2009 -- Very Subjective Commentary
on the Political Situation 2009 -- Very Subjective Commentary
on the Political Situation This is a running dialog giving me a place to comment upon politics of the day without cluttering up the primary dialog.
I started writing this with a list of crimes against humanity, US
citizens, etc. by GWB and the persons running against Obama in
2008. I realize that this is a waste of my time. GWB is the
worst war criminal in the history of the world. No further
explanation is necessary. McCain chose a beauty contestant as
his running mate and we all feared he would die in office. This
is the remnant of a political party that thought no level of corruption
or incompetence mattered any more so why not run with arm candy.
Hillary Clinton threw mud until she ran out of mud, money, and time.
But enough is enough. This is all history.
Our war criminal president has sunk our country into economic
quicksand. He has eliminated the middle that is needed to repair
the damage. And we are now seeing president who is doing his
utmost to restore dignity to our country and his office. This is
a near impossibility. But he is doing a good job.
Obama is living up to his promises and making his decisions and
actions very public. The back rooms filled with smoke and magic
mirrors have been exposed and we are getting real government now.
The right-wing people are screaming but mostly the citizens who are
hungry and homeless and jobless know that this is the death scream of
failed policies and corruption. Their concern is who dies first:
the failed policies of making the rich richer at the expense of the
poor or the poor themselves . We now have poor that historically
have been not poor. If any of them still hold on to the delusion
that making rich people rich will make them better off, I hope there is
room in the nearest asylum for them.
Remember that one? I grew up listening to that one. My
father was a Republican. He even worked for GM at one time.
I grew up 50 years ago hating the concept of making the rich richer and
the poor poorer. I have lived to see the disaster that that has
caused the entire world.
GM is crying in its beer that people do not want to buy its
cars. Oh. First it was the Japanese did not play fair. They
anticipated market changes and got their cars there first. The
Japanese built cars to last more than 3 years. This took Chrysler out of
the game. Then GM and Ford believing in unending cheap natural
resources built cars to exploit them. Only the resources are
controlled by others (including the family and friends of GWB) and the
lack of fuel efficiency nailed the coffins of Ford and GM.
It is their fault and they are now surviving only on the welfare of
the taxpayers that they exploited. Where was Ford or GM when
Toyota was backlogging orders for the Prius? Making competitive
cars? No. Making more of their junk and expecting someone else to
pay for their greed. Greed has become the key word of the entire
corporate world.
Politics? GWB would do anything to continue the wealth of the
executives at GM and Ford. But our new president, Obama, is more
likely to find jobs for those who made the cars that made the
executives wealthy and are now losing their homes. Just this week
he has announced the reversal of another GWB policy: let the states run
their own business as long as they make rules at least as strong as
the federal rules. The Republicans should be ecstatic: states
rights. But no. GM and Ford have announced that if the states
have their way, they will die regardless of the billions of dollars of
gifts they have received. Oh. Not gifts? Loans?
Bullshit. Loans are intended to be repaid. Do you really believe
you will live long enough to see these executives even consider repaying
the taxpayer who refused to buy their junk? I Have owned a dozen
cars in my lifetime. My Ford Ranger is the first American car
that shows any interest in quality matching the Japanese. If
Ford had attempted to match the engineering of the Japanese, Rangers
and F-150's would rule the world. Now Ford cannot give them away.
Obama has stated his intent to let the states set more restrictive
emissions standards than the Feds. Since it is the Feds (read
that ad GWB's) lack of leadership which has gotten us here, it is good
to see that the states have enough integrity to tell GM and Ford to
wake up and smell the roses before your emissions have killed them
all. Hooray for the states. Hooray for Obama.
At this point what is left of the Republicans is sort of sad.
Their polices have run the greatest economic power in the world into
bankruptcy and they are crying that they cannot run it out of
existence. If the continue their obstructive actions they
themselves will cease to exist. Oh. They won't go away no
matter how hard we pray but the more they cry foul, the more people
will see that they are the foul. We are in a world trying to make
it better and get us out of the secrets and bankrupt policies that got
us here. The Democrats have enough votes to undo what the
Republicans did when they had the votes.
Keep screaming Rush and you other Neanderthals, history has a place for you.
The Republicans today again astounded me. They are actually
afraid that someone might get a tax rebate larger than the taxes that
they paid and this would be discriminatory against those who worked
hard to support their families. Republicans never gave a shit
about the American family. And claims of giving rebate checks and
tax reductions to those who now cannot afford to feed their families
are negative incentives for working? GWB stole these jobs in
favor of million dollar bathrooms to bankers in a "stimulus package"
for the wealthy. Obama is trying to get a stimulus package
for the rest of us. Sounds good to me.
The Senate proposed relief checks go to those on Social
Security. More screams. The people living on Social
Security are not productive workers and should get nothing. This
is the thinking that has run the Social Security Administration broke
and its recipients broker. Playing games with cost of living
adjustments to under pay those who worked to make our country great
but who can no longer do so is more of this smoke and magic
mirrors. The people on Social Security are those most likely to
spend the money and get us back on track. Every cent that I get
from Social Security for the next 6 years is already accounted for.
Let's see. You put a person already weakened from physical ,
and mental abuse and, by the way, underfed into constraints and place him an an
unnatural angle and then deluge water onto his face and body so that he
cannot talk or breath. You have the intent of making him believe
that you will drown him if he does not cooperate. And you have
had him in a wire cage for five years or more and otherwise treating
him worse than a stray dog in a kennel.
You do this to people who you have no proof have ever done you any
harm or any intent to do you harm. You have hundreds of people in
cages that are there because someone else was paid to provide a head
count.
The reason for the location of these prisons is intentionally not on
United states soil to prevent any court claims against the
treatment. Overstated? I do not think so. If there
were any evidence against these prisoners, then GWB would not have
been afraid to have them have their say in the secret war tribunal
court system. They are there because no proof exists of any wrong
doing. They are afraid, that is GWB's cronies are afraid, that if
released these people will becomes enemies of the USA. Duh?
You expect them to like being released? Oh, they will like the
release but after 6 or more years of being treated as a dog, you expect
them to forget? Even my dog holds a grudge against the hose that
sprayed him one afternoon.
Close the prisons down. Treat the prisoners with some level of
humanity when you do so and be prepared for their future actions.
There are bad guys out there. The peanut company that, knowing
that they had salmonella in their vats, sent their product to school
lunches for the poorest of our children shows us that there are some
really bad guys out there.
But there are are bad guys out there. People with no
conscience. Another example: Laboratory Corporation of
America. They will forge expensive prescriptions for tests and
then redundantly bill the insurance companies until they have received
125% of their fabricated bill. No conscience. Absolute
criminal behavior.
That is why we pay government bureaucracies to control this criminal
behavior. We also pay them to discover honest mistakes and assist
in correcting them. So who is really the bad guy? The
peanut company that sends poison to our children? The blood lab that
falsifies tests endangering my life? The control agency asleep at
the wheel? All three are to blame. In the case of Lab.
Corp. the insurance company is also to blame: they paid the bogus bill
-- same bill multiple times. They don't care, they use the
payment to justify higher rates and more profit to them.
The ultimate bad guy here is the Food and Drug Administration.
When they discovered the bad peanut, they should have acted immediately
and covered all of the bases. Because they were so slow off the
line, the real problem has grown like the salmonella itself. The FDA is
one of the list of agencies that should be under criminal
indictment. It is because we have an FDA, and by the way, an FDA
that adds substantially in percentage terms to your every food item, we
should have some faith in what we buy. The problem is that
because the FDA is incompetent this faith in American foods is grossly
misplaced.
Oh, now they cry that they are incompetent because they are
underpaid. Wow. I would really like to know what percentage
of my food budget goes to them The costs of inspection. The costs
of labeling. The costs of running down scofflaws. If this
percentage is less than 10% I would be greatly surprised.
It is time for our government, read that as Congress. investigated
this incompetence. Obviously the Administrative branch of our
government has a vested interest in underpayment and under
staffing. New president or not, someone had to guard the chickens
besides the wolf.
On one of the radio talk shows a man called in and seriously accused
Obama of his job loss. Now that we have a new president, the job
-- for two weeks -- should not have been lost. Wow. He did
not state that new policies caused this loss -- his only claim is that
he lost his job within the term of the new president. I think my
dog is smarter than this.
GWB has caused such a tear in the world economy that I think it will
be 30 or 40 years before we have recovered. One or two weeks is
only enough to let us know that there is hope as the new president is
fixing things as rapidly as possible. With the help of a new
Congress.
But the IMF, you know, the world bank, has a dimmer view than
myself: it has announced that GWB's depression, and make no mistake, it
is HIS depression, will take the world 60 to 70 years to recover.
There will not be enough people left alive in 70 years to know how good
we had it 8 years ago. They will only have statistics to follow
to understand that they made it back to where their grandparent left it.
