewish organizations across the political spectrum have called LaRouche not only an anti-semite but also a “small-time Hitler.” The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) warned against ignoring the "infiltration by the neo-Nazi elements of Lyndon H. LaRouche," and worried that too often, especially in the media, "the LaRouchites" are "dismissed as kooks….In an age of ideology, in an age of totalitarianism, it will not suffice for a political party to be indifferent to and ignorant about such a movement," said Moynihan. Ironically, when the New York Times covered Moynihan's speech, they showed cowardice by repeatedly substituting the softer term "fascist" wherever Moynihan had said "nazi."
Dennis King’s book on the cult was titled Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. Read it online here.
I have written popular and scholarly studies identifying the LaRouchites as neofascists. You can find the details here.
So the Republican spinmeisters, right-wing radio and TV demagogues, and insurance company hacks have a tough decision. They can denounce the odious LaRouchite neofascists who have allied themselves with the right-wing populist protests against health care reform; or they can continue to lie in bed with these strange bedfellows who are heirs to Nazi propaganda techniques complete with the big lies, antisemitism, racism, and “vile, contemptible” claims.
Thanks Barney, for setting the record straight, as only a proud gay Jewish Democrat with an urban accent could. That's why he gets getting elected by a diverse constituency... he stands up, talks plain, and does the right thing. We could learn a lesson here.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Health Care Mobs are The Swift Boat Vets of 2009
Health Care Mobs = Swift Boat Vets. And the Press Plays Dumb Again
By Eric Boehlert -- Media Matters -- August 18, 2009
Here we go again.
During August's summer daze, right-wing mini-mobs (egged on by corporate interests) have run wild at town hall meetings, propagating all kinds of smears and misinformation in an effort to derail an important Democratic campaign. Yet the mini-mob members have been treated as deeply important newsmakers by the press during a slow summer news month.
Sound familiar? Recall August 2004, when the right-wing Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (egged on by corporate interests) stole a month's worth of campaign headlines by propagating all kinds of smears and misinformation in an attempt to derail an important Democratic campaign. Yet they were treated as deeply important newsmakers by the press during a slow summer news month.
Honestly, the only thing missing this time around is a crackpot, best-selling book. In 2004, the Swifties used the release of Unfit for Command to launch their media-based smear campaign. This summer, it could have been something like ObamaScare: How Liberal Health Care Will Destroy America. (The Swifties' right-wing publisher must be kicking itself over the missed marketing opportunity.)
But what has been perfectly consistent is the way the press has, again, fallen for a right-wing smear campaign and dressed it up as news. Just as with the Swifties, the press has turned over its summer coverage to a band of agitators spreading misinformation. Five summers ago, the Swift Boat Vets helped hijack the election. They lied about documents, they lied about eyewitness, and they lied about their partisan affiliations and connections. For several crucial weeks during the campaign, journalists turned away from the pile-up of Swift Boat falsehoods and contradictions, rarely daring to call the Swift Boat attack out for what it really was -- a hoax. Too spooked by the GOP Noise Machine and its charge of liberal media bias, the press propped up the Vets as serious men and showered them with attention.
This year, the press has handed over untold hours of free airtime to mini-mob members whose sole purpose seems to be to spread as much fear as possible. (The ones who show up toting guns and Nazi posters make that point rather emphatically.)
Fringe players on the right are making wild accusations that cannot be backed up by fact. The mainstream media response? We must cover the phenomenon daily, even hourly!
So, day after August day, these vacuous health care "debates" are aired on cable television, just as news consumers suffered through night after night of vacuous Swift Boat "debates" five summers ago. In both cases, the press for the most part handed in its referee's whistle and focused its attention on simply reporting the fact-free claims and then getting the Democratic response. (i.e. he said/she said.) It turns out journalists are petrified of calling out right-wing activists as liars, and the other side knows it.
What's amazing is that even a conservative Republican congressman has conceded that the mini-mobs (this summer's news superstars) appear to be completely detached from reality. "You cannot build a movement on something that is not credible,'' Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina told the Los Angeles Times after being confronted by belligerent, fact-free protesters who were convinced that as part of health care reform, children would soon be forced to receive swine flu vaccinations. "At town meetings, the hostility went straight through to hysteria,'' said Inglis.
The "town hells" are really just mob rule masquerading as a health care debate, masquerading as direct democracy. Sadly, the news media are hyping both phony story lines. The press is taking the fringe players seriously, even the ones who spend their free time drawing up Obama-is-Hitler posters.
The Wall Street Journal, describing a New Hampshire protester:
[She] held a sign with Mr. Obama's face superimposed on a Nazi storm trooper, a sign, she said, that was made by her chronically ill mother.
"Adolf Hitler was for exterminating the weak, not just the Jews and stuff, and socialism -- that's what's going to happen."
I'm sorry, but since when are these types of crackpot protesters taken seriously by the American media? I guess I must have missed all the prewar coverage in 2003 when reporters from elite newspapers such as the Journal patiently interviewed radical protesters who showed up outside presidential events with posters featuring Bush's face superimposed over a Nazi storm trooper. I must have missed it when the Journal quoted people at length about how Bush wanted to start killing -- "exterminating" -- Americans.
In 2003, those fringe players (understandably) couldn't get arrested by the press. But the mini-mobs today have been ushered onto the national stage and urged to express their hatred incessantly and preferably in front of television cameras. It's just like when the press showered the lying Swifties with all kinds of attention despite the fact that they could barely keep track of their own laundry list of lies.
Today, the press, for the most part, won't call out the mini-mob supporters as liars or point out that, at times, they are blindingly ignorant about the facts in play. (OK, let's stipulate that many media outlets did debunk Sarah Palin's loony "death panel" claim. But does the press really deserve a pat on the back for completing that obvious task? Isn't that like congratulating your 12-year-old for not wetting the bed at night?) Apparently, journalists feel most comfortable reporting on what the mini-mobs are saying and how they're making life politically uncomfortable for Democrats.
And so now extremists are the news. And no, it doesn't really matter if what they're yelling about bears little resemblance to reality. For instance, here is a random collection of recent mini-mob quotes. I'm pretty sure every journalist covering the issue of health care understands the claims are obviously false. But good luck finding examples of fact-checking context:
"[T]he bill is socialistic. ... If this bill passed, would my wife be alive today?"
"They're going to cut Medicare by half a trillion dollars."
"This is the Soviet Union, this is Maoist China. The people in this room want their country back."
"The government wants to control my body, my health care decisions and the doctors I see."
"It doesn't say in the Constitution, give out free health care to people, bail out the auto companies. ... George Washington is rolling over in his grave right now. This is not what the Constitution wrote."
"They're going to take over everything. It's socialism. I don't want some bureaucrat making health decisions for me and my family."
"We are so far removed from the philosophy of the Founding Fathers that if they were here today, we would be talking about one thing: How to get the government out of health care."
And remember the man at Sen. Arlen Specter's televised town hall meeting last week who ignored the forum's protocol (the first 30 people admitted were allowed to ask questions) and screamed that Specter was "trampling on our Constitution" as the crowd erupted. After security guards moved in, the man kept shouting and yelling about how Specter's office had lied about being allowed to ask a question at the forum. "One day, God is going to stand before you and he's going to judge you!" the main announced before storming out of the room.
That confrontation was looped endlessly on television.
But seriously, what kind of voter gets in the face of a 79-year-old U.S. senator and starts pointing his finger and screaming about Judgment Day because the guy's upset about the Q&A format at a town hall meeting? How did any part of the man's pointless tirade qualify as news?
Simple. He yelled! Just look at The New York Times' headline on its blog post about the same Specter town hall forum: "Eruptions at Sen. Specter's Town-Hall Meeting."
There were eruptions, and "questioners did not hide their anger," which meant -- of course -- it was news. (And naturally the man should be invited to rant more on TV.) More important, there were conservative eruptions. Because as a general rule for Beltway newsrooms, when conservatives get angry about public policy, it's news. When liberals get angry (think anti-war), it's annoying. (The Times, by the way, never reported whether any of the town hall claims that day were accurate or not. The paper simply repeated the claims as news.)
Like the Swifties and their fictitious allegations, the fact-free claims of the mini-mobs have been instantly embraced as significant and game-changing events. But what exactly were those "eruptions" about? At the highlighted Specter event, it turns out the "eruptions" and "anger" had very little to do with health care reform.
Here were some crowd highlights:
"I did not want to pay on a health care plan that includes the right for a woman to kill her unborn baby."
"The illegals. They shouldn't even be here. I would ask Congress to do something to send them home, so we don't have to deal with that."
"I don't want this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialized country."
"Senator, if you wish to be remembered in the Congress by the American people, when you get back there, sponsor legislation that requires every House and Senate bill to be written in a junior high school level."
"Would you go back to Washington and represent us first as an American and tell Mr. Obama he's an American, and if not, there's other countries."
"But what about this Guantánamo closure? I don't want these criminals to come over here into our area and then escape and we find that a bunch of innocent people have been murdered. And that's what's going to happen."
Reading those, I wonder if Democratic consultant James Carville was too polite when he told Good Morning America that the mini-mob members "don't even know what they're talking about."
But that didn't matter, because The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza announced that the Specter town hall event where the televised mini-mob fireworks exploded had become the iconic moment of the summer:
The back-and-forth between Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter and several attendees of a town hall meeting in Lebanon, Pa., this week may become the lasting political symbol of the summer of 2009: a politician and his constituents standing inches away from one another, angrily debating the merits (or lack thereof) of President Obama's health-care reform plan.
Debating the merits? Really? Because if somebody could point out to me in the transcript where any sustained, informed debate actually took place that day, I'd sure like to see it. To me, the event seemed more like a right-wing radio gabfest, with citizens spouting a collection of repetitive talking points.
It was just a tea party held indoors.
Did anything the Specter mini-mob said that day make sense? Was any of it connected to reality? The Post didn't care. It made great theater. It was news.
And like the 2004 Swift Boat offensive, the mini-mobs are just another right-wing hoax that's managed to fool the press.
By Eric Boehlert -- Media Matters -- August 18, 2009
Here we go again.
During August's summer daze, right-wing mini-mobs (egged on by corporate interests) have run wild at town hall meetings, propagating all kinds of smears and misinformation in an effort to derail an important Democratic campaign. Yet the mini-mob members have been treated as deeply important newsmakers by the press during a slow summer news month.
Sound familiar? Recall August 2004, when the right-wing Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (egged on by corporate interests) stole a month's worth of campaign headlines by propagating all kinds of smears and misinformation in an attempt to derail an important Democratic campaign. Yet they were treated as deeply important newsmakers by the press during a slow summer news month.
Honestly, the only thing missing this time around is a crackpot, best-selling book. In 2004, the Swifties used the release of Unfit for Command to launch their media-based smear campaign. This summer, it could have been something like ObamaScare: How Liberal Health Care Will Destroy America. (The Swifties' right-wing publisher must be kicking itself over the missed marketing opportunity.)
But what has been perfectly consistent is the way the press has, again, fallen for a right-wing smear campaign and dressed it up as news. Just as with the Swifties, the press has turned over its summer coverage to a band of agitators spreading misinformation. Five summers ago, the Swift Boat Vets helped hijack the election. They lied about documents, they lied about eyewitness, and they lied about their partisan affiliations and connections. For several crucial weeks during the campaign, journalists turned away from the pile-up of Swift Boat falsehoods and contradictions, rarely daring to call the Swift Boat attack out for what it really was -- a hoax. Too spooked by the GOP Noise Machine and its charge of liberal media bias, the press propped up the Vets as serious men and showered them with attention.
This year, the press has handed over untold hours of free airtime to mini-mob members whose sole purpose seems to be to spread as much fear as possible. (The ones who show up toting guns and Nazi posters make that point rather emphatically.)
Fringe players on the right are making wild accusations that cannot be backed up by fact. The mainstream media response? We must cover the phenomenon daily, even hourly!
So, day after August day, these vacuous health care "debates" are aired on cable television, just as news consumers suffered through night after night of vacuous Swift Boat "debates" five summers ago. In both cases, the press for the most part handed in its referee's whistle and focused its attention on simply reporting the fact-free claims and then getting the Democratic response. (i.e. he said/she said.) It turns out journalists are petrified of calling out right-wing activists as liars, and the other side knows it.
What's amazing is that even a conservative Republican congressman has conceded that the mini-mobs (this summer's news superstars) appear to be completely detached from reality. "You cannot build a movement on something that is not credible,'' Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina told the Los Angeles Times after being confronted by belligerent, fact-free protesters who were convinced that as part of health care reform, children would soon be forced to receive swine flu vaccinations. "At town meetings, the hostility went straight through to hysteria,'' said Inglis.
The "town hells" are really just mob rule masquerading as a health care debate, masquerading as direct democracy. Sadly, the news media are hyping both phony story lines. The press is taking the fringe players seriously, even the ones who spend their free time drawing up Obama-is-Hitler posters.
The Wall Street Journal, describing a New Hampshire protester:
[She] held a sign with Mr. Obama's face superimposed on a Nazi storm trooper, a sign, she said, that was made by her chronically ill mother.
"Adolf Hitler was for exterminating the weak, not just the Jews and stuff, and socialism -- that's what's going to happen."
I'm sorry, but since when are these types of crackpot protesters taken seriously by the American media? I guess I must have missed all the prewar coverage in 2003 when reporters from elite newspapers such as the Journal patiently interviewed radical protesters who showed up outside presidential events with posters featuring Bush's face superimposed over a Nazi storm trooper. I must have missed it when the Journal quoted people at length about how Bush wanted to start killing -- "exterminating" -- Americans.
In 2003, those fringe players (understandably) couldn't get arrested by the press. But the mini-mobs today have been ushered onto the national stage and urged to express their hatred incessantly and preferably in front of television cameras. It's just like when the press showered the lying Swifties with all kinds of attention despite the fact that they could barely keep track of their own laundry list of lies.
Today, the press, for the most part, won't call out the mini-mob supporters as liars or point out that, at times, they are blindingly ignorant about the facts in play. (OK, let's stipulate that many media outlets did debunk Sarah Palin's loony "death panel" claim. But does the press really deserve a pat on the back for completing that obvious task? Isn't that like congratulating your 12-year-old for not wetting the bed at night?) Apparently, journalists feel most comfortable reporting on what the mini-mobs are saying and how they're making life politically uncomfortable for Democrats.
And so now extremists are the news. And no, it doesn't really matter if what they're yelling about bears little resemblance to reality. For instance, here is a random collection of recent mini-mob quotes. I'm pretty sure every journalist covering the issue of health care understands the claims are obviously false. But good luck finding examples of fact-checking context:
"[T]he bill is socialistic. ... If this bill passed, would my wife be alive today?"
"They're going to cut Medicare by half a trillion dollars."
"This is the Soviet Union, this is Maoist China. The people in this room want their country back."
"The government wants to control my body, my health care decisions and the doctors I see."
"It doesn't say in the Constitution, give out free health care to people, bail out the auto companies. ... George Washington is rolling over in his grave right now. This is not what the Constitution wrote."
"They're going to take over everything. It's socialism. I don't want some bureaucrat making health decisions for me and my family."
"We are so far removed from the philosophy of the Founding Fathers that if they were here today, we would be talking about one thing: How to get the government out of health care."
And remember the man at Sen. Arlen Specter's televised town hall meeting last week who ignored the forum's protocol (the first 30 people admitted were allowed to ask questions) and screamed that Specter was "trampling on our Constitution" as the crowd erupted. After security guards moved in, the man kept shouting and yelling about how Specter's office had lied about being allowed to ask a question at the forum. "One day, God is going to stand before you and he's going to judge you!" the main announced before storming out of the room.
That confrontation was looped endlessly on television.
But seriously, what kind of voter gets in the face of a 79-year-old U.S. senator and starts pointing his finger and screaming about Judgment Day because the guy's upset about the Q&A format at a town hall meeting? How did any part of the man's pointless tirade qualify as news?
Simple. He yelled! Just look at The New York Times' headline on its blog post about the same Specter town hall forum: "Eruptions at Sen. Specter's Town-Hall Meeting."
