Is This Really All They Can Come Up With?

The Heritage Foundation has produced a "fact sheet" to summarize why they oppose Obama's health care reform. After reading it, I take heart: Is this really all the mighty Heritage Foundation could muster? It is so easy to debunk their assertions, that I feel like it's not even a fair fight. Let's begin...

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The Heritage Foundation has the following objections to the health care reform plan that is slowly emerging from Congress:

It Undermines Parental Authority
This is a such a fuzzy accusation that it is impossible to refute. The so-called fact sheet does nothing to enlighten us as to what exactly "undermines parental authority" and a search of the bill for the word parent does not return any hits that show how this statement is true.

It Puts Federal Bureaucrats in Control of Health Care Decisions
For the last time, this is not true. Even if it were true, it would put "federal bureaucrats" in control of health decisions only for those people who would opt into the public option. As things stand, we are not even sure (unfortunately) that a public option is going to be a part of any bill produced by Congress. Those who prefer to keep their health insurance would have the choice to continue to let INSURANCE BUREAUCRATS make health care decisions for them. (And I am still waiting for a libertarian or a conservative to explain to me how decisions made by a private bureaucrat are better than those made by any other bureaucrats.)

It Shackles Families with Unknown Costs
Under this heading, Heritage makes the following assertion: "President Obama promised American families that under his health plan the average family would save $2,500. But independent analysis shows that less than 11 percent of American families would actually see that level of savings with the reforms proposed by the Administration." (Emphasis added.)

The only independent analysis that I know of to make that assertion is the Lewin Group. How independent is the Lewin Group? Well, not so much, it turns out. NPR reported that "the Lewin Group, [is] a number-crunching consulting group owned by Ingenix, which is a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group." [NPR, All Things Considered, 6/10/09]

This is the same Lewin Group according to which "103 million people would
choose a public health insurance option," killing the health insurance industry as we know it. But the estimates of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office paint a much different picture (PDF), so a grain of salt is needed when considering anything coming from the Lewin Group.

Additionally, the Heritage Foundation "fact sheet" tells people that they should be concerned about health care reform for the following reasons:

It Dumps Families into a Government-Run Health Plan
As a matter of fact, it does not. People would have a choice to keep their existing private coverage, and the Lewin Group's assumption that the proposed health care legislation would cause over 100 million people to choose a public health option appears to have been greatly exaggerated (see previous point.)

It Makes Bureaucrats Moral Decision-makers
According to the Heritage Foundation, "the Obama health agenda would hand the moral compass over to anonymous bureaucrats to decide what questionable health benefits the government plan will cover. Taxpayer-funded abortions are just one of many potential problems."

What a load of bull. All you need to do is watch Sicko, read Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business--and Bad Medicine, or follow this link (and all the other links you find once you get there) to realize that the danger that the risk of "the government deciding what questionable health benefits the government plan will cover" may be greatly overstated compared to the non-questionable benefits that health insurance board routinely decide to deny.

As for the risk that taxpayer-funded abortion may be allowed, I have six words for you: "taxpayer-funded illegal wars" and "Hyde Amendment". Conservatives don't seem to ever have a problem with the former, while conveniently forgetting that the latter bans public funds from being used to pay for abortions, as has been the case for the last 32 years.

It Disregards Conscience Options for Patients and Providers
How? Again, the Heritage Foundation stays conveniently fuzzy on this issue. They throw catchwords around, and hide their hand.

They do say this about this subject:

Families need to be able to vote with their feet when it comes to abortion and other sensitive health care issues. They need the freedom to choose doctors and health plans that reflect their values. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals need protections of their right of conscience so they can practice according to their convictions respecting life. Religious doctors, nurses, and hospitals are the front lines in providing the care families need, particularly in low-income and rural areas.

If the market is truly as wonderful as libertarian think-tanks like Cato and conservative ones like the Heritage Foundation tell us, can you not envision a world in which all godless, abortion-supporting and abortion-seeking liberals will flock to the public option, and where Christocrats and free-market supporters will flock to the many health insurance plans that will no doubt spring up, full of all the exclusions for stem-cell research, no abortion coverage, and a "no blood transfusion" provision that evangelicals and Jehova's Witnesses love?

Conservatives and god-fearing people out there, let's make a deal: as long as I have to pay for your kids' public education (which you despise), even though I have no kids of my own, and as long as I have to pay for the wars you endorse, even though I loathe them, you will have to pay for elective abortions. After all, why should the concern that "[f]amilies need to be able to vote with their feet when it comes to abortion and other sensitive health care issues" be valid only as far as abortion goes, and not for those ideas that progressive taxpayers are burdened with by the likes of you?

There is one, at last, one thing that I agree with in the Heritage Foundation's "fact sheet". We should "demand sound financing" as they suggest. That is a responsible, adult request. I do wish, though, that we could demand sound financing for military enterprises, for bailing out financial institutions, and for all those things that many conservatives are most often reliably silent about. You might even say that they really don't give a hoot about sound financing, except when it threatens their interests.

An Injection of Sense in the Abortion v Health Care Reform Debate

As a companion piece to my previous post, I offer this one, which I just read on the Guttmacher Institute website:

Health Care Reform is good news for the unborn

Not enough attention is being brought to the fact that, currently, uninsured women procure abortions at a disproportionally high rate. It's easy to see why. The woman who doesn't have health insurance has to fully pay for the hight cost of pre-natal and pediatric care and would actually realize a financial gain if she chose to abort.

To restate: Uninsured women are being subsidized to abort their children. Women who have a choice about health care options are more likely to bring their pregnancies to term.

You may argue that repealing the Hyde Amendment would be 'pro-abortion'. Perhaps you're right, but it could never be as pro-abortion as poverty is. If you really care about the well being of the very young you should be doing everything you can to advance Health Care Reform.

Paul Bradford

Pro-Life Catholics for Choice

Now, that is a refreshing, inspiring, and intelligent way to push the need for health care reform with those who are usually duped by wolves in Christian clothing.

Some Arguments Just Cannot Be Won

As the debate on health care reform rages, plenty of self-anointed Christians leaders are trying to convince their flock to oppose reform on the grounds that it would provide that public funds can be used to support access to abortions.

Take for instance our old, easy target: Douglas Groothuis. In a recent post entitled Reform That Should Revolt You, Groothuis tries to scare his Christian readers into mobilizing against reform:

Charles Colson writes a powerful piece today about the health care "reform" bill that would undermine religious liberty, individual liberty, endanger hospitals and doctors who do not perform abortions, and would require your tax dollars to support abortion on demand. This is now illegal under the Hyde Amendment. (Emphasis added.)

Facts are rarely a hindrance to Dr. Groothuis when he concocts his feverish and apocalyptic fantasies of what liberals are up to destroy the lives of the unborn (and, by the extension, to speed the downward spiral of our society). So when one of his readers commented that "[n]either House nor Senate versions of the healthcare legislation contains any requirement that federal funding be made available for abortions," and that, as a result, "[c]laims that tax dollars will be used for abortions, as a television ad from the Family Research Council contends, are premature and somewhat misleading," what did the biased and incorrigibly misleading professor respond? Here's what:

"I find it hard to believe that the most pro-abortion president ever and the most pro-abortion party ever would not find a way to use tax dollars to support abortion once they get control of 1/6 of the economy. Abortion may not be there in red letters now, but it would end up there."

In that short paragraph, we see Groothuis's standard modus operandi at work. First he arbitrarily sets up President Obama as the most pro-abortion president ever (a statement he has made repeatedly on his blog and backed up with no statistical data). Then he attributes the label of most pro-abortion party ever to the Democratic party. (Yes, compared to the Whigs and the Republican party, the statement is probably true, but what does it mean in practice? A few Democratic senators have already expressed their opposition to the repeal or modification of the Hyde Amendement, which bans the use of federal funds to finance most abortions.) The last ingredient necessary to complete the fallacy is the statement "I find it hard to believe", which is in essence Groothuis's version of "abracadabra."