So, stupid caller, put the blame for your job loss where it belongs
and start to help make it better. It is people putting the blame
in the right place: bankrupt government polices, that will lead us to
improve our government and not let another GWB into the White
House. And they are out there. GWB's brother is looking for
a chance to make it worse than it is. Frist and Rice and his
other cronies are already revising history to place GWB, the man who
makes Hitler look good, next to Jesus at the second coming.
You want a job? Work to make it better. Help stop the
lies. Help rid of us bankrupt government policies that make the
rich richer (i.e. stop "trickle down"). Start making people in
Washington understand that food for your family is more important than
another, bigger yacht for someone you will never know.
Come on Obama and you Democrats. What is wrong with you?
We know that the first TARP/Stimulus package was just an exit gift from
GWB to the already rich -- with help from the GOP Senators and people
who after 8 years still believed his lies. We really do not want
to repeat this. We know that. But that is exactly what the
Senate compromise has done!
But. But. This second package is necessary because we
got lied to about the first one. The new one must be and really
must be one for the people who earn and spend money. So each line
item should ask: "Who ultimately goes to work and who gets the
money?" But the current Senate version stripped the very items
which will give us back our economic strength.
It is not necessary for me to go line at a time. The reason
for each cut is obvious: we are back to the rich get richer
thing. The Democrats should sink this compromise like the dirty
laundry it is.
For example, one of the most successful programs in our government's
history has been First/Head Start. This puts our children on the
front line for better lives through better education. But the
Senate totally removed this one. So much for the future
generation. So much for re-employing teachers.
Gone is the school nutrition program funding. Companies
sending poison peanut butter to our schools because it is the cheapest
food around is the best exhibit for NOT cutting this item. A
poisoned child may not need a future job but this is the wrong way to
eliminate jobs -- and to increase health costs.
Anything that supports our professional engineering community -- all
but eliminated by GWB -- has been tossed. So we want to employ
bridge builders but not the people, not the working class, middle class
people, who are ready to show the world their skills -- but will never
get the chance because anything with the word "science" has been gutted
from the package.
In other words, anything that includes the words "school",
"education" or "science" is gone. So why bother with putting our
country further in debt? The future generation that needs to
repay it will not have the skills to earn the money or the education to
even know that their lives were intentionally destroyed by their
parents in favor of supporting the current American credo: "Greed!
Now!". And I had really thought that we had elected people who
cared. Stupid me.
The compromise bill added back in some money for schools and
research. Not enough but then there never is. Thank you,
whoever you are for understanding that with no education and no research
there is no future and with no future ...
Of all of the stupid things to do: make a perverted and dead
chimpanzee the subject of an anti-Obama cartoon. And then try to defend
it saying there was no racism? The USA is a racist country for
the most part. That is not the problem. Ad Hominum is the
problem. McCain lost the election. He should shut up and go
home. Why? Because that is what losers do? No.
He lost because he ran a stupid campaign on the side of the issues that
are finally recognized as why our country is financially and morally
bankrupt. Not just McCain. All of those people who are
trying to make anything in the next 4 years fail just to prove that
they are right. No. They are wrong. They have been
wrong for a long time. The train is leaving the station with or
without help from the wrong side. Our world would be better if
they were helping but we will succeed through their worst mudslinging.
How do I know this? Simple. We saw a year of the worst
that they could do and they lost badly. You would not have
believed that it would happen if you watched any of the news
channels. And the Republican PACs made as much mud to sling as
they possibly could. Their caricature of a news office, Fox News,
made it look like the people of our country did not stand a
chance. They nominated a Barbie Doll for their VP candidate
thinking that they could again steal an election. Even with
jiggered electronic voting machines, they lost this one big time.
So. Get on the train and help or be ignored for the malevolent
filth that you are spewing.
No. No. No. 1000 times "NO!" You are right: he is trying to do
too much. The problem is that in order for us to return to a democratic
republic, we have to undo 8 years of GWB bankrupting our economy as he
converted the USA to a theocracy. It will take 30 to 40 years to
undo the damage but we must start now before the religious fanaticism
takes serious roots and there is no money left to give to the
banks. The shopping list is long:
Did I leave any out? You had better believe it. Every couple
of days I hear about a new program, an expanded program, or an
abandoned program -- none of which I had even thought about until I
heard it on the news. And you know the worst part? You can
read it in Alice in Wonderland: you must run as fast as you can just to
stay in one place. You must run twice as fast to make any
progress. GWB pushed us over the edge and now we must grab on
with both feet, both hands, claws, and our teeth just to stop the
freefall into the abyss.
And trying to blame any of this on the guy who inherited it is so
irresponsible that I am amazed that there are any Republicans left at
all. Hopefully they will take a lesson from the lemmings.
I wonder as equal to what but that is irrelevant. There is a
world treaty (law) guaranteeing equal rights among the two sexes.
There are at least three problems here.
The first problem is that countries sign it and ignore it. You
have read about the woman whose ex-fiancé threw acid in her face and in
addition to disfiguring her, blinded her? That country still does
an "Eye for an Eye". But not really. The court has deemed
punishment to a minimum degree. They will drip acid into one of
his eyes. Why only one? In that country, a woman is worth
only half of a man and therefore he gets only half the
punishment. Moreover, there is no disfigurement just blindness in
one eye. Now I am against the concept -- but if you are following
this "law" and you accept a law stating all people are equal, then the
proper disposition of this case is to find out how much and which acid
he used and make an identical delivery. Half a person is not
equal. An eye-dropper is not a bucket.
The second problem is that the USA has refused to sign the treaty. This is called "leadership?"
The only other countries not signing it are other theocracies.
Mostly Moslem. This puts the USA into a bad group.
The third problem is really the most interesting to me. The US
Congress wants to add "riders" to the law as signed by the USA.
Adding a rider to any law is like adding the word "but" to the end of a
sentence. "But" negates the sentence. Equal is equal.
The rider effectively negates and qualifies the concept of equal.
Luckily for us citizens, such riders apply to treaty and not financial,
budget subversions. Luckily for us also is that making such riders just
adds fuel to the laughter of other countries as they watch the legal
gymnastics of the world's largest collection of hypocrites.
This is a surprise? Only to Republicans.
President Calderon took on a greater challenge than did President
Obama when he took office. Calderon took on the drug
cartels. There is a simple solution to the Mexican drug
problem. I have noted it before: in the United States, stop
the drug demand and stop the flow of money and arms to Mexico. In
other words, Calderon is spending millions of dollars and thousands of
lives in his country to correct a symptom. The problem is the United States drug addition.
GWB could never be shamed into either admitting nor attempting to solve the problem
Why not? GWB has no shame. Building an ugly fence to
prevent aliens from entry does not stop the drugs. Neither does
harassment of me at the San Luis gate. Nor does checking a little
schoolgirl's backpack.
In Mexico drugs are part of the culture. Calderon's
predecessors did little to stop the drugs. There are rumors that
Calderon has bitten off more than he can chew. The rumors may be
correct. Drug creation and shipment involve a great portion of
the Mexican population, directly or indirectly. Mexicans are very
family oriented. Every time a drug "dealer" is killed, a family loses a
father. Every field burned creates another family with no
income. It is not as simple as a person having made the wrong
choice. They may have inherited the choice. The favorite
uncle or even the father left them with a heritage that they cannot get
rid of. Killing all of the drugs and the people involved at all
levels will seriously injure the entire economy and the people of
Mexico. But it must be done to improve the country's chances for
entry into the more prosperous economic levels of the G-8.
But the problem lies in the law of supply and demand and other
things that you learn in Econ 101. If the USA did not have the
strong demand, Mexico would not be in the supply business. If the
United States did not have a free flow of military style weapons, the
Mexicans would not find it so easy to kill each other and their
police. In Mexico you cannot buy these weapons. You cannot
even buy a pistol. The only way for these weapons to get into the
hands of those who are using them is for these weapons to come from a
cooperating country, like the USA. And how are these guns paid
for? With the money from the drugs.
No matter how you turn it around, the problem originates with the
United States. The USA demands the drugs and it supplies the
weapons and the money for the drug production and shipment. This
puts Calderon in the middle of a battle that is not possible to win
without help from the source of the problem: the USA.
Since the USA refused to acknowledge its part in the drug cycle,
Calderon has become more and more vocal in demanding help. With GWB in office, such help would never be
provided. With Obama, we are already seeing positive steps.
Money to the Mexican government in the shape of weapons (so that the
police are not outgunned), technology (on both sides of the border) and
and aviation (helicopters and airplanes) and, finally, political
support (administration high-level visits and communications). We
may not be attacking the demand side but were are owning up to our part
of the supply side. Let us just hope that we are not
just revisiting the World War II Lend-Lease program. We need more
than words and a few weapons: we need to have people and equipment on
our side of the fence to stop the flow south so that Calderon can stop
the flow north. Shake hands and come out fighting: but not each
other.