There were eruptions, and "questioners did not hide their anger," which meant -- of course -- it was news. (And naturally the man should be invited to rant more on TV.) More important, there were conservative eruptions. Because as a general rule for Beltway newsrooms, when conservatives get angry about public policy, it's news. When liberals get angry (think anti-war), it's annoying. (The Times, by the way, never reported whether any of the town hall claims that day were accurate or not. The paper simply repeated the claims as news.)
Like the Swifties and their fictitious allegations, the fact-free claims of the mini-mobs have been instantly embraced as significant and game-changing events. But what exactly were those "eruptions" about? At the highlighted Specter event, it turns out the "eruptions" and "anger" had very little to do with health care reform.
Here were some crowd highlights:
"I did not want to pay on a health care plan that includes the right for a woman to kill her unborn baby."
"The illegals. They shouldn't even be here. I would ask Congress to do something to send them home, so we don't have to deal with that."
"I don't want this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialized country."
"Senator, if you wish to be remembered in the Congress by the American people, when you get back there, sponsor legislation that requires every House and Senate bill to be written in a junior high school level."
"Would you go back to Washington and represent us first as an American and tell Mr. Obama he's an American, and if not, there's other countries."
"But what about this Guantánamo closure? I don't want these criminals to come over here into our area and then escape and we find that a bunch of innocent people have been murdered. And that's what's going to happen."
Reading those, I wonder if Democratic consultant James Carville was too polite when he told Good Morning America that the mini-mob members "don't even know what they're talking about."
But that didn't matter, because The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza announced that the Specter town hall event where the televised mini-mob fireworks exploded had become the iconic moment of the summer:
The back-and-forth between Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter and several attendees of a town hall meeting in Lebanon, Pa., this week may become the lasting political symbol of the summer of 2009: a politician and his constituents standing inches away from one another, angrily debating the merits (or lack thereof) of President Obama's health-care reform plan.
Debating the merits? Really? Because if somebody could point out to me in the transcript where any sustained, informed debate actually took place that day, I'd sure like to see it. To me, the event seemed more like a right-wing radio gabfest, with citizens spouting a collection of repetitive talking points.
It was just a tea party held indoors.
Did anything the Specter mini-mob said that day make sense? Was any of it connected to reality? The Post didn't care. It made great theater. It was news.
And like the 2004 Swift Boat offensive, the mini-mobs are just another right-wing hoax that's managed to fool the press.
Conservatives Hate Blow Jobs
If I may quote the wise, insightful words of my dear Internet friend, Reaper:
"Oh, that's another thing the crazy Cons hate -- blow-jobs. Damn, if you Cons would of just left Bill alone, he may of had more time to get Osama Bin Laden. Thanks cons, for your pious disregard of freedom and your love of telling others what to do."
"Oh, that's another thing the crazy Cons hate -- blow-jobs. Damn, if you Cons would of just left Bill alone, he may of had more time to get Osama Bin Laden. Thanks cons, for your pious disregard of freedom and your love of telling others what to do."
Monday, August 17, 2009
Conservatives Hate Homos
Conservatives hate homos. That's why they talk about Barney Frank so much.
The Conservatives' favorite Democrat is Barney Frank. They mention him more than they do any other Democrat. They attack Barney Frank before they attack any other Democrat who takes the same positions he does. Why? Because Conservatives hate homos.
The Conservatives' favorite Democrat is Barney Frank. They mention him more than they do any other Democrat. They attack Barney Frank before they attack any other Democrat who takes the same positions he does. Why? Because Conservatives hate homos.
Conservatives Hate The Poor
My good friend Reaper sent me the following comment:
"Conservatives hate the poor -- and I know that hating the poor is mentioned in the Bible many times."
Right on, Reaper. Way to go! I couldn't have said it better myself.
"Conservatives hate the poor -- and I know that hating the poor is mentioned in the Bible many times."
Right on, Reaper. Way to go! I couldn't have said it better myself.
Right-Wing Nuts Are Going After Obama on Health Care the way Kenneth Starr went after Clinton on Oral Sex
President Obama is the Real Target of Health Care Protesters, Not Policy
By Mike Lupica -- New York Daily News
The woman went to an airplane hangar in Belgrade, Mont., the other day, prepared to actually listen to President Obama talk about health care reform in America. She has watched, the way the rest of us have watched, as the debate about health care has turned into a sideshow and in some cases even more of a freak show than Glenn Beck's. Now she wanted to see for herself, along with more than 1,000 others, if it would happen this way in Montana.
This is what she said about the event when it was over: "Yes, there were a few protesters en route. But the Montanans who were excited to hear the President far outnumbered the fringe groups." Then she said this about Obama: "He was smart, fair, funny."
So this wasn't an occasion when people with legitimate concerns and legitimate points to make were overwhelmed by the wing nuts and screamers who take their marching orders from right-wing radio and television and the Internet. Those idiots come to these town hall meetings more to be seen than heard, and think creating chaos makes them great Americans.
Those people have been convinced by the current culture that we are dying to hear from them, and the louder the better. People who think that all they need to star in their own reality series is a couple of TV crews. But then this is Twitter America now, where no thought is supposed to go unspoken.
We hear that all of this is democracy in action. It's not. It's boom-box democracy, people thinking that if they somehow make enough noise on this subject, they can make Obama into a one-term President.
The most violent opposition isn't directed at his ideas about health care reform. It is directed at him. It is about him. They couldn't make enough of a majority to beat the Harvard-educated black guy out of the White House, so they will beat him on an issue where they see him as being most vulnerable.
In the process, they'll come after him on health care the way Kenneth Starr went after Bill Clinton on oral sex in the Oval Office.
With that kind of zealotry, screaming about government programs as if Medicare isn't one. It is why so many of them, all these wild-eyed red faces in the crowd, look completely certifiable, screaming about how Obama wants to kill Grandma, as if he's suddenly turned into Jack Kevorkian.
And by the way, if Sarah Palin is involved - Palin as uninformed as ever about these so-called "death panels" - the debate just got dumber, if that's possible. No kidding. If foreign policy was a brain-buster for Palin, something as truly complex as health care will make her feel as dizzy as if she just rolled down a hill.
So much of this comes from people who get all their information from right-wing media, or their cheerleading from political has-beens like Betsy McCaughey, people who don't see this as a fight for better and more inclusive health care, but who now see it as something grander and more noble, a fight to reclaim America from Obama.
They couldn't win the fight last November, when he laid out John McCain and Palin and a whole party with one election, so they try to do it now, with lies and rather amazing distortions. They want everybody to believe that, if Obama gets his way, he'll eventually be in charge of insurance and doctors and whether you use CVS or Duane Reade. He's a Socialist selling socialized medicine. He'll kill Grandma. Come on. The notion that this is all honest dissent is just one more lie.
Even in Montana, the Swift Boaters who would line up against any health care plan endorsed by Barack Obama ran one television ad 115 times over a day and a half before the President arrived.
"Every time we are in sight of health insurance reform, the special interests fight back with everything they've got," the President said outside Bozeman. "They use their influence and run their ads. They use their political allies to scare the American people."
He is right about that. But the special interests aren't fighting the reform, in a system that cries out for reform, as much as they are fighting him. They see their first real good opening and they go for it.
They don't just want to hijack this debate, they want to hijack his presidency. The rest of it, about your coverage and everything else, is just the cover story.
By Mike Lupica -- New York Daily News
The woman went to an airplane hangar in Belgrade, Mont., the other day, prepared to actually listen to President Obama talk about health care reform in America. She has watched, the way the rest of us have watched, as the debate about health care has turned into a sideshow and in some cases even more of a freak show than Glenn Beck's. Now she wanted to see for herself, along with more than 1,000 others, if it would happen this way in Montana.
This is what she said about the event when it was over: "Yes, there were a few protesters en route. But the Montanans who were excited to hear the President far outnumbered the fringe groups." Then she said this about Obama: "He was smart, fair, funny."
So this wasn't an occasion when people with legitimate concerns and legitimate points to make were overwhelmed by the wing nuts and screamers who take their marching orders from right-wing radio and television and the Internet. Those idiots come to these town hall meetings more to be seen than heard, and think creating chaos makes them great Americans.
Those people have been convinced by the current culture that we are dying to hear from them, and the louder the better. People who think that all they need to star in their own reality series is a couple of TV crews. But then this is Twitter America now, where no thought is supposed to go unspoken.
We hear that all of this is democracy in action. It's not. It's boom-box democracy, people thinking that if they somehow make enough noise on this subject, they can make Obama into a one-term President.
The most violent opposition isn't directed at his ideas about health care reform. It is directed at him. It is about him. They couldn't make enough of a majority to beat the Harvard-educated black guy out of the White House, so they will beat him on an issue where they see him as being most vulnerable.
In the process, they'll come after him on health care the way Kenneth Starr went after Bill Clinton on oral sex in the Oval Office.
With that kind of zealotry, screaming about government programs as if Medicare isn't one. It is why so many of them, all these wild-eyed red faces in the crowd, look completely certifiable, screaming about how Obama wants to kill Grandma, as if he's suddenly turned into Jack Kevorkian.
And by the way, if Sarah Palin is involved - Palin as uninformed as ever about these so-called "death panels" - the debate just got dumber, if that's possible. No kidding. If foreign policy was a brain-buster for Palin, something as truly complex as health care will make her feel as dizzy as if she just rolled down a hill.
So much of this comes from people who get all their information from right-wing media, or their cheerleading from political has-beens like Betsy McCaughey, people who don't see this as a fight for better and more inclusive health care, but who now see it as something grander and more noble, a fight to reclaim America from Obama.
They couldn't win the fight last November, when he laid out John McCain and Palin and a whole party with one election, so they try to do it now, with lies and rather amazing distortions. They want everybody to believe that, if Obama gets his way, he'll eventually be in charge of insurance and doctors and whether you use CVS or Duane Reade. He's a Socialist selling socialized medicine. He'll kill Grandma. Come on. The notion that this is all honest dissent is just one more lie.
Even in Montana, the Swift Boaters who would line up against any health care plan endorsed by Barack Obama ran one television ad 115 times over a day and a half before the President arrived.
"Every time we are in sight of health insurance reform, the special interests fight back with everything they've got," the President said outside Bozeman. "They use their influence and run their ads. They use their political allies to scare the American people."
He is right about that. But the special interests aren't fighting the reform, in a system that cries out for reform, as much as they are fighting him. They see their first real good opening and they go for it.
They don't just want to hijack this debate, they want to hijack his presidency. The rest of it, about your coverage and everything else, is just the cover story.
Conservative Fear-Mongers Vs. The Facts About England's Health System
In Defense of Britain's Health System
By Ara Darzi and Tom Kibasi
Monday, August 17, 2009 - The Washington Post
LONDON -- When Britain's National Health Service (NHS) was created in 1948, its founder, the charismatic politician Aneurin Bevan, observed that it was "in place of fear." More than 60 years later, it is fear that dominates the discussion of the NHS in the U.S. debate about health-care reform.
The myth-making ranges from the misleading to the mendacious to the downright ludicrous. Bizarre allegations of "death panels" denying care to the elderly, doctors unable to make medical decisions and "socialized medicine" fill newspapers, airwaves and the blogosphere. These are, without exception, categorically untrue. When it comes to claims about the health of professor Stephen Hawking, not only have the arguments been distasteful, but those proposing them have been proved embarrassingly wrong.
Here are a few things Americans should know about the NHS:
Every Briton is registered with his or her own family doctor, whom they can see when they need -- without paying a fee. These doctors are independent contractors to the health service and are recognized and rewarded for quality in their compensation -- so they can focus on what works, not just what pays. Expanding on the facilities that are already in place, by next year every community in England will have a physician's office open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day of the year, and you can simply walk in and see a doctor, for free, regardless of whether you are registered.
In the unfortunate instance that a patient is diagnosed with a dire disease, such as cancer, it often takes only a week or two for a patient to be seen by all the right specialists, complete all the required diagnostic tests and be ready for surgery or other interventions. This rivals the best care in the United States or anywhere else in the world.
Under our NHS constitution, patients have a legal right to choice of provider. That means any provider -- public, private or not-for-profit. By April 2010 our NHS will be the first health system in the world to systematically measure and openly publish the quality of care achieved by every clinical department in every hospital. It means patients will be able to make meaningful, informed choices on what is best for them and their family. Some of this data is already published.
Many of the mischief-making rumors have focused on our National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the clinically led body, independent of government, that gives advice on the effectiveness of drugs and treatments. Call it fiscal conservatism or old-fashioned common sense, but we think you should pay only for what works. At the same time, it should be remembered that Britain's pharmaceutical industry is second only to the United States in its innovation and the significance of its discoveries. The NHS invents and delivers pioneering treatments, from the first clinical use of MRI in the 1960s to leading developments in robotically enabled scar-free surgery today.
Standing in defense of Britain's health service does not mean that we believe it is the right prescription for the United States. It is not for us to propose the solution for America, but we hope that correcting the record on some of the facts about our NHS will help Americans evaluate the real strengths and challenges of our system, instead of focusing on the misinformation spread by fear-mongers. Indeed, none of the proposals for reform -- from President Obama or anyone else -- would create a system that resembles that in Britain. What we share across the Atlantic are a set of common values: a belief that health care transcends the narrow confines of consumerism and is a moral right to be secured for all; and fidelity to the principle that a good society brings its citizens together in common purpose, where hope can overcome fear.
Fear is the weapon of choice for opponents of reform who have no substantive alternative to offer. America spends five times the share of its national wealth on health as Singapore, and yet life expectancy in each country is roughly the same. Even allowing for other factors, it is undeniable that the way a health system is organized and operated makes a difference. Americans fear that countries such as Britain and Canada ration care -- and that such rationing could and should never be tolerated in the United States. Yet 47 million uninsured is quite an extreme form of rationing. So at this moment, the burden of proof falls upon those who oppose change -- for they stand in defense of fear.
By Ara Darzi and Tom Kibasi
Monday, August 17, 2009 - The Washington Post
LONDON -- When Britain's National Health Service (NHS) was created in 1948, its founder, the charismatic politician Aneurin Bevan, observed that it was "in place of fear." More than 60 years later, it is fear that dominates the discussion of the NHS in the U.S. debate about health-care reform.
The myth-making ranges from the misleading to the mendacious to the downright ludicrous. Bizarre allegations of "death panels" denying care to the elderly, doctors unable to make medical decisions and "socialized medicine" fill newspapers, airwaves and the blogosphere. These are, without exception, categorically untrue. When it comes to claims about the health of professor Stephen Hawking, not only have the arguments been distasteful, but those proposing them have been proved embarrassingly wrong.
Here are a few things Americans should know about the NHS:
Every Briton is registered with his or her own family doctor, whom they can see when they need -- without paying a fee. These doctors are independent contractors to the health service and are recognized and rewarded for quality in their compensation -- so they can focus on what works, not just what pays. Expanding on the facilities that are already in place, by next year every community in England will have a physician's office open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day of the year, and you can simply walk in and see a doctor, for free, regardless of whether you are registered.
In the unfortunate instance that a patient is diagnosed with a dire disease, such as cancer, it often takes only a week or two for a patient to be seen by all the right specialists, complete all the required diagnostic tests and be ready for surgery or other interventions. This rivals the best care in the United States or anywhere else in the world.
Under our NHS constitution, patients have a legal right to choice of provider. That means any provider -- public, private or not-for-profit. By April 2010 our NHS will be the first health system in the world to systematically measure and openly publish the quality of care achieved by every clinical department in every hospital. It means patients will be able to make meaningful, informed choices on what is best for them and their family. Some of this data is already published.
Many of the mischief-making rumors have focused on our National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the clinically led body, independent of government, that gives advice on the effectiveness of drugs and treatments. Call it fiscal conservatism or old-fashioned common sense, but we think you should pay only for what works. At the same time, it should be remembered that Britain's pharmaceutical industry is second only to the United States in its innovation and the significance of its discoveries. The NHS invents and delivers pioneering treatments, from the first clinical use of MRI in the 1960s to leading developments in robotically enabled scar-free surgery today.