Say the magic words, mix these fantastic assumptions together with your unshakable, faith-based personal conviction, and you too, like Douglas Groothuis, will be able to convince yourself, and maybe a few gullible others, that it does not matter if "n]either House nor Senate versions of the healthcare legislation contains any requirement that federal funding be made available for abortions." Your fantasy-fueled powers of interpretation will always allow you to believe that what is absent from something will actually appear in it, given enough time and faith. Bad faith, that is. With it, you will train yourself to believe that President Obama's end game is not to gain control of 1/6th of the economy to improve coverage for people whose lives are devastated by the absence of affordable and comprehensive access to health care, but to seize control of it so that one day he will be able to sign legislation aimed at killing as many babies as possible, so as to earn the medal of most pro-abortion president ever that you have already assigned to him in your fevered mind.

That, in a nutshell, is the extent of Douglas Groothuis's self-delusion and of his furor to deceive. In his visceral hatred of everything that is liberal, no fantasy cannot be dressed up as reality. When even the absence of the word abortion from thousand of pages of proposed legislation cannot convince him to stick to the facts and tone down the rhetoric, what evidence could one possibly offer to Groothuis, or to his believers, that could make him change--if not his mind--at least his hateful attitude?

A Little Fact-Checking Never Hurt Anyone

Investors who have heeded the advice of the Investor's Business Daily should hope that its investment tips are better grounded in fact than their editorials on health care.

As reported on Countdown by Keith Olbermann, and as posted by Ed Brayton on his blog under the header Dumbass Quote of the Day, I am submitting to you--my irony-loving readers--this gem from the Investor's Business Daily, which ham-handedly attempted to establish the superiority of the American health care system over its British counterpart thusly:

"People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."

Except that, as Brayton notes:

"There's just one tiny little problem with this: Stephen Hawking was born and raised in the UK and has lived there all his life. He teaches at Cambridge. That's in the UK."

Ooops!

The funny thing is that the editorial has been corrected in such a way that the correction is even more idiotic than the blunder it attempted to correct. Says the Editor's Note:

"This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK."

How does the editorial correct the mistaken implication that Stephen Hakwing does not live in the UK? Simply by removing any mention of Stephen Hawking from the editorial.

Dave in RI, on the Daily Kos, correctly notes the other, more egregious omission:

"They don't mention that the editorial also said Hawking would be dead if he did live in the UK."

The moral for conservatives: Never miss the opportunity to turn an honest blunder into a dishonest spin job.

UPDATE:
Stephen Hawking himself felt a statement was needed on the Investor's Business Daily moronic editorial.

"I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS," he told the Guardian. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived." The article's author went on to say this: "Something here is worthless. And it's not him." Amen.

Obama's First Townhall Meeting On Health Care

I just got done watching the first of three Obama's townhall meetings on health care reform. The president did an excellent job explaining his goals, refuting misconceptions and lies, and promoting health care reform. All I can say to those who are protesting (in bad faith, i.e. just to protect special interests; people like Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, and pols bought and paid for by the health care industrial complex, just to clarify) is this: I hope you get sick, lose your coverage, go bankrupt and die a painful death. Too many people have suffered and continue to suffer needlessly for these clowns to go on spewing their lies and continue scaremongering.

My wife always tells me I should not wish ill on others, but I don't believe in judgment day and my only hope is that people who act in bad faith will be punished in this life. There.

As for those who are carrying their masters's water unwittingly, many of whom are self-styled Christians, all I can say is this: forgive them, for they are too dumb to know what they are doing.

UPDATE:
I am now watching Sen. McCaskill (D-MO) answer questions at a townhall in Missouri. A participant (applauded by many in attendance) brought up a devious piece of bullshit pushed by the Christian right that the public option will include paying for elective abortions. Sen. McCaskill explained that there is nothing in the 600 plus pages of the Senate bill (which has yet to be voted on) which changes the Hyde Amendment, which bars use of federal funds for abortions, except for cases of rape, incests and danger to the life of the mother. Additionally, the senator said that she would not vote for a bill which contained changes to the Hyde Amendment. Nonetheless, anti-choice* people were not content and kept booing the senator throughout. God this people are idiots.

The crowd is very vociferous and disruptive and making it hard for Sen. McCaskill to keep her cool. This combination, the idiotic acceptance of misinformation and the incivility, shows America at its worst these days.

UPDATE 2:
Sen. McCaskill just said: "I really don't understand this rudeness... I don't know what else I can do... Do you really think you are convincing people when you shout as you do?"

The more ignorant and uneducated people are, the more vocal and boisterous they are, senator.

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*It takes more than being against abortion to be pro-life

Huh? Wow!

Wealthy Group Pushes To Be Taxed More.

When are these people going to be invited by Cavuto or CNBC?

Pay Or Die

Thom Hartmann, bless him, directed my attention to this post by Southern Beale. It is heart-rending and is the best possible answer to that dishonest, bloviating, dimwit shill, Sarah Palin, with her asinine death panels.

We already have death panels, and they are run by insurance administrators, the heartless, bottom-line driven bureaucrats that are hidden from the reform discussion when idiotic right-wing hacks tell us that we don't want a [government] bureaucrat between us and our doctors.

Helping The Poor

"Maybe we can’t afford the measures that would begin to alleviate America’s growing poverty — affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation and so forth. I would argue otherwise, but for now I’d be content with a consensus that, if we can’t afford to truly help the poor, neither can we afford to go on tormenting them."

So writes Barbara Ehrenreich, in her read-worthy piece in the New York Times.

We Get Shafted, Once Again

As posted previously, the White House has agreed to a backdoor deal with pharmaceutical companies: They have agreed to cut costs by $80b over the next 10 years, in exchange for a continued ban on price negotiations. Robert Reich says this is bad for democracy. Indeed, it is. But it is also bad for us. Consider these figures from 2007 (Source: Fortune magazine, July 23, 2007, via CNN.):

Company	Revenues	Profit
Johnson & Johnson	53,324.0	11,053.0
Pfizer	52,415.0	19,337.0
GlaxoSmithKline	42,730.6	9,915.0
Novartis	37,020.0	7,175.0
Sanofi-Aventis	36,998.4	5,026.1
Roche Group	34,702.8	6,285.4
AstraZeneca	26,475.0	6,043.0
Merck	22,636.0	4,433.8
Abbott Laboratories	22,476.3	1,716.8
Wyeth	20,350.7	4,196.7
Bristol-Myers Squibb	17,914.0	1,585.0
Eli Lilly	15,691.0	2,662.7

(Figures above in billions of dollars.)

If you do the math, you will see that the profits of just these 12 companies in 2007 fell barely short of $80b.

In essence, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to give up 10% of its huge yearly profits for the next ten years, in exchange for the government dropping its huge negotiating power (and its pants). Not a bad deal--for the companies--if you ask me. And the White House has said "Yes, we will bend over." And, I ask, is the $80b a fixed dollar amount? In other words, if the drug industry's profits in coming years exceed this year's profits, then the % amount of savings is further reduced. The more I think about it, the more it stinks.

Oh, by the way: To sweeten the deal, the PhRMA has thrown in $150m of advertising in support of the White House health care reform plan.

It would be one thing (though it would still be wrong) if the President had decided that the real devil in the health care system is the health insurance sector, and that it is ok to make a deal with the lesser demon (PhRMA) to enable change that will substantially reform, and eliminate, the stifling power of the insurance industry. Pre-existing conditions, policy exclusions, denial of coverage, ever-rising premiums, and refusal to insure (adequately or at all) 30% of the American people are ignominious practices and should be done away forever.

If Obama's real goal was to tackle one overpowering industry at a time, his strategy would almost make sense. But from all we know, and from what has filtered out of the various committees over the last few weeks, the same backdoor deals are taking place between the Administration and the insurance industry as well. See this piece for details. The more we look, the more it looks like we're getting shafted, once again.