This needs repeating. By far the most economical and efficient
means of transportation of people and things is by train. I have
seen no one hopping aboard my suggestion that they add a few
auto-transport train cars to the passenger trains so that people can
travel long distances by train and then sight-see from their car.
This to me sounds like a great idea.
But whether you like my idea or not, high speed corridors are not
the generic transportation solution. The passenger train usage
all over Europe is great. Get yourself a Eur-Rail pass and see
the entire continent or sleep in luxury while going to your next
destination. In the USA? Not a chance. The price of a train
ride is higher than the same airfare -- just less hassle but not by
much. It is either be treated like cattle by airport security or
treated like cattle by train conductors. (I will concede that European train transportation without a pass is expensive.)
But we must return to travel by train. Not just high-speed
corridors. Real trains going to real places. Like the Grand
Canyon. Like Yosemite Village. Like Bozeman, Montana. How
about public transportation between the train stations, airports and
bus stations? How about anything that permits us to watch the
countryside in luxury and comfort? I do not mean the trains that
must take sidings and wait for the local freight to pass by.
Give us on-time trains with flexible schedules. Give us fair
prices. Give us this tidbit and the airports will empty. I
can get from downtown Milwaukee to downtown Chicago faster by train
than I can by car or plane. I can be in Chicago in the
three hours it takes me to park my car, walk through airport security,
and then wait for my plane to fill and take off.
President Obama: give us back our historic heritage. Give us back our mobility.
His sentence was reduced to one year from three years. The
supreme court noted that the lower court erred as the maximum sentence
for insulting a foreign dignitary was two years and this was the mans
first offense. This is great. An assault is an
insult? Interesting. But any excuse to release a hero
sooner than three years. Now. When the Spanish court finds
Bush/Cheney war criminals, how does Iraq give the man back his year?
II was amazed. Two Border Patrol agents shot an illegal
immigrant -- on his backside. The man was unarmed, did not
assault them, and was fleeing. The two went to prison.
Rightly so. Shooting people who have not committed a crime in the
back is attempted murder. Jail is the correct place for this
crime.
He was illegal? If this does matter, then they needed a
warrant saying he was illegal or they saw him cross the border and he
did not have papers. No conviction, no papers, no shooting.
He was running drugs? Yeah. This matters since they can take the
drugs from him when they catch him. But running drugs is not a
capital offense even in he USA.
No. These cops just decided to shoot the man and going to jail
was the correct punishment. Then strange things happened.
First off, GWB has the two released. As President, he can do this. Most presidential commutations and pardons are for political or monetary crimes. Not usual to release (attempted) murderers. The Country of Mexico must take exception to their release since it impugns the integrity of the Mexican people: it is OK to try to kill a Mexican but not an American?
But then the fun begins. Some friends of mine state they agree
with GWB and that the men should never have go to prison.
Weird. It was their comments that made me look further into the
situation. The men are on television bemoaning the separation
from their families. Duh. This is what happens to
criminals: they are separated. Am I to feel more sorry for
them and their families than all of the other persons in prison for
their separations? I do not think so.
Now these guys are petitioning for a full pardon. This request
for a pardon is based upon the knowledge (unknown by them at the time
and unknown to their jury) of the man's history. You shoot
someone, you go to jail. It does not matter if you like that
someone or his activities. You have the right of self-defense and
in many states self-defense includes force in excess of that threatened
to you. But the man they shot was running away. The worst
that happens if he gets away is that they need to try to get him next
time. These officers belong in prison where they hopefully can
hurt no more people.
Talk about slanted news coverage. You do not hear why the
Somalian pirates exist. The ocean off of their coast has had
tremendous bounties of sea life -- which the Somolians harvested and
sold. But this has been decimated by foreign fishing trawlers
illegally within the national waters of Somalia. Estimated loss
of income to Somalia: $300 million per year. And this does not
include the future losses due to over-fishing. If they recovered
$300 million per year from pirating, it makes the balance sheet
even. But it is worse than that. Due to the extreme
shipping traffic (and worse items) in this ecologically sensitive area,
their waters are becoming seriously polluted and permanently less
valuable for fishing.
Now. The government of Somalia may have dissolved into
chaos. Pirating may be a bad thing. Killing people is
certainly a bad thing. Not getting their problems aired to the
world may be a bad thing. But. Maybe it is time that the
economic giants give equal time to Africa instead of just raping its
resources. Maybe the reason it is called "The Dark Continent" is
because of the news blackout.
Maybe having pirates is the only way Somalia can get its problems aired. If so, they seem to be losing this battle too.
To me this is a no brainer. Right now the insurance companies
control the entire medical system. Which doctors you can
see. What they will pay that doctor if you can see him.
Which treatments you can receive. Which medications can be
prescribed. All of it. This is the problem.
The solution is simple: no more insurance companies. If you
think the banks got away with billions, the insurance companies are
getting away with the same AND THEY ARE RUINING YOUR HEALTH at the same
time. Expanding Medicare to everyone does not seem difficult but
as long as there are obstructionists (aka Republicans) we shall never
have health care equal to that of the rest of the world -- and we shall
pay twice as much for this diminished care.
Medicare overhead: 7-8%. Private insurer overhead:
35-38%. This means that for every hundred dollars you pay to
Medicare (in payroll taxes), 93 dollars get paid in medical
benefits. For every hundred dollars you pay to your
private insurer, 62 dollars gets paid in benefits. You get 50%
more health care from Medicare than you get from the private
insurers. And the shareholders of the private insurers get to
keep your $38 dollars and their only interest is to increase that
percentage until the company or its competition cries foul.
Who wants to keep the private insurance? Certainly not the
people who need to see a doctor or have an operation. For most
procedures the private insurer will not even permit you to be admitted
to the hospital until AFTER the surgery is complete. This saves
them money but can leave you lying on a gurney in the hospital while
they find you a room that you insurer will pay for.
Other than the bad joke on you called Medicare Part D, when you turn
65, you get hospital and doctor coverage with $100 per month taken from
your Social Security. It comes with limits and deductibles.
If you want more, add a private policy. If you need more, make
sure to buy the private policy early. THe private policies may
even cover you out of the country.
I could spend pages on this but why. If you are already a
believer, why bother even reading this. If you are not a believer
then you objectives are to cost us all more money to make corporations
richer at my expense.
Why should you believe me more than the next guy? My minor in
college was risk management (include insurance). I worked for
State Farm Corporate. I worked for Ross Perot at EDS to improve
health care insurance claims processing. But then there are many
more who know more than me. The one who knows the most is the guy
for which his thousands of dollars in insurance payments will not cover
his condition for any of a book full of reasons. Or the woman who
makes the choice between her children having dinner or her paying for
her medicine.
Mr. Obama: Anything of a Medicare type federal coverage is better
than anything we have now -- and it will cost us less. At least get
your foot in the door.
I am not talking about is war crimes. Hopefully those will be
exposed. I am talking about crimes he is committing today.
We had an election. People who think as Mr. Cheney does are no
longer in office and now the most diplomatic label that they wear is
"obstructionist".
No. This is an obvious problem. You see, national
defense is at issue here. When you receive DOD security
clearance, you sign a contract that states that you will not divulge
defense secrets. This statement includes everything except that
you signed such a statement. You may not divulge what you have
learned as a result of this contract. For example, when I signed a
"Secret" clearance contract in 1969 with Bendix corporation, I could
not divulge any more than I had done so.
My father did defense work throughout his career. I suspect he
had such clearance. I have suspicions on some of the projects
that he worked on. To this day, 20 years after he died, neither
myself nor anyone else in my family knows what he did. That is
how secret these contracts must be.
Back to Mr. Cheney. He claims that he has personally seen the
results of secret activity of the military. He claims that such
activity is being misrepresented. to the general public. As Vice
President I can presume that he had access to many secret
activities. But it is a direct violation of his legal contract to
divulge even that he had such access..
Mr. Cheney is in direct violation of our national defense laws when
he states that he knows the results of any specific secret actions --
especially when it is his intent to subvert the actions of the current
government. We are coming very close to treason at this point.
What has he said that is so bad? He claims that specific
information from illegal torture made a difference in war
activities. He wants this information made public.
Wow. He wants the world to know, point blank that we interrogated
people illegally. We know this but do we want on record the
details of individual actions? If he is correct, then those
actions should remain secret -- for security reasons. If he
is incorrect, then he is lying. If he is stating something that
is a secret, he is violating his oath or contract. If he is
stating something that is not a secret, he should not be claiming that
it is. So far he has not made his unpatriotic claims under oath.
Unpatriotic? Any attempt to subvert the US government is at
least unpatriotic. His actions are treasonous and
for these he should go to jail. Then he can be tried for those
actions which he claims he knows about and was probably directly
responsible for.
