We All Are The Champions, My Friend.

 
 

Tonight the Congress voted to pass the Health Care Reform bill by a vote of 219 to 212.  By all accounts, no matter what side of the fence you are on, this day is nothing less then historic.  For some it is a day of great excitement and celebration, while for others it is a day of defeat.  But regardless of how you feel about this day certain facts now remain. You or no one you know will ever again be refused health insurance due to a pre-existing condition. You or no one you know will ever again have there health insurance dropped because an illness is costing the company too much money.  You or no one you know will ever have to face forty percent rate increases in premiums or have insurance payments that are larger then your mortgage.  You will not lose your insurance because you lose your job.  You will not have to choose between having to take a job in order to get group health insurance, or starting a small business.  And to those who opposed reform, there are no death panels. You are not going to be forced to change your doctor, or change your insurance.  There is no government take over of your or anybody’s health care, in fact anything even resembling a government plan or public option was removed from this bill completely. The scare tactics were just that, scare tactics.  None of it was true, and for those who still believe what you were being fed by those who opposed reform, time will tell us all, because not only will those who supported reform benefit from this bill, but those who opposed it, and continue to oppose it will benefit as well. 
 
The reason why this bill succeeded was not because the Democrats won.  I’ve said this before and I will say it again, no matter how much debate we all heard over the last year on this subject, this never has been and this never will be a political issue.  This bill succeeded because all along this issue of health insurance reform has been a human issue. Health care touches all of us no matter if you are Democrat or Republican, Independent or Libertarian, male, female, young, old, black, white, Hispanic, or Asian.  We all were born and we all will die.  We all at one point or another in our lives need medical care, and we all know people near and dear to us who have needed or will need medical care as well.  And when that happens, our political affiliations go away.  We don’t care who they voted for or what they support.  We just want them to get better.  And the reality, that the opposition for some reason either can not grasp, or if they can, they put there political aspirations before simple human decency, is that too many people, on all sides, have gotten screwed by the current system.  Too many people lost there coverage and then lost there homes.  Too many people were denied coverage because they suffered from depression, or high blood pressure, or were raped, or g-d forbid were pregnant.  Too many people were told that the equipment needed to keep them alive for the rest of there lives would no longer be covered. And too many of us had children, parents, husbands, wives, partners, and friends who simply died for no other reason then they could not afford the health care that would have kept them alive.
  
For once and for all this issue was not about Democrats or Republicans.  It should never have been about who is in power and who is not.  It should never have been about future political conquests because this issue was far too important to make it about ones self.  This issue was personal.  It was about people, not about power.  President Obama recently said that he would rather be remembered as a great one term president, then a mediocre two term president.  And with health care President Obama did what a leader should do.  He set the example.  He did not do this because it was popular. He did it because it was right.  His concern was not for his political future, but for the future of everyone else.
 
This bill is far from perfect.  It is not the end all be all, but instead a foundation for us to grow on.  Just like any major legislation that has past, the future will bring changes, amendments, and improvements as need arises. We still do not have a Public Option or a Medicare buy-in.  Even with 34 million more people covered we will still remain the only industrialized nation that does not ensure coverage to 100% of its citizens.  And for those who say health care is not a right I say why not?  Quality health care in this country has become no different then the ability to afford a Mercedes, or a home in Bel Air.  Health care should not be a luxury that only the rich can afford and the poor and middle class go with out.  No one should ever have to choose between there medicine and there mortgage, but unlike all other industrialized countries, in this country we do.  Health care is a right not because the Constitution does or does not say so, but because as humans, how could humanity have it any other way?

Share

Over?...Did Pelosi Say Over?

 

One of my favorite movies of all time is Animal House.  I saw it a few months after it came out at the old Highland Park Theater, which was one town over from where I grew up.  I was 13 years old and the scenes of toga parties, food fights in the Faber cafeteria, and free flowing, well…let’s just say at the Delta House there were many things that were free flowing, is what made me want to go to college.  Animal House will always have a special place in my heart because of that. Then just last week something happened that reminded me of a particular scene from Animal House.  The scene was the one where Eric Stratton, a Delta, thinks he is going to meets Mandy, one of the Omega girls, in a hotel room only to find five of the Omega men ready to do “a little dance” on his head.  He finds his way back to the Delta house, bruised and battered only to be told by D-Day, they’ve all been expelled.
   
Now what happened, that reminded me of this classic scene from Animal House, was when Nancy Peolsi got up in front of a huge press core, with the American people watching, and announced that the Public Option would not be included in the House health care reform bill.  She announced this unbelievable statement with these facts in place.  First, forty one senators have signed on to pledge there support for a health care bill that includes the Public Option, leaving only nine more senators necessary to seal the deal.  Of the senators that are left, none have said they would not support it and at least nine have indicated in the past that they would support the public option if it was in the final bill.  In addition, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin has said that he will push through any bill that comes from the house including one with a Public Option.  Next, the majority of Americans, once they understand what a Public Option is, support it.  And finally, the House already passed a bill earlier that included a public option.  So what possible explanation could there be for Nancy Pelosi announcing to the world that the House bill will not include the Public Option?  Only one thing, Animal House.  You see, here is what I think happened…
 
Some time in the afternoon of March, 11th, Nancy Pelosi got a call from newly elected and former Cosmopolitan magazine's "America's Sexiest Man" of 1982, Scott Brown, asking if Nancy would like to meet him at a hotel room at the Watergate to discuss some future pending legislation that he would like to aggressively “ram” through her House.  She indicated that she would love to help an “up and coming” Congressman “ram” anything through her House, and would be happy to meet him there to discuss the details.
 