Standing in defense of Britain's health service does not mean that we believe it is the right prescription for the United States. It is not for us to propose the solution for America, but we hope that correcting the record on some of the facts about our NHS will help Americans evaluate the real strengths and challenges of our system, instead of focusing on the misinformation spread by fear-mongers. Indeed, none of the proposals for reform -- from President Obama or anyone else -- would create a system that resembles that in Britain. What we share across the Atlantic are a set of common values: a belief that health care transcends the narrow confines of consumerism and is a moral right to be secured for all; and fidelity to the principle that a good society brings its citizens together in common purpose, where hope can overcome fear.
Fear is the weapon of choice for opponents of reform who have no substantive alternative to offer. America spends five times the share of its national wealth on health as Singapore, and yet life expectancy in each country is roughly the same. Even allowing for other factors, it is undeniable that the way a health system is organized and operated makes a difference. Americans fear that countries such as Britain and Canada ration care -- and that such rationing could and should never be tolerated in the United States. Yet 47 million uninsured is quite an extreme form of rationing. So at this moment, the burden of proof falls upon those who oppose change -- for they stand in defense of fear.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Conservatives Have To Be Dishonest
Conservatives have to be dishonest because most of the things they stand for are bad for the vast majority of Americans. They keep trying to sell Americans on supporting policies that are not in Americans' best interests -- indeed, in our worst interests.
That's why Conservatives urge their followers to oppose Obama's Health Plan by inventing non-existent bogey-men like "Death Panels".
That's why they label as "Socialism" and "Communism" Obama's efforts to save our capitalist system from the destruction that Conservative policies almost created.
That's why Conservatives label as "No Child Left Behind" an education policy in which Every Child is left behind.
That's why they label as Clean Air programs every policy that furthers pollution and global warming, and befouls the air we breathe and the water we drink.
That's why they call themselves "Compassionate Conservatives" while they decimate every government program designed to help the poor, the old, the sick, the infirm, the young and the vulnerable.
If Conservatives were ever honest about what they stood for, and the effect of their policies on this country, they would be lucky to get 10% of the national vote. 10% is roughly the number of people who actually do benefit from Conservative policies.
That's why Conservatives urge their followers to oppose Obama's Health Plan by inventing non-existent bogey-men like "Death Panels".
That's why they label as "Socialism" and "Communism" Obama's efforts to save our capitalist system from the destruction that Conservative policies almost created.
That's why Conservatives label as "No Child Left Behind" an education policy in which Every Child is left behind.
That's why they label as Clean Air programs every policy that furthers pollution and global warming, and befouls the air we breathe and the water we drink.
That's why they call themselves "Compassionate Conservatives" while they decimate every government program designed to help the poor, the old, the sick, the infirm, the young and the vulnerable.
If Conservatives were ever honest about what they stood for, and the effect of their policies on this country, they would be lucky to get 10% of the national vote. 10% is roughly the number of people who actually do benefit from Conservative policies.
Conservatives are Dishonest
Obama Gets Personal at Town Hall
At a health-care town hall Saturday in Colorado, President Barack Obama got personal when he argued that those who argue his plan includes a push for euthanasia are "dishonest." "I just lost my grandmother last year, I know what it's like to watch somebody you love who's aging deteriorate, and have to struggle with that," Obama said. "So the notion that somehow I ran for public office, or members of Congress are in this, so they can go around pulling the plug on grandma? When you start making arguments like that, that's simply dishonest." Obama addressed the crowd of almost 2,000, pushing back on what he termed the "scare tactics" used by opponents. "For all the scare tactics out there, what is truly scary is if we do nothing," he said. Obama also addressed a few sharply-worded questions on the public option, though the crowd seemed largely supportive of the president.
Read it at The New York Times
At a health-care town hall Saturday in Colorado, President Barack Obama got personal when he argued that those who argue his plan includes a push for euthanasia are "dishonest." "I just lost my grandmother last year, I know what it's like to watch somebody you love who's aging deteriorate, and have to struggle with that," Obama said. "So the notion that somehow I ran for public office, or members of Congress are in this, so they can go around pulling the plug on grandma? When you start making arguments like that, that's simply dishonest." Obama addressed the crowd of almost 2,000, pushing back on what he termed the "scare tactics" used by opponents. "For all the scare tactics out there, what is truly scary is if we do nothing," he said. Obama also addressed a few sharply-worded questions on the public option, though the crowd seemed largely supportive of the president.
Read it at The New York Times
Conservatives Like to Censor Medical Information
Conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh are claiming that Obama's new Health Care bill creates "death panels". That is total nonsense.
What Obama's proposed legislation does provide is funding for end-of-life counseling so that people with terminal illnesses can consult with medical specialists and be advised as to what their choices are when they have incurable diseases.
Conservatives are against medical counseling and are trying to scare people into believing that providing information so that a patient and his family can make an informed decision and make proper legal and medical preparations in very difficult circumstances is the same thing as having a bureaucratic panel decide who shall live and who shall die, and when.
Once again, Conservatives are trying to censor medical information.
A similar thing happened during the Bush administration when Conservatives pushed through new regulations which removed funding for abortion counseling. Conservatives don't want women to be informed about the different medical ways in which they can end an unwanted pregnancy and they also don't want terminally ill patients to be informed about their life choices.
Conservatives are using false scare tactics to frighten folks into believing things that simply aren't so and to prevent them from learning important medical facts and information about their lives. Conservatives do not want the people to be informed.
What Obama's proposed legislation does provide is funding for end-of-life counseling so that people with terminal illnesses can consult with medical specialists and be advised as to what their choices are when they have incurable diseases.
Conservatives are against medical counseling and are trying to scare people into believing that providing information so that a patient and his family can make an informed decision and make proper legal and medical preparations in very difficult circumstances is the same thing as having a bureaucratic panel decide who shall live and who shall die, and when.
Once again, Conservatives are trying to censor medical information.
A similar thing happened during the Bush administration when Conservatives pushed through new regulations which removed funding for abortion counseling. Conservatives don't want women to be informed about the different medical ways in which they can end an unwanted pregnancy and they also don't want terminally ill patients to be informed about their life choices.
Conservatives are using false scare tactics to frighten folks into believing things that simply aren't so and to prevent them from learning important medical facts and information about their lives. Conservatives do not want the people to be informed.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Compassionate Conservative? Bull Poop!
The following is a posting that was placed on the Internet in the year 2001 after Bush and Cheney had been in the White House a little over a hundred days. It is well worth re-reading this posting today to remind everyone of the extraordinary damage Bush and Cheney did to this country right from the git-go -- in their First Hundred Days -- wreaking havoc that we feel more than ever today, as all the "Compassionate Conservative" chickens have come home to roost.
"Compassionate Conservative? Bull Poop!
The Cheney Administration and its little village idiot front man has had more than a hundred days now to prove their silly claim that they offered anything even remotely resembling "Compassionate Conservatism". Let's look at just what they have accomplished and see if any of it resembles being "compassionate" on any level.
The most obvious issue to begin with is the one trillion dollars plus that has been earmarked to pay back their wealthy campaign contributors (and was passed on 5/25/01 with the complicity of way too many slime balls in the Democratic Party). That's one trillion dollars for the top one percent of all Americans and three hundred million or so to be divided up by the other 99% (you and me).
On the regulatory front, they have barred enforcement of a regulation proposed and endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences that would have limited the amount of arsenic in your drinking water to ten parts per billion. Naturally, they did this because the vast majority of the arsenic that we now find in our water is being put there through the pesticide runoff and industrial pollution that their corporate owners are responsible for. Since keeping arsenic out of our water would have cut into their owner's profits, the choice was obvious; lots more cancer cases in children and the general population arising from arsenic but higher profits for Corporate America.
How about the withdrawal of the proposed rule to prohibit mining that would cause "substantial, irreparable harm" to communities or the environment?
How about stopping a rule from taking effect that would have saved literally millions of Americans from getting repetitive stress injuries on the job?
How about their effort to open 60 million acres of national forest to oil drilling, logging, and the building of new logging roads?
How about their decision to delay a rule that would have put a stop to HMOs releasing your personal health records to anyone willing to pay for your personal information?
How about their decision to stop a rule that would have barred industry from draining wetlands?
How about their decision to block a law that would have protected children and workers from lead paint poisoning?
How about their cutting $200 million from the successful program of block grants to states that helped pay for child care for low-income family's children? These funds were the basis for Cheney's secretary of human services, Tommy Thompson, successful efforts to get people off of welfare and into the work force without endangering their children. Thompson has often stated that his state's vast program worked only because child care was available to the workers.
How about their 18% cut in funds to states to investigate child abuse?
How about their cuts in federal funds that were used to train doctors who practice at children's hospitals?
How about the 100% cut in the "early learning fund" that Congress created to improve the quality of education and child care for pre-school children five years of age and lower?
How about their decision to end mandatory testing for salmonella in hamburger meat served to our children through the school lunch programs?
How about their Clinton-like waffling and then reversal on their promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, a little trick that humiliated their EPA chief, Christine Todd?
How about their plan to weaken clean air rules for coal fired power plants?
How about their decision to reduce anti-pollution standards for oil refiners?
How about their decision to allow river flows that harm the fish population and interrupt spawning activities?
How about their easily disprovable claim that they have increased discretionary spending in their budget while the reality is that, in constant dollars and allowing for inflation, there is actually a 4.7% decrease.
How about their specious claims of an 11% increase in education funds when the reality is that the majority of that increase was passed in Clinton's last budget and they have actually decreased funding for job training for displaced workers?
How about their decision to center the administration's "energy policy" around using more and more oil, coal, and nuclear resources and completely ignores any alternative energy sources and pretty much laughs at any form of real conservation programs?
How about the fact that their "energy policy" supports more nuclear power plants but offers no clue as to how the tons and tons of radioactive wastes will be safely disposed of?
How about the fact that all of the oil projected to be found in the Artic National Wildlife Reserve (regardless of the lies told to support this insanity) is only 3.2 billion barrels or barely enough to satisfy our thirst for oil for six months?
How about the fact that the huge tax cuts for the wealthy are fashioned on Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy in Texas during his last two years there and that the state of Texas is now facing a $700 million shortfall in providing the absolute minimum of services in that state (and absolute minimum in Texas means exactly that)?
How about their 36% cuts in federal funds for renewable sources of energy and for conservation programs?
How about their decision to destroy the historical and necessary wall between religion and government in their desire to use "Mainstream" churches to provide vital government assistance programs?
How about their fawning over such religious maniacs as Pat Robertson who demand that any church outside of their narrow minded version of "Mainstream" be barred from providing those services?
How about their mean spirited decision to ban aid to international family planning groups that promote, perform or even discuss abortions, meaning millions and millions more children born into abject poverty that will die of starvation or disease or war or any of the other myriad of deaths inflicted on the poorest on the planet? How about announcing the ban on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade?
How about wasting $2 billion for research into "clean coal" techniques rather than truly renewable sources?
How about undermining chemical plant safety rules?
How about barring project labor agreements that ensure union and worker rights in complex construction projects?
How about completely pulling the U.S. out of the Kyoto Protocol and abandoning the international global warning treaty on the basis of truly "fuzzy math" by conservative "scientists"?
How about signing into law a bankruptcy bill that force individuals to repay credit card debt ahead of paying child or spousal support?
How about refusing to control the interstate power prices, effectively allowing generation owners to gouge California and to force the state into a recession that will quickly be followed by the rest of the nation?
How about initiating the repeal of the contractor responsibility rule, which gave procurement officers the ability to refuse to enter into contracts with companies with a record of serious violations of laws protecting workers, the environment, consumers, tax laws and other regulations and laws?
How about threatening to close both the White House Civil Rights and AIDS offices?
How about delaying a proposal to expand public access to information regarding the risks and effects of chemical accidents?
How about their stated desire, at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec in April of 2001, to create a Free Trade Area spanning North, Central, and South America? How about their claim that this treaty will improve the lives of citizens from Alaska to Argentina while, at the exact same moment, police were arresting hundreds of individuals who were exercising their democratic right to protest and to demand that poverty be alleviated through any trade treaties?
How about the fact that only "Democratic" nations will supposedly be allowed into the Free Trade Area but Republicans are busy trying to pass a Congressional resolution that states that America is not a Democracy but is a Republic (this effort being proposed to somehow add legitimacy to the outright theft of the White House by Cheney and the village idiot)?
How about the wee, barely noted fact that the Cheney/Village Idiot Administration is considering repaying the illegal and immoral Supreme Court theft of the 2000 presidential election by naming Assistant US Attorney General Janet Rehnquist to the office of inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Resources, Eugene Scalia to Labor Department solicitor, and Virginia Thomas to a "top spot" at OMB? Do those names sound vaguely familiar? Janet is the daughter of Chief Justice Rehnquist, Eugene the son of Justice Antonin, and Virginia the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. As The Nation put it, it isn't really a political payoff as much as it's just affirmative action the Republican way.
How about the fact that Ted Olson, the attorney that "won" the Supreme Court case that illegally put Bush into the White House, has been appointed to the office of solicitor general? This office is responsible for determining which cases the government should appeal or which it should file amices curiae or "Friend of the Court" briefs? Another case of affirmative action, Republican style?
How about the fact that their efforts to repeal the estate tax will affect less than 2% of all Americans (the richest 2%)? Of course, one has to consider the fact that 14 of their 17 cabinet officials, as well as Bush and Cheney, qualify for this tax cut.
How about the fact that, at a "tax cut rally" sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers, actual working Americans refused to attend? The response from the association? They issued a memo to its members and supporters to "Dress Down" in order to appear to be "Real Worker[s]". They also planned to have hard hats for the attendees to wear during the "rally" to lend an aura of "reality".
How about the fact that their administration keeps spewing out the lie that the Social Security trust fund earns only 2% annual interest when the reality is that the fund's annual interest earnings are based on an enhanced version of the Treasury bond yields and have averaged 6.7% for the past few years?
How about their oft repeated lie that, "Last year, government spending shot up 8 percent ... That's far more than our economy grew"? How about the reality that the GDP grew 7.8% last year and the federal budget rose about 3.6%? In fact, in every single year since the moron's daddy was beaten by Clinton, the government's outlays have grown slower than the economy has. Federal spending for their information, has actually fallen from 22.2% of the GDP in 1992 to only 18% in 2001.
How about the fact that they are refusing to budget any funds to pay for the massive security demands at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, a venue that will offer terrorists (both foreign and domestic) ripe targets from "enemy" nations of all stripes?
How about the fact that their budget cuts funds for the EPA, the Interior Department and for enforcement of laws such as the Endangered Species Act?
Finally, how about the fact that we have a President so moronic that the New York Times felt it necessary to write an editorial that proclaimed that Bush "smarter than Saturday Night Live gives him credit for" and that actually commended him for taking the Presidency "seriously"? Has there ever before been a President whose "intellect" and ability to take the job "seriously" had to be defended in a major newspaper's editorial pages?
Okay, gentle readers, I'm tired and I'm REALLY depressed. I simply cannot list any more of this vile and mean spirited group of political criminal's anti-human activities. Obviously, the fact that the Democrats aren't screaming constantly and informing the American public about these acts are just more insults added to a growing list of injuries. In fact, the dweebs in the Democratic Party have exposed themselves to be the miserable little boot lickers that this space has always proclaimed them to be.
Never have so many done so little to avert so much evil while pointing their fingers at someone who had such a small role in the election of that evil."
"Compassionate Conservative? Bull Poop!
The Cheney Administration and its little village idiot front man has had more than a hundred days now to prove their silly claim that they offered anything even remotely resembling "Compassionate Conservatism". Let's look at just what they have accomplished and see if any of it resembles being "compassionate" on any level.
The most obvious issue to begin with is the one trillion dollars plus that has been earmarked to pay back their wealthy campaign contributors (and was passed on 5/25/01 with the complicity of way too many slime balls in the Democratic Party). That's one trillion dollars for the top one percent of all Americans and three hundred million or so to be divided up by the other 99% (you and me).
On the regulatory front, they have barred enforcement of a regulation proposed and endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences that would have limited the amount of arsenic in your drinking water to ten parts per billion. Naturally, they did this because the vast majority of the arsenic that we now find in our water is being put there through the pesticide runoff and industrial pollution that their corporate owners are responsible for. Since keeping arsenic out of our water would have cut into their owner's profits, the choice was obvious; lots more cancer cases in children and the general population arising from arsenic but higher profits for Corporate America.