The goal of health care reform should not simply be to cover the uninisured. It should be to stop the runaway costs that have become a structural feature of the system. People are getting crushed not just by the absence of or the difficulty of getting health care, but also by its costs.

We were promised change we could believe in, but it's starting to look like it's change the usual suspects can believe in. I was hoping for better.

Health Care Reform For Sale

President Obama has caved in. He has given the pharmaceutical industry what it wanted, which is really shameful because during last year's presidential campaign he had led us to believe that he would take on PhRMA.

When a health care reform bill is passed, we will be told that it is a good deal for the American people, the best deal we could get; that it is a historical moment in the history of the nation, that all parties to the deal, Congress and industry, need to be commended for their hard work, and for coming up with a pragmatic solution that addresses the needs of the American people but does not weaken the competitiveness and innovation of the best system in the world. To which we should respond: Bullshit.

The more time passes, the more apparent it is becoming that the defenders of private interests are gaining ground, and that the American people are less and less likely to get what they need out of so called reform.

Jim Wallis On Free Speech And Accountability

"We must all say loudly and strongly that misinformation and angry mobs are not how democracy functions. While freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are certainly our rights, those rights must always be exercised with responsibility and accountability."

Another bullseye from Jim Wallis, who is that rare American Christian leader who puts the welfare of his flock before that of corporations.

I Don't Give A Rat's Ass About What Rahm Emanuel Thinks

He will think I am "fucking stupid", because apparently that's how he described dems who attack other dems. And guess what? I don't give a rat's ass. Dems who are doing all they can to derail health care reform are idiots, and so is he for defending them instead of going after them like a rabid dog.

So kudos to the groups running ads like the one below, against Sen. Nelson (D-NE), who is one of the blue dog Democrats threatening to weaken reform beyond uselessness.



And if what the New York Times is reporting today is true, i.e. that Emanuel's boss, our president, gave Big PhRMA's lobbyist Billy Tauzin a "rock solid deal" that the government would not use its clout to negotiate lower prices for drugs, then shame on President Obama, too, because he has let us all down. Because, as William Greider of The Nation wrote, "[t]his is roughly the same deal that George W. Bush cut with the drug makers when he was legislating Medicare's new coverage of drug purchases. It is the same bargain that Democrats in Congress universally condemned as wasteful and corrupt. The deal does not smell any better now that a Democratic president is embracing it." (Emphasis added.)

Tonight's Real Time Should Be A... Maddening One!

Guest list on tonight's Real Time:

Arianna Huffington, huffingtonpost.com
Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA)
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA)
Dr. David Scheiner, President Obama's former doctor

I assume David Scheiner's appearance will be a must-see. I posted a link to his appearance on yesterday's Grit TV earlier today, and he was crystal-clear and convincing on why single-payer would be the way to go.

I am also looking forward to the appearances by Darrell Issa and, particularly, Jack Kingston. While the former is just your typical, run-of-the-mill Republican hack, the latter is a veritable nut job. Some of his past exploits can be found here, here, and here, if you have the stomach and the required zen self-control. Notice how Jeremy Scahill and Robert Greenwald give the nut job a good, healthy counter-grilling.

Please... Cut The Crap!!!

Listening to Thom Hartmann's program today I heard a mention of Please... Cut The Crap!!!, a website dedicated to debunking Republican bunkum.

The author(s) of the website have done a bang-up job to debunk the long list of lies, fallacies, and misleading conservative statements about HR 3200. Due to the length of the bill, and the related lies, the bunkum-crushing project has been split into various parts. See part I and part II, with part III to follow soon.

(I had started debunking this seemingly endless list of conservative crap myself, but I was steaming after reaching the lies about page 59, of the 1200 page document, so I am glad I found the cut the crap site.)

UPDATE:

Part III is now here.

The Health Care Misinformation Echo Chamber and Idiot America

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, American Professor of Communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, co-wrote a book called Echo Chamber in which she describes how misinformation travels from the deepest halls at the RNC to Americans, via the "echo chamber" provided by the likes of Rupert Murdoch's various News Corp outlets, Rush Limbaugh, etc, reprising a theme first treated, and well, in David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy.

As I was driving home this afternoon, listening to All Things Considered on NPR, I came across a very good example of exactly how pernicious and ruinous the Republican echo chamber is for democracy and intelligent discourse. In a portion of the program dedicated to the ongoing debate on health care reform, an opponent of health care reform named Heather Liggett, a self-described stay-at-home mom and grassroots organizer, was given the opportunity to explain the rationale for her opposition to what she believes is an attempt to socialize medicine.

It is amazing just how many misconceptions Liggett was able to pack into a four-minute interview, which she garnished with the hard to believe assumption, repeated a couple of times, that the Congressman she was confronting in a town hall meeting was not listening the voice of the majority of his constituents. The representative in question is Lloyd Doggett, of the 25th district in Texas. He was elected with 66% of the vote, which makes it very hard to believe that the majority of his largely Democratic constituency would oppose health care reform.

Luckily, Liggett's interview was followed by a fact-checking segment in which Bill Adair, editor of the Pulitzer Prize winning Politifact.com, was asked to rate some of Liggett's comments for truthfulness (or, rather, their lack thereof.) Liggett earned two "Pants on Fire" and a "False".

Many of the arguments used by people like Liggett in their opposition of health care reform, said Adair, come from a chain email that his organization attributes to a Peter Fleckenstein. It may be that Fleckenstein is the source, or that the real culprit is Larry Schweikart, one of two charlatans whom I dealt with in a previous post titled Health Care and Charlatans. Whatever the case, this is a typical example of how Republican disinformation works: Someone publishes a factually inaccurate piece, a dishonest opinion, or the RNC's daily talking points, and a gang of talk radio hosts, News Corp hacks, christocratic fanatics, and corporate shills repeat it ad nauseam, until it his picked up by regular (and irregular) folks across the Heartland, at which point it starts passing for truth.

Which brings us to Idiot America. Charles Pierce just wrote a very insightful book titled Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. It just so happens that, right before listening to the interview with Heather Liggett, I had just finished reading the chapter of Pierce's book titled Radio Nowhere. In it, Pierce argues convincingly that if a host (or an author) "seems to argue passionately enough, then what he is saying is judged to be true, simply because of how many people are listening to him say it." Pierce follows his pronouncement with a study by Professor Andrew Cline of Washington University in St. Louis, who came up with the following list of rules for talk radio success:

1. Never be dull.
2. Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity.
3. The American public is stupid; treat them that way.
4. Always ignore the facts and the public record when it is convenient to do so.

By extension, we can say that the rules are not just a recipe for success on talk radio, but in the political arena as well. As Liggett demonstrates by buying into and by disseminating the Republican anti-reform rhetoric, lock, stock and barrel, she mindlessly parrots the series of factually inaccurate statements that she picked up somewhere in the misinformation-sphere. It is hard, then, to disagree with point number 3 in the above list: "The American public is stupid; treat them that way." Just think, for example, of all the seniors who are railing against socialized medicine, only to follow their attacks with cries off "Hands off my Medicare!"

If the debate on health care reform has proven anything so far, it is that it is impossible to overestimate the stupidity of the American people. Idiot America is here to stay.

Excellent Segment On Health Care From Grit TV

Laura Flanders had an excellent segment on health care reform and the opportunity for single-payer reform on yesterday's episode of Grit TV, including an appearance by Dr. David Scheiner, President Obama's former personal physician, who is in favor of single-payer. Watch it below.

Maddow Dissects Corporate Sponsored Anti-Health Care Reform Rallies

Be thankful that we have Rachel Maddow and her hardworking staff, and that MSNBC gave them a daily slot, because they are among the best in the business at uncovering and/or at relaying information about corporate shenanigans aimed at enriching the few at the expense of the many.