Speaker Pelosi arrived at the Watergate later that evening anxious to discuss Rep. Browns "pending legislation".  After getting a key from the front desk she opened the door to the hotel room only to find that Scott Brown was nowhere to be seen, but instead standing there, was John McCain, John Boehner, and three unnamed health insurance lobbyists.  Without getting into too much detail, if you have seen Animal House you know what happened next.  (Being a liberal progressive myself, I do not approve of this type of behavior, but hey that’s a Republican for you.)  The next morning, Nancy Peolsi, with the aid of Senator Harry Reid stumbled into the Oval office where President Obama was slamming down Red Bull with Joe Biden.  The President asked what happened and Pelosi replied, “No public option…it’s Over!”
 
That’s when it happened.  Joe Biden crushed his Red Bull can against his head, stood up and yelled, “OVER?..Did you say OVER?...NOTHING’S OVER UNTILL WE DECIDE IT IS!  Was it OVER when Iran invaded Kuwait?”  Reid looked at Obama and asked, ”Iran?” Obama replied, “Forget it, he’s rollin’.” Biden continued, “Hell no! And it’s not over now!  We may not support the public option but HELL if we’re gonna let health reform die!  So who’s with me!?  LET'S DO IT!……”  And that’s when he ran out of the room, fist in the air, with no one following him.  Now this is all speculation, of course.  It may not have happened exactly like this, but I' m sure it's pretty close.
 
Later that day, a recomposed Pelosi held her news conference. Caving to the pressure of the republicans, the lobbyists, and the conservative democrats, she announced that the public option would not be a part of the health reform legislation to come out of the House.  To the dismay of the Senate democrats who have the votes to pass it, and the majority of Americans who support the public option this announcement was both shocking and disappointing, but just like Joe Biden said, “Nothing’s over untill WE decide it is!”  We the People want real competition in Health Care!  We the People want lower premiums! We the People want the insurance companies to be held accountable! We the People want a Public Option!  SO LET'S DO IT!… (c’mon, don’t leave me hangin’ here people.)
 
 

Call your Representative and Speaker Pelosi today and demand the Public Option.

You can e-mail Speaker Nancy Pelosi at http://www.speaker.gov/contact.

You can write your Rep at https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml.

Check to see if your Senator is supporting the Public Option at http://whipcongress.com/.

Sign the petition to include the Public Option in the House Bill at http://www.democracyforamerica.com/activities/311.

 

Share

Yaba-Daba-Doo! Fred Flintstone was "Gay"!

 

There was a time in this country when the word “gay” meant happy.  “Gay” was a common word in many popular songs.  For example the song “Twistin’ the Night Away” by Sam Cooke went "Let me tell you 'bout a place, Somewhere up-a New York way, Where the people are so gay, Twistin' the night away-ay…"  Or in the Christmas song Deck the Halls, they sing “Don we now our gay apparel.”  In the song “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story, Maria sings “I feel pretty and witty and gay.” Even Elvis sang songs that had the word “Gay” in it and as far as I know, Elvis was heterosexual. The Flintstones theme song ended with telling us that “We’ll have a gay old time!” There was no other meaning to the word “gay” then happy.  The word had no connotation to homosexuality in any way shape or form.  But somehow in the early seventies the word came to be associated with people who were attracted to the same sex.  “Homosexual” was considered to be to clinical.  “Queer” was to insulting.  “Gay” just seem to fit.  The truth is people have been gay for as long as there have been people.  This is nothing new. Homosexuals didn’t all of a sudden appear when the word Gay started being used to describe them.  Today, whether the Christian right likes it or not, Gay men and women exist in every level of our society.  They are doctors and lawyers, politicians and pastors.  They are teachers, they are mothers, they are fathers, they are our co-workers, and our neighbors. And they are even our soldiers.  The amazing thing is that in every aspect of our society, except for the military, a person can be openly gay with out fear that they will face legal retribution for being gay.  Yet in our military, for the past 17 years we have tolerated legalized discrimination through a policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.  What’s missing from that policy is “and Pray to G-d you Don’t Get Caught”.  In the military, being gay is not just frowned upon it is a crime that is punishable not only by dishonorable discharge but by imprisonment.  A person can go to jail in the military simply for there sexual preference.  In all other parts of our society this intolerance of sexual orientation is considered a hate crime but in our military it’s considered standard policy.
 
But now congress is considering the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a move that is long over due.  On Wednesday the Pentagon promised congress that they would provide an honest assessment on whether allowing gays to serve openly might cause troops to lose their edge in battle.  Let’s think about this for a moment.  If you consider that the estimated percentage of U.S. Citizens who are openly gay is 4%, and if we apply that same percentage to the amount of active troops currently serving in our military, which is about 1,475,000, then there are about 59,000 men and women currently in our military who are gay.  That’s a lot of gay soldiers, gay soldiers who are serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, helping with relief efforts in Haiti, manning our nuclear subs and protecting our coast lines.  It’s not like if all of a sudden if we allow them to be openly gay they are going to ask for pink uniforms and start redecorating the mess hall.  Most likely nothing will happen, except the tables will turn and the ones being prosecuted will be those who are showing intolerance to gay individuals.  But there must be some precedence set for this somewhere around the world?  There must be at least one other country that allows openly gay men and women to serve, that can give us some type of indication of how this would affect our military?  Well actually there is.  You see there are 25 other countries that around the world don’t make there soldiers hide who they are and don’t send them to prison for it either.  They are:
 
Australia,
Austria,
Belgium,
Canada,
Czech Republic,
Denmark,
Estonia,
Finland,
France,
Germany,
Ireland,
Israel,
Italy,
Lithuania,
Luxembourg,
Netherlands,
New Zealand,
Norway,
Slovenia,
South Africa,
Spain,
Sweden,
Switzerland,
United Kingdom,
and Uruguay.
 