How about the withdrawal of the proposed rule to prohibit mining that would cause "substantial, irreparable harm" to communities or the environment?
How about stopping a rule from taking effect that would have saved literally millions of Americans from getting repetitive stress injuries on the job?
How about their effort to open 60 million acres of national forest to oil drilling, logging, and the building of new logging roads?
How about their decision to delay a rule that would have put a stop to HMOs releasing your personal health records to anyone willing to pay for your personal information?
How about their decision to stop a rule that would have barred industry from draining wetlands?
How about their decision to block a law that would have protected children and workers from lead paint poisoning?
How about their cutting $200 million from the successful program of block grants to states that helped pay for child care for low-income family's children? These funds were the basis for Cheney's secretary of human services, Tommy Thompson, successful efforts to get people off of welfare and into the work force without endangering their children. Thompson has often stated that his state's vast program worked only because child care was available to the workers.
How about their 18% cut in funds to states to investigate child abuse?
How about their cuts in federal funds that were used to train doctors who practice at children's hospitals?
How about the 100% cut in the "early learning fund" that Congress created to improve the quality of education and child care for pre-school children five years of age and lower?
How about their decision to end mandatory testing for salmonella in hamburger meat served to our children through the school lunch programs?
How about their Clinton-like waffling and then reversal on their promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, a little trick that humiliated their EPA chief, Christine Todd?
How about their plan to weaken clean air rules for coal fired power plants?
How about their decision to reduce anti-pollution standards for oil refiners?
How about their decision to allow river flows that harm the fish population and interrupt spawning activities?
How about their easily disprovable claim that they have increased discretionary spending in their budget while the reality is that, in constant dollars and allowing for inflation, there is actually a 4.7% decrease.
How about their specious claims of an 11% increase in education funds when the reality is that the majority of that increase was passed in Clinton's last budget and they have actually decreased funding for job training for displaced workers?
How about their decision to center the administration's "energy policy" around using more and more oil, coal, and nuclear resources and completely ignores any alternative energy sources and pretty much laughs at any form of real conservation programs?
How about the fact that their "energy policy" supports more nuclear power plants but offers no clue as to how the tons and tons of radioactive wastes will be safely disposed of?
How about the fact that all of the oil projected to be found in the Artic National Wildlife Reserve (regardless of the lies told to support this insanity) is only 3.2 billion barrels or barely enough to satisfy our thirst for oil for six months?
How about the fact that the huge tax cuts for the wealthy are fashioned on Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy in Texas during his last two years there and that the state of Texas is now facing a $700 million shortfall in providing the absolute minimum of services in that state (and absolute minimum in Texas means exactly that)?
How about their 36% cuts in federal funds for renewable sources of energy and for conservation programs?
How about their decision to destroy the historical and necessary wall between religion and government in their desire to use "Mainstream" churches to provide vital government assistance programs?
How about their fawning over such religious maniacs as Pat Robertson who demand that any church outside of their narrow minded version of "Mainstream" be barred from providing those services?
How about their mean spirited decision to ban aid to international family planning groups that promote, perform or even discuss abortions, meaning millions and millions more children born into abject poverty that will die of starvation or disease or war or any of the other myriad of deaths inflicted on the poorest on the planet? How about announcing the ban on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade?
How about wasting $2 billion for research into "clean coal" techniques rather than truly renewable sources?
How about undermining chemical plant safety rules?
How about barring project labor agreements that ensure union and worker rights in complex construction projects?
How about completely pulling the U.S. out of the Kyoto Protocol and abandoning the international global warning treaty on the basis of truly "fuzzy math" by conservative "scientists"?
How about signing into law a bankruptcy bill that force individuals to repay credit card debt ahead of paying child or spousal support?
How about refusing to control the interstate power prices, effectively allowing generation owners to gouge California and to force the state into a recession that will quickly be followed by the rest of the nation?
How about initiating the repeal of the contractor responsibility rule, which gave procurement officers the ability to refuse to enter into contracts with companies with a record of serious violations of laws protecting workers, the environment, consumers, tax laws and other regulations and laws?
How about threatening to close both the White House Civil Rights and AIDS offices?
How about delaying a proposal to expand public access to information regarding the risks and effects of chemical accidents?
How about their stated desire, at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec in April of 2001, to create a Free Trade Area spanning North, Central, and South America? How about their claim that this treaty will improve the lives of citizens from Alaska to Argentina while, at the exact same moment, police were arresting hundreds of individuals who were exercising their democratic right to protest and to demand that poverty be alleviated through any trade treaties?
How about the fact that only "Democratic" nations will supposedly be allowed into the Free Trade Area but Republicans are busy trying to pass a Congressional resolution that states that America is not a Democracy but is a Republic (this effort being proposed to somehow add legitimacy to the outright theft of the White House by Cheney and the village idiot)?
How about the wee, barely noted fact that the Cheney/Village Idiot Administration is considering repaying the illegal and immoral Supreme Court theft of the 2000 presidential election by naming Assistant US Attorney General Janet Rehnquist to the office of inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Resources, Eugene Scalia to Labor Department solicitor, and Virginia Thomas to a "top spot" at OMB? Do those names sound vaguely familiar? Janet is the daughter of Chief Justice Rehnquist, Eugene the son of Justice Antonin, and Virginia the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. As The Nation put it, it isn't really a political payoff as much as it's just affirmative action the Republican way.
How about the fact that Ted Olson, the attorney that "won" the Supreme Court case that illegally put Bush into the White House, has been appointed to the office of solicitor general? This office is responsible for determining which cases the government should appeal or which it should file amices curiae or "Friend of the Court" briefs? Another case of affirmative action, Republican style?
How about the fact that their efforts to repeal the estate tax will affect less than 2% of all Americans (the richest 2%)? Of course, one has to consider the fact that 14 of their 17 cabinet officials, as well as Bush and Cheney, qualify for this tax cut.
How about the fact that, at a "tax cut rally" sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers, actual working Americans refused to attend? The response from the association? They issued a memo to its members and supporters to "Dress Down" in order to appear to be "Real Worker[s]". They also planned to have hard hats for the attendees to wear during the "rally" to lend an aura of "reality".
How about the fact that their administration keeps spewing out the lie that the Social Security trust fund earns only 2% annual interest when the reality is that the fund's annual interest earnings are based on an enhanced version of the Treasury bond yields and have averaged 6.7% for the past few years?
How about their oft repeated lie that, "Last year, government spending shot up 8 percent ... That's far more than our economy grew"? How about the reality that the GDP grew 7.8% last year and the federal budget rose about 3.6%? In fact, in every single year since the moron's daddy was beaten by Clinton, the government's outlays have grown slower than the economy has. Federal spending for their information, has actually fallen from 22.2% of the GDP in 1992 to only 18% in 2001.
How about the fact that they are refusing to budget any funds to pay for the massive security demands at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, a venue that will offer terrorists (both foreign and domestic) ripe targets from "enemy" nations of all stripes?
How about the fact that their budget cuts funds for the EPA, the Interior Department and for enforcement of laws such as the Endangered Species Act?
Finally, how about the fact that we have a President so moronic that the New York Times felt it necessary to write an editorial that proclaimed that Bush "smarter than Saturday Night Live gives him credit for" and that actually commended him for taking the Presidency "seriously"? Has there ever before been a President whose "intellect" and ability to take the job "seriously" had to be defended in a major newspaper's editorial pages?
Okay, gentle readers, I'm tired and I'm REALLY depressed. I simply cannot list any more of this vile and mean spirited group of political criminal's anti-human activities. Obviously, the fact that the Democrats aren't screaming constantly and informing the American public about these acts are just more insults added to a growing list of injuries. In fact, the dweebs in the Democratic Party have exposed themselves to be the miserable little boot lickers that this space has always proclaimed them to be.
Never have so many done so little to avert so much evil while pointing their fingers at someone who had such a small role in the election of that evil."
The Con Word
"Liberal" is an excellent word. It's certainly a much better word than "Conservative", especially in the "Con" word's current distortions. "The Con Word" has become very bad.
Sarah Palin's "Pants On Fire" Lies About "Death Panels"
Media Matters has Debunked The "Pants On Fire" Lies by Sarah Palin, Betsy McCaughey and other Right-Wing Pundits About the So-Called, Non-Existent "Death Panels" in Obama's Health Reform Plan:
"REPORT: The media have debunked the death panels -- more than 40 times over
Numerous media outlets have now debunked right-wing claims that the House health care reform bill would encourage euthanasia of the elderly, including Sarah Palin's claim -- forwarded by the conservative media -- that the bill would create a "death panel" and the related claim -- initiated by Betsy McCaughey -- that the bill would "absolutely require" that seniors on Medicare undergo end-of-life counseling "that will tell them how to end their life sooner." Indeed, Media Matters for America has identified more than 40 instances of media reporting that these claims are false.
40+ media reports debunking false claims of "death panels," euthanasia
PolitiFact says "death panel" claims are "pants on fire," "false." On August 10, PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times, wrote: "We've looked at the inflammatory claims that the health care bill encourages euthanasia. It doesn't. There's certainly no 'death board' that determines the worthiness of individuals to receive care. ... [Palin] said that the Democratic plan will ration care and 'my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of [President] Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care.' Palin's statement sounds more like a science fiction movie (Soylent Green, anyone?) than part of an actual bill before Congress. We rate her statement Pants on Fire!" Addressing a revised version of Palin's claim in a subsequent post, PolitiFact wrote on August 13: "The fact is that there is nothing in the health care bill that would require people to get the end-of-life counseling. Perhaps, as [The Washington Post's Charles] Lane - and by extension Palin - argues, patients might feel some subtle pressure from a doctor to get the counseling. But the patients make the call. That's the definition of voluntary." PolitiFact added: "We've said in our previous item that it was voluntary and we see nothing in Palin's argument that proves otherwise. And so we rule her claim False."
PolitiFact previously determined that McCaughey's claim was "a ridiculous falsehood." PolitiFact stated: "For our ruling on this one, there's really no gray area here. McCaughey incorrectly states that the bill would require Medicare patients to have these counseling sessions and she is suggesting that the government is somehow trying to interfere with a very personal decision. And her claim that the sessions would 'tell [seniors] how to end their life sooner' is an outright distortion. Rather, the sessions are an option for elderly patients who want to learn more about living wills, health care proxies and other forms of end-of-life planning." The article concluded: "McCaughey isn't just wrong, she's spreading a ridiculous falsehood. That's a Pants on Fire." [PolitiFact.com, 7/23/09]"
"REPORT: The media have debunked the death panels -- more than 40 times over
Numerous media outlets have now debunked right-wing claims that the House health care reform bill would encourage euthanasia of the elderly, including Sarah Palin's claim -- forwarded by the conservative media -- that the bill would create a "death panel" and the related claim -- initiated by Betsy McCaughey -- that the bill would "absolutely require" that seniors on Medicare undergo end-of-life counseling "that will tell them how to end their life sooner." Indeed, Media Matters for America has identified more than 40 instances of media reporting that these claims are false.
40+ media reports debunking false claims of "death panels," euthanasia
PolitiFact says "death panel" claims are "pants on fire," "false." On August 10, PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times, wrote: "We've looked at the inflammatory claims that the health care bill encourages euthanasia. It doesn't. There's certainly no 'death board' that determines the worthiness of individuals to receive care. ... [Palin] said that the Democratic plan will ration care and 'my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of [President] Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care.' Palin's statement sounds more like a science fiction movie (Soylent Green, anyone?) than part of an actual bill before Congress. We rate her statement Pants on Fire!" Addressing a revised version of Palin's claim in a subsequent post, PolitiFact wrote on August 13: "The fact is that there is nothing in the health care bill that would require people to get the end-of-life counseling. Perhaps, as [The Washington Post's Charles] Lane - and by extension Palin - argues, patients might feel some subtle pressure from a doctor to get the counseling. But the patients make the call. That's the definition of voluntary." PolitiFact added: "We've said in our previous item that it was voluntary and we see nothing in Palin's argument that proves otherwise. And so we rule her claim False."
PolitiFact previously determined that McCaughey's claim was "a ridiculous falsehood." PolitiFact stated: "For our ruling on this one, there's really no gray area here. McCaughey incorrectly states that the bill would require Medicare patients to have these counseling sessions and she is suggesting that the government is somehow trying to interfere with a very personal decision. And her claim that the sessions would 'tell [seniors] how to end their life sooner' is an outright distortion. Rather, the sessions are an option for elderly patients who want to learn more about living wills, health care proxies and other forms of end-of-life planning." The article concluded: "McCaughey isn't just wrong, she's spreading a ridiculous falsehood. That's a Pants on Fire." [PolitiFact.com, 7/23/09]"
Friday, August 14, 2009
Clarence Thomas, Judicial Disaster
The Biggest Loser
By Gregory Allen Howard | Posted March 13, 2009 10:30 AM
Not Sarah Palin. Not John McCain. Not the Republican Party.
No. The biggest loser was Clarence Thomas. Watch him as he sits but a few feet away from Barack Obama at the swearing in ceremony. Watch the furious, suppressed envy in his eyes. The hatred. The jealousy. In his small, simple brain he thinks: Him? That should be me taking the oath of office. I've done everything they wanted.
Before Barack Obama was elected President, the highest-ranking black person in the government was Justice Clarence Thomas. He knew it and acted thusly. The arrogant, wrinkled sneer of his lips said everything about him. Lifetime tenure on the highest court in the world. One of nine. He was a king, and he thought, eventually, the Civil Rights establishment would come and kiss his ring because he could never be eclipsed; no one would ever outrank him. There was but one little bitty problem with his grandiose scenario... Barack Obama.
Justice Thomas has created the Clarence Thomas Story--a narrative, equal parts facts and fiction, and full of anguished victimology. Born po', picked myself up, worked hard, overcame racism, lifted myself up to a college education, shocked to find I got into Yale Law under affirmative action, couldn't get a job after law school because no one believed my grades were earned, but continued to lift myself up working in government, and earned a seat on the Supreme Court. Bootstraps. Did it myself with no help from the dreaded preferences. Once on the court, I rail against those evil racial preferences, citing Booker T. Washington. Lift yourself up by your bootstraps. Don't be stigmatized. Look at me. I'm the paradigm. I did it!! And so on and so forth...
In an appearance at Saddleback Church with Pastor Rick Warren, Barack Obama pierced this largely fictional narrative by saying that Clarence Thomas was not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. Narrative up in flames--paper tiger, exposed. Not qualified. Obama did not mention his ideology. He did not have to. He compared Clarence to Justice Scalia, whom he completely disagreed with, but said Scalia was qualified to be on the court: Thomas was not. And make note, Barack Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review. He has been around brilliant jurists and lawyers his entire professional life.
Thomas has developed a brilliant and effective defense against the attacks on his right wing sellout ideology. "I have a different ideology. I don't have to subscribe to your (the Civil Rights Establishment) thinking. I think for myself." Blah, blah, blah.
"Not qualified."
It must have been like acid was poured on Thomas. And what was left exposed was that the emperor was not wearing any clothes at all. He was the ultimate bad affirmative action hire: no qualifications for the job, in over his head, and could not be fired. When George Bush One announced his appointment, he said, "Thomas is the most qualified man for this job." Huh? Let's take a look at this most qualified man and his "story."
Clarence attended Holy Cross in the sixties when Holy Cross, like other elite universities, was aggressively recruiting Black students. Yes, the tar baby of the right, Affirmative Action, is the reason this heretofore, 99% white elite Catholic University admitted Thomas. Further, Yale Law, where Thomas was accepted also was aggressively recruiting Black students in the sixties. Why? Because the Civil Rights Struggle moved them to inclusiveness; that same Civil Rights struggle that Clarence Thomas has repeated demeaned and belittled. Yes, this hypocrite owes his education at these elite institutions to Black people who got their heads cracked open and died.
First bootstrap pulling--the Civil Rights Movement.