The latest such report just aired on MSNBC. It exposes what some have come to call "Astroturf" protests (as opposed to legitimate grassroots protests) for what they really are: corporate-backed events that incite both the sincerely gullible and those with vested interests to do the dirty work of the oligarchs that own and run the country.

As soon as the video becomes available, I will post it here. You, in turn, MUST watch it.

UPDATE
And here it is...

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UPDATE TWO

This is a priceless bit by Maddow about the supposedly grassroots mob that protested at the Miami-Dade Elections office to have the 2000 Bush v. Gore election recount "shut down." And indeed, as documented in the HBO movie "Recount". Consider that many of the rioters where paid for their services. You can see history repeating itself in the anti-health care reform protests that are going on these days. What a country!

Astroturf Protests

Robert Reich, on his blog, once again puts opposition to health care reform in due perspective.

On The Disruption Of Health Care Townhall Meetings

Much has been said about the fact that angry Republicans are showing up at town hall meetings on health care all over the country to voice their anger in opposition of health care reform. Rachel Maddow has done a great job reporting on this, as has Keith Olbermann.

As I see it, the problem is not that these people may be part of, or supported by, organizations that oppose health care, rather than a crowd of individuals each showing up of their own independent volition. Nor is it a problem that they are voicing their opposition. The problem is their incivility. The problem is that the organizations behind these mobs are actually inciting them to be disruptive. Think Progress reports of a memo aimed at participants at these events that lists a series of "best practices", which include--shamefully--the following advice: "Be Disruptive Early And Often," and "Try To 'Rattle Him,' [the representative] Not Have An Intelligent Debate."

And in fact, Lloyd Doggett--one of the politicians targeted at these events, like Sen. Specter and HHS Secretary Sebelius--has released a statement in which he says:

This mob, sent by the local Republican and Libertarian parties, did not come just to be heard, but to deny others the right to be heard. And this appears to be part of a coordinated, nationwide effort. What could be more appropriate for the “party of no” than having its stalwarts drowning out the voices of their neighbors by screaming “just say no!” Their fanatical insistence on repealing Social Security and Medicare is not just about halting health care reform but rolling back 75 years of progress. I am more committed than ever to win approval of legislation to offer more individual choice to access affordable health care. An effective public plan is essential to achieve that goal.

There is a a place for protest rallies, and that is on the streets, not in town halls. People, including these people, have every right to voice their opposition, whether it represents their deeply held convictions or the views of others that they have chosen to shill for. What they have no right to do is to disrupt opportunities for debate, exchanges of ideas, or even lectures, for that matter. That they do anyway proves that what they are looking for is not a debate but a brawl, not a civil discussion in search of an acceptable solution but the protection of special interests, and that they will use violence (yes, verbal violence can be as detestable as physical violence) to thwart the right of others to hear and to be heard.

The fact that so many Republican party leaders will choose to endorse or encourage such activities, as House Minority Leader John Boehner has already done, says quite a lot about the state of the Republican party, where the endorsement and encouragement for fascist tactics is no longer a fringe phenomenon, but a mainstream choice.

Colbert Captures Bush Years In One-Liner

Last night, Stephen Colbert closed his show's introduction, as he usually does, with a different, witty one-liner. It said: "If at first you don't succeed, redefine what you did as success." What a fitting capture of the Bush years!

As an added bonus, here is Colbert's opening segment from last night's show. It is entirely devoted to health care and it skewers conservative objections to health care reform with typical, brilliant wit. Colbert and his writers are truly a gift to this realism-impoverished world.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bears & Balls - How to Pay for Health Care
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Tasers

Olbermann's Exposé On Corrupt Politicians

No, corrupt is not too strong a word for the politicians targeted in last night's Special Comment. The dictionary definition of corrupt is "characterized by improper conduct (as bribery or the selling of favors)." You see, if you call funds given to a politician by a corporation or by industry groups a "campaign contribution", all is well. We could not possibly call them by their more accurate, truthful names: bribes.

Yes, Olbermann can be a bit grating on the ears at times, as he often comes across as pompous and overly sarcastic. However disagreeable you may find his delivery, though, he rarely misses the target if you judge him on substance alone. Remember that, when you watch the video below.

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The Dumbest Bumper Sticker Ever

Driving back home this morning, I had the mixed fortune of being stuck behind a white Chevrolet pickup truck. On the rear window, there were a few stickers, including a U.S. Marines Corps sticker and this, the dumbest sticker ever: "My kid fought in Iraq so yours could party in college."

At just 11 words, it is a condensate of American stupidity (and a source of great amusement for me.) It expresses the belief that the reason why American troops have been fighting in Iraq is the defense of American freedom. It associates college with partying, rather than with studying (an association which sounds particularly easy to draw for the author of the sticker.) It overlooks the irony that the sticker might be displayed on the back of a gas guzzling pick up truck, an irony which is missed both by the sticker's author and even by the vehicle's owner. Quite an accomplishment, for just 11 words.

While we are on the subject of bumper stickers, The Constructive Curmudgeon has also railed about the stupidity of bumper stickers. Not surprisingly, he completely missed the target and twisted facts. The sticker he condemned says "Jesus was a liberal. Hitler was a conservative." The Curmudgeon went on to state his inane and insane conviction that fascism and nazism were an development of socialism, because he read a couple of books by conservative hacks that make that point, and because both Mussolini and Hitler themselves, who would not be your most credible witnesses on the stand, at one point or another made direct or indirect associations between their tyrannical systems and socialism, no matter what the evidence to the contrary suggested. Needless to say, fascism (and nazism, which drew upon fascism) is the ultimate convergence of political and corporate tyranny (Mussolini himself made the shockingly accurate prediction that "the Corporative System is destined to become the civilization of the twentieth century," a statement that was finally realized in Bush's eight year dominion over America in the next century,) über-nationalism, cult of personality, antipathy for and repression of dissent, contempt for everything and everyone that lives outside the borders of the fascist nation, etc.

The fact that most reputable historians and sociologists agree on assigning the expression of fascism to the radical right (where it rightfully belongs) does not deter the Curmudgeon from insisting on his case for fascism as the ultimate expression of liberalism (which he, once again ignorantly, associates with statism, and with socialism--by which he really and always means its worst incarnation, communism).

I agree that a bumper sticker that read "Jesus was a liberal. Hitler was a conservative" deserves to be railed against for its off-the-mark oversimplification. A simpler, but more truthful sticker could read "Jesus is a fantasy. Hitler was real."

Putting Opposition To Cash For Clunkers In Perspective

Reporting on the CAR Allowance Rebate System (CARS), the hugely successful government program known informally as Cash for Clunkers, which gives American drivers either $3500 or $4500 to trade in their old, fuel-inefficient vehicle for a new more efficient one, David Lightman of McClatchy Newspapers writes that "Senate Republican leaders railed against it Monday, calling the program a model of government inefficiency and out-of-control spending. The program originally got $1 billion, but all but exhausted that funding last week, its first. The House of Representatives approved another $2 billion on Friday, but the Senate is balking."

In news only seemingly unrelated, the Guardian reports that Bank of America has agreed to pay a $33m fine to settle "a prosecution by US regulators for keeping investors in the dark over billions of dollars of bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch bankers in the wake of a $50bn merger with the Wall Street brokerage last year." How many billions exactly? In defining the merger, "Bank of America had already agreed to payouts of up to $5.8bn to Merrill's bankers. A sum of $3.6bn was eventually paid out despite losses at Merrill of $27.6bn for 2008." The problem? TARP funds were used to finance the acquisition (and, indirectly, to pay for the billions of dollars in bonuses.)

So, to recap and to put things in due perspective: Senate Republican leaders rail against a government program that, not quite indirectly, does provide a much needed stimulus to the auto industry, in addition to beneficial effects for the environment, and higher safety for American drivers (given the fact that many newer vehicles have better safety standards than the old ones they are replacing.) Perhaps my memory fails me, but I don't remember Republican Senate leaders railing against the use of government funds when Bank of America used them to pay billions of dollars in bonuses to newly acquired Merrill Lynch employees.