As you can see, precedence has been set.  We would be far from the only country who openly allows gays to serve in the military.  But what most of us don’t seem to realize is that many of our troops have already served with openly gay men and women in the military.  One of our biggest allies is the United Kingdom.  They have been right by our side through both wars in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.  And as far as I know there were no reports of problems with troop morale because of an openly gay soldier fighting right next to them for the same freedoms as everyone else.  In fact as far as I know, they had a gay old time.

The Real World, DC!

 

This is the true story, of 40 politicians, picked to live together, for seven and a half hours, and have their lives taped, to find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting REAL!  The Real World DC!  Minus the edgy sound track and MTV style fast camera cuts, that’s pretty much what the Health Care Summit was, extremely predictable reality television.  Now I’m not gonna sit here and claim that I watched all seven and a half hours of this must see TV, because I didn’t.  I actually have a life and just like watching the movie Titanic, I pretty much knew what the outcome was going to be.  Maybe if Nancy Pelosi stripped down on a red velvet couch while John Dingle drew a portrait of her it would have been more interesting, but that was not very likely to happen.  But if you missed the health care summit hosted by President Obama today lets just say that it was only slightly more exciting to watch then the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Olympics.  So let me give you the cliff notes of what went on at Reformapalooza 2010.  After everyone arrived, they changed into there tie dyes and open toed sandals.  Barack gave everyone a high five, while John McCain lit some incense that he had been saving since his days in the Hanoi Hilton.  Then they all sat down indian style in a circle, democrat, republican and so on, and passed around a hookah that Joe Biden found in the Lincoln bedroom.  After they were all totally wasted, House GOP Leader John Boehner broke out 40 tabs of some trippin’ LSD that he got from Wavy Gravy at Woodstock.  Then they all agreed on a Single Payer Health Care system, sang We Are The World, and all of the republicans pledged to become democrats.  It was awesome!
 
You know I have to give President Obama a lot of credit here.  This summit, pow wow, meeting, what ever you want to call it, was not something he had to do.  The reality is he does not need the republicans to get this done.  The senate democrats could pass this tomorrow through reconciliation with 51 votes, and not a single republican involved.  But Obama is not your ordinary President.  So why did he have this meeting?  I’ll tell you why.  The president is not in charge of the Senate. To take control the President needed to get these politicians on his turf.  He needed to take them out of there comfort zone where they don’t discuss, but only lecture each other.  He needed to put these politicians in a place where they had to talk to each other and where he could make the rules and control how they talked.  And that he did. For the first time in this insane year long debate where even when republicans have admitted that reform is needed, yet still have done everything in there power to block it, there was real conversation.  There was honest agreement on a limited number of points, and a whole lot of disagreement, and even though it became clear to both sides by the end of the day that if reform was to happen going to happen, it was most likely not going to be with the help of the republicans, President Obama now could move forward and honestly say to both sides, and the American people, I listened, I tried, I did everything I could short of caving in and giving the republicans everything they wanted.  I don’t think for a moment that the President expected everyone to come together, sing Kumbaya, and walk out with unanimous support, but he showed that he is a different type president then we have ever seen.  He talks straight, tells it like it is and even when other may wonder why he’s not playing hardball with the other side, ignoring the Republicans, and just ramming through his policies, he sticks to his values and does it his way.  He said during his campaign that he believes in dialogue with your opposition.  He believes in discussion.  Our last president shut out dialogue with the democrats, he shut out Iran, he shut out the Palestinians, he shut out the entire Muslim world, unless we needed there oil.  If they opposed us or our allies they were shut out.  And in turn, in many parts of the world so were we.  This President believes that without dialogue there can be no progress, and while others may disagree with that philosophy, Obama is our President and he will run things in the way that he believes will benefit this country the most.  And if that means he needs to hold the Republicans feet to the coals and force them to have a real discussion with him about one of the most important pieces of legislation of our time, even if he knows what the outcome will be, then that’s what this President will do.  We may not agree, we may not understand, we may not even watch, but 3.9 million people did. Apparently this was must see TV.