In Clarence's narrative, he says he was "shocked" to find that he had been admitted under AA. He wasn't the least bit shocked. He knew. And once there, if he were "shocked," what stopped him from earning selection to the Yale Law Review? Surely that would have been a way to prove his worth everyone. No, he did not make Law Review. Surely, to prove his worth he finished 1st in his class, or won one of the moot court competitions. Surely, his legal writing was so brilliant that it was published in some other law journal somewhere. No. Surely there must have been something that this brilliant law student did to distinguish himself at Yale... No.
Contrast that to Barack Obama who became not just a member of the Harvard Law Review, but president, the first African American in history. See the difference.
The Clarence Thomas narrative turns into pure fiction after law school. Po' Clarence, one of a handful of black students from Yale Law School, supposedly could not get a job at any of the big law firms because they didn't believe he earned the grades he got at Yale. Oh really. Please note that not one of the other black students who graduated with Clarence has come forward to say that he or she could land the job of their choice after graduating from Yale. Not one.
So Clarence began his career in government working under Missouri Attorney General, John Danforth, the first of many appointments. After a brief stint in the private sector, he then came to Washington as a legislative assistant to now Senator Danforth. Another appointment. A few years later Clarence was appointed to head the EEOC, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, pushed by his sponsor, Senator Danforth. It was in this position that he harassed Anita Hill (one of them lying; guess who).
A few years later, after his right wing ideology had been fully on display at EEOC, and he had proved himself "brave" enough to condemn the Civil Rights Movement, he was rewarded with an appellate judgeship. Yet another appointment. He served there for approximately a year before being nominated to the Supreme Court.
Note, in that year on the appellate bench he never authored a single important opinion. Not one. There are now, and have always been, federal judges who are so brilliant that the Supreme Court cites them in their decisions. There are federal judges who fill up Law Journals, write landmark legal books, many of them legal scholars, moving the law with their brilliance. Not Clarence. No published writings. No books. Nothing. He wrote a couple of inconsequential opinions that no one cared to publish. He was in over his head on this appellate court. Not once, did anyone ever use the words "brilliant" and "Clarence Thomas" in the same sentence.
He would have stayed there and ended his life in mediocre obscurity, rocking back and forth in oral arguments, lost. But Thurgood Marshall died, and George Bush One was President. The circus that was his confirmation followed. The rest, as they say, is history.
If one looks at Clarence's career, it is mediocre by any measure: a few minor jobs in government, an important job, EEOC, which gave him a platform to exhibit his contempt for the very movement that created that position, a year on the appellate court dazzling no one, and then boom--appointed to the Supreme Court. Clarence did not pull himself up by his bootstraps; his sponsors did. He didn't earn anything. It was all given to him on account of his race/ideology.
If a white man with this meager background of minor government bureaucrat, an undistinguished lawyer, non-published legal writing, not a legal author, never even appeared in federal court, had been put up for the Supreme Court, there would have been outrage. Except that he was Black. The right wing proved once again by his appointment, that it cares nothing for qualification, only ideology. And Thomas learned early on that if he parroted right wing policy and condemned the very people and movement that provided him his opportunities, he would be rewarded handsomely. The pay for selling out your people is always good.
But, all the lying, the fiction, the selling out that Thomas used to gain this position has come to naught. Yes, he is still on the court, but his extremism has moved the other justices away from him. Even Scalia, no liberal, has derided Thomas's refusal to honor stare decesis. Clarence's law clerks are picked for him by a conservative legal foundation. They write his opinions for him; the few he is ever given to write that is. He's an embarrassment.
But fortunately, Thomas has been diminished, and rendered a nullity because another black man, elegant, brilliant, beautiful, a man who loves black people as much as Clarence hates them, leapfrogged over him. And this ascendancy by Barack Obama moved even Black Republicans to tears: Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and Juan Williams. Did anyone see Clarence cry?
And Thomas, angry, bitter and unqualified will have to look at this man who revealed him for the fraud that he is for the next 8 years. Once a year at the State of the Union, Thomas will sit just a few feet from Obama. He will have to watch him and listen to him, his eloquence, his command. That will be difficult for Clarence. It will be so painful that Thomas may actually implode; he may even explode. We could only hope...
Anyone who thinks that Thomas's envy and hatred is conjecture, or a mere fantasy, need only look at Clarence's December attempt to push one of those frivolous Obama citizenship cases on the Supreme Court docket. This is after Justice Souter had already turned it down. Yes, the Silent Justice, as he is called because he rarely opens his mouth during oral arguments, sprung to life on this one. He got excited about the chance to send Obama back to the Senate, vitiate a landslide election, and remain the black king in Washington. It didn't matter that every single court, in every jurisdiction, at every judicial level, had rejected these silly suits. What Clarence did by trying to get this foolishness docketed after another member of the Court turned it down, never, ever happens on the Court.
Clarence Thomas's frustration, anger, and bitterness, and jealousy had now bled into his not-so-nimble brain; it affected his already risible judgment. Can you imagine what that conference was like? Clarence had to look at Souter, liberal, but respected even by the right wing of the Court, who rejected this petition, and his fellow esteemed qualified jurists, and try to sell them on accepting this utterly frivolous petition. He only needed three other votes to put it on the docket. Trust me, no one in that room even flirted with the idea of accepting this petition. Those justices must have looked at Clarence with a combination of pity and disbelief. Or, maybe they looked at him more benevolently and thought: Clarence has become insane.
But he is not crazy, he's just... Clarence; Uncle Remus wearing a robe: an embittered, eclipsed, forgotten Negro-- outted by the most admired man in the world, the first African American President, a Black man who earned his way to the top, a self-made man, not an appointed man, who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and never forgot or rejected his people.
And Clarence Thomas? Once a footstool of the right wing, now just a footnote, He will be known now and forever for what he really is: The Unqualified Justice. Thank goodness Obama has pulled that robe off, and laid bare this pathetic little man who thought himself a king, but was and is, only a pawn. And Thomas knows only too well that the real king resides down the block.
By Gregory Allen Howard | Posted March 13, 2009 10:30 AM
Not Sarah Palin. Not John McCain. Not the Republican Party.
No. The biggest loser was Clarence Thomas. Watch him as he sits but a few feet away from Barack Obama at the swearing in ceremony. Watch the furious, suppressed envy in his eyes. The hatred. The jealousy. In his small, simple brain he thinks: Him? That should be me taking the oath of office. I've done everything they wanted.
Before Barack Obama was elected President, the highest-ranking black person in the government was Justice Clarence Thomas. He knew it and acted thusly. The arrogant, wrinkled sneer of his lips said everything about him. Lifetime tenure on the highest court in the world. One of nine. He was a king, and he thought, eventually, the Civil Rights establishment would come and kiss his ring because he could never be eclipsed; no one would ever outrank him. There was but one little bitty problem with his grandiose scenario... Barack Obama.
Justice Thomas has created the Clarence Thomas Story--a narrative, equal parts facts and fiction, and full of anguished victimology. Born po', picked myself up, worked hard, overcame racism, lifted myself up to a college education, shocked to find I got into Yale Law under affirmative action, couldn't get a job after law school because no one believed my grades were earned, but continued to lift myself up working in government, and earned a seat on the Supreme Court. Bootstraps. Did it myself with no help from the dreaded preferences. Once on the court, I rail against those evil racial preferences, citing Booker T. Washington. Lift yourself up by your bootstraps. Don't be stigmatized. Look at me. I'm the paradigm. I did it!! And so on and so forth...
In an appearance at Saddleback Church with Pastor Rick Warren, Barack Obama pierced this largely fictional narrative by saying that Clarence Thomas was not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. Narrative up in flames--paper tiger, exposed. Not qualified. Obama did not mention his ideology. He did not have to. He compared Clarence to Justice Scalia, whom he completely disagreed with, but said Scalia was qualified to be on the court: Thomas was not. And make note, Barack Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review. He has been around brilliant jurists and lawyers his entire professional life.
Thomas has developed a brilliant and effective defense against the attacks on his right wing sellout ideology. "I have a different ideology. I don't have to subscribe to your (the Civil Rights Establishment) thinking. I think for myself." Blah, blah, blah.
"Not qualified."
It must have been like acid was poured on Thomas. And what was left exposed was that the emperor was not wearing any clothes at all. He was the ultimate bad affirmative action hire: no qualifications for the job, in over his head, and could not be fired. When George Bush One announced his appointment, he said, "Thomas is the most qualified man for this job." Huh? Let's take a look at this most qualified man and his "story."
Clarence attended Holy Cross in the sixties when Holy Cross, like other elite universities, was aggressively recruiting Black students. Yes, the tar baby of the right, Affirmative Action, is the reason this heretofore, 99% white elite Catholic University admitted Thomas. Further, Yale Law, where Thomas was accepted also was aggressively recruiting Black students in the sixties. Why? Because the Civil Rights Struggle moved them to inclusiveness; that same Civil Rights struggle that Clarence Thomas has repeated demeaned and belittled. Yes, this hypocrite owes his education at these elite institutions to Black people who got their heads cracked open and died.
First bootstrap pulling--the Civil Rights Movement.
In Clarence's narrative, he says he was "shocked" to find that he had been admitted under AA. He wasn't the least bit shocked. He knew. And once there, if he were "shocked," what stopped him from earning selection to the Yale Law Review? Surely that would have been a way to prove his worth everyone. No, he did not make Law Review. Surely, to prove his worth he finished 1st in his class, or won one of the moot court competitions. Surely, his legal writing was so brilliant that it was published in some other law journal somewhere. No. Surely there must have been something that this brilliant law student did to distinguish himself at Yale... No.
Contrast that to Barack Obama who became not just a member of the Harvard Law Review, but president, the first African American in history. See the difference.
The Clarence Thomas narrative turns into pure fiction after law school. Po' Clarence, one of a handful of black students from Yale Law School, supposedly could not get a job at any of the big law firms because they didn't believe he earned the grades he got at Yale. Oh really. Please note that not one of the other black students who graduated with Clarence has come forward to say that he or she could land the job of their choice after graduating from Yale. Not one.
So Clarence began his career in government working under Missouri Attorney General, John Danforth, the first of many appointments. After a brief stint in the private sector, he then came to Washington as a legislative assistant to now Senator Danforth. Another appointment. A few years later Clarence was appointed to head the EEOC, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, pushed by his sponsor, Senator Danforth. It was in this position that he harassed Anita Hill (one of them lying; guess who).
A few years later, after his right wing ideology had been fully on display at EEOC, and he had proved himself "brave" enough to condemn the Civil Rights Movement, he was rewarded with an appellate judgeship. Yet another appointment. He served there for approximately a year before being nominated to the Supreme Court.
Note, in that year on the appellate bench he never authored a single important opinion. Not one. There are now, and have always been, federal judges who are so brilliant that the Supreme Court cites them in their decisions. There are federal judges who fill up Law Journals, write landmark legal books, many of them legal scholars, moving the law with their brilliance. Not Clarence. No published writings. No books. Nothing. He wrote a couple of inconsequential opinions that no one cared to publish. He was in over his head on this appellate court. Not once, did anyone ever use the words "brilliant" and "Clarence Thomas" in the same sentence.
He would have stayed there and ended his life in mediocre obscurity, rocking back and forth in oral arguments, lost. But Thurgood Marshall died, and George Bush One was President. The circus that was his confirmation followed. The rest, as they say, is history.
If one looks at Clarence's career, it is mediocre by any measure: a few minor jobs in government, an important job, EEOC, which gave him a platform to exhibit his contempt for the very movement that created that position, a year on the appellate court dazzling no one, and then boom--appointed to the Supreme Court. Clarence did not pull himself up by his bootstraps; his sponsors did. He didn't earn anything. It was all given to him on account of his race/ideology.
If a white man with this meager background of minor government bureaucrat, an undistinguished lawyer, non-published legal writing, not a legal author, never even appeared in federal court, had been put up for the Supreme Court, there would have been outrage. Except that he was Black. The right wing proved once again by his appointment, that it cares nothing for qualification, only ideology. And Thomas learned early on that if he parroted right wing policy and condemned the very people and movement that provided him his opportunities, he would be rewarded handsomely. The pay for selling out your people is always good.
But, all the lying, the fiction, the selling out that Thomas used to gain this position has come to naught. Yes, he is still on the court, but his extremism has moved the other justices away from him. Even Scalia, no liberal, has derided Thomas's refusal to honor stare decesis. Clarence's law clerks are picked for him by a conservative legal foundation. They write his opinions for him; the few he is ever given to write that is. He's an embarrassment.
But fortunately, Thomas has been diminished, and rendered a nullity because another black man, elegant, brilliant, beautiful, a man who loves black people as much as Clarence hates them, leapfrogged over him. And this ascendancy by Barack Obama moved even Black Republicans to tears: Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and Juan Williams. Did anyone see Clarence cry?
And Thomas, angry, bitter and unqualified will have to look at this man who revealed him for the fraud that he is for the next 8 years. Once a year at the State of the Union, Thomas will sit just a few feet from Obama. He will have to watch him and listen to him, his eloquence, his command. That will be difficult for Clarence. It will be so painful that Thomas may actually implode; he may even explode. We could only hope...
Anyone who thinks that Thomas's envy and hatred is conjecture, or a mere fantasy, need only look at Clarence's December attempt to push one of those frivolous Obama citizenship cases on the Supreme Court docket. This is after Justice Souter had already turned it down. Yes, the Silent Justice, as he is called because he rarely opens his mouth during oral arguments, sprung to life on this one. He got excited about the chance to send Obama back to the Senate, vitiate a landslide election, and remain the black king in Washington. It didn't matter that every single court, in every jurisdiction, at every judicial level, had rejected these silly suits. What Clarence did by trying to get this foolishness docketed after another member of the Court turned it down, never, ever happens on the Court.
Clarence Thomas's frustration, anger, and bitterness, and jealousy had now bled into his not-so-nimble brain; it affected his already risible judgment. Can you imagine what that conference was like? Clarence had to look at Souter, liberal, but respected even by the right wing of the Court, who rejected this petition, and his fellow esteemed qualified jurists, and try to sell them on accepting this utterly frivolous petition. He only needed three other votes to put it on the docket. Trust me, no one in that room even flirted with the idea of accepting this petition. Those justices must have looked at Clarence with a combination of pity and disbelief. Or, maybe they looked at him more benevolently and thought: Clarence has become insane.
But he is not crazy, he's just... Clarence; Uncle Remus wearing a robe: an embittered, eclipsed, forgotten Negro-- outted by the most admired man in the world, the first African American President, a Black man who earned his way to the top, a self-made man, not an appointed man, who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and never forgot or rejected his people.
And Clarence Thomas? Once a footstool of the right wing, now just a footnote, He will be known now and forever for what he really is: The Unqualified Justice. Thank goodness Obama has pulled that robe off, and laid bare this pathetic little man who thought himself a king, but was and is, only a pawn. And Thomas knows only too well that the real king resides down the block.
Paul Krugman Vs. Lying Republican Smear Merchants
Published on Friday, August 14, 2009 by The New York Times
Republican Death Trip
by Paul Krugman
“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.
Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.”
So, how’s it going?
Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.
This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.
Right now, the charge that’s gaining the most traction is the claim that health care reform will create “death panels” (in Sarah Palin’s words) that will shuffle the elderly and others off to an early grave. It’s a complete fabrication, of course. The provision requiring that Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling was introduced by Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican — yes, Republican — of Georgia, who says that it’s “nuts” to claim that it has anything to do with euthanasia.
And not long ago, some of the most enthusiastic peddlers of the euthanasia smear, including Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Mrs. Palin herself, were all for “advance directives” for medical care in the event that you are incapacitated or comatose. That’s exactly what was being proposed — and has now, in the face of all the hysteria, been dropped from the bill.
Yet the smear continues to spread. And as the example of Mr. Gingrich shows, it’s not a fringe phenomenon: Senior G.O.P. figures, including so-called moderates, have endorsed the lie.
Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is one of these supposed moderates. I’m not sure where his centrist reputation comes from — he did, after all, compare critics of the Bush tax cuts to Hitler. But in any case, his role in the health care debate has been flat-out despicable.