I guess Mr. Obama had the better idea: let the Republicans vocalize
their vitriol. All of these right-wing radicals to going around
spouting their anger at having lost the elections and public trust, are
just publicizing their "xxx" "xxx"? You will in the
word: incompetence, arrogance, greed, ignorance. Almost any
negative adjective fits here. After 8 years of Bush politics, our
country is bankrupt, our largest corporations are failing, the knows us
for violations of everything from Geneva convention war crimes to
United Nation treaty violations, and our people have lost their jobs
and then their homes to banks that received billions of dollars of Bush
government handouts for free.
So, now that the Republicans have been recognized for what they are,
all they can do is complain about the new government policies that are
attempting to keep us out of total collapse? I have never thought
much of the intelligence of the average person. But the average
person no longer can support his family and they are living in
tents. My mother lived in a tent in the 1930's. We are back
to that after only 8 years.
Every 2 years we elect one third of our Senators. Right now
60% of the Senators are Democrats or at least not Republican.
This means that in 2010 (next year) 33 Senators will be running for
election of which about 17 (50%) will come from Republican states and
if the current percentage holds, then there will be at least 3 new
Senators returning to Washington from the Democrat Party. This is
just a statistical reference but if the Republican losers keep their
current level of noise for another year, the number of new Democrats
may be much more than 3.
All of the House Representatives are up for election in 2010.
We can expect an even greater shift to Blue from Red in that
house. What does this mean? It means that in 2010,
President Obama will have a Congress stronger in his party than Bush
had at any time during his 8 years. Bush used his Congress to
pass unbelievable laws that are now slowing being recognized and
reversed.
We cannot remove the idiots that he put on the Supreme Court but
there will be new judges that can offset them. The zinger of
course is Roberts but even he can be overridden with enough non-idiots.
So, all of you losers out there whose intent is to cry in your beer
and bad mouth our return to civilization, keep it up. It is hard
to scream about the failures of the current administration when you
have lost your home and family life to the previous administration.
President Obama has been too weak on many issues. Gun control
is one of them. Not pursuing the illegalities of the Bush Crime
Family is another. Maybe with a stronger Congress and a couple of
years experience he can go after the guns. I cannot afford to
live in the USA any more because of the inflation of the last 8
years. In my lifetime I doubt that that can be fixed. But
then my lifetime might be shortened even more because of the abundance
outside of the USA of machine guns exported from the USA. Machine
gun? An old term, but recognizable, for automatic weapon.
No wonder people are buying ammunition for these weapons. They
can sell it for twice what they paid for it or keep it for their
resurrection (fat chance) or keep i for when they can buy no more of
their machine guns to sell to foreign terrorists. In the mean
time, they are employing people to make this ammunition which is a good
thing but they are exporting it along with the weapons to people who
do not care if these weapons are used on me. This is definitely a
bad thing.
In my lifetime this is the strongest expletive I have ever
used. It is a vulgarity. It is not cursing. And the word
"shit" is used daily if you have a pet dog or other animal. That
is, you use it unless you want to use a euphemism like "poop" or
"job". Euphemisms are not bad. "Gee Whiz" is better
sounding than saying "Jesus" all of the time. "Oh my Gosh" is
better than "Oh my God" all of the time (I still think that when you
call God by name, any name, you get His instant attention). But
shit? I guess. My daughters would castigate me for using that
word -- 20 years ago. But our language has changed in those 20
years. Kids (and adults) regularly use every day words that I
would never ever use. I do not think that the "G" in "OMG" stands
for "Gosh". For my kids, I would often say "shoot" when
"shit" was too strong for the occasion but they never converted me.
As they say "you cannot put the Genie back in the bottle". The
whole world now uses these words in every day speech. But our
Supreme Court has ruled that "shit" and other words now in common use
cannot be said on over-ther-air TV. The radical right sees this
as a giant step forward. Sorry guys. Do you know why we
have migrated to digital TVs? No? We are using digital
because that is easier to transmit over wires, cable, whatever.
When I was a kid, Detroit had 4 channels and if you lived within 100
miles of Detroit and wanted to watch TV, you put a tower on your roof
or in your back yard. Today, if you live outside the range of
rabbit ear antennas, you subscribe to cable or satellite and get 100
channels. 90 of which are not controlled by language used 20 to
50 years ago. If the over-the-air networks really wanted to
survive, they would have laid their survival at the doorstep of the
Supreme Court. Now these networks just become more irrelevant as
their language becomes more ludicrous.
Ludicrous? They make their money on advertisements from
companies wanting to sell products. Historically, the primary
advertisers were cigarettes, liquor, car, soap, and over-the-counter
drugs. Well, no more cigarettes. No more liquor. Car
companies are cutting all expenditures. That leaves soap and
drugs. Let's take drugs. These guys do somersaults to
avoid saying "shit". Pepto-Bismal and Immodium can do it. But
why should they have to?
It gets worse than just language. In Europe when you see an
advertisement for a body cleansing or skin softening soap, you see the
person (usually a woman since they are the ones buying the soap) in the
shower using this soap. This is where people use soap. This
is how people use soap. And they usually take a shower with no
clothes. In the prurient USA, these ads cannot be aired. In
the purulent USA, they cannot even show someone washing while in their
underwear. In the USA over-the-air television is itself a
euphemism. One of these days it will cost too much to exist and
it will go away. So I guess my concerns about a radical court
decision are really not important. But then their next
radical decision might be important.
President Obama will likely have an opportunity to help here.
Maybe two or three. Let us hope he makes some better choices than
his predecessor. We have our two steps back - we need at least one step
forward.
Nixon was bad. Really bad. A crook in office. But
GWB was the worst world leader in recorded history. Far beyond
Nixon: lies, world aggression, world economic disaster. It is no
surprise that Rice supports him even after the fact. What is
surprising is that she is saying that because he is the President that
makes it legal. That was Nixon's defense. Even Hitler got
himself elected as president, named himself dictator, and THEN started
his world conquest. GWB did worse while still claiming to be ONLY
President.
College Student loans are are a serious rip-off for students.
The banks make high profits from these students while complaining that
many are in default and the loans must be collected at high
expense. The banks are crying in their beer. This bank
profiteering should stop now that the money that they are loaning comes
directly from us taxpayers (mostly ex-students).
Here is the deal. The amount of the loan is designated by a more or less government office and it chooses a bank.
Your student is notified that he has been approved for a no-interest
or low-interest student loan to go to college. For this
privilege, he pays the equivalent of one year's interest off the top --
deducted from the loaned amount. He has paid a year's interest
before he even sees the money. This is called a "fee" and not
interest. This falls into the "I don't give a shit" what you call
it category.
Then, when the student graduates or otherwise leaves school, he has
90 days to repay the loan in full. The alternative: pay interest
(at a high rate) for the entire duration of the loan -- including for
the first year for which the bank has already been paid. This
might be multiples of the original amount. Default? I would
just out of principle.
How to solve this piggy problem? Make these student loans
direct from the same office that authorizes them. Take the
profiteering out of the picture. Then they can no longer ruin
their beer. Then set up a rational repayment schedule as an IRS
Federal Tax return line item. The loan repayment comes out of tax
refunds. The IRS is the world's most efficient collection agency:
there is no crying in the beer: the government gets its money back.
For those few ex-students who do not earn enough to pay back
the loan quickly, maybe there is a reason. I hate the IRS but
rules can be made for these exceptions. Better the IRS wanting
the money than the banks ruining more beer.
This is a no-expense item for the government. Other than the
originally designated, budgeted amount, loans are made, repaid and new
loans made. Collected interest offsets the loans not
repaid. The bureaucracy already exists, just use it more
effectively.
I just had to weigh in on this one. Where to start. First off,
Notre Dame University is unique. Small-town parents of daughters
in South Bend dread the day that their daughter may be seduced by one
of the Notre Dame rah-rahs (that is the word that they used).
Personally, I think it might broaden their daughters' horizons
but mostly while I lived there, I thought it a strange joke.
Things may have changed but podunks such as South Bend find change very
difficult. South Bend hated the university so much that Notre
Dame had to incorporate as a separate city: South Bend disowned
them and was ashamed of them -- except the football team. Maybe
it was just the people I knew but I doubt it. And South Bend
never forgave Studebaker -- sort of the modern day Elkhart problem 20
miles east.
A couple of my friends got married there. Notre Dame. It
was a Catholic wedding, of course, and required some counseling
sessions, of course. This was the first time I heard the joke:
"What do they call women who use the rhythm method of birth
control? Mothers." They heard it from their priest who also
told them that he could not recommend birth control devices or
medicines. She was already pregnant.
So Obama accepted the invitation to give the commencement
speech. I think this a bad mistake on his part. Arizona, of
course. A cult university, no. I have no argument with
cults that do not hate other cults nor kill people. Live and let
live. Great. You want to teach faulty history and science:
no problem. These should be labeled as faulty but if in your
heart you believe this stuff, then such labeling would be hypocritical.
The problem as I see it is that Obama keeps his mouth moving on
every possible issue but his actions are in contrast to his
words. Health care reform. Real reform is already off the table
and he is dealing with the ultimate card sharks: presidents of
insurance companies. Remove our troops from an illegal war?
