We Don't Deserve the FLOTUS or the POTUS

The New FLOTUS Bob

Did your health insurance premiums just rise by 39%? Lucky you! Some older folks had their insurance premiums upped by 75%. Many premiums now exceed the monthly mortgage payment. If your mortgage debt exceeds the value of your home, you are under water. If you lose your job, your new address will be the nearest Wal*Mart parking lot.
You could have avoided all this.
Every civilized nation has an insurance program called single payer. The system covers all citizens regardless of age, wealth or physical condition cradle to grave. The cost averages about half of the US burden. Its universality mandates the widest pool of insureds to build the lowest possible risk exposure.
The US present and proposed health plans leave too many citizens without coverage at prohibitive costs doomed to fail.

USA Meets Waterloo

The health care debacle has given us a foretaste of government after the SCOTUS corporate funding decision. The general public is completely out of the political process. The goal should have been to reduce costs from 17% of GDP to the level of about 9% enjoyed by Europeans. At any time the Democrats through reconciliation could have enacted parts of the reform. They didn't, because they are in the corporate trophy bag as much as the Republicans are.
SCOTUS only stuck a fork into the American carcass to see if it was done.
The US health reformers deserted their wounded on the battlefield 122 dying daily. At least Napoleon committed his best troops to the fray. He did not withdraw in disgrace.

Democrats Face Second Tea Party Drowning

From my ten years living in Boston, I recall human beings very different from the stereotypes pictured by the national media. They are not the knee-jerk ideologues remembered by the pundits from college freshmen bull sessions. Most of them vote in places other than Massachusetts. Also gone are the street captains and ward healers who rousted the voters on election day.
Mr. Brown has been out pressing the flesh; Ms. Coakley has not.
Everybody knows the health care bills now before the Congress do not benefit ordinary citizens. They have been written by and for the health insurance industry. This is why the special interests have put $millions into the Coakley campaign. They fear the Democrats will lose their 60-seat majority.
It would be ironic if the second Tea Party dumps the Democrats into Boston Harbor. Floating in the murky waters, they might reconsider the virtues of single payer.

Progressives Avoid Success as a Plague

Having developed rabbit ears for the right-wing taunt of "liberal media bias," reporters, editors, producers, and pundits seemed determined during the Bush years to prove how un-liberal they really were. In the process, the press abandoned its traditional watchdog role and morphed instead into lapdogs. Media Matters

Many Progressives revel in membership in a righteous minority that always loses. This way they have an excuse. Whatever goes wrong they are not guilty of it because they rarely commit to any ideal. Their participation is at the periphery easy to escape when the Police begin to use taser pistols.
They couldn't wait to jump off the Obama bandwagon. The only Progressive President since Teddy Roosevelt, Obama has come closer to health reform than any other.
This explains my motivation for a tip of the cap to Harry Reid. This also explains why OEN members did not comment on this article. Winners make them nervous.

Are You Just Finding This Out?

My grandfather could have told you this 120 years ago. He named my father Clarence after the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow. The called him the attorney for the damned. Why were they damned? They were blacks, women and members of despised religious minorities wrongly accused by a totally corrupt and godless society.
Abraham Lincoln lied. Liberty and justice existed for slave owners of blacks in the south and of whites in the north. Lincoln was a shill for the special interests with the gift of oratory the Barack Obama of his day.
In the 1950's any kid with 25 cents could buy a Ballantine paperback. Muckrakers wrote the inside story of Washington. Every Senator indulged in white slavery, influence peddling, graft or any number of other departures from acceptable norms.
People don't change.

The Persecution of Al Gore

The orgy of resentment that erupted toward Gore during the 2000 campaign season was likely unprecedented in American politics, as media elites did very little to hide their disdain for Gore. For years, they mocked him, bad-mouthed him, and made up nasty stories about him.

Media Matters

"[T]he 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out by it. Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd."

Eric Pooley, Time Magazine

On January 23, 2009, the topic on the table was the administration's proposed economic stimulus package and whether the White House, which was hoping for a bipartisan effort on the legislation, would be disappointed if the bill passed with little or no Republican support. And that's when Todd asked Robert Gibbs the following:

Would [the President] veto a bill if it didn't have Republican support?

Todd's absurd query highlighted the unheard-of double standard the press constructed for the new Democratic president. Namely, when addressing the issue of bipartisanship (i.e. "involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties") the press decided to hold only one of the political parties accountable: the Democrats. Bipartisanship was now something Democrats had to bring to fruition. Chuck Todd, msnbc

My bookend quotes capture how the "liberal" Beltway press corps changed the rules to cover Gore at the beginning of the decade and Obama at the end of it. And how did the same press corps spend the years between Gore and Obama? Lying down for Bush, of course. Having developed rabbit ears for the right-wing taunt of "liberal media bias," reporters, editors, producers, and pundits seemed determined during the Bush years to prove how un-liberal they really were. In the process, the press abandoned its traditional watchdog role and morphed instead into lapdogs. Media Matters http://bit.ly/5eXOfW #p2

Here is a recent example of the ABC media sell-out.

Organ Harvesting Happens in 191 Other Countries

Israelis know they must accompany a loved one in the operating room if they want him to survive intact.
As in stolen cars, the parts are worth more than the entire body.
The body parts trade exists everywhere. Why is the ABC news article about Israel worthy of special note? Jason Paz

ABC News.com reported on organ harvesting in Israel. Posted by Stanimal on the OEN home page news, ABC has removed the article.

I'm tempted just to let Jason Paz comment on this one.
How does organ removal compare with drone bombing? For fork's sake.

by GLloyd Rowsey

Organ Removal is Worse than Drone Bombing Jason Paz

At least, a drone bomb has a good chance of killing the victim outright. In hospital the victim may suffer for days while the doctors take out parts one by one. Parts from living victims fetch higher prices.
GLloyd,
Please drop me an e-mail whenever you see an article such as this about anywhere in the world. The stories from the Mexican border are particularly sad.

It will become interesting if NBC continues to bash Obama after the mangled health bill passes. Will David Gregory on Meet the Press remain a prominent shill for Boeing and the corporations? Will Progressives dote on the Main Stream Media for information?

McCain Promotes Health Insurance Fraud

The McCain Health Plan: Millions Lose Coverage, Health Costs Worsen, and Insurance and Drug Industries Win

By Roger Hickey

Today Arizona Sen. John McCain will deliver what his handlers are hyping as a major address on health care. McCain’s plan is a dangerous fraud.

He wants voters to think he is going after health care cost inflation. In reality, he wants to dismantle the employer-provided system that now covers over 60 percent (or about 158 million) of non-elderly Americans, forcing millions of us who now get fairly decent health insurance on the job to instead buy whatever they can find on the individual market controlled by unregulated and predatory insurance companies. And he would drive health care costs upward, not downward.

This is truly amazing: McCain and his handlers knew they had to say something about health care. So they turned to their friends (and financial supporters) in the health care industry and the conservative think tanks. And they have adopted the most extreme right-wing ideological approach, premised on the idea that the big problem in health care is that Americans have too much insurance – in their words, we don’t have enough “skin in the game” – and that only when we have to buy health care with money that comes directly out of our own pockets will consumers force doctors, hospitals and insurance companies to become more efficient.