If you ask me, Dickipedia needs to make room for more members, ASAP.

Birthers Should Have Railed Against the Ronald Reagan First

If Obama may indeed be ineligible to be president, but then again so where "Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Ulysses Grant, William McKinley, James Garfield, William Howard Taft, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, Harding, Harrison and Hayes. A rule's a rule," says Chris Kelly. He explains why in this brilliant, funny (and accurate) piece by Chris Kelly about the "birthers" controversy.

Chris Kelly is a writer on Real Time With Bill Maher. No one but a comic could find comedy where the rest of us can only see insanity.

Be Careful What You Wish For

"President Obama wanted health insurance reform in the worst way. And at the rate things are going, he is likely to get it." Thus begins an excellent piece by Robert Kuttner, co-founder of The American Prospect. It's a must read.

AP: No Guarantee Taxes Won't Go Up

According to the AP, a top White House advisor (Larry Summers) "says he can't rule out a tax on middle-class Americans to pay for President Barack Obama's health care overhaul." Huh?!? WTF! Sounds like they are thinking injury (of the not covered kind) is not enough and it's a good idea to add insult to it. How? In that the reform that is taking shape does more to appease special corporate interests (Big PhRMA, health insurers, and health care providers) than it does to improve health care delivery, and costs, for regular folks.

On the Black Agenda Report, Bruce Dixon highlights some of the reasons why the bill currently under consideration does not go far in enough and is too weak to be considered a step in the right direction:

• The plan doesn't cover the uninsured till at least 2013.
  
• The “public option” in the plan isn't Medicare, won't bring costs down and will only cover about 10 million people.
  
• The president and his party have already caved in to the drug companies on reimporting Canadian drugs, on negotiating drug prices downward and on generics.
  
• The plan contains requirements for an individual mandates and a higher exemption from mandates for small businesses.
  
• The president's plan, and those of Republicans and Democratic blue dogs too, could force you to buy junk insurance.
  
• The president's plan, as well as those of Democratic “blue dogs” and Republicans, are to be funded in part with cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
  
• The president and his party, and the corporate media have spent more time and energy silencing and excluded the advocates of single payer health care, mostly the president's own supporters, than they have fighting blue dogs and Republicans.
  
• Despite the president's own admission that only a single payer health care system will deliver what Americans want, he and the leaders of his party insist that Medicare For All, HR 676, us utterly off the table.

(For more details see Dixon's full report)

So, not only we are not going to get anything resembling the health care reform that we should be getting; instead, we are moving in a direction where pharmaceutical companies get protectionist guarantees they should not be getting, where an individual mandate creates 47 million new customers for health insurance companies with no guarantee that costs will be kept down, where the AMA wins because services provided under a weak public option (or none at all) would not be reimbursed at Medicare rates, and we would have to pay higher taxes to make that all possible?

If you are starting to feel like the health care/congressional industrial complex is giving you a rectal exam it is because you are being given one. And you are going to pay for it.

Weekly Round Up (on Health Care Reform)

Here are a few articles, opinions, and resources you need to be familiar with as you discuss health care reform with family, friends, and colleagues.

Bruce Dixon, at Black Agenda Report, has been very critical of Congress and President's Obama's approach to health care reform as too weak and too eager to seek the kind of bipartisanship that can only spell disaster for Democrats (in that it will do nothing to win over moderates and will do everything to piss off progressives). Read Dixon's latest opinion.

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Republicans are resorting to the same type of scare tactics that helped to keep them in power for 8 years prior to Obama's election. Their current target? Seniors. They are trying to scare the living bejesus out of seniors with crank concepts like "end of life rationing", euthanasia, and so on. Now, we all know that seniors are very susceptible to bullshit, which is surprising because they have a lot of time on their hands to read and do research. Many though lack the intellectual discernment or the curiosity to see through the bullshit of the Hannitys and the Limbaughs of this world (not to mention their misplaced reverence and almost total lack of suspicion for their elected representatives.) I know, I am generalizing, there are plenty of smart seniors around. It is just that it does not seem like they are the majority of seniors, and that is a problem.

The Bill Moyers Journal profiles an organization called Remote Area Medical. This is the kind of volunteer organization that, like Doctors Without Borders, you expect to operate in the Third World or in countries affected by natural or man-made disasters. You simply do not associate such organizations with providing health care services in the country that, above all, prides itself on standing up to the rest of the world as an example to be followed and imitated.

The Journal also has a rich and growing section dedicated to health care reform, which you should bookmark, visit often, and share with everybody you know. It will have an impact.

Elsewhere, David Sirota points out that 13 lawmakers, hailing from states with a combined population of 13 million, are holding the rest of the nation hostage on health care reform. It's a result of a political system in which South Dakota or Oklahoma hold as much power (in the Senate) as California and New York. Sirota rightly points out that

"[t]hanks to our undemocratic system and our corrupt campaign finance laws, the health care industry doesn’t have to fight a 50-state battle. It can simply buy a tiny group of congresspeople, which is what it’s done. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, health interests have given these 13 members of Congress $12 million in campaign contributions."

An ironic development in the health care reform debate is that President Obama's own physician "respectfully differs with him on his approach to health reform." Dr. Sheiner explains: "I was supposed to be at the recent town hall meeting at the White House where I was to ask a question of the president, but my visit was cancelled at the last minute, presumably to prevent the national airing of my views on health reform." Turns out that the good doctor supports a single-payer system, like Canada's for example, a topic which has been studiously avoided and swept under the rug, though the President admittedly supports it.

To close this roundup, you should read The Truth About Socialized Medicine. It is a first-hand comparison between the American health care (non-)system and the health care services you receive when you are lucky enough to live in Finland (not exactly one of the world's powerhouses, and yet--at least on health care--so much more civilized than "Number One!!!)

Krugman's Four Pillars Of Health Care Reform

This op-ed by Paul Krugman, which appeared in the July 26th edition of The New York Times, deals with the incoherence of the position held by the so-called Blue Dog Democrats on health care reform. But it is especially notable for its description of the four pillars of health care reform: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition. Take away any one of the pillars, Krugman warns, and the whole project collapses.

Interestingly, Krugman concisely and clearly sum my ire at those who, in his words, game the system: Americans who are uninsured because they are currently healthy and who sign up only when they need care. Young Americans, mostly, but not only. These are the people who give health insurance companies legitimate ground to stand on when they come up with exclusion lists based on pre-existing conditions. That is why the congressman who said that no young and healthy son of his should be forced to subsidize health care for everybody else by being forced to buy insurance is dead wrong: if everyone must be insured from birth, regardless of their age or health situation, then there can be no "pre-existing condition" excuse to deny coverage to those who need it.

Of course, even this obvious reality still does nothing to contain costs because it does nothing to control or limit the amount of money that ends up in the pockets of health insurance fat cats; but, as Krugman says, effective reform has four pillars: Take any one of them away, and the whole reform effort collapses. And corrupt politicians and their sponsors are the only ones who can continue to thrive among the ruins of America's health care.

Shifting The Blame

The Huffington Post reports that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has identified the real culprits in the health care reform fiasco that is slowly, but surely, unfolding in Washington: the insurance companies. Says Pelosi: "They are the villains in this. They have been part of the problem in a major way... It's almost immoral, what they are doing" and, she adds, "Of course, they've been immoral all along. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening, and the public has to know about it."

It's almost like blaming Halliburton, KBR, and Blackwater for the war in Iraq. If Democrats believe that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are responsible for the foreign policy fiascoes of the Bush years, then Pelosi all Pelosi, Reid, the blue dog democrats and all the players bought and paid for by the health insurance need only look in the mirror to see where the real blame lies.