Yes, but bring them home, not just move them to another part of the
war. I could go on but why bother. You have heard it all
too.
But stepping into a cult, a famous university of that cult, with his
ongoing policy statements contrary to the beliefs of that cult is ...
. I am not sure which word to use here. Insulting
fits. Inflammatory fits. So does stupid and a whole bunch
of other negative words..
It is too late to back out. The offer should never have been
made. Once made, never accepted. Now we live with a
controversy that we did not need to have. Now students will
follow their beliefs and boycott their own celebration of 4 years of
expensive hard work. This is sad. They deserve
better. I think the whole country deserves better. I am not
sure with Mr. Obama that we will get anything better. Like the
old Ford problem: we shift into gear and go the wrong way. At
least Ford fixed the problem by requiring you to change gears only with
your foot on the brake. A better place for your foot than in your
mouth. So much for a president who listens.
We got a remedy at last! NO. A thousand times NO! The banks gave up a few points but got what they wanted.
You think Congress just gave you something? The banks own
Congress. They owned the last president. This president is
not standing up to what he promised to do. No. We lost on this
one. The few things we gained should have been ours in the first
place. The steps backwards are the reasons for not using credit
cards any more. Use your debit card. Use cash. Write
the check. But get rid of the card. The banks just got more
-- not less. And we thought only the Republicans used Doublespeak.
Another Obama/Congress gotcha. For an additional $1,300 per car or more, the mileage requirement over the next 7 years will go to 35 mpg AVERAGE. The only thing good about this is that the word "car" now includes light trucks. But we should have already been at 35 except for a president for whom high oil prices were money in his pocket. That is why we are at we are. We are now talking about solar-powered cars. We are talking about hydrogen-powered cars. We are talking about alternatives to even these and hybrids. 35 should be a piece of cake but no. We need to ad $1,300 plus inflation to the average car price. Sounds like we are bailing out Detroit twice, maybe three times.
I mean we have already given them billions. Billions which
will not be repaid when the bankruptcy smoke clears. Now we are
looking the other way to a 5% price increase for things that they are
doing anyway. And the jobs of the workers and sales offices are
still gone. GM is looking to China for cars to import and sell
here. This after they have closed thousands of dealerships.
Thousands. Let's see. If between Chrysler and GM 3,000
dealerships are closed, that averages 60 per state. I am sure
that the closed dealerships are chosen both by profitability and
proximity to dealerships. But presume that the dealership has
both a sales and a service area. None of these people have a job
-- and are unlikely to find a similar job in their neighborhood. And if
there is another dealership in the near neighborhood, the fired workers
just add to the downward wage pressure.
So we gave them billions. First bailout. Gave them an
automatic 5% price hike, second bailout. And they provide fewer
jobs. Third bailout. And for all of this what do we
get? The cars we would have gotten anyway.
If Congress had allocated anywhere near this amount instead to the
railroads, we would have a good mass-transit system -- nationwide and
no automatic price increase on the cars we would not have the need for
-- but that is a different argument.
No. This president and this congress are not your friends. They are in it for the free headlines as we get more and more of the same. At least we may stop killing people in foreign countries but I do not hear that happening either.
The gun freaks have swindled us again. Do any of you think that any
part of this credit card usury gift has anything in for you (unless you
are a banker)? A rider on the law, added with little or no
discussion and by overwhelming majority, permits loaded guns to be
carried throughout or National Parks and Monuments. Protected
animals? Up for grabs as the nearest gun loony claims that some
poor coyote was preparing to eat him. Or Mountain lion. Or
screech owl. Or his children. Or his ex-wife. Maybe
he just wants to take pot shots at the moon.
There are two sounds in the woods in the parks that I hoped never to
hear. The first is a siren although these are sometimes necessary
because of the environment. In fact, it would be nice to never
need a siren again. The second sound is that of a rifle or a
pistol. Now it may be worse than that. Now I might hear an
AK47. Oh, it will never happen because these people use their
weapons responsibly. Do you want to buy a bridge in New
York? Beach lot in Arizona? I read about these responsible
people killing their own families and friends in the news every week.
Hundreds of kids cross from Mexico every day to attend school on the
American side. Why? Better schools. For some,
yes. But the news tonight said that these kids cross because they
can feel safe in the American classroom. I hope so. Guns
are banned in most schools. So now you can be safe, mostly, n a
classroom but these same fruitcakes can attack you in your sleep in
your tent in the middle of the forest.
Do not get me wrong. Some people have guns and can walk past airport
security. I know at least one of them. These same people
can take their guns almost anywhere. Why do I accept this and not
the local fruitcake? Because there has to be security for some
people at all times. Regardless of where they are or with whom
they are traveling. Believe it or not, just like we have a list
of terrorists to be shot on sight, other organizations have similar
lists of our own people. These people generally know who they are
and on what list their name is to be found. Their name is on
another list: those who may carry guns anywhere. Thank God that
such people exist for if they did not, then any fruitcake could kill
anyone at anytime without concern that the next guy over might be
someone who has the authority stop them. But these are not normal
people and you rarely ever hear about them. They would rather
that you never heard about them because that knowledge endangers not
only them but their families. And they have proved themselves to
be this responsible. Not just to have a gun permit. They have the
gun in the name of national security and may carry the permanent guilt
of someone who has had to take the life of someone in the name of that
security. Believe me, that is guilt you do not want to carry.
But if you are not one of these special people, and it is unlikely
that you are, then you have no business carrying a gun where you might
hurt me. Congress needs to reverse this stupid addendum.
But then as I have said, this Congress is not your friend.
Electing Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is sort of like when I
bought my Ford Ranger. I mean I really hate the truck. Any
trip over 100 miles gives me a back sore enough that I am useless for
at least the next day and maybe two days. And the lack of
engineering insight would fill a large volume. But I wanted to
buy American. The Ranger met my
requirements although I had to search 4 states to find one with the
options i needed. And it does what a Ranger is supposed to do: it
drives around town with my dog in the back and with odd-shaped parcels when
needed. But if I had known what I know now, I would have bought
the Nissan or the Toyota: products known for fulfilling or exceeding
their customer's needs.
This is sort of how I feel about Sotomayor. Let's see.
We want a woman. Having only one, and that one is likely to retire
soon leaving no women on the court, is not acceptable. We have
never had an Hispanic and it is about time we did. Hispanics are a
large minority population and may be someday the plurality. The
GOP have picked on two quotes to attempt to nail her. The second
is basically while an appellate court justice she made the statement
that the Appellate Court is where the laws are made. Let that one
ride for a minute. The first quote is taken to be racist.
In a meeting primarily of people from the Hispanic culture she simply
states that a wise, experienced woman from her culture knows more
about her Hispanic culture than an intelligent white man. Given
any individual from any group of people and comparing them to one
individual in the opposite group, you can replace Hispanic/white and/or
man/woman, with any opposite group that you wish: Christian/Moslem,
Yellow/Black, whatever. Her statement was not racist: it was
simply a matter of fact. The adage: walk a mile in my shoes is
appropriate. If the Republicans want to play this card, we will
laugh all of the way to the vote.
The other quote about where laws are "made" is a logical layer thing
to me. Congress passes laws. The President signs the
laws Now the law exists. The law has no meaning, no
strength until someone decides to challenge it. Then the court
decides the strength and consequences of that law. In
then normal state of the laws, a judge and maybe a jury decide
this.
But if their decision is questioned, not on a fact but on a procedure
or consequence dealing with that law, the Appellate Court is asked for
their decision. You cannot go to the Appellate Court just because
you do not like the first judge. You go to the Appellate Court
because you believe the first judge misinterpreted that law or the
first judge did not follow proper judicial procedure. In both
cases the job of the Appellate court is to make sure that the law is
understood ("made" in most jargons) and that the first judge acted
within legal bounds. The Appellate court as few options. One of
them is refuse to hear the original which says that there is no
problem, to reverse the original decision on some appropriate grounds
or to send the decision back to the lower court with a set of
instructions changing the priority of the legal interpretation.
If the litigants find fault with the Appellate COurt, they can take
the case to the Supreme Court. But here is the rub. The
case when brought to the Appellate Court has been argued on the same
grounds as will be argued at the Supreme Court: the legal nuances of
the law in question in terms of its range and in terms of its
relationship to other laws. If the case has been properly dealt
with at the Appellate level, the Supreme Court either digs a little
deeper or refuses to hear the case. In other words, unless there
is serious constitutional argument, the buck stops at the Appellate
Court. This is where the law is made. if you question this,
look at the case dropout rate for each court level. And look at
the parties involved. If a case gets to the Supreme Court, there
is a good chance that some national organization is sponsoring the
contest in an attempt to actually change the law. This is where
we have the argument against activist judges. But Sotomayor has
no history of gratuitous law decisions nor as a matter of fact a
history of incisive legal decisions.