 

The Mass Murder Of America

 

In 2006 I was selling mortgages, but not just any mortgages I was selling those sub-prime, interest only, nothing down, debt consolidation, 30 day ARM, you don’t know what the hell you just got yourself into, mortgages.  Now sure, just like the SS guards, I was only following orders that my generals from Countrywide told me to follow, but I knew what I was doing and quite frankly couldn’t believe that some of the loans that I sold, people actually went for.   Now to be honest, I never tricked anyone into anything.  I told them exactly what they were getting and how the loan worked, but to be fair most of the people I spoke to weren’t exactly financial geniuses.  They were just happy that all of their credit card bills, medical bills, car loans, and student loans, were going to be paid off, they were going to get $3000 in cash, and would now have only one payment instead of thirty.  Never mind I was raising their interest rate 4 points, there 6 year car loan just turned into a 30 year car loan, and the amount of interest they were going to pay over the life of the loan increased 20 fold.  They were just happy they had cash, and more money in their pocket each month, that is until the interest rate went up 2 years later, changed every month, and they maxed out all of their credit cards again, but by that time I was out of the game and Countrywide, well if you’ve seen the news, you know what happened to Countrywide.   But during that time I got to read hundreds of credit reports, and I didn’t need an international study to tell me what was crystal clear from reading all these credit reports.  The biggest reason that people had filed for bankruptcy was due to medical bills and medical premiums they could not afford.  These were everyday Americans just like you and me.  Most of them had health insurance but it only took one catastrophic illness to destroy them financially and ruin everything that they had worked so hard for there entire lives.
 
Last year, In a article published in the Washington Post it stated that according to a nationwide study released by the American Journal of Medicine “Sixty-two percent of all bankruptcies filed in 2007 were linked to medical expenses…and nearly 80 percent had health insurance.”  In addition, the Article stated that the authors of the study concluded that the financing of health care in this country is “broken” and that middle class families, “frequently collapse under the strain of the health care system that treats physical wounds, but inflicts fiscal ones.” By comparison, in 1981 only 8% of families filing for bankruptcy cited medical expenses as the primary reason for filing.  But what most don’t realize is that this problem is no longer simply an issue of affordable healthcare for all Americans.  The reality is, Health Care Finance Reform is the single most important issue affecting every American on this planet.  In the history of our nation there has never been an issue more vital to the continued health, welfare and economic growth of our country as reforming health care.  What I frankly can not understand is why this issue has not been emphasized more, of how vitally important economically health reform is to our county.  So let's break it down. In 2009 there were 1,400,000 bankruptcies filed in the U.S. and 62% were due to medical expenses.  Than means 868,000 Americans filed for bankruptcy due to medical expenses.  So we are talking about 868,000 Americans that because of medical expenses, because of a broken health care finance system, have to put so much of there personal income towards paying off uncovered medical expenses that they have nothing left to invest in personal savings, buying real estate, purchasing cars, opening businesses, paying for college, or buying any of the other millions of goods and services that are so vital to growing our national economy and would help to bring us out of this economic hole that we have been in for the last nine years.  Even Americans who are fortunate enough to be able to afford there medical expenses and don’t have to file bankruptcy still have to divert funds from other goods, services and investments that could be benefiting the grown of our economy.  The issue of health Care Finance Reform makes every other issue pale by comparison including Jobs.  Ask any economist in this county, if you want to bring back jobs you have to stimulate the economy.  People have to have money to buy goods and services.  If so much of our money is being diverted to medical expenses that American are going bankrupt, growing our economy becomes that much more difficult.  In California insurance costs are rising by as much as 40 percent.  This means more money going towards insurance premiums and less going into our economy.  It means more business that have to pay more for group health insurance and have to make choices on how to pay for those increases.  They can pass the cost along to there workers who will then have less in there paycheck, or they can reduce benefits to keep rates down but then the workers will have to put more out for uncovered services, or they can pass the costs along to you and me by raising the price of there goods and services to cover the increase in insurance costs.  All of that translates to more going to pay for health care and less going to everything else.  And then there are those who can't afford health care insurance, or those with a pre-existing condition who can’t get covered, or those with chronic illnesses who have maxed out there coverage and have to pay every penny of there health care themselves and have to pick and choose what they get treated for and pray that nothing serious happens.  How do these people pay for goods and services that help grow our economy when most of there income is going to health care costs?  If you want to bring back jobs, reduce the cost of health care to all Americans, eliminate bankruptcies due to medical expenses, allow Americans to spend there money on goods and services rather then medical bills and insurance premiums.   Make it more affordable for small business to provide group coverage to there employees so that small businesses can compete in the job market for qualified employees, and have more capitol to grow there businesses.  Our current health care finance system is killing our economy.  I've said it before and I’ll say it again, this is not a political issue, this is a human issue.  Both Democrats and Republicans need to step up and do what is right for this country and stop making it about what is in it for them.  We need reform that eliminates pre-existing conditions, eliminates caps on coverage, and brings down costs, and the only way that is going to happen is with a true public option that is available too all Americans.  With out that the insurance giants will continue to have no competition and no reason to reduce costs and the only ones who will see more money in there pockets will be the CEOs of the Health Insurance giants.  And you and me, regardless of income, will be only one catastrophic illness away from financial ruin. 

The Tea Baggers (giggle) are F--king Retards!