God only knows that health insurance companies and health care providers have done much evil, what with their denial of health care benefits or their insistence on bankrupting "the lucky ones" who received them, but right now they are only protecting their interests. It's the people we elected, those who should be protecting our interest, who will carry most of the blame for failure to achieve meaningful, fair, and just health care reform in the coming weeks. (And it is bound to be failure, to a greater or lesser degree, trust me.) The rest of the blame will fall squarely on the shoulders of those of us who will see a tv ad financed by the status quo, opposing reform that includes a robust public option portrayed as government meddling with the rights of doctors and patients, and will buy the ad hook, line, and sinker. They will be the ones who are happy that things have stayed the same, or gotten worse, only to bemoan their condition when the health care/congressional complex comes after them when they or their children get gravely ill and have nowhere to turn for help.

And the charade will go on...

Time To Sharpen The Knives

Robert Reich recently explained on his blog, in his characteristically clear and eloquent way, why the public option is essential for meaningful health care reform. But now the AP reports that the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by the health care industry minion Max Baucus (D-MT), has reached "a health care compromise that omits two key Democratic priorities," one of them being the public option.

If I were religious, I would hope that Baucus would rot in hell. Since I have no such comfort, I am quite depressed right now. But I am not giving up quite yet. After all, neither is Robert Reich, and he is much, much smarter than I am.

In his latest post to date, The Future of Universal Health Care, as of Now, Reich charts the path progressive must follow over the next few weeks to turn this thing around. He closes his post with an invitation to his readers to stay on the case, and to call their representatives and senators to let them know how they feel about the attempt by Congress to castrate real reform by dropping the public option.

In a previous post, The Blood Of Americans, I posted the phone numbers of a few politicians we need to keep applying pressure to, including the always disappointing and growingly despicable Max Baucus. So here they are again:

Senator Dianne Feinstein (202) 224-3841
Senator Mary Landrieu (202) 224-5824
Senator Max Baucus (202) 224-2651
Senator Ben Nelson (202) 224-6551
Senator Kay Hagan (202) 224-6342
Senator Kent Conrad (202) 224-2043
Senator Ron Wyden (202) 224-5244

Pick up the phone, and do the right thing.

Health Care And Charlatans

One charlatan, you already know, is Dr. Groothuis, the incorrigible and insufferable professor from Denver Seminary who does his best, day in day out, to earn a place on Dickipedia. More about him at the end of the post, below the fold.

Another charlatan is Larry Schweikart, of an organization called Family Security Matters, who wrote a laundry list titled Look Here to See What’s in the Health Care Bill: CHILLING!, so full of patently incorrectly assumptions and lies, masked as excerpts from HR 3200 (requires pdf reader), to make one's head spin. I got through debunking only a handful of items in Larry Schweikart's deceptive list before I decided that debunking the rest of them is not worth my time, or yours. I will give you a few examples below the fold, and, if you have the stomach for it you are a better person than me, you can go through the complete, long list yourselves. (If you do, please send me a link to your post and I will cross-post or link to it.)

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Schweikart begins on page 22 of the bill, which--says he--"mandates the Government will audit books of all employers that self insure." As it happens, page 22 does not any such thing. It simply says that the Commissioner for Health Choices (a new position to be created under the bill) will be responsible to produce a "study of the large group insured and self-insured employer health care markets". A study is quite different than an audit, of course, except if you want to mislead your readers and scare them into opposing reform.

The next inaccurate statement (lie?) is about page 30, which--according to Schweikart--says: "a Government committee (good luck with that!) will decide what treatments/benefits a person may receive." Again, we have the benefit of having the real page 30, so we can take a look to see what it really says: "There is established a private-public advisory committee which shall be a panel of medical and other experts to be known as the Health Benefits Advisory Committee to recommend covered benefits and essential, enhanced, and premium plans." With typically dishonest sleight of hand, Schweikart transforms "a private-public advisory committee" into "a Government committee" to support his false allegation that reform equates the end of private medicine. (See the bottom of his article for more on that.)

(And by the way: I would like a conservative to explain why I should buy the rationale that a committee of private health insurance experts would do a better job for me, the patient, than a private-public advisory committee, given the health insurance sector's history of sky-rocketing premiums, denied coverage, and uninsured corpses abandoned on the playing field. Two strikes already, by page 30 of a document numbering 1007 pages total.)

Next, Schweikart goes back in time, to page 29, telling you to look at "lines 4-16 in the HC bill - YOUR HEALTHCARE WILL BE RATIONED! (We all knew this, because health care is rationed in Canada and Britain, but Obama kept saying it would not be)." As it is, we all know this because Schweikart says so, not because of lines 4-16 on page 29, which say nothing of the kind. Rather, they explain--and quite unequivocally at that--that the financial responsibility of an individual for the "essential benefit package" cannot exceed $5,000 a year ($10,000 for a family). Three strikes, but I shall continue for the sake of debunking.

Schweikart continues in his quest to slaughter facts when he says that on page 42 of the bill "The Health Choices Commissioner will choose your HC Benefits for you. You will have no choice!" Page 42 outlines the Commissioner's duties and begins by stating that the Commissioner is responsible for "The establishment of qualified health benefits plan standards under this title, including the enforcement of such standards in coordination with State insurance regulators and the Secretaries of Labor and the Treasury." Nothing that follows comes remotely close to the accusation that Schweikart levels.

A couple more examples should suffice, before you abandon Schweikart's silly, shitty post, like I did.

"Pg 58 HC Bill – Government will have real-time access to individual’s finances
and a National ID Healthcard will be issued!"

The real quote? [The system shall]

(D) enable the real-time (or near real-time) determination of an
individual’s financial responsibility at the point of service and, to
the extent possible, prior to service, including whether the
individual is eligible for a specific service with a specific physician at
a specific facility, which may include utilization of a machine-readable health
plan beneficiary identification card;

(E) enable, where feasible, near real-time adjudication of
claims

That does not mean, as Schweikart would have you believe, that "the Government will have real-time access to individual’s finances"; it simply means that the system should be able to check benefit a patient's eligibility for benefits and financial responsibility on the fly, as it should, in a country that prides itself on being number one in every fucking thing, except that in the case of health care it does not have the slightest clue what it's talking about.

Finally, by which time I was ready to vomit, Schweikart says: "Pg 59 HC Bill lines 21-24 Government will have direct access to your bank accts for election [sic] funds transfer."

Never mind the "election funds transfer" typo. What the bill says is that the system should "enable electronic funds transfers, in order to allow automated reconciliation with the related health care payment and remittance advice." This is standard terminology of the banking industry, which simply means that the system should be able to handle EFTs (electronic fund transfers) to match payments with remittance advices. It just does not mean that the government can tap into your bank account and subtract funds from it, nor that Big Brother is in; no more, anyway, than when you go to Old Navy and your paper check instantly becomes an EFT transaction.

And Schweikart goes on, and on, and on, like the blathering, deceitful, uninformed, and misinforming idiot he is.

And now on to the other charlatan who is the subject of this post.

What do you do with Schweikart's post if you are Dr. Groothuis, of Denver Seminary? Do you a) take the time to read it critically, recognize its falsehoods, and see it for the venomous piece of ass-wipe it is (which a professor of philosophy should be able to do blindfolded, hands tied behind his back); or, b) post a link on your blog for the drooling anti-liberals like you, who are eager to spread lies and bullshit around if only they serve your partisan purposes?

Well, you guessed it, b) is the answer. Groothuis links to Schweikart's unspeakably base, ill-informed, and misleading post with the following fanfare: "Here are some of the deeply dangerous and liberty-destroying details of Obama's socialist, statist, authoritarian plan to take over American medicine." Funny how a professor of philosophy would take what is manifestly a mountain of bullshit as an example to be taught to others.

In closing, one clarification: I would have been more than happy to write a more civil rebuttal for Dr. Groothuis and his readers on his blog, but he has long ago chosen to censor and discard my civil rebuttals, so no obligation of reciprocal civility exists where none has been granted in the first place.