So like my Ford Ranger, Sotomayor comes to us looking like a judge
should look. She has the basic requirements and the President
searched many locations. Now the Senate has a job which I did not
do well. I did not take the car out driving for a week to
discover its bad points. The Senate can look at all of the court
cases and decisions and say yes or no. I looked at all of the
knobs and buttons and said the Ranger does what it needs to do. I
would have needed a week of hard driving to discover that the Ranger is
all fluff and not a serious vehicle. The Senate cannot have a
provisional acceptance so they need to do a better job of inspecting
how the judge decides before saying yes or no.
Remember the Oldsmobile ad: "It's not your father's
Oldsmobile". Her mother worked very hard as a single parent to
raise her family. I know from experience how hard this
is. Sotomayor 's mother's experience gives Sotomayor an edge in
many ways. But she has not proven to be of the same stuff as her
mother.
Times are tough. Recently two judges having the intent of
changing our country's direction ("making law') were added to the
court.
We are losing a judge who has worked hard to hold the line. The
question before the Senate should be: can we afford to put in place a
judge who wants to change our laws. We need a judge to lead us
back to the path of equal rights for all people in all things. I
think Sotomayor can do this. I hope she can. I hope the
Senate does a better job of discovering her intentions than I did in
selecting my car.
Wow. The Republicans have really run off the deep end on this
one. I mean, I look at Sotomayor as Obama's offering of a judge
with nothing against her -- but again not as much for her as I would have
liked. I think he took the easy path to seating a new
judge. But look what is happening on the right!
I hear complaints that Obama is not doing enough to
support Sotomayor against
these claims. But why should he? Even the stupidest guy on
the block can see that the Republicans are just putting more nails in
their coffins. If you want to believe these accusations, this is
your choice. These Republican "spokesmen" are paid well for their
diatribes. I would hope that even the sitting Republican Senators
flinch as new nails hit their coffins. Any Obama support action
against crackpot claims only validates the crackpots.
I may need to re-evaluate upwards my opinion of Sotomayor and Obama if I hear any more crackpot Republican accusations.
And on the side, I am tired of hearing about "activist" judges
making law. This presumes some judges are not activist and that
some are. How are we deciding which are which? How are we
deciding what it means to be "making" law? A single judge does
not "make" the law. The court does not "make" the law in the
definition put forth by the Republicans. This concept sounds more
and more like doublespeak. It is an activist judge making law if
you disagree with the vote. It is not making law if you agree
with the decision. Hogwash.
Look at the California Prop 8 Court decision. Here we have a
bad law: Prop 8 is a bad law. The California court said
that the law stands. The Court does not have to like the law --
the court decision states that Prop 8 meets the California requirements
of a law. If the majority of Californians does not like the law,
they know how to change it: they can make a new law. On the other
hand, the Federal court may now decide that the law violates the Equal
Rights Amendment.
Bottom line: there are NO -- ZERO -- bipartisan health care options.
The simple reason is that the Republicans require that the current
insurance companies make additional profits whereas the problem is that
they are already making excessive profits and are controlling every
aspect of your health care: which doctors, which hospitals, which
medications, and which procedures are available on your contract.
If we want quality health care, this control must end. If we
want quality health care, extend Medicare to everyone.
Period. If people wish, like myself, to carry a supplemental
policy, the insurance companies already have this covered. But
then if Medicare were universally available, the need for supplemental
policies would also disappear.
The only people who could be against a single payer system (e.g. Medicare) are those
afraid that someone other than themselves might benefit. The
ultimate greed: deprive us all -- including yourself -- for fear of
someone may have their health improved without paying for it.
Sounds like a Republican attitude without even getting to the arguments.
You want health care for yourself at lower cost? Call your
senator and congressman and tell them that we need a Medicare-type
system for everyone. You want to keep spending thousands of
dollars for someone else to determine your health level? And be
sure, they tell everyone but you, the policy holder, what level of
control they are exercising. You want the health care: take away insurance company control. They -- and
their political puppets -- are the enemy.
I hear the Republicans pushing "Patients Rights". This is
doublespeak for limiting those rights, sort of like the Constitution
Bill of Rights: each amendment limits government control. In the
"Patients Rights" documents, the rights being limited are those
of the patient --- you-- not of the insurance company.
You want to live a few more years? Call now. It is that easy and your voice must be heard.
Duh. The argument is that just having a government-run option
would destroy the private system. The insurance companies claim
that just the existence of a government-run insurance alternative will
destroy them. Dear reader, do you understand that this is a war
for your personal well-being? If the insurance companies win this
time, kiss good-bye any long and healthy life for you and your children.
That the insurance companies and the Republicans have this fear is
exactly why we need this reform. That the government could give
us better medical care at a lower cost is obvious. What surprises
me is that people are not screaming at their representatives to give us
that care. Do the politicians who line their pockets and their
campaign budgets with insurance company money want to continue receiving
that money or would they permit that money to go instead to improve the
nation's health? If you believe representatives will vote your
health before their pocketbook, your rose-colored glasses have been
stapled to your face. Call them, write them, fax them, email them
-- anything -- put their jobs on the line. Give us real national
health care and take away insurance company excess profits and the strangle-hold that they have on your health.
National health care means at least the choice/option of a
single-payer system. Without an available single-payer option,
the entire government game is smoke and mirrors -- and more profits and
less health care.
Many years ago in the School of Business at the University of Wisconsin, I took Economics 101.
I have spoken elsewhere about my low opinion of the education I
received there. But at least, the classes were taught from a more
or less neutral level. I had profs who would bring in guest
speakers with opposing viewpoints just to make sure that their students
understood that some issues had opposing viewpoints. Like many
courses, I did not do well in Econ 101 -- but I did learn or I could
not have finished the subsequent business courses.
The problem came a few years later when I worked in the State Farm
corporate office. State Farm would pay for almost any employee to
take college-level credits to obtain a certificate to add extra letters
after their name. You have seen these letters in the yellow pages
after the name of an insurance agent. The letters advertise that
you are an insurance company stooge.
In order to obtain one of these certificates, I needed to a take
courses taught by real professors borrowed from the state university in
Normal. The fact that I already had taken some of these courses
at a real university and that they were on my transcript was
irrelevant. That the same course from the Normal university may
have paralleled the Wisconsin course was irrelevant. I needed to
take Econ 101 again. This time from the insurance company viewpoint.
Do you know how a religious cult operates? The cult takes some
part of your basic knowledge, adds a twist, and builds upon that
twist. The Catholics translate a quote from Jesus referring the
faith of Peter to Peter personally and claim Peter as the head of their
church rather the faith in Jesus as the foundation of the church.
The Mormons take "man created in God's image" to mean that someday, if
you are good enough, you get to be God somewhere else. The
Scientologists use word definitions from a particular dictionary and
build upon them. The list goes on -- but the bottom line is that
your cult started with you accepting some twist in your primary
beliefs. This is what happens in the State Farm sponsored Econ
101 class. I had enough trouble with the real Econ 101. I ultimately
dropped the Insurance company version before completion. This
meant I had to pay for the course and books since the company only
repaid you if you completed the course with a passing grade. I
choke on bullshit. It may take a while but it comes down to
either I stand up to my core beliefs or I join the cult.
Sometimes I join the cult and then discover the bullshit. I left
Scientology. I left the Mormons. I left the
Catholics. I left the State Farm early enough that the only loss
was tuition, books and a year in a miserable climate.
I mean she is a bad joke. A beauty queen governor. I
guess this is similar to an ugly pro-wrestler or a movie star as
governor. At the fund-raiser dinner party Palin was the center of
attention. I really do hope that she runs for president in
1012. We would all enjoy a good laugh and to be honest, I really
enjoy pictures of beautiful women - even with that beauty being only
skin deep. With a screwed up family, screwed up family values,
and a mean mouth, what Palin adds mostly is comic relief. If the
Republicans want to nominate her and she then gets an audience, the USA
deserves what it gets.
For all of you who enjoy yelling "Fire" in the theater or are enjoy
the ongoing, constant, day-in-and-day-out negative harangue of their
political opponents, please accept credit for the murder of the
abortion clinic doctor and the security guard an the holocaust
museum. I know some of you take pride in these
murders. For the rest of you, please remember that these murders
are the direct result of your voices and not isolated incidents by
random crazies.
Sometimes I wonder if the GOP will ever get the news. They are NOT the "Loyal Opposition Party". They claim to represent some portion of the American populace. That populace represents absence of control in some areas and excessive control in others. Guns, including machine guns, for everyone. No abortions for anyone. The more money, the more privileges and less taxes. Speak English or leave. Christian Nation. We have heard it over and over to the point that the Republican Party is not just irrelevant but obnoxiously recruiting murderers -- which they then disavow. I could go on but why bother.