Last week, Mr. Grassley claimed that his colleague Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor wouldn’t have been treated properly in other countries because they prefer to “spend money on people who can contribute more to the economy.” This week, he told an audience that “you have every right to fear,” that we “should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”
Again, that’s what a supposedly centrist Republican, a member of the Gang of Six trying to devise a bipartisan health plan, sounds like.
So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.
The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.
So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.
What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.
What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.
So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell.
Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. Krugman was the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal, and his most recent, The Return of Depression Economics.
Republican Death Trip
by Paul Krugman
“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.
Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.”
So, how’s it going?
Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.
This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.
Right now, the charge that’s gaining the most traction is the claim that health care reform will create “death panels” (in Sarah Palin’s words) that will shuffle the elderly and others off to an early grave. It’s a complete fabrication, of course. The provision requiring that Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling was introduced by Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican — yes, Republican — of Georgia, who says that it’s “nuts” to claim that it has anything to do with euthanasia.
And not long ago, some of the most enthusiastic peddlers of the euthanasia smear, including Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Mrs. Palin herself, were all for “advance directives” for medical care in the event that you are incapacitated or comatose. That’s exactly what was being proposed — and has now, in the face of all the hysteria, been dropped from the bill.
Yet the smear continues to spread. And as the example of Mr. Gingrich shows, it’s not a fringe phenomenon: Senior G.O.P. figures, including so-called moderates, have endorsed the lie.
Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is one of these supposed moderates. I’m not sure where his centrist reputation comes from — he did, after all, compare critics of the Bush tax cuts to Hitler. But in any case, his role in the health care debate has been flat-out despicable.
Last week, Mr. Grassley claimed that his colleague Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor wouldn’t have been treated properly in other countries because they prefer to “spend money on people who can contribute more to the economy.” This week, he told an audience that “you have every right to fear,” that we “should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”
Again, that’s what a supposedly centrist Republican, a member of the Gang of Six trying to devise a bipartisan health plan, sounds like.
So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.
The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.
So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.
What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.
What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.
So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell.
Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. Krugman was the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal, and his most recent, The Return of Depression Economics.
"Obama is Going to be a Four Year President, Just Like Clinton."
One of my dear Conservative friends sent me the following comment:
"Obama is going to be a four year president, just like Clinton."
My dear Conservative friend, if Obama's "going to be a four year president, just like Clinton" -- then I guess Obama is going to be an eight-year president.
"Obama is going to be a four year president, just like Clinton."
My dear Conservative friend, if Obama's "going to be a four year president, just like Clinton" -- then I guess Obama is going to be an eight-year president.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
The Cowardly Cons
The Cowardly Cons are out in full force these days. They think that they're so macho, but they are quite the opposite. The Cowardly Cons are the ones who sent our troops into Iraq looking for non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, and falsely concocted non-existent connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Quaida, and between Saddam Hussein and 9-11.
Then, when the Iraq war was underway, the Cowardly Cons made sure there was no draft and that the USA had an all-volunteer army. Accordingly, this war was fought mostly by poor young American boys looking for a career or an education, not to get killed in an unprovoked war. The Cowardly Cons who sent these boys into war didn't have to worry. Their boys were not going to be drafted. Nor were they going to volunteer. How many members of the Bush administration had their sons serving in the military during the Iraq War?
By way of contrast, President Roosevelt's sons were in the military during World War II and they all had distinguished service records. That's a very key distinction between liberal leaders and Cowardly Cons.
Now, the Cowardly Cons are back again. First, they had their Tea Parties (which sounds like what they should be doing -- with crumpets) to protest against Obama's Stimulus Package, which is now starting to pull us out of the economic crisis that Obama inherited.
Next, they are boisterously protesting at Democratic Town Hall meetings, and disrupting them, in opposition to Obama's Medical Care proposals. These are the people who say they believe in "Free Speech", but only for their side. They believe in free speech if that means flooding the radio air waves with Right-Wing shills, flacks and propagandists -- Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck, Savage, Coulter, etc., ad nauseum. But not when it comes to hearing the other side.
As Nancy Pelosi said, there is indeed something "Un-American" about drowning out the opposition. Of course, the Cowardly Cons don't believe that they are "Un-American." However, they do continue to show their true color: Yellow.
Then, when the Iraq war was underway, the Cowardly Cons made sure there was no draft and that the USA had an all-volunteer army. Accordingly, this war was fought mostly by poor young American boys looking for a career or an education, not to get killed in an unprovoked war. The Cowardly Cons who sent these boys into war didn't have to worry. Their boys were not going to be drafted. Nor were they going to volunteer. How many members of the Bush administration had their sons serving in the military during the Iraq War?
By way of contrast, President Roosevelt's sons were in the military during World War II and they all had distinguished service records. That's a very key distinction between liberal leaders and Cowardly Cons.
Now, the Cowardly Cons are back again. First, they had their Tea Parties (which sounds like what they should be doing -- with crumpets) to protest against Obama's Stimulus Package, which is now starting to pull us out of the economic crisis that Obama inherited.
Next, they are boisterously protesting at Democratic Town Hall meetings, and disrupting them, in opposition to Obama's Medical Care proposals. These are the people who say they believe in "Free Speech", but only for their side. They believe in free speech if that means flooding the radio air waves with Right-Wing shills, flacks and propagandists -- Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck, Savage, Coulter, etc., ad nauseum. But not when it comes to hearing the other side.
As Nancy Pelosi said, there is indeed something "Un-American" about drowning out the opposition. Of course, the Cowardly Cons don't believe that they are "Un-American." However, they do continue to show their true color: Yellow.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Obama Wins By a Landslide in 2012
Obama's approval rating today is 54% -- higher than the percentage he received when he won the 2008 election. The stock market is rising and the post-Bush economic free-fall has ended. Obama's stimulus packages are working. Republicans are falling behind in all the fastest-growing demographics -- young people, Hispanics, Westerners. Judge Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed as a Justice of the Supreme Court despite recalcitrant GOP opposition. The GOP-organized disruption of Democratic Town Hall meetings is giving these Republican champions of "free speech" and the "marketplace of ideas" another black eye with the general public. Rush Limbaugh's comparing Obama's Health Plan to the Nazis doesn't lend much credibility to the GOP, either. The truth about Obama's Health Care Plan is starting to emerge and people are seeing the real benefits of his programs. Republican lies and scare tactics about euthenasia for the elderly and denial of medical treatments for younger people are being refuted. The denial of vital medical treatments by private insurance companies is a problem with the current system, which Obama's program is aiming to rectify. Obama's health care package will be enacted, and that will be another big victory for this administration. The difference between where our country stood when Obama took office in 2009 and where it will be by 2012, thanks to Obama's new policies, will give him a landslide re-election victory. He will have brought the USA back from the brink of destruction to a position of renewed power, health and prosperity.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
An Important Article About Health Care Reform
Salon - The Web - Tuesday, Aug 11, 2009
The "Death Panels" Are Already Here
Sorry, Sarah Palin -- Rationing of care? Private companies are already doing it, with sometimes fatal results
By Mike Madden -- Salon's Washington correspondent
"The future of healthcare in America, according to Sarah Palin, might look something like this: A sick 17-year-old girl needs a liver transplant. Doctors find an available organ, and they're ready to operate, but the bureaucracy -- or as Palin would put it, the "death panel" -- steps in and says it won't pay for the surgery. Despite protests from the girl's family and her doctors, the heartless hacks hold their ground for a critical 10 days. Eventually, under massive public pressure, they relent -- but the patient dies before the operation can proceed.
It certainly sounds scary enough to make you want to go show up at a town hall meeting and yell about how misguided President Obama's healthcare reform plans are. Except that's not the future of healthcare -- it's the present. Long before anyone started talking about government "death panels" or warning that Obama would have the government ration care, 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan, a leukemia patient from Glendale, Calif., died in December 2007, after her parents battled their insurance company, Cigna, over the surgery. Cigna initially refused to pay for it because the company's analysis showed Sarkisyan was already too sick from her leukemia; the liver transplant wouldn't have saved her life.
That kind of utilitarian rationing, of course, is exactly what Palin and other opponents of the healthcare reform proposals pending before Congress say they want to protect the country from. "Such a system is downright evil," Palin wrote, in the same message posted on Facebook where she raised the "death panel" specter. "Health care by definition involves life and death decisions."
Coverage of Palin's remarks, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's defense of them, over the weekend did point out that the idea that the reform plans would encourage government-sponsored euthanasia is one of a handful of deliberate falsehoods being peddled by opponents of the legislation. But the idea that only if reform passes would the government start setting up rationing and interfering with care goes beyond just the bogus euthanasia claim.
Opponents of reform often seem to skip right past any problems with the current system -- but it's rife with them. A study by the American Medical Association found the biggest insurance companies in the country denied between 2 and 5 percent of claims put in by doctors last year (though the AMA noted that not all the denials were improper). There is no national database of insurance claim denials, though, because private insurance companies aren't required to disclose such stats. Meanwhile, a House Energy and Commerce Committee report in June found that just three insurance companies kicked at least 20,000 people off their rolls between 2003 and 2007 for such reasons as typos on their application paperwork, a preexisting condition or a family member's medical history. People who buy insurance under individual policies, about 6 percent of adults, may be especially vulnerable, but the 63 percent of adults covered by employer-provided insurance aren't immune to difficulty.
"You're asking us to decide that the government is to be trusted," Gingrich -- who may, like Palin, be running for the GOP's presidential nomination in 2012 -- told ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday. But as even a quick glance through news coverage of the last few years shows, private insurers are already doing what reform opponents say they want to save us from. (The insurance industry, pushing back against charges that they're part of the problem, said last month that "healthcare reform is far too important to be dragged down by divisive political rhetoric." The industry has long maintained that its decisions on what to cover are the result of careful investigations of each claim.) Here is a look at a handful of healthcare horror stories, brought to you by the current system. It took Salon staff less than an hour to round these up -- which might indicate how many other such stories are out there.
-- In June 2008, Robin Beaton, a retired nurse from Waxahachie, Texas, found out she had breast cancer and needed a double mastectomy. Two days before her surgery, her insurance company, Blue Cross, flagged her chart and told the hospital they wouldn't allow the procedure to go forward until they finished an examination of five years of her medical history -- which could take three months. It turned out that a month before the cancer diagnosis, Beaton had gone to a dermatologist for acne treatment, and Blue Cross incorrectly interpreted a word on her chart to mean that the acne was precancerous.
Not long into the investigation, the insurer canceled her policy. Beaton, they said, had listed her weight incorrectly when she bought it, and had also failed to disclose that she'd once taken medicine for a heart condition -- which she hadn't been taking at the time she filled out the application. By October, thanks to an intervention from her member of Congress, Blue Cross reinstated Beaton's insurance coverage. But the tumor she had removed had grown 2 centimeters in the meantime, and she had to have her lymph nodes removed as well as her breasts amputated because of the delay.
-- In October 2008, Michael Napientak, a doorman from Clarendon Hills, Ill., went to the hospital for surgery to relieve agonizing back pain. His wife's employer's insurance provider, a subsidiary of UnitedHealthCare, had issued a pre-authorization for the operation. The operation went well. But in April, the insurer started sending notices that it wouldn't pay for the surgery, after all; the family, not the insurance provider, would be on the hook for the $148,000 the hospital charged for the procedure. Pre-authorization, the insurance company explained, didn't necessarily guarantee payment on a claim would be forthcoming. The company offered shifting explanations for why it wouldn't pay -- first, demanding proof that Napientak had tried less expensive measures to relieve his pain, and then, when he provided it, insisting that it lacked documentation for why the surgery was medically necessary. Napientak's wife, Sandie, asked her boss to help out, but with no luck. Fortunately for the Napientaks, they were able to attract the attention of a Chicago Tribune columnist before they had to figure out how to pay the six-figure bill -- once the newspaper started asking questions, the insurer suddenly decided, "based on additional information submitted," to cover the tab, after all.
-- David Denney was less than a year old when he was diagnosed in 1995 with glutaric acidemia Type 1, a rare blood disorder that left him severely brain damaged and unable to eat, walk or speak without assistance. For more than a decade, Blue Cross of California -- his parents' insurance company -- paid the $1,200 weekly cost to have a nurse care for him, giving him exercise and administering anti-seizure medication.
But in March 2006, Blue Cross told the Denney family their claims had exceeded the annual cost limit for his care. When they wrote back, objecting and pointing out that their annual limit was higher, the company changed its mind -- about the reason for the denial. The nurse's services weren't medically necessary, the insurers said. His family sued, and the case went to arbitration, as their policy allowed. California taxpayers, meanwhile, got stuck with the bill -- after years of paying their own premiums, the Denney family went on Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid system.
-- Patricia Reilling opened an art gallery in Louisville, Ky., in 1987, and three years later took out an insurance policy for herself and her employees. Her insurance provider, Anthem Health Plans of Kentucky, wrote to her this June, telling her it was canceling her coverage -- a few days after it sent her a different letter detailing the rates to renew for another year and billing her for July.
Reilling thinks she knows the reason for the cutoff, though -- she was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2008. That kicked off a year-long battle with Anthem. First the company refused to pay for an MRI to locate the tumors, saying her family medical history didn't indicate she was likely to have cancer. Eventually, it approved the MRI, but only after she'd undergone an additional, painful biopsy. Her doctor removed both of her breasts in April 2008. In December, she went in for reconstructive plastic surgery -- and contracted a case of MRSA, an invasive infection. In January of this year, Reilling underwent two more surgeries to deal with the MRSA infection, and she's likely to require another operation to help fix all the damage. The monthly bill for her prescription medicines -- which she says are mostly generics -- is $2,000; the doctors treating her for the MRSA infection want $280 for each appointment, now that she's lost her insurance coverage. When she appealed the decision to cancel her policy, asking if she could keep paying the premium and continue coverage until her current course of treatment ends, the insurers wrote back with yet another denial. But they did say they hoped her health improved."
And this is the system that Right-Wing Town Hall protesters are trying to maintain? Can it be that some of these protesters and disrupters are simply shills sent out into the streets by the insurance companies? Like the Brooks Brothers rioters in Florida in 2000 who disrupted the counting of votes in the Bush-Gore election?
The "Death Panels" Are Already Here
Sorry, Sarah Palin -- Rationing of care? Private companies are already doing it, with sometimes fatal results
By Mike Madden -- Salon's Washington correspondent
"The future of healthcare in America, according to Sarah Palin, might look something like this: A sick 17-year-old girl needs a liver transplant. Doctors find an available organ, and they're ready to operate, but the bureaucracy -- or as Palin would put it, the "death panel" -- steps in and says it won't pay for the surgery. Despite protests from the girl's family and her doctors, the heartless hacks hold their ground for a critical 10 days. Eventually, under massive public pressure, they relent -- but the patient dies before the operation can proceed.
It certainly sounds scary enough to make you want to go show up at a town hall meeting and yell about how misguided President Obama's healthcare reform plans are. Except that's not the future of healthcare -- it's the present. Long before anyone started talking about government "death panels" or warning that Obama would have the government ration care, 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan, a leukemia patient from Glendale, Calif., died in December 2007, after her parents battled their insurance company, Cigna, over the surgery. Cigna initially refused to pay for it because the company's analysis showed Sarkisyan was already too sick from her leukemia; the liver transplant wouldn't have saved her life.
That kind of utilitarian rationing, of course, is exactly what Palin and other opponents of the healthcare reform proposals pending before Congress say they want to protect the country from. "Such a system is downright evil," Palin wrote, in the same message posted on Facebook where she raised the "death panel" specter. "Health care by definition involves life and death decisions."
Coverage of Palin's remarks, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's defense of them, over the weekend did point out that the idea that the reform plans would encourage government-sponsored euthanasia is one of a handful of deliberate falsehoods being peddled by opponents of the legislation. But the idea that only if reform passes would the government start setting up rationing and interfering with care goes beyond just the bogus euthanasia claim.
Opponents of reform often seem to skip right past any problems with the current system -- but it's rife with them. A study by the American Medical Association found the biggest insurance companies in the country denied between 2 and 5 percent of claims put in by doctors last year (though the AMA noted that not all the denials were improper). There is no national database of insurance claim denials, though, because private insurance companies aren't required to disclose such stats. Meanwhile, a House Energy and Commerce Committee report in June found that just three insurance companies kicked at least 20,000 people off their rolls between 2003 and 2007 for such reasons as typos on their application paperwork, a preexisting condition or a family member's medical history. People who buy insurance under individual policies, about 6 percent of adults, may be especially vulnerable, but the 63 percent of adults covered by employer-provided insurance aren't immune to difficulty.