 

The Tea Baggers are f—king retards!  Oh I’m sorry, was that not politically correct and incredibly insensitive of me?  Did I pull a Rahm?  Well then let me now apologize for everything that I am about to say in this article and let you know in advance that if you are easily offended, boo hoo for you and go grow a pair!  Quite frankly I don’t know who I’m more pissed at, the Tea Baggers, the Republicans, the Democrats, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, or Mickey Mouse (I missed the G-D Dam State of the Union speech because I was riding Space Mountain for a week!)  Ok, maybe calling the Tea Baggers, retards is a bit harsh but they did call themselves Tea Baggers without realizing the graphic connotation that makes me giggle like Bevis every time Butthead said the word “Ball”.  And I find it both interesting and disturbing that I have never seen a more racist and illiterate group of individuals since the people of Louisiana elected David Duke (you know, former grand wizard of the KKK) as Republican State Representative.  The keynote speaker at the Tea Party convention was former Republican Presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (“who?” you’re asking.  Yea I never heard of him either,) who suggested in his speech that Obama won because, "we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country, people who could not even spell the word 'vote,' or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House, name is Barack Hussein Obama."  So basically Tommy Boy is suggesting that we go back to the Jim Crow laws that existed before the civil rights movement that kept African Americans from voting because many of them could not pass the test that was given in order to vote.  This is so wrong and racist on so many levels that it baffles me!  So it is not enough for an individual to be a citizen on this country to have the right to vote, now they have to be literate, and pass a test?  Well then I guess that would eliminate a large number of Tea Party members.  Let’s look at some Tea Party signs in this video from Jimmy Kimmel:
  

As far as I can tell there is no official demographic study of who makes up this Tea Party but as one reporter observed who was at the convention “it was hard to ignore the one-sided demographic of the attendees.  There's virtually no one under the age of 45 and almost no African-American or minority group represented.  This is very much a white, middle-aged gathering.” And let’s get one other thing straight here.  Barack Obama is not a Socialist.  He is not a Communist, or Fascist, or Marxist, or Nazi, or any other word that these paranoid Tea Baggers (giggle) keep randomly shouting out without even knowing there true meaning.  Apparently all of these words are now interchangeable.  Socialism “advocates a system of collective or government ownership and management of the means of production and distribution of goods.” If Obama was a Socialist he would not be trying to get banks to increase loans to small businesses, he would want to own all the small businesses.  He would not be trying to create a new health care insurance system that promotes increased competition among insurance companies in order to drive down costs to consumers, instead he would be an advocate of Single- Payer and would want to eliminate the insurance companies all together. I don’t mind when individuals have dissenting views.  Supreme Court justices do it all the time.  The difference is that there arguments are based on pure fact, not on made up fiction that is only designed to incite uneducated morons who are too lazy and stupid to check the claims they hear for themselves.  These people are like lemmings following who ever yells the loudest off the cliff. 
 
But what the Tea Party movement really is, is a clear sign of the failure of the Republican party to come together and provide leadership and clarity to their party members.  Tea Partiers are nothing more than hard core, ultra conservative republicans that don’t feel that they are being heard by their own party, and watch way to much FOX news.  They are Republicans who were so used to being in power and having their agenda in the White House for so long, that now they are in shock that there power has been completely eroded and the religious right that used to rule the roost, no longer does.  The Republicans have made it abundantly clear that they have one agenda, and that is stopping President Obama any way they can even if what he wants to do is the right thing to do.  They have made it clear that there will not be any compromise, no matter how often the President meets with the GOP or makes speeches to joint session or holds press conferences expressing how he is more than willing to listen to any body.  No matter how often the President expresses that we must put partisan politics aside for the good of the people, it has been made clear that the GOP will do nothing of the sort.  And while I would fully expect Democrats to do the same if the shoe was on the other foot, it is plain wrong and the practice should cease.  I was not a supporter of George W. Bush, but I sure did not want him to fail, and if he did something that I liked I supported it regardless if I voted for him or not, and to be quite frank, I did vote for him when he ran for his second term, but only because I thought John Kerry was a terrible candidate for the Democrats and I think I was drunk on voting day.   But it seems that this time around, the republicans do not want to give this guy a break.  Even when companies like Anthem Blue Cross of California, (who announced this week that they will be raising there rates by a whopping 39%), are taking complete advantage of the general consumer and forcing many into bankruptcy and causing others to lose their insurance completely because they cannot afford to pay these exorbitant rates. There is hardly a Republican who will not say that we need reform, yet they will not work with this president on anything.  Like many progressive democrats, I have been unhappy with the president.  He has not been vocal enough, but now he is and I applaud him.  Mabey it took the election of Scott Brown to wake him up but whatever it is it worked.  I just hope he spends more time putting the ones who are obstructing progress in their place and keeping his message in front of the American people, and less time trying to get the Republicans to play nice, because they will not.  They will continue to rely on lies and scare tactics.  The Tea Baggers (giggle) will continue to believe the lies and propagate the fear.  Sarah Palin will continue to prove herself the idiot that she is (Really Sarah, you wrote on your hand after criticizing the President for using teleprompters!) and bigger idiots will put her in the number one position for Republicans they would vote for president.  In a recent poll, 63 percent of self identified Republicans believe Obama is a socialist, 39 percent think he should be impeached, 24 percent said Obama wants “the terrorists to win”, 31 percent agreed with the statement that Obama is “a racist who hates white people”, 36 percent of respondents do not believe the president was born in this country, and 23 percent, want their state to secede from the union…Retards! (oops, my bad.)

 

McSteamy Goes to Washington

 

Imagine for a moment you walk into a bank and standing there are two tellers.  One is a very plain bookish looking woman with a tan business suit on who doesn’t smile much, and somewhat resembles Kathy Bates.  The other teller is a tall, extremely handsome gentleman, with a winning smile, blue eyes, and looks like this is his side job, when he’s not working as a Chippendale dancer in the evenings.  No one is in line at either teller and you have your pick.  Who do you choose?  If you said the one that looks like Kathy Bates, male or female, you would be in the minority.  Most people would choose the Chippendale.  This is essentially what happened in Massachusetts this past week when Scott Brown, or as I will continue to refer to him, McSteamy, won the Senate seat that Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy held since 1972.   Quite simply, the nation was rocked!  The Republicans celebrated! The Democrats did shots of Jagermeister to numb the pain!  FOX news held a giant tea party while Glenn Beck tea bagged Bill O’Reilly!  It was absolute mayhem! It seemed that with this one election, President Obama’s entire agenda would be in jeopardy!  How could this happen?  Well, we will get to that in a minute. First let’s ask ourselves, who really is Scott Brown, I mean McSteamy?
 