Sotomayor. The Senate gave her the longest pre-inquisition
questionnaire in history. She returned it with volumes of
information. The largest response in history. Now the GOP
is requiring 4 copies each of thousands more pages. It is not
that they need this information to decide their vote. This is
just pure harassment and obstructionism. Which GOP Senator is
going to read all of this material? They shall divide it
up? They do not have enough Senators to read the current volumes
and then the new portions and make a sensible vote. I am
surprised they made the effort to find things on which she did not give
sufficient coverage (their opinion). Maybe they have a reason for the 4
copies. Maybe they are hoping for misprints to justify further
delays. Maybe they want to reduce their own office paper
expense. Maybe they cannot read from a computer monitor.
If the volumes already supplied do not give sufficient information
on her capabilities, values, and qualifications, then maybe they should
read their own support documents on her applications to the lower
courts. They are questioning her abilities on the basis that she
has a longer history than the un-accomplished judges submitted by the
previous president (GOP).
I was wrong. Obama did make a good choice in selecting a non-controversial judge. Now the ducks can shoot themselves in the feet on the easy choice. When the next choices arrive, the lame ducks will have a more difficult time finding their feet and maybe have less legs to stand on when generating opposition. Maybe it will be easier to tell the real representatives from the lame ones. Maybe we should rename the GOP the "Disloyal Opposition Party": DOP. It is not that far from DOP to DOPE.
Says one Democrat
Senator. Well, at least he understands the results of a public
option. The problem is that the rest of his analogy falls on its
face. I can think of a better analogy from the 1960's: We
need the private insurance company medical control like a fish needs a
bicycle.
The compromise that I have heard so far sounds good to me: require
that everyone have medical insurance and have the public option.
On its face the companies bought into this one. I am glad I have
no TV, have no magazine subscriptions, and read no newspapers so I have
control over the bullshit that the insurance companies will be peddling
in the next few months. I see enough of our elected
representatives supporting their insurance company donors on the
internet news to ruin my day.
That's the number they are throwing around. The ten year cost
of a public option insurance program. That is 100 million dollars
each year. That is 30 cents for each man, woman, and child in the
country every year. For this 30 cents, each man, woman, and child
gets to live. Let's be perfectly clear: In the United States of
America, arguably the greatest country in the history of the world, you
can die if you do not have insurance. And for every dollar you
pay for insurance, you get 65 cents worth of medical coverage while
your insurance company determines which treatments are available, which
medications are available, which doctors can treat you and in which
medical facilities you can be treated. The other 35 cents of your
insurance dollar goes to company "overhead" and executive
salaries. The news this week listed some of these salaries.
For the largest insurers, the salary of the CEO is itself in the
double digit millions per year.
That's right. If you reduced the salaries of the insurance
company executives to 1 million dollars per year, you have paid for the
public option -- without even having one. How many of these
executive salaries are worth the price of the life of my baby?
I have heard that the number of citizens of the USA that want a
public option is greater than 70%. Our representatives are
telling us that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. Medicare
exists on 8 cents on the dollar. This is a government
bureaucracy. The insurance companies want to tell you that a
public option is too expensive and at the same time are saying that it
is so inexpensive that they cannot compete. They really want it
both ways.
In Mexico or Canada, if you have a health problem, you can go to the
local clinic. In Mexico, if you have the national insurance, IMS,
you go to nicer clinics. IMS costs about $300 per year -- for a
gringo. Similar insurance in the USA costs $500 per month -- when
subsidized. Even as a gringo, I get treated for free in Mexico at
the local health clinic. In the USA, you do not get medical care:
you get insurance company benefits.
The system stinks. In the last couple of years, a doctor
billed my insurance company for a colonoscopy that I never heard about
except for the notice from the insurance company that they paid for
it. A blood lab, "Lab Corps", billed me and my insurance company
for a fabricated blood test of $2400. When I refused to pay this
fabricated billing, they re-billed the insurance company multiple times
for the same tests until they got enough money to satisfy their illegal
accounting. I protested to the insurance company about this fraud
and they sent me a polite letter acknowledging my concerns for their
well-being. I am sure that what they paid Lab Corps was less than
an investigation would have cost them. So they just paid the bill
and raised my premium. Lab Corps sent my non-payment to
collection. The collection company agreed with me: Lab Corps had
provided no service and was due nothing.
1 Trillion dollars over ten years is paying substantially less than
we are paying now. How many lives will the public option
save? A single-payer option would save even more lives but then
the insurance companies would be guaranteed second place.
This is the best example that I have seen in my lifetime of my
government being controlled by industry dollars rather than supporting
the needs of their electorate. And I do not want to hear that
they know best of what is good for me. I think today nobody is buying
that any more. We have just accepted that our Senators and
Representatives are feeding from the corporate troughs.
The pill-making companies have promised lower prices for senior
citizens. This is bait to prevent national health care.
Even the President is buying. Even fish learn to ignore baited
hooks. But our representatives do not. Blue Cross / Blue
Shield is the best example of this: these "charitable"
organizations were formed to pay for people who could not afford to
pay. People are still dying because they cannot pay. I pay
approximately $20 per month for my 6 prescriptions. If I used the
American plan for seniors, I would be paying the insurance company the
$20 per month and paying Wal-Mart $30 per month for the same
medications. And I would be standing in lines and arguing with
clerks who have no idea what they are doing. Do not get me wrong:
I like Wal-Mart. I think they are doing more than the
pharmaceuticals for lowering prices. But I have waited in lines
for an hour while some clerk argued with some customer. In
Mexico, I walk in, clerks compete to get my attention, they know what
pills they have and what my prescriptions require. I do not get
un-authorized replacements although I might get suggestions.
Their computer immediately displays the prices. I pay and I am
gone. My car may even be parked outside illegally since the
transaction will take less than 5 minutes. But more likely their
attendant assisted me to park the car and to get in and out of it.
Our system is broken. The
insurance companies broke it. Our government is refusing to fix
it. Our government is bought and paid for by the insurance
industry. Enough said.
Gee. It must be nice to think that the world turns around you and
nobody seems to understand. I think the psychologists have a term
for this. Mostly it is a sad joke on the state of our country
that anyone would take her dog and pony show comedy parade
seriously. The best way to make sure that the Democrats win in
2010 is for them to start fulfilling the promises that got them
elected (e.g. real national health care). But since the Democrats
seem to be unable to deal with the power that they have been handed,
the second best thing is Sarah Palin on a national ticket.
If you cannot face yourself in the morning for voting FOR the local
brain dead Democrat, you can at least vote AGAINST the beauty queen
runner up, Sarah Palin. More quotes like "they will never
understand me" only insults the electorate and shows how little respect
she has for them. Oh, I know -- her comments are directed at the
"press" and not the electorate. Right. If you cannot
convince the press, you have an uphill battle to get people on your
side.
Getting comedians to apologize for an intentional mis-interpretation
of a joke based totally on the reality your family may show Republican
money power but makes a whole lot of people wonder at what level of the
crazy scale you belong. Run, Sarah, Run. You damage your party --
already almost in death throws -- more than you can imagine.
If the Democrats cannot get their agenda rolling before 2010, then
we need some new Democrats. Robert Heinlein wrote
"Friday". The book was about wars that had no boundaries -- sound
familiar? The combatants were not radical religions. The
combatants were corporate giants. There are many such science
fiction stories. The problem is that if we do not get public
health care now, the insurance companies and the banks will remove the
"fiction" from "science fiction" -- we already lost the science.
I forget the book but I have been watching the movie and if I
remember the profile of the president is the same in both. Tom
Clancy's President Fowler seems to be throughout the story as the
effect of causes outside his control. Weak. Relying upon
the expertise of others both technically and for advice. Just
what Clancy would have us think of any Democrat. After all,
Clancy is one of those right wing nuts who believes Nixon's claim that
it was the hippies who lost the VietNam war that he had won.
Remember when the terrorists rammed the planes into the towers?
The reaction of President Bush? He continued reading his
children's story. The reaction of President Bush to the imminent
landfall of Hurricane Rita? I will sit in the local command
center to make sure everyone does his job. The fictitious
President Fowler does neither of these things but the real giveaway
that he must be a Democrat? Fowler's first reaction when informed
that there is a bomb in the Baltimore football stadium? "Get the
people out of there!" What Republican would ever think of that?
It must be election time or something. I guess that I just got on
this guy's mailing list. Maybe someone just hates me that much.
This very large, weasel-worded letter implies that he thinks that he is
doing great things FOR me. Somewhere else on my web page I have
commented that what you do for someone you do to them. In this
case, I would really rather that this senator stop what he is doing to
me.
Every article on this page describes something that I consider
criminal. His comments about Sotomayor sound like he is trying to
balance something when it is obvious that he is just another
obstructionist. Ditto for his comments on health care.
Ditto on his comments on anything. He and people like him are the
reason that our country and our world is in the mess that it is.
The Republicans know that they lost the last election. They
are taking a two-pronged approach. The first is behaving as if it
never happened. This will keep support form the corporations and
from people who are already perverted enough to be Republicans.
This not enough but these mis-guided positions hope that the Americans
will see the error of their ways and return to their party's
belligerence. The second is to understand that they lost and try
to rebuild the party. The problem here is that the party has no
integrity. It is all for the large corporations and rich.