"You're asking us to decide that the government is to be trusted," Gingrich -- who may, like Palin, be running for the GOP's presidential nomination in 2012 -- told ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday. But as even a quick glance through news coverage of the last few years shows, private insurers are already doing what reform opponents say they want to save us from. (The insurance industry, pushing back against charges that they're part of the problem, said last month that "healthcare reform is far too important to be dragged down by divisive political rhetoric." The industry has long maintained that its decisions on what to cover are the result of careful investigations of each claim.) Here is a look at a handful of healthcare horror stories, brought to you by the current system. It took Salon staff less than an hour to round these up -- which might indicate how many other such stories are out there.
-- In June 2008, Robin Beaton, a retired nurse from Waxahachie, Texas, found out she had breast cancer and needed a double mastectomy. Two days before her surgery, her insurance company, Blue Cross, flagged her chart and told the hospital they wouldn't allow the procedure to go forward until they finished an examination of five years of her medical history -- which could take three months. It turned out that a month before the cancer diagnosis, Beaton had gone to a dermatologist for acne treatment, and Blue Cross incorrectly interpreted a word on her chart to mean that the acne was precancerous.
Not long into the investigation, the insurer canceled her policy. Beaton, they said, had listed her weight incorrectly when she bought it, and had also failed to disclose that she'd once taken medicine for a heart condition -- which she hadn't been taking at the time she filled out the application. By October, thanks to an intervention from her member of Congress, Blue Cross reinstated Beaton's insurance coverage. But the tumor she had removed had grown 2 centimeters in the meantime, and she had to have her lymph nodes removed as well as her breasts amputated because of the delay.
-- In October 2008, Michael Napientak, a doorman from Clarendon Hills, Ill., went to the hospital for surgery to relieve agonizing back pain. His wife's employer's insurance provider, a subsidiary of UnitedHealthCare, had issued a pre-authorization for the operation. The operation went well. But in April, the insurer started sending notices that it wouldn't pay for the surgery, after all; the family, not the insurance provider, would be on the hook for the $148,000 the hospital charged for the procedure. Pre-authorization, the insurance company explained, didn't necessarily guarantee payment on a claim would be forthcoming. The company offered shifting explanations for why it wouldn't pay -- first, demanding proof that Napientak had tried less expensive measures to relieve his pain, and then, when he provided it, insisting that it lacked documentation for why the surgery was medically necessary. Napientak's wife, Sandie, asked her boss to help out, but with no luck. Fortunately for the Napientaks, they were able to attract the attention of a Chicago Tribune columnist before they had to figure out how to pay the six-figure bill -- once the newspaper started asking questions, the insurer suddenly decided, "based on additional information submitted," to cover the tab, after all.
-- David Denney was less than a year old when he was diagnosed in 1995 with glutaric acidemia Type 1, a rare blood disorder that left him severely brain damaged and unable to eat, walk or speak without assistance. For more than a decade, Blue Cross of California -- his parents' insurance company -- paid the $1,200 weekly cost to have a nurse care for him, giving him exercise and administering anti-seizure medication.
But in March 2006, Blue Cross told the Denney family their claims had exceeded the annual cost limit for his care. When they wrote back, objecting and pointing out that their annual limit was higher, the company changed its mind -- about the reason for the denial. The nurse's services weren't medically necessary, the insurers said. His family sued, and the case went to arbitration, as their policy allowed. California taxpayers, meanwhile, got stuck with the bill -- after years of paying their own premiums, the Denney family went on Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid system.
-- Patricia Reilling opened an art gallery in Louisville, Ky., in 1987, and three years later took out an insurance policy for herself and her employees. Her insurance provider, Anthem Health Plans of Kentucky, wrote to her this June, telling her it was canceling her coverage -- a few days after it sent her a different letter detailing the rates to renew for another year and billing her for July.
Reilling thinks she knows the reason for the cutoff, though -- she was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2008. That kicked off a year-long battle with Anthem. First the company refused to pay for an MRI to locate the tumors, saying her family medical history didn't indicate she was likely to have cancer. Eventually, it approved the MRI, but only after she'd undergone an additional, painful biopsy. Her doctor removed both of her breasts in April 2008. In December, she went in for reconstructive plastic surgery -- and contracted a case of MRSA, an invasive infection. In January of this year, Reilling underwent two more surgeries to deal with the MRSA infection, and she's likely to require another operation to help fix all the damage. The monthly bill for her prescription medicines -- which she says are mostly generics -- is $2,000; the doctors treating her for the MRSA infection want $280 for each appointment, now that she's lost her insurance coverage. When she appealed the decision to cancel her policy, asking if she could keep paying the premium and continue coverage until her current course of treatment ends, the insurers wrote back with yet another denial. But they did say they hoped her health improved."
And this is the system that Right-Wing Town Hall protesters are trying to maintain? Can it be that some of these protesters and disrupters are simply shills sent out into the streets by the insurance companies? Like the Brooks Brothers rioters in Florida in 2000 who disrupted the counting of votes in the Bush-Gore election?
Monday, August 10, 2009
Warren Buffet Vs. Conservative Pinheads
Warren Buffet has all sorts of tax shelters, accountants, etc., who apply the law to reduce his actual tax bracket to 15%.
Buffet himself said he is in a much lower tax bracket than his own secretary.
Unfortunately, most Conservatives are total jerks who don't have a fingernail's worth of intelligence, and don't think the way Warren Buffet does.
Buffet is a financial genius. He knows what has to be done to keep the Golden Goose alive. Most Conservatives are blind, deaf and dumb, short-sighted pinheads who spend their every waking moment Killing the Golden Goose and wrecking the American economy.
35% is not a high tax bracket. Conservatives don't want to pay any taxes. They just want to watch the US economy die.
Buffet himself said he is in a much lower tax bracket than his own secretary.
Unfortunately, most Conservatives are total jerks who don't have a fingernail's worth of intelligence, and don't think the way Warren Buffet does.
Buffet is a financial genius. He knows what has to be done to keep the Golden Goose alive. Most Conservatives are blind, deaf and dumb, short-sighted pinheads who spend their every waking moment Killing the Golden Goose and wrecking the American economy.
35% is not a high tax bracket. Conservatives don't want to pay any taxes. They just want to watch the US economy die.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
The GOP Fossil
The Grand Old Party has become so Old that it has turned into a Fossil. Too Old and Too Tired.
David Sirota Sums It All Up: The Me-First-Screw-Everyone-Else Crowd
Here's a new article by David Sirota in today's Salon which says it all -- better than I ever could:
"The Me-First, Screw-Everyone-Else Crowd
Nothing will keep the rich from whining about how tough easy street is
By David Sirota
Aug. 8, 2009 | I know I should be mortified by the lobbyist-organized mobs of angry Brooks Brothers mannequins who are now making headlines by shutting down congressional town hall meetings. I know I should be despondent during this, the Khaki Pants Offensive in the Great American Healthcare and Tax War. And yet, I'm euphorically repeating one word over and over again with a big grin on my face.
Finally, there's no pretense. Finally, the me-first, screw-everyone-else crowd's ugliest traits are there for all to behold.
The group's core gripe is summarized in a letter I received that denounces a proposed surtax on the wealthy and corporations to pay for universal healthcare:
"Until recently, my family was in the top 3 percent of wage earners," the affluent businessperson fumed in response to my July column on taxes. "We are in the group that pays close to 60 percent of this nation's taxes ... Think for a second how you would feel if you built a business and contributed more than your share to this country only to be treated like a pariah."
This sob story about the persecuted rich fuels today's "tea parties" -- and I'm sure you've heard some version of it in your community.
I'm also fairly certain that when many of you run into the me-first, screw-everyone-else crowd, you don't feel like confronting the faux outrage. But on the off chance you do muster the masochistic impulse to engage, here's a guide to navigating the conversation:
What they will scream: We can't raise business taxes, because American businesses already pay excessively high taxes!
What you should say: Here's the smallest violin in the world playing for the businesses. The Government Accountability Office reports that most U.S. corporations pay zero federal income tax. Additionally, as even the Bush Treasury Department admitted, America's effective corporate tax rate is the third lowest in the industrialized world.
What they will scream: But the rich still "pay close to 60 percent of this nation's taxes!"
What you should say: Such statistics refer only to the federal income tax. When considering all of "this nation's taxes" including payroll, state and local levies, the top 5 percent pay just 38.5 percent of the taxes.
What they will scream: But 38.5 percent is disproportionately high! See? You've proved that the rich "contribute more than their share" of taxes!
What you should say: Actually, they are paying almost exactly "their share." According to the data, the wealthiest 5 percent of America pays 38.5 percent of the total taxes precisely because they make just about that share -- a whopping 36.5 percent! -- of total national income. Asking these folks to pay slightly more in taxes -- and still less than they did during the go-go 1990s -- is hardly extreme.
Stripped of facts, your conversation partner will soon turn to unscientific terrain, claiming it is immoral to "steal" and "redistribute" income via taxes. Of course, he will be specifically railing on "stealing" for stuff like healthcare, which he insists gets "redistributed" only to the undeserving and the "lazy" (a classic code word for "minorities"). But he will also say it’s OK that government sent trillions of dollars to Wall Streeters.
And that's when you should stop wasting your breath.
What you've discovered is that the me-first, screw-everyone-else crowd isn't interested in fairness, empiricism or morality.
With 22,000 of their fellow countrymen dying annually for lack of health insurance and with Warren Buffett paying a lower effective tax rate than his secretary, the me-first, screw-everyone-else crowd is merely using the argot of fairness, empiricism and morality to hide its real motive: selfish greed.
No argument, however rational, is going to cure these narcissists of that grotesque disease."
This is what the Conservative Tea Party Protesters, the Town Hall Disrupters, and the Limbaugh Dittoheads are all about.
"The Me-First, Screw-Everyone-Else Crowd
Nothing will keep the rich from whining about how tough easy street is
By David Sirota
Aug. 8, 2009 | I know I should be mortified by the lobbyist-organized mobs of angry Brooks Brothers mannequins who are now making headlines by shutting down congressional town hall meetings. I know I should be despondent during this, the Khaki Pants Offensive in the Great American Healthcare and Tax War. And yet, I'm euphorically repeating one word over and over again with a big grin on my face.
Finally, there's no pretense. Finally, the me-first, screw-everyone-else crowd's ugliest traits are there for all to behold.
The group's core gripe is summarized in a letter I received that denounces a proposed surtax on the wealthy and corporations to pay for universal healthcare:
"Until recently, my family was in the top 3 percent of wage earners," the affluent businessperson fumed in response to my July column on taxes. "We are in the group that pays close to 60 percent of this nation's taxes ... Think for a second how you would feel if you built a business and contributed more than your share to this country only to be treated like a pariah."
This sob story about the persecuted rich fuels today's "tea parties" -- and I'm sure you've heard some version of it in your community.
I'm also fairly certain that when many of you run into the me-first, screw-everyone-else crowd, you don't feel like confronting the faux outrage. But on the off chance you do muster the masochistic impulse to engage, here's a guide to navigating the conversation:
What they will scream: We can't raise business taxes, because American businesses already pay excessively high taxes!
What you should say: Here's the smallest violin in the world playing for the businesses. The Government Accountability Office reports that most U.S. corporations pay zero federal income tax. Additionally, as even the Bush Treasury Department admitted, America's effective corporate tax rate is the third lowest in the industrialized world.
What they will scream: But the rich still "pay close to 60 percent of this nation's taxes!"
What you should say: Such statistics refer only to the federal income tax. When considering all of "this nation's taxes" including payroll, state and local levies, the top 5 percent pay just 38.5 percent of the taxes.
What they will scream: But 38.5 percent is disproportionately high! See? You've proved that the rich "contribute more than their share" of taxes!
What you should say: Actually, they are paying almost exactly "their share." According to the data, the wealthiest 5 percent of America pays 38.5 percent of the total taxes precisely because they make just about that share -- a whopping 36.5 percent! -- of total national income. Asking these folks to pay slightly more in taxes -- and still less than they did during the go-go 1990s -- is hardly extreme.
Stripped of facts, your conversation partner will soon turn to unscientific terrain, claiming it is immoral to "steal" and "redistribute" income via taxes. Of course, he will be specifically railing on "stealing" for stuff like healthcare, which he insists gets "redistributed" only to the undeserving and the "lazy" (a classic code word for "minorities"). But he will also say it’s OK that government sent trillions of dollars to Wall Streeters.
And that's when you should stop wasting your breath.
What you've discovered is that the me-first, screw-everyone-else crowd isn't interested in fairness, empiricism or morality.
With 22,000 of their fellow countrymen dying annually for lack of health insurance and with Warren Buffett paying a lower effective tax rate than his secretary, the me-first, screw-everyone-else crowd is merely using the argot of fairness, empiricism and morality to hide its real motive: selfish greed.
No argument, however rational, is going to cure these narcissists of that grotesque disease."
This is what the Conservative Tea Party Protesters, the Town Hall Disrupters, and the Limbaugh Dittoheads are all about.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
A Muslim In a Christian Church
Barack Obama is the only Muslim I've ever heard of -- in the entire world -- who spent the past 20 years attending services in a Christian church.
"Birthers" Are Liars
One persistent myth perpetuated by the "Birthers" is that Obama's grandmother said that he was born in Kenya.
The fact is that, In an interview with a street preacher named Ron McRae, Sarah Obama, the second wife of the president's grandfather, did say she was there, in Kenya, for her grandson's birth.
Unfortunately for the Birthers, it was the result of a miscommunication and, as soon as McRae started pressing the issue, Obama's family realized what had happened and corrected him. Most Birthers simply ignore the corrections, excising them from audio and transcripts of the conversation posted online.
The relevant portion of the interview is as follows:
"MCRAE: Could I ask her about his actual birthplace? I would like to see his birthplace when I come to Kenya in December. Was she present when he was born in Kenya?
TRANSLATOR: Yes. She says, yes, she was, she was present when Obama was born.
MCRAE: When I come in December. I would like to come by the place, the hospital, where he was born. Could you tell me where he was born? Was he born in Mombasa?
TRANSLATOR: No, Obama was not born in Mombasa. He was born in America.
MCRAE: Whereabouts was he born? I thought he was born in Kenya.
TRANSLATOR: No, he was born in America, not in Mombasa.
MCRAE: Do you know where he was born? I thought he was born in Kenya. I was going to go by and see where he was born.
TRANSLATOR: Hawaii. Hawaii. Sir, she says he was born in Hawaii. In the state of Hawaii, where his father was also learning there. The state of Hawaii."
Clearly, McRae asked Obama's grandmother, through a translator: "Was she present when he was born in Kenya?" The grandmother answered: "yes, she was present when Obama was born".
But when McRae pressed the question as to where in Kenya Obama was born -- Mombasa? -- the grandmother immediately corrected McRae and said: "No ... he was born in America. He was born in Hawaii, in the state of Hawaii, where his father was also learning there. The state of Hawaii."
What phony charlatans the Birthers are to quote only the first sentence of the grandmother's response, and to omit her clarification which followed immediately. She answered "Yes" to the "When" part of the question but "No" to the "Where" portion.
Not to mention the announcements of Obama's birth in Honolulu newspapers the day after he was born. Those were official announcements placed in the newspapers by the Hawaii Department of Health, as is the Department's customary procedure -- not by friends or relatives.
The fact is that, In an interview with a street preacher named Ron McRae, Sarah Obama, the second wife of the president's grandfather, did say she was there, in Kenya, for her grandson's birth.
Unfortunately for the Birthers, it was the result of a miscommunication and, as soon as McRae started pressing the issue, Obama's family realized what had happened and corrected him. Most Birthers simply ignore the corrections, excising them from audio and transcripts of the conversation posted online.
The relevant portion of the interview is as follows:
"MCRAE: Could I ask her about his actual birthplace? I would like to see his birthplace when I come to Kenya in December. Was she present when he was born in Kenya?