McSteamy, born September 12, 1959, was a practicing attorney before winning the senate race in Massachusetts.  Before that, McSteamy, at the ripe age of twenty two, won Cosmopolitan magazine's "America's Sexiest Man" contest and appeared nude in the June 1982 issue. Cosmo described him as "strong but huggable."  I’m sure Harry Reid has never been described as “strong but huggable,” at least not by anyone except Mrs. Reid.  Indecently, doesn’t Harry Reid sound like one of those fake names they give porn stars?  (along with John Boehner, John Dingall.)  Little known fact, Joe Lieberman was 1982’s sexiest man according to the Boca Raton News.  McSteamy, a triathlete, enjoys bicycling, running, swimming, long walks on the beach, sunsets, nice people, and looking in the mirror.  He is pro-choice, against gay marriage but favors civil unions.  He was initially in favor of the health care bill, but says he now opposes it because most people in Massachusetts have health insurance, and Massachusetts would be subsidizing the rest of the country.  Incidentally that seems like a pretty pathetic reason to be against the health care bill.  Maybe we shouldn’t help the people in Haiti, after all we didn’t have an earth quake here, and everything is fine.  Maybe we shouldn’t give help to the homeless.  After all I have a house, don’t you?  Actually there are about 64,000 people in Massachusetts with no health insurance.  I guess McSteamy does not have a problem with that. 
 
But let’s get back to what this article is really about.  How could this happen?  How could Senator Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat be ripped away from the Democrats so easily?  After all the Democrats held this seat for 48 years!  This was a shoe-in!  It’s a Democratic state!  How could the Democrats loose there super majority in the Senate and put in jeopardy every initiative that the Obama administration wants to achieve over the next three years?  Who is to blame for this?  Well, before I tell you that, let’s understand that if the only issue here was that the Democrats lost Massachusetts this would not be much of an issue.  The real issue here is what this loss was a symptom of.  This loss was a symptom of the failure of President Obama to effectively communicate to the American people why he has pushed through the agenda that he has and how it will benefit this country.  The Republicans, on the other hand, did a masterful job of communicating a message of fear to the American people.  The have the Washington experience and know how to combat any positive initiative that the President has tried to push through.  The Republicans have successfully made intelligent rational Americans believe that not being denied insurance due to a pre-existing condition is a bad thing, that removing a lifetime cap on your insurance is a bad thing, that reducing the cost of health insurance is a bad thing, that getting 45 million more Americans who don’t have insurance, coverage for themselves and there families, is a bad thing, and some how they made people believe that giving Americans more choices in health insurance is the same thing as the government is going to control your health care, limit your coverage, and put grandma before a socialist death panel.  The President has admitted on television that this year was definitely a learning experience for him on how to play the game in Washington.  This is where he failed.  In a recent interview after Scott Brown won the election he said that it was much easier to get his message out when he was on the campaign trail but as President it is much more of a challenge. On the campaign trail he communicated with the American people every day because there was always something to combat from the other side.  As President he became much more relaxed in his efforts to communicate.  He pushed through his agenda but did not communicate why.  He pushed through health care but did a terrible job of communicating how it would benefit everyone.  He left too many questions unanswered and left the door wide open for the Republicans to fill the void.  And fill it they did.  The Republicans and the conservative media did a masterful job of communicating why everything that the President was pushing through was, according to them, harmful to our country, even if what they were communicating was not true.  The truth did not matter.  What mattered was that the only message getting out was the Anti-Obama message and any information that supported what the President was doing was not being communicated.  In August, after the Republicans spent a month throwing tea parties and having town hall meetings that resembled WWE wrestling matches that did nothing but spread fear about the Presidents, the President made a speech before a joint session of congress to answer his critics and put health care reform back on track.  He said that he would no longer stand for the lies being told and if he hears these untruths being spread any further, those spreading these lies will be dealt with.  It was tough talk and sounded like he would finally put those who were spreading fear about health care reform in there place.  He sounded like the man we saw on the campaign trail, not the President who had not been communicating to the American people. Then the speech ended, and the tough talk turned into no talk.  The Republicans continued to spread there fear, to reinforce there agenda that had nothing to do with benefiting the American people and only had everything to do with returning the Republicans to power at what ever the cost was to the American people, and the end result was Scott Brown stole the seat in Massachusetts away from the Democrats.  How did this happen?  I’ll tell you how.  The President and the Democrats delivered it to the Republicans gift wrapped with a big shiny bow on top.  It wasn’t Scott Browns smile, or his truck, or his centerfold, or even the seemingly dissatisfaction of the people of Massachusetts.  It was the utter failure of the President and the Democrats to effectively communicate to the American people why health care reform is so important, why we aren’t out of Gitmo today, why we have spent billions of dollars on bank bailouts and how this will benefit all of us.  People have a natural fear of the unknown and the Republicans took full advantage of that fear, and they did it like a party fighting for its life, and they were virtually un-answered by the Democrats.  The President and the Democrats had all the power, and had absolutely no idea what to do with it.  If the President wants the next three years to be successful and hopes to see a second term he needs to re-evaluate how he is conducting his presidency.  He needs to be the man that we saw on the campaign trail.  He needs to be the man who promised all of us change, who gave us hope, who said yes we can, who promised transparency in government, who made us feel that this presidency will be different from all the others, because if he does not there may not be any health care reform, there may not be any second term, and I may be writing an article about President Palin!  Imagine that for a moment.

