I have HCR hangover and we still have another bar to hit. The Stupak agreement is another example of Christian privilege that violates my religious rights and a woman’s right to her body. I hope that the price was enough and that we keep working on shaping the reform into what it should be including a viable Public Option that ends the monopoly practices of the health insurance industry.
CPAC? No thanks, I’m driving
Some kind of convention took place this weekend where a bunch of white men and women complained about the government without using facts and evidence to back up their claims. It was “find a scapegoat” weekend and they found plenty. It all reminded me of the KKK having a convention and sounded like one too. They also failed to admit that their political ideas screwed us all when they were in charge.
Speaking of the straw poll, Ron Paul won it. Seriously. Ron Paul crushed–absolutely crushed–all the other GOP big shots on the list except for Mitt Romney, who took a close second. Romney has a history of doing GOTV on big straw polls, but apparently he didn’t get an operation in gear to best Paul.
Paul’s victory said something about the event, and the type of people who attended it. CPAC was an exposition of ideology and conservative glee, not necessarily political prowess. Ron Paul will probably not be president in 2012; he seems to have no relationship with the tea partiers; he has ceded his conservative stardom to the likes of Sarah Palin.
So it’s questionable how much CPAC has to do with electoral reality–and even the realities of the conservative movement’s preferences.
The plea was made all the more effective by the intertwining of [Glenn] Beck’s own story of struggle and redemption Pointing to his time as a recovering alcoholic, the Fox News host urged the GOP to embark on a 12-step program of recovery. “Hello, my name is the Republican Party, and I got a problem. I’m addicted to spending and big government,” he declared, reading out the apology he wanted lawmakers to deliver. Reflecting on his own lack of formal education, he railed against government handouts – extending the logic to argue against a right to health care.
The crowd was enthralled, even as Beck took them down winding tales of Calvin Coolidge, the Statute of Liberty and the supposed great middle class explosion of the 1920s.
That is what drives me nuts. Whack jobs like Beck and the other speakers will never admit that the previous 8 years, when they had their way under Bush, screwed us all.
They still drink from the Kool-aid that small government and handouts to the rich works and millions of unemployed people with no homes show that it doesn’t.
The GOP in general believe that spending on war is good but spending to help people live is bad.
How fucked up is that?
I need to take a shower now to get the CPAC idiotic bigotry stank off me…
It is so obvious it makes me sick
Like dragging ones feet across the carpet on a cold dry day and then getting a jolt when touching anything, I get to a point where some things in life and the world become so obvious to me I wonder why it seems I am the only one who sees it and why can’t I get others to see it too. When others get that way they get ulcers or fly into a rage – me? I beat my head on a wall and write about it in my blog. Here is the latest obvious crap flaking my pie crust.
1. Where’s the change I voted for? It seems even with a new administration in Washington and the bullies out of power in Congress, we were to see actual real change. I’m still waiting. The Health Care reform debate is a prime example. It’s been obvious for years that we must end the monopoly by private insurance companies who profit from the pain and suffering of their customers. We don’t tolerate it for any other industry except health insurance.
Now it seems both spineless Democrats and the GOP bullies are planning a big wet kiss to the insurance companies along the same lines as we saw when the Medicare D pharmacy plan came out – huge payments to big insurance companies for crappy coverage for those least able to afford any medical bills in the first place. Can you say Donut hole?
Republicans have lied about the reform from the beginning – just plain lied – and our fourth estate and even Democrats just let them do it.
Here are the facts 40 MILLION people have NO insurance and approx 40,000 DIE each year because of having NO insurance.
What kind of human would allow that to happen? Republicans for one and Democrats who accept money from the insurance industry.
Polls show overwhelming public support for reform and a public option, yet some in Congress let the money do their thinking for them. SHAME ON THEM!!!!
2. Passing off “talking points” as news. What boils my blood almost as much as the GOP lies about health care reform that go unchallenged is the general incest that goes on within the Washington DC media complex.
We had an election in November and the Democrats won handy majorities in both houses and have the White House but you wouldn’t know it if you watch or read the mainstream media that comes out of DC.
It seems that the Sunday talk shows and political news in print supposedly needs to have a 1 to 1 “balance” of left and right views. While it seemed on some Sundays, former VP Dick Cheney, or for some odd reason, his daughter, was allowed to basically give a monologue about his version of events when he was President and approved of the criminal torturing of human beings among other GOP centric discussions.
Do you remember tug-of-wars from your childhood? I remember the adult in charge lining up us kids by height and then going down the line, alternating which team we would be on, to ensure that neither side was unfairly stacked. That notion of balancing the sides to make things fair has morphed in modern media to this simplistic binary equation of Republican vs. Democrat. But it’s a false equivalence, because it assumes a completely valid argument on both sides, and as we chronicle daily here at C&L, rarely do we see sensible, much less valid, arguments coming from the right to make the “balance” actually informative. Instead we get death panels, socialicommunistmarxism, concern trollism over deficit spending and the Olympic Games.
The point again is this assumes that both sides have equally valid arguments and in some cases, like the health care debate, this is not even close. The lies about death panels, lack of public support for a public option, and “socialized medicine” told by the right are lies. Lies are not valid arguments.