TRANSLATOR: Yes. She says, yes, she was, she was present when Obama was born.
MCRAE: When I come in December. I would like to come by the place, the hospital, where he was born. Could you tell me where he was born? Was he born in Mombasa?
TRANSLATOR: No, Obama was not born in Mombasa. He was born in America.
MCRAE: Whereabouts was he born? I thought he was born in Kenya.
TRANSLATOR: No, he was born in America, not in Mombasa.
MCRAE: Do you know where he was born? I thought he was born in Kenya. I was going to go by and see where he was born.
TRANSLATOR: Hawaii. Hawaii. Sir, she says he was born in Hawaii. In the state of Hawaii, where his father was also learning there. The state of Hawaii."
Clearly, McRae asked Obama's grandmother, through a translator: "Was she present when he was born in Kenya?" The grandmother answered: "yes, she was present when Obama was born".
But when McRae pressed the question as to where in Kenya Obama was born -- Mombasa? -- the grandmother immediately corrected McRae and said: "No ... he was born in America. He was born in Hawaii, in the state of Hawaii, where his father was also learning there. The state of Hawaii."
What phony charlatans the Birthers are to quote only the first sentence of the grandmother's response, and to omit her clarification which followed immediately. She answered "Yes" to the "When" part of the question but "No" to the "Where" portion.
Not to mention the announcements of Obama's birth in Honolulu newspapers the day after he was born. Those were official announcements placed in the newspapers by the Hawaii Department of Health, as is the Department's customary procedure -- not by friends or relatives.
A Scoop -- You Heard It First Here at "Conservatives Are America's Real Terrorists"
It looks as though this Site has scooped the entire media world.
Below is a Comment I posted on August 4, 2009, the day that President Clinton freed two American journalists from a North Korean prison and flew them back home to freedom in the USA.
Below my Posting is an article dated August 7, 2009 by Joe Conason of Salon confirming everything I said on August 4, and backing it up with lots of Chapter and Verse:
1. CJP Posting on August 4, 2009:
"North Korean media say Kim Jong Il has pardoned two American journalists and ordered their release during former President Bill Clinton’s visit, AP reports.
Matt McKenna, spokesman for former President Bill Clinton, announced at 7:27 p.m. ET: 'President Clinton has safely left North Korea with Laura Ling and Euna Lee. They are en route to Los Angeles where Laura and Euna will be reunited with their families.' "
This is terrible news for Conservatives. The Cons will be sorely distressed that we did not nuke North Korea back into the Stone Ages before securing the release of these two American journalists.
What appeasement we were guilty of. What weakness shown by Obama. What secret deals we must have entered into.
Listen to Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Savage, Coulter, and the entire Right-Wing Media Klan tomorrow and you'll learn what an awful political disaster was committed by Obama and the Clintons. The secret hands of Jeremiah Wright, William Ayres and Professor Gates can clearly be seen in this back alley deal.
Today, Laura and Euna are free again. Tomorrow the Right-Wing Lunatic fringe takes to the airwaves again. Be sure to tune in to Fox News and all the other Far Right Crazies to get your red-hot serving of the latest Right-Wing Lunacy.
2. Excerpts from Joe Conason article in Salon on August 7, 2009:
"Here was an effort that exemplified the best of America -- a society that values the lives of its citizens enough to send a former head of state, with all the power of government behind him, to the aid of two women in distress. Here was a happy reunion, bringing wives home to their husbands and a mother back to her little girl, that surely uplifted the spirit of anyone who actually believes in family values. Here was a moment of pride and joy.
But not for Gordon Liddy, the demented felon and radio bigot who cackled about "Ling Ling and Wee Wee being locked up for nine hours in an airplane with Bill Clinton." Not for Rush Limbaugh, the obsessive guttersnipe who wondered aloud whether Clinton "hit on those two female journalists on the long flight home." Not for Andrea Peyser, the curdled tabloid columnist who insisted that "the whole shebang was nakedly scripted and staged as a device to help rehabilitate the image of former President Bill Clinton" (and who neglected to mention that Clinton did not speak to the eagerly waiting press corps and has given not a single interview on the North Korea mission). Not for Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who predictably seized on Clinton's mission as an opportunity for gratuitous and ugly insults to his wife, weirdly imagining that the prisoner release was "some clever North Korean revenge plot, giving the limelight to Daddy to punish Mommy."
Consider the reaction of the former president’s former advisor Dick Morris, who still pontificates on the Fox News Channel airwaves as a Clinton expert, although he hasn’t spoken with either of them for more than 10 years. Denouncing Clinton’s trip as "awful" and "ridiculous," he suggested with a sickening grin that Ling and Lee should instead have been left to "live with the consequences of their acts" -- essentially a death sentence in a hard labor camp. (Is that what any Fox commentator would say in the unlikely event that any of their colleagues had the guts to try to report on life in North Korea -- and got arrested?)
John Podhoretz didn’t go quite that far in Commentary, but he too felt deeply disturbed by Clinton’s achievement. As a "journalist" who spends most of his life watching television and eating ice cream, he felt moved to mock Ling and Lee for seeking to expose the dark side of the North Korean regime -- and to throw in a few bitter words about Al Gore for employing them at Current TV. If that sounds bizarre coming from a self-styled hard-liner, it is simply another symptom of the mental imbalance induced in some people by the sight of Clinton (and Gore).
Finally there are the "serious" commentators, most notably former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, the former diplomat best known for disdaining diplomacy and rattling the atomic saber until he was mercifully relieved of public responsibilities. In him the syndrome’s most noticeable effect is a severe case of amnesia. On the pages of the Washington Post, he complained that despite "decades of bipartisan U.S. rhetoric about not negotiating with terrorists for the release of hostages, it seems that the Obama administration not only chose to negotiate, but to send a former president to do so." Leaving aside the question of whether this situation in any way fits that description, Bolton has clearly forgotten the Iran-Contra affair, when his colleagues in the Reagan administration, all the way up to and including the president, negotiated with Iran’s leaders to release hostages in exchange for deadly missiles -- violating statute and policy. He also seems to have forgotten how he tried to help cover up that outrage as an assistant attorney general."
Three days later, and everything I Posted on August 4th is fully confirmed. These Right-Wing media flacks are so totally predictable, aren't they?
Below is a Comment I posted on August 4, 2009, the day that President Clinton freed two American journalists from a North Korean prison and flew them back home to freedom in the USA.
Below my Posting is an article dated August 7, 2009 by Joe Conason of Salon confirming everything I said on August 4, and backing it up with lots of Chapter and Verse:
1. CJP Posting on August 4, 2009:
"North Korean media say Kim Jong Il has pardoned two American journalists and ordered their release during former President Bill Clinton’s visit, AP reports.
Matt McKenna, spokesman for former President Bill Clinton, announced at 7:27 p.m. ET: 'President Clinton has safely left North Korea with Laura Ling and Euna Lee. They are en route to Los Angeles where Laura and Euna will be reunited with their families.' "
This is terrible news for Conservatives. The Cons will be sorely distressed that we did not nuke North Korea back into the Stone Ages before securing the release of these two American journalists.
What appeasement we were guilty of. What weakness shown by Obama. What secret deals we must have entered into.
Listen to Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Savage, Coulter, and the entire Right-Wing Media Klan tomorrow and you'll learn what an awful political disaster was committed by Obama and the Clintons. The secret hands of Jeremiah Wright, William Ayres and Professor Gates can clearly be seen in this back alley deal.
Today, Laura and Euna are free again. Tomorrow the Right-Wing Lunatic fringe takes to the airwaves again. Be sure to tune in to Fox News and all the other Far Right Crazies to get your red-hot serving of the latest Right-Wing Lunacy.
2. Excerpts from Joe Conason article in Salon on August 7, 2009:
"Here was an effort that exemplified the best of America -- a society that values the lives of its citizens enough to send a former head of state, with all the power of government behind him, to the aid of two women in distress. Here was a happy reunion, bringing wives home to their husbands and a mother back to her little girl, that surely uplifted the spirit of anyone who actually believes in family values. Here was a moment of pride and joy.
But not for Gordon Liddy, the demented felon and radio bigot who cackled about "Ling Ling and Wee Wee being locked up for nine hours in an airplane with Bill Clinton." Not for Rush Limbaugh, the obsessive guttersnipe who wondered aloud whether Clinton "hit on those two female journalists on the long flight home." Not for Andrea Peyser, the curdled tabloid columnist who insisted that "the whole shebang was nakedly scripted and staged as a device to help rehabilitate the image of former President Bill Clinton" (and who neglected to mention that Clinton did not speak to the eagerly waiting press corps and has given not a single interview on the North Korea mission). Not for Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who predictably seized on Clinton's mission as an opportunity for gratuitous and ugly insults to his wife, weirdly imagining that the prisoner release was "some clever North Korean revenge plot, giving the limelight to Daddy to punish Mommy."
Consider the reaction of the former president’s former advisor Dick Morris, who still pontificates on the Fox News Channel airwaves as a Clinton expert, although he hasn’t spoken with either of them for more than 10 years. Denouncing Clinton’s trip as "awful" and "ridiculous," he suggested with a sickening grin that Ling and Lee should instead have been left to "live with the consequences of their acts" -- essentially a death sentence in a hard labor camp. (Is that what any Fox commentator would say in the unlikely event that any of their colleagues had the guts to try to report on life in North Korea -- and got arrested?)
John Podhoretz didn’t go quite that far in Commentary, but he too felt deeply disturbed by Clinton’s achievement. As a "journalist" who spends most of his life watching television and eating ice cream, he felt moved to mock Ling and Lee for seeking to expose the dark side of the North Korean regime -- and to throw in a few bitter words about Al Gore for employing them at Current TV. If that sounds bizarre coming from a self-styled hard-liner, it is simply another symptom of the mental imbalance induced in some people by the sight of Clinton (and Gore).
Finally there are the "serious" commentators, most notably former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, the former diplomat best known for disdaining diplomacy and rattling the atomic saber until he was mercifully relieved of public responsibilities. In him the syndrome’s most noticeable effect is a severe case of amnesia. On the pages of the Washington Post, he complained that despite "decades of bipartisan U.S. rhetoric about not negotiating with terrorists for the release of hostages, it seems that the Obama administration not only chose to negotiate, but to send a former president to do so." Leaving aside the question of whether this situation in any way fits that description, Bolton has clearly forgotten the Iran-Contra affair, when his colleagues in the Reagan administration, all the way up to and including the president, negotiated with Iran’s leaders to release hostages in exchange for deadly missiles -- violating statute and policy. He also seems to have forgotten how he tried to help cover up that outrage as an assistant attorney general."
Three days later, and everything I Posted on August 4th is fully confirmed. These Right-Wing media flacks are so totally predictable, aren't they?
The Boston Police Report
That's a good police report, my Conservative friend. Thank you for sending it to me. I hadn't seen it before.
According to the police report, Sergeant Crowley acted very professionally. He has an exemplary record. I have a very high regard for this excellent police officer.
But Professor Gates is a fine man, too. According to the police report, he got a little too hot under the collar and flew off the handle without real provocation. I must admit that I haven't seen Professor Gates' statement as to why he got so incensed. Maybe he has a different version of what actually happened that day. I haven't seen his version of the facts.
However, we all have our bad hair days. These two guys have now talked things over, and I'm sure the situation between them has calmed down.
As for Obama, the question from the reporter specifically asked if he felt this incident reflected "racism" by the Boston police. Obama's response was that he didn't think it showed "racism", but rather that the Boston police had acted "stupidly". In saying that the Boston police had acted "stupidly", Obama was already trying to tone things down from the initial charge of "racism". Probably, he should have toned things down even further, particularly in light of the police report.
However, since then, Obama has retracted the word "stupidly", and he has taken a number of steps above and beyond what a typical American president would do to reconcile the two parties.
No one expected that the Right-Wing Attack Media would get its tits in a wringer over the word "stupidly", especially since Obama said it in virtually the same sentence in which he tried to tone down the rhetoric by saying he didn't think the Boston police were guilty of "racism" in this situation.
According to the police report, Sergeant Crowley acted very professionally. He has an exemplary record. I have a very high regard for this excellent police officer.
But Professor Gates is a fine man, too. According to the police report, he got a little too hot under the collar and flew off the handle without real provocation. I must admit that I haven't seen Professor Gates' statement as to why he got so incensed. Maybe he has a different version of what actually happened that day. I haven't seen his version of the facts.
However, we all have our bad hair days. These two guys have now talked things over, and I'm sure the situation between them has calmed down.
As for Obama, the question from the reporter specifically asked if he felt this incident reflected "racism" by the Boston police. Obama's response was that he didn't think it showed "racism", but rather that the Boston police had acted "stupidly". In saying that the Boston police had acted "stupidly", Obama was already trying to tone things down from the initial charge of "racism". Probably, he should have toned things down even further, particularly in light of the police report.
However, since then, Obama has retracted the word "stupidly", and he has taken a number of steps above and beyond what a typical American president would do to reconcile the two parties.
No one expected that the Right-Wing Attack Media would get its tits in a wringer over the word "stupidly", especially since Obama said it in virtually the same sentence in which he tried to tone down the rhetoric by saying he didn't think the Boston police were guilty of "racism" in this situation.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Why Didn't Obama Apologize to the Boston Police?
Obama did more than apologize. Right off the bat, he said that the police did not act like racists. He said they acted "stupidly". Later, he backed off that statement and said that "stupidly" was a poor choice of words. What he should have said was that the police could have handled the situation in a better way. If they had been more diplomatic, there probably would have been no confrontation and Professor Gates, a lame man who walks with a cane, would not have ended up hand-cuffed in his own home.
The woman who called the police was no racist. She never even mentioned the race or color of the two men trying to enter the house. She even went so far as to say that it may have been two men trying to get into their own home. The police should have been fully aware of this possibility, which the woman had specifically alerted them to, and should have approached a citizen in his own home a little more deferentially and not in a confrontational manner.
Obama went far beyond an apology. The president called Officer Crowley in Boston and had a very friendly phone conversation with him, culminating in his invitation to Officer Crowley and Professor Gates to come to the White House, enjoy a beer, and have a civil conversation together.
It was a misunderstanding that had gotten blown way out of proportion. Professor Gates and Officer Crowley had already started talking to each other in Boston and were overcoming their issues even before they went to the White House.
Obama reached out to bring these two men together, and even admitted that he had made a poor choice of words in his initial remarks. In this entire episode, Obama showed that he is a national healer and a conciliator.
Only the Right Wing Hate Media saw this as an opportunity to infuriate white folks and went on a vitriolic rampage against Obama. Obama brings people together. The Right Wing Media is the Great Divider. "Divide and Conquer" has long been their strategy. Today, however, that strategy seems to be backfiring on them. Most people, whites and non-whites, are sick of this Conservative game. We watch with disbelief as Conservatives continue to marginalize themselves.
The woman who called the police was no racist. She never even mentioned the race or color of the two men trying to enter the house. She even went so far as to say that it may have been two men trying to get into their own home. The police should have been fully aware of this possibility, which the woman had specifically alerted them to, and should have approached a citizen in his own home a little more deferentially and not in a confrontational manner.
Obama went far beyond an apology. The president called Officer Crowley in Boston and had a very friendly phone conversation with him, culminating in his invitation to Officer Crowley and Professor Gates to come to the White House, enjoy a beer, and have a civil conversation together.
It was a misunderstanding that had gotten blown way out of proportion. Professor Gates and Officer Crowley had already started talking to each other in Boston and were overcoming their issues even before they went to the White House.
Obama reached out to bring these two men together, and even admitted that he had made a poor choice of words in his initial remarks. In this entire episode, Obama showed that he is a national healer and a conciliator.
Only the Right Wing Hate Media saw this as an opportunity to infuriate white folks and went on a vitriolic rampage against Obama. Obama brings people together. The Right Wing Media is the Great Divider. "Divide and Conquer" has long been their strategy. Today, however, that strategy seems to be backfiring on them. Most people, whites and non-whites, are sick of this Conservative game. We watch with disbelief as Conservatives continue to marginalize themselves.
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