Chilling Video From The Bill Moyers Journal

Please watch this video, and please pass it on to others. Watching health insurance executives defending the practice of canceling insurance coverage to those in dire need of it because of omissions or inaccuracies in their enrollment forms, and saying that they won't commit to changing such practices because they are within the bounds of the law of the land, is enough to make one's blood curdle.

Then watch Wendell Potter's testimony, on how health insurance companies bask in Wall Street health insurance to maximize profits at the expense of the insured. Wendell Potter was most recently head of corporate communications at Cigna and the company's chief corporate spokesman.

Bill Maher Puts Health Care Opposition In Perspective

Friday night's top new rule, Not Everything In America Has To Make A Profit, was yet another example of why we should be thankful we have comedians like Maher, Jon Steward and Stephen Colbert to fill the gap left by the so called mainstream media. As Maher pointed out

If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private health care "soulless vampires making money off human pain." The problem with President Obama's health care plan isn't socialism, it's capitalism.

Combined with David Sirota's brief op-ed in Salon, The Rich Never Had It So Good, and with Robert Reich's Tax The Wealthy To Keep Everyone Healthy, you should be armed with enough ammunition to shoot down the rhetoric of the fat cats who are opposing health care reform and of their willing and shameful accomplices in the Congress, the media, and the blogosphere.

Happy rebutting to all!

It's Not Diffuse The Situation

I can't stand it anymore! It's not "diffuse the situation", it's "defuse the situation" (as in remove the fuse from an explosive device). Good grief! You would think that the minimum requirement to do close captioning, journalism, etc. would be to know and understand the language!

This almost irks me as much as TBS's slogan, "more movie, less commercials". I'm telling you, this is what happens when you leave the language in the hands of sloppy people!

Ben Nelson Is A Douche

According to the Huffington Post, Democratic senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska is one of six centrist senators who have asked President Obama to delay a vote on health care reform. Nelson also "spoke derisively of the House health care reform effort, which taxes the wealthy to subsidize coverage, calling it 'class warfare.'" In a nutshell: Nelson is a douche (albeit not the only one): by choosing to use Republican rhetoric to defend the interests that, to a significant extent, have bankrolled his career, he has taken the side of his owners against 95% of Americans, and he must be defeated when he seeks re-election.

Those who, like Nelson, oppose a public option understand that--by doing so--they are protecting the moneyed interests that they have chosen to represent. Nothing, short of a public health care system shaped after those of most European countries, threatens the earning potential of for profit health care more than the public option, which Sen. Nelson is not loathe to defending using inflammatory rhetoric and scaremongering.

Contrast Nelson's rhetoric and position with that of Robert Reich, always the astute commentator of political and social affairs, who defined the House plan (no doubt to the jubilation of conservative spinmeisters who will twist his comments to their ends) "the most blatant form of Robin-Hood economics ever proposed." Reich correctly notes that "the best-off 1 percent of American households take home about 20 percent of total income -- the highest percentage since 1928." That should put in proper perspective Sen. Nelson's douchebag comment that health care reform as proposed by the House is "class warfare." If that does not make your head explode, nothing will.

The Blood Of Americans

According to a study by the Commonwealth Fund, the number of deaths that could be prevented if everyone in the United States had adequate access to health care exceeds 100,000. In fact, The United States ranks last among all countries examined in the study. This study flies in the face of those who repeat ad nauseam that everybody, the uninsured included, has access to health care when they need it.

In light of this and of many other undeniable facts about the pitiful state of health care in the United States, the position of Republican politicians and, alas, of too many of their Democratic colleagues who are trying to block meaningful, is literally unconscionable and is analogous to complicity in murder.

If a health care reform bill is passed which is any way weaker than the most desirable of all possible bills, such as one that would cover everyone at affordable prices (with subsidies for those who cannot afford the cost of health care), the blood of Americans whose deaths could have been avoided, had they had timely and effective access to health care, will be on those politicians who have done their best to stop reform in its tracks. Never mind Republicans, they are shills for corporate interests and I would expect nothing else from them. I am referring to congressmen (and women) who are doing the bidding of the health care business, such as Democratic senators Max Baucus (Montana), Dianne Feinstein (California), Mary Landrieu (Louisiana), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Ron Wyden (Oregon), Kent Conrad (North Dakota), and Kay Hagan (North Carolina), to mention but a few.

You can call these senators and remind them that the blood Americans will be on their hands if the continue to oppose health care reform that includes a strong public option:

Senator Dianne Feinstein (202) 224-3841
Senator Mary Landrieu (202) 224-5824
Senator Max Baucus (202) 224-2651
Senator Ben Nelson (202) 224-6551
Senator Kay Hagan (202) 224-6342
Senator Kent Conrad (202) 224-2043
Senator Ron Wyden (202) 224-5244

Curmudgeonly Love

The Constructive Curmudgeon, Denver Seminary professor and hater of all things liberal/statist, has been smitten with Sarah Palin at least since she entered the national fray in last year's presidential campaign. Since then, he has lavished as much praise on Sarah Palin, who is incapable of doing any wrong in his eyes, as he has poured contempt over President Obama and his administration.

As with all conservatives, particularly those of the Christocratic right, facts are nothing to be taken seriously, an inefficient nuisance. And so, tonight, a short post entitled "Sarah!" appeared on the Curmudegeon's website. With typical curmudgeonly enthusiasm, the post invites acolytes to read "Sarah Palin's excellent editorial on the wrongness of Obama's so-called 'Cap and Trade' tax apocalypse." Excellent? Sure! It comes from Sarah "The Goddess" Palin, so it has to be. Except...

Ah, those pesky liberals, always scouring the media in search of inconvenient facts! Did the Think Progress blog really have to dig up footage from the vice-presidential debate between Sarah and Joe Biden, where Gwen Ifill of PBS, no doubt another serpentine representative of the liberal media, trapped "The Goddess" into contradicting her future Washington Post editorial? When will the the liberal media stop ambushing the poor woman with trick questions?

And did that other insufferable liberal snob, Keith Olbermann, have to remind us that "The Goddess", one of America's greatest energy experts according to Sen. McCain, filled her op-ed with so many arbitrary opinions that it makes you wonder if "[t]he 'Op' in Op-ed could have stood for [facts] optional."

'tis such hard business, this "love" thang!

Are We Really What We Eat?

Last night I finally went to see Food, Inc., the documentary by Robert Kenner and Eric Schlosser that examines what Eisenhower, were he alive today, might have termed the "food industrial complex." After seeing it, I cringed at the thought that, as the saying goes, "we are what we eat."

In only 94 minutes, the documentary highlights several disquieting facts: the link between the rise of industrial agriculture and farming and the rise of previously uncommon health conditions; the lack of oversight by regulatory agencies compared to the recent past; the environmental and social impact of the "food industrial complex"; the powerlessness of small farmers faced with competition by huge corporations (often made unfair by the disparity in government subsidies); the way the system is built to reward unhealthy choices over healthier ones (for example, a fast food meal is cheaper than the produce you can buy at your local supermarket); and the list goes on.

One welcome aspect of Food, Inc. is that it does not aim, unlike many of its predecessors, to convert omnivores into vegetarians by suggesting that a vegetarian lifestyle is entirely devoid of risks. In other words, while the negative aspects of meat consumption are made abundantly clear, the documentary makes it clear that becoming a vegetarian only eliminates the ethical complications of eating animals raised inhumanely, inefficiently, and dangerously for human health and for the environment; vegeterianism does not, however, come without risks for human health or the environment, because the giant food conglomerates that sit atop our food chain have contaminated the vegetable side of the equation as well, both by genetically modifying food like corn, soybeans, rice, tomatoes, etc., and by polluting much produce via the poisonous byproducts of animal farming.