Hug a Politician...Just Make Sure to Shower Afterwards.

"My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference." - Harry S. Truman

 

The one thing that I really love about this country is that our elected officials truly represent us, the people.  They put there own self interests aside and never let big corporate money influence how they vote.  Our politicians do what is best for us and believe with all there heart that if they are meant to be re-elected, they will be!  They give of themselves and…Ok, I’m sorry, I just cant keep a straight face here while saying such utter bullshit!  I tried, really I did.  You see, there is an old saying that goes power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.  There have been many examples of this through out history, Saddam Husain, Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Milosevic.  These leaders were monsters and there own power and actions are what eventually led to there ultimate down fall.  In this country we are fortunate to have a system of checks and balances that would never let a Stalinist type leader ever come into power but that does not mean that our leaders do not abuse the power they have.  The problem is that most of the time, the power they abuse is within the letter of the law. They work within our inherently flawed system.  Fortunately for us, if we do not like what our leaders as a whole have done, we can vote them out of office.  We are not stuck with them until they die, unlike the citizens of Cuba, North Korea or Arizona. 
 
You might be wondering to yourself at this point, what the hell is he getting at?  Well what I am getting at is this.  As a private citizen, I have learned a hell of a lot over the last few months watching our House and our Senate go through the process of debating health care and I have concluded that if this is the way most of our bills are decided, if this is how things are run in our hallowed government halls, in which most of us pay little attention to, even though we have more access to it, and more ability to have direct influence over our legal process then at any other time in our history, then to put it simply, we are all collectively screwed.  And by all, I don’t mean just all Progressive Democrats, I mean all of us.  While we would like to think that the power is in our hands because we can vote, and we can make calls, and we can e-mail and sign petitions, the real power, the absolute power that has corrupted our government truly lies between the corporations, the lobbyists and our elected officials who, when it all comes down to it, care more about increasing there bank accounts so that they can get re-elected, and the perks they are given in the form of vacations and hand outs, then simply doing what is the best for there constituents.  And it does not matter whether it is a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent, most of them get into power and it is not long before they are corrupted by the power they are given.  Sure there are exceptions to this rule such as Senators Al Frankin, and Bernie Sanders. Senator Sanders of Vermont has proven that you can vote your conscience and be true to your constituents and get re-elected with out being owned by corporate interests.
 
The facts are this, and I repeat these are facts.  This is not my opinion, or a Democratic point of view.  Poll after poll of average Americans from June of 2009 until today, taken by independent sources, consistently show that most Americans favor a Public Option being included as part of the Health Care reform bill, a bill that will be presented to President Obama, at the exceedingly rushed pace that is it being pushed through, so that the President can stand before the nation at his State of the Union address later this month and declare the great thing he and the Democratic Party has done to reform our health care insurance.  I repeat, most Americans consistently favor a public option.  So have the members of the House and the Senate done there jobs and represented the people of this country as they were elected to do?  Have they listened to there constituents and made sure that a public option will be in there bills, because that is what most Americans want to see?  To give credit to our House of Representatives, the answer is yes, they did.  They presented a bill that includes the Public Option.  It was, except for one Republican, an entirely Democratic effort, but they did.   But the Senate, on the other hand, has demonstrated on both the Republican and Democratic sides that there self interests, party lines, and the interests of the corporations that pay them millions of dollars each year in campaign contributions, and not the interests of the people they represent, are what matter to them.  The Democrats in the Senate bought and sold there votes.  They made bargains to get the sixty votes needed to pass, that if done on the State level would be investigated as pure bribery.  They ignored what the people want and made this into a game in which only themselves and the corporations that control our health care will win, and we as a people will all loose.  The Republicans were not much better, but they do not control congress.  They do not currently have the power to do what ever they g-d damn want to. But they could have one-upped the Democrats by showing us that at least they had the moral high road, but they didn’t.  They could have ignored party lines and voted strictly there conscience, like the one Republican in the House, Rep. Joe Cao of Louisiana did, but time and time again I have watched the Republicans in every vote since the Democrats took power vote strictly on party lines. And if this is how our laws get passed, if no matter who we elect, our representatives can just be bought and sold, if the only thing that matters on both sides is party lines, and how much the corporation that has the most too lose pays the politician that can help them gain the most, then we are all screwed and it does not matter if you are Republican or Democrat.  The game will never change. The Democratic Party has the power.  They have the choice on how to use that power.  They have a choice to represent there constituents, or not.  They have a choice to help people who really need the help, or not.  They have a choice to make real change for this country that will really matter for decades to come, or not. And they have made there choice.  They have a choice as to who they are going to truly represent with this power.  The Democrats in the Senate have chosen not to represent the people that got them elected, the people they represent, the people who can get them re-elected…or did they?  

The North Shore Dad, The 2009 "Daddie" Awards!