Only a few years ago if you dissented against the President your words were treasonous and you should be “sent to Gitmo” or worse, where regular people wearing T-shirts saying “Bush Sucks” were detained by police when they showed up to protest Bush in public. Since November if you bring a gun to an event the President is appearing, it’s called “free speech” and you want to “take back your country” from a black guy and his uppity ways.
It kind of has an Orwellian “doubleplusgood” ring to it all.
3 Finally, who the hell is Kim Kardashian? What has she done to merit any mention in the press? I had to look her up in Wikipedia and just as I guessed she is famous for no real reason. She didn’t land a plane in the Hudson, she didn’t cure a disease, and she doesn’t contribute to society in any memorable way.
If she was someone of substance I could see why she would be newsworthy but unless I missed her winning an Oscar recently then her celebrity worth is very small compared to the amount of press she gets.
I’m just fed up with narcissism being passed out as something important. I don’t care about her or any other “celebutante” and I’ll now have to spend time scrubbing the taint from this blog. UGH!
And THAT is this edition of my Obvious rant….
Defending government is easier today
The one thing about current political debate or any kind of debate is the need for “talking points”. These are buzzwords or short phrases that quickly make a point and say more than the number of words used. Usually the person or group who come up with the quickest talking points can frame the debate. It is kind of like a gun fight – the quickest draw wins. Some of my conservative friends have told me during the current health care reform debate that “Obamcare is socialized medicine” or “Medicare is clogged with waste and fraud”. I needed some place to go to rebut some of the classic “government is bad” arguments from the right and I think I found it.
Some years ago on an e-mail list I use to be on, a guy came on spouting Libertarian arguments hard and fast. Many times I didn’t have a quick way of refuting the classic arguments even though I knew he was wrong. Then I found the A Non-Libertarian FAQ which allowed me in some cases to cut and paste answers to his arguments like “Social Contract? I never signed no steenking social contract. ” etc….
With the right media bias currently, the political arguments today get framed by conservative talking heads with little to no counter arguments from people on the left side of the spectrum. Most times the host – like David Gregory of Meet the Press – just lets the conservative spew their talking points like it was a press conference rather than a political show.
I needed a place that had some good rebuttals I could use when I had my own debates with friends who like to parrot talk radio.
Government is Good is recent addition to my bookmarks as it offers a quick way to answer the arguments from the right about how bad government is. For example:
When the Republicans took over Congress in the mid-1990s, one of their first priorities was to “reform welfare” along these lines. In a landmark 1996 bill, welfare was declared to be no longer an entitlement, and strict time limits and work requirements were imposed on recipients – all designed to discourage people from staying on welfare and forcing them onto the job market. This legislation has come to be celebrated by conservatives as one of the most successful policies coming out of that period. They point out that between 1996 and 2003, the number of people on the welfare rolls dropped by over 60%.
This is pretty impressive. But unfortunately, the effect of this reduction of the welfare rolls on the poverty level was not what Republicans had predicted. If welfare was actually a major cause of persistent poverty, then we should have also seen a dramatic decrease in poverty as millions of people were forced off welfare and onto the job market. But this is precisely what did not happen. The poverty rate did not fall by 60% or 50%. Not even by 40% or 30%. Not by 20%, nor even by 10%. It fell by a measly 8% — from 13.7% to 12.5% from 1996 to 2003.
How can this be explained? It is simple. Conservatives were wrong about poverty being largely caused by government welfare programs. First, they ignored the fact that most poor people aren’t even on welfare – and that many of them work already. Second, as many scholars of poverty have pointed out, the major causes of poverty in this country are mostly in the economic system. Most people are poor for two reasons: (1) there is a chronic lack of jobs, and (2) many low-level jobs pay wages below the poverty level.
So if you are looking for some backup in your own debates with people who claim government is bad for us then check out the website.
Don’t believe the Republican view on health care reform
Republicans are all a gasp about President Obama and the Democrats plan to reform health care in this country. They claim that the Democrats want to take over the industry and get between the person and their Doctor. Once again the truth is totally different than the Republican talking points.
Anyone of us “regular people” who don’t have our own tax payer supported health plan – like the members of Congress – know that there is someone who stands between us and the Doctor now. We call them the insurance company. It was set rules on what is or isn’t covered and specific rules to follow or you won’t have something covered.
Insurance companies don’t want you to use your plan and make it as hard as possible to do so. They make a profit off your premiums but not if they have to pay out money – so they nickle and dime you. The most recent health care product is called the “Consumer Directed Health Plan”. Basically the there are little rules on coverage but you are forced to pay a $1500 to $4000 deductible upfront before the plan pays anything. If you are a healthy person then you get a nice suprise should you ever need to use your CDH plan.
Then there are plans where they have something called “managed care” where they won’t pay for something unless you have tried something else that is less expensive.
Basically most private insurance companies are not your friends and never will be. They like their profit too much. They will be working with their friends in the Republican party to make Obama’s health care reform seem as scary as possible.
The fact is our health care system is broken and needs to be fixed so that more people are covered and a majority of Americans feel the same way.
85% of Americans support “fundamental changes” to or a “complete rebuild” of the health care system. 64% believe the government should guarantee insurance for all Americans and 72% think the government should offer a public option styled after Medicare to compete with private insurers.