So they have to lie and refuse social and economic growth hoping to
blame the results on the Democrats.
And therein lies the real problem. Although the Republicans
know that they have lost, the Democrats do not know that they have
won. The Democrats are still seeing how low that they can bow to
their counterparts to get something done. WIth all of the
kowtowing, nothing will get done. Someone must kick them in the
butt to get their heads high enough to see that there are other
Democrats in the wings if they cannot do the job for which they were
elected. And then there is always the danger that a Republican
can look enough like a real human being that the Democrat will lose the
election for his party altogether.
This is the most stupid argument against national healthier.
Let me say this: I am against employer-paid health insurance.
Mostly it is self-insurance geared to making a corporate profit and
restricting your benefits. If you were paid the real cost, it would
more than cover the cost of national health coverage and you would get
much better care.
But here goes. Let us say you have private insurance -- we
won't quibble over how much of it you pay for or how much more salary
you could get if your company were not involved. Let us say you
are against national health care because you do not want to pay for
someone else. Basically what you are saying is that you are the
most selfish person in the entire world.
Let us say you have paid $6,000 for yourself and family this year for
medical expenses and insurance coverage. With national
healthier, that probably would have come to $1,200 for you and your
family. And you would not have to have primary care referrals and
concerns over whether your care were covered. That would be
history. I do not know about you, but $4,800 ($6,000 minus $1,200) would buy a whole
lot of chocolate cherry Cokes or clothes for the children. But
someone else may have gotten their care for less than you paid.
Oh my God!
Taking the same $6,000 or $500 per month for the family insurance,
let us say that you had no medical bills. Lucky you. Thank
whoever. You are in great health. Did anyone return your
$6,000? Where do you think it went? Oh. The concept
of insurance is to cover the average and your costs were way below
average. Reading the news, we can say that ALL of your $6,000
went to someone else. In fact $2,000 went into corporate
overhead: not even medical care for someone else. Corporate overhead? Salaries for the employees,
their offices, buildings, etc. But with national healthier
(e.g. Medicare) the overhead is $600 of your $6,000. National
healthier has employees, buildings, offices, etc. also. 10%.
This leaves $1,400 ($2,000 minus $600) into salaries of executives. Your money went
into someone else's wallet and not even into insurance or medical care.
But the other $4,000 ($6,000 minus $2,000) that you paid. Where did the $4,000 go? We said that $1,400 of the
top $2,000 went into someone else's wallet. The $4,000 paid for
someone's health care. Not yours. You were healthy.
You paid for someone else to get well or at least be treated.
You. You paid for them.
Oh. You say you might have needed the insurance? You might
have had cancer? You might have used more than the $4,000?
This is true. Then someone else paid for you. But to get
that $4,000 with your insurance, you would have paid in the
neighborhood of another $1,000 in deductibles, co-pays, and
medicine. Out of pocket: $7,000 ($6,000 plus $1,000) for $4,000 ($6,000 minus $2,000) care.
I do not think I left anything out. National health care
covers everything you need at 1/3 the cost of your insurance before the
deductibles and copays are added on. And your argument is that
someone else got the same or better deal? Talk about greed and
selfish. You just got the best care in the world at the best
possible price and you want to make sure that you are the only
one? You are so selfish that you are willing to pay 6 times the
amount to prevent someone else from getting the equal care?
Remember that the person at the insurance company that is examining
your claim has one and only one job: find a way to refuse to pay the
claim. The claim is a profit loss and they will do anything to make a
profit. This is called good business. With national
healthier the claims person is trying to make sure that the claim is
real and that you got the treatment that you needed.
How did any of you ever get through school with no basic insurance knowledge?
The people who evaluate nominees for the Nobel prizes have a tough
job. There are dozens of persons nominated for each prize.
The people who initially examine these nominees may have good or not so
good backgrounds. But the people making the final decision for
each prize winner are qualified. They have the responsibility to
choose the very best candidates to receive the $1 Million dollars and
to go down in history..
So. All of the critics of whether the correct person received
the prize are calling into doubt the credentials of the awards
committees. I will concede that some of the choices may seem
arbitrary. I read the Consumer Reports Magazine and often dispute
their recommendations. Why? They enumerate their testing
criteria and give the results for each test and each product. The
best gets their recommendation. The problem I have is that I may
not score the value of the test itself at the same ranking as Consumer
Reports. My choice may be different than theirs. But this
is a test of things, real things, with real test results -- and the
value of the results is disputable. The test results themselves may not
be disputable.
But this prize committee has not real set of tests and therefore has
no way of ordering these tests. People in each field to be
awarded are chosen carefully because they must scale each nominee
against a set of criteria that they themselves set and have no
guidelines other than their own experience. This is a tough
call. Oh. Some years one or two candidates may outshine all of
the others and the choice is easy. But the Peace Prize is never
easy. This year Doctors Without Borders gets my vote. There
are others.
But the committee examined at Obama and awarded him the prize.
Certainly not for results. We are still the only country without
national health care -- and it looks like he will lose this one.
He has made many promises and in nine months has primarily only kept
his promise of a puppy for the kids. The committee obviously
considers more than results.
The easiest way to see Obama's value is to compare him to his
predecessor. GWB isolated the USA from the rest of the world with
his "Go Get'em Cowboy" policies. The entire world recognized the
USA as the primary terrorist rogue country in the world. So.
Take anything that GWB did and compare Obama. Obama wins on
everything he has done or promised. That is why his election
results were so overwhelming. Not just because he is good.
That is yet to be proved. It is the contrast with the
pseudo-Hitler person of his predecessor.
Obama has not promised to fix the world. He did promise to fix
health care and this is a concern. But he has promised to try to
fix many things here in the USA and in he world. He has promised
to restore the integrity and leadership of the USA to the rest of the
world. He has been doing exactly this and for this he received
the award. On a scoring of 0 to 10, the difference between 9 and
10 may be very small and difficult to score. The difference on a
scoring system of minus 10 to plus 10 with the comparison between a
minus 9 and a plus 5 is easier to score. Given in my terminology
Obama the plus 5 means not that he has the advantage of 14
points. No. His 5 points of 10 (or 20) must be
compared to the other current nominees and not an historical
Hitler-figure.
The problem again is how to score what. Obama has not
accomplished many things he has promised. He has had 9 months to
fulfill these promises. He was a Senator for 6 years but he spent
the last 4 becoming president and not much in the way of being a
Senator.
So. The Nobel Peace Price Committee took the big gamble: award Obama
the prize for his intentions and works in progress. Tough call
when there are visible results from such groups as Doctors Without
Borders. But DWB is not promoting peace. They are promoting
healthier. hoping that they can do so peacefully. Obama is
promoting peace. His opponents are willing to commit treason to
defeat this effort. This is sad. When even people who should
be pushing you forward are doing so with knives in your back, it takes
people like the Nobel Prize Committee to help you forward and thereby
blunting the knives.
This prize will make Obama go down in history for what he tried to
do. You can go down in history too. Just prevent Obama from
succeeding. Be one of the Hitler-types or maybe Brute (Et tu,
Brute?). But then there are people like me who think that peace
is a good thing. Peace in the world/. Peace in the
country. Peace in the family. Peace. The Prize
committee has drawn a line in the sand: You want peace, this is our
man. You do not want peace, choose your leader and we shall see
who wins.
There are issues and President Obama talks the talk but is unable to walk the walk.
Obama understands that we have lost in Iraq but rather bring our
troops home, he has moved them to Afghanistan. Obama has
capitulated to the Department of Defense.
We had a chance for health care reform. We had his
promise. Congress is bought and paid for by the insurance
companies. All of the Republicans and at least 50 of the
Democrats. Obama never even tried -- or if he did it was a squeak
and not a roar. All we heard were how to put more power and
control into the insurance companies. We never heard a serious
argument supporting health care for all. What we hear is
mandatory insurance for all. This is reform?
And nobody cares. In fact, we have people arguing in the
streets that they really want their lives controlled by the
corporations. I give up. Nobody cares. No one has any
ideas. Nobody thinks about consequences. To argue for the
insurance companies is just plain stupid. To disrupt meetings
claiming freedom of speech is beyond ignorance and stupidity
both. The rights of your fist end at the start f my nose.
You have no right to speak if you have denied my right to hear or my
equal right to speak.
The banks have shown us what the insurance companies are
expecting. The banks took the government money, repaid part of
it, claimed additional profits, paid additional bonuses, raised
customer rates and charges, and are moving onto more control.
New Jersey? Virginia? You want to lose more? En Masse?
You promised health care reform. It is a year later. The
ONLY thing on the horizon is more insurance rate increases and
mandatory payments. This is not reform and if you keep believing
that it is, in 2012 we will have a new president.
There is a price to pay for every promise you do not keep.
Nobody reads what I write. Nobody cares even for their own well-being. Bye.