Notwithstanding the fact that becoming a vegetarian is not the silver bullet to the world's food crisis, several powerful reasons remain why we should at least consider the option:

• Even the chickens, pigs, and cattle raised on a Virginia organic farm are still slaughtered before coming to market. How animals are raised on the farm does nothing to change the fact that they suffer a death that we would not wish on our worst enemy, and that they are killed non-chalantly to make foodstock for the omnivores amongst us. Animals raised humanely on an organic farm may be healthier for humans but remain the victims of humanity's blind spot and "dominionist" view of nature.
  
• Absent serious regulation and enforcement, raising animals for human consumption has potentially disastrous side-effects on the environment and on human health.
  
• Meat-based diets are significantly less efficient than plant-based diets, and less sustainable. If we take into account the limited availability of clean water for much of the world's population, the amount of water necessary to sustain meat-based diets is an unconscionable waste of the most precious resource.

The most positive thing about the documentary, though, is that it does not stop at raising flags and pulling alarms, like other documentaries, books, and feature films before it have done; it also shows how consumers can influence what the market offers and highlights some healthy or healthier choices that are already available. The viewer can take heart in finding out that even Walmart has jumped on the organic food bandwagon: not because it has suddenly found a conscience, but because it has realized that there is a market for organic choices that can enhance shareholder value and corporate profits. Whatever the motivations, consumers can find some hope knowing that they vote for products everytime the contents of their shopping carts are scanned.

Amongst a dearth of interesting movie offerings this summer, there are far worse ways to spend an hour and a half than to sit through this powerful and eye-opening documentary. You should see it, and bring a friend along while you're at it.

News From The Health Care Reform Front

When President Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel declared in an interview that "The goal is to have a means and a mechanism to keep the private insurers honest" and that "[t]he goal is non-negotiable; the path is", his statement sent shivers down the spine of those who, like me, consider a public option the only viable alternative to a single-payer health care system like those that most industrialized, civilized countries have. (See here for a comparison of what happens to cancer patients in the United States and in France.)

The goal of health care reform should not simply be to keep insurers honest, rather it should be a complete overhaul of a system which, while working for some, has failed too many to be preserved in its form. Besides, who's to say that when the next Republican president is sworn into office, a prospect which appears remote now but that is only a matter of time in the cyclical scheme of American politics, his first order of business will be to undo the reform that is so acutely, so desperately needed to ensure that people have a reasonable guarantee that they won't be left to their own devices just when they are most vulnerable?

If a public option is introduced into our sick health care system now, at the beginning of President Obama's first term, chances are that it will achieve measurable success that will contribute to the President's re-election in 2012. And after 6 or 7 years of a system which will foreseeably improve, it will be much harder for a Republican president to undo the gains realized by millions and millions of people and voters. That is why Sen. Reid's clarion call to the likes of Sen. Max Baucus, to abandon the pursuit of a bipartisan bill and to "stop chasing Republican votes" which would entail compromise that would eliminate the public option, was welcome and sorely needed.

Some welcomed the long-awaited arrival of Sen. Franken as it broke the 60 vote barrier needed to avoid the specter of a Republican filibuster; but, as many have clarified, including former Gov. Dean, there is no need for 60 votes. "If Republicans want to shill for insurance companies," said Dean, "then we should do it with 51 votes," using budget reconciliation rules.

It is hard to disagree with Gov. Dean and the many voices who are pushing for a strong public option, like former President Bill Clinton, and like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Sen. Sanders, who has collected health care horror stories in a booklet that you can view online (not for the faint of heart, particularly those who lack coverage), and who said, in his trademark "call a spade a spade" fashion, that "[i]t has become clear that the function of a private health insurance is to make as much money as possible. Every dollar not paid out in claims is another dollar made in profits for the company." Clear to all but those who revel in a system that has proven a political contribution cash cow, to milk for every drop of money it can produce.

Jane Hamsher wrote at firedoglake.com that "Congress never had ordinary people come and testify about their insurance company horror stories, because nobody wanted to piss the insurance companies off." I believe that, simply because something similar happened to me last year.

I attended an event on the health care crisis at Denver University that featured a panel including former Colorado Gov. Lamm, a neurosurgeon, a medical ethicist and an insurance industry representative. When the panel discussion was over, the floor was opened to the public for questions and comments. The majority of the people who had the opportunity to direct their questions to the panel was critical of the status quo and reported their personal experiences and horror stories.

At that event, I had the welcome opportunity to step up to the mic and tell of my own experience in the United States, and how (negatively) it compares to the system I grew up with, in Italy. One of my comments was luckily highlighted for posterity on the pages of the Colorado Independent (formerly Colorado Confidential). The event was hosted by Colorado Public Radio's Dan Dreyer and was supposed to have been broadcast on KCFR shortly afterward.* To the best of my knowledge, it never aired, and there is hardly a trace that the event ever happened if you try and google it up. I have never gotten over the feeling that the reason the broadcast was never aired is because KCFR did not want to rock the boat and risk alienating its active and potential underwriters in the insurance and health care industries, which could have cost the station a lot of money.

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* After a research that took me the best part of an hour, I found this blurb:

RADIO PANEL ON HEALTH CARE: The public is invited to be part of the studio audience of a joint production of Colorado Public Radio and the Daniels College of Business, "Health care and the Bottom Line: A Panel Discussion on the Ethics of Corporate Medicine," which takes place Thursday, April 3, in the Hamilton Recital Hall at the Newman Event Center, 2344 E. Iliff Ave., at the University of Denver.

It will be taped for rebroadcast on KCFR and podcast on both the CPR and NPR site.

(If It Is True) Good Riddance!

Is Sarah Palin out of politics for good? Some say so. If true, good riddance.

In the year she spent in the political limelight, she has shown herself to be an extremely ignorant, conceited, nastily divisive, and petty politician. On top of that, she has often chosen to pose as the victim of a media conspiracy, instead of recognizing her own faults and inadequacies. She greatly deserved the negative press she got.

If indeed it is true that Sarah Palin is out of politics for good, that would be a good thing for the country, for women in politics (whose presence in politics would no longer be tarnished--by association--with the soon-to-be former Alaska governor), and for Republicans (who cares about them, right?), who have seen their already sagging reputation drop even lower since Sarah Palin made her entrance on the national political scene (coincidence? I think not).

My prediction? After she retires from office, we will not have seen the last of Sarah Ap-palin'. She will resurface in some nagging capacity (perhaps on Fox News), perhaps to run for office again in a few years. The woman is simply incapable of staying out of the public eye. She is full herself and narcissistic. Remember when the McCain/Palin ticket became the Palin/McCain ticket in her interviews and appearances on the stump? Her kind does not simply fade into the background.

Unfortunately, she will be back.

Strong Words From Frank Schaeffer

Frank Schaeffer cautions Christians of the consequences of their actions (and inaction) and of the perils of Republican extremism. (Via Alternet)

Blessed Be Sen. Franken

At last! Norm Coleman has finally thrown in the towel.

I am proud to have supported Sen. Franken's campaign and ecstatic that the saga is finally over.



Congratulations, Senator Al!

Blessed Be Sen. Sanders

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said:

I think the strategy should be to say, it doesn't take 60 votes to pass a piece of legislation. It takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster. I think the strategy should be that every Democrat, no matter whether or not they ultimately end up voting for the final bill, is to say we are going to vote together to stop a Republican filibuster. And if somebody who votes for that ends up saying, 'I'm not gonna vote for this bill, it's too radical, blah, blah, blah, that's fine.'

Sen. Sanders also added:

I think the idea of going to conservative Republicans, who are essentially representing the insurance companies and the drug companies, and watering down this bill substantially, rather than demanding we get 60 votes to stop the filibuster, I think that is a very wrong political strategy.

You can read the whole article here.

Also, don't forget to tune in to the Thom Hartmann Program every Friday at 12:00 EST(every day, actually) to listen to "Brunch with Bernie", Thom's weekly conversation with the Vermont senator.