 

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the first annual North Shore Dad, Daddie Awards!  Here we will honor achievements however dubious and ridiculous they may be of those individuals who touched our lives in ways that often we could have done without, and issues that forced us to take notice.  And now here is your host for the evening, the North Shore Dad himself,…Brian Dann! 
 
Thank you, Thank you!  Before we get started I just want to make an announcement, Joe Lieberman has just left Judaism citing Hanukkah as costing too much to celebrate and has converted to Islam.  He will now be known as Abdul Mohammed Goldstein.  And now for our first award.
 
Our first award goes to the individual most unable to recognize a good thing when he had it.  And the Nominees are:

• David Letterman - for his affair with a staff intern.
• Governor Mark Sanford - for his “hike through the mountains.” (is that what you call cheating on your wife these days)
• Tiger Woods - For using Tigers Wood way too much.

And the Daddie goes to…Tiger Woods!  At the risk of sounding redundant, are you a frigin’ idiot?  First of all your wife is smokin’ hot, and second, you’re not.  Third of all, what’s the story Tiger? Are you making up for all those years when you couldn’t get laid as a young geeky kid playing golf all the time?  You don’t just stick your club in any bimbo that wants to play with your putter!
 
And now on to our next award.  This next award is the George W. Bush Lifetime achievement award for the most stupid things said in one years time.  And the Nominees are:

• Rush Limbaugh - "Exercise freaks ... are the ones putting stress on the health care system." June 12, 2009
• President Obama - "UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? It's the Post Office that's always having problems," Undercutting his argument for health care reform while trying to make his case.
• Glenn Beck – “This president…has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture... This guy is, I believe, a racist."
• Sarah Palin - "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel.'"

And the Daddie goes to… Sarah Palin! Oh please this was way too easy!  Was this even a contest?  Lets review some of the quotes that gave her this award.
 
“That was fun!” – Said after pardoning a turkey while other turkeys were having there heads chopped of behind her.
 
"I think on a national level your Department of Law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out." – The Department of Law in the White House… does not exist.
 
"It may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: 'Sit down and shut up,' but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out." – Said as she QUIT her position as governor of Alaska.
 
Oh there were countless others that I could have included from the Katie Couric interview or other things she said while on the campaign trail but only the last 12 months can be considered.  But I am fully in favor of her running for President, Oh please if there is a god in heaven let her run for president.
 
The next award is the Shock and Awe award and goes to the biggest honor bestowed this year that may have been ever so slightly questionable.  There was only one Nominee for this award this year.
 
And the Daddie goes to... President Barack Obama for his award of the Nobel Peace Prize!  Now granted I like the president and all, but don’t you think that on the day they announced the winner, Mahatma Gandhi rolled over in his grave and said, “Are you Fuckin kidding me!”  I’m not going to question whether he deserved this prize or not, but if he didn’t have enough pressure on him already, he does now.
 
This next award is the Biggest Scam award and goes to the individual or individuals who pulled off the biggest hoax of the year.  And the Nominees are:

• Bernie Maddof – He easily pulled off the largest ponzi scheme in history, with some help from the SEC.
• Richard Henne – Better known as the Balloon Boy case.
• Michaele and Tareq Salahi – The couple who crashed the White House State Dinner. Actually that took a hell of a lot of balls! Kudos to them!

And the Daddie goes to… Richard Henne!  Oh sure Bernie Maddof scammed many more people out of billions of dollars and wiped out the life savings of everyone from some of the wealthiest people in the world to others with modest nest eggs to retire on, as well as some of the top charitable organizations in our country, but no one pulled off a scam with the same utter stupidity and disregard for their own young children then Richard Henne.  This idiots hair brained scheme included telling his children that they should lie to the national media and he was convinced that if he pulled this off it would land him on a reality TV show.  So much for teaching good values to your kids and getting an honest job. 
 
The next award is the coveted Douche-bag award!  This goes to the biggest Douche-bag of the entire year.  With out a doubt there is no contest here and only one nominee. 

The Daddie for this year’s Douche-bag award proudly goes to Senator Joe Lieberman!  This is the only man in history who is the Yin to his own Yang!  Joe was originally elected as the Senator from Connecticut as a Democrat.  He even ran for Vice President with Al Gore on the Democratic ticket.  Joe became an independent when he lost the Democratic primary election in 2006 and ended up winning the election as an independent even though he highly resembles the cartoon character Droopy-Dog. At that time he also promised to uphold the ideals of the Democratic Party as an independent. He pretty much sealed his fate as Douche-bag of the year the moment he campaigned for the Republican candidate John McCain rather then the Democratic Barack Obama. Yes, I know this happened before 2009, but it was such a Douche-bag move that we can’t help but in consider it for the award.  Gotta-Go-Joe then further sealed his fate as a world class back stabber by pledging to filibuster during the Senate debate on health care reform, further betraying the Democrats and then went on to enter the ranks of hall of fame back-stabbers by promising to side with the Republicans by opposing both a Medicare-buy-in and a Public Option.  Way to go Joe! What a Douche-bag!
 
And the final award of the evening goes to the NorthShoreDad “Reader of the Year”! 
 
And I am proud to announce that this years Reader of the Year award goes to my Uncle Rick!  Oh sure I have had many loyal readers over the past year and many who have told me that they liked this article or that article, but Uncle Rick is the only reader that has read almost everyone of my articles and has actually made a point to comment, in writing, on most of the things I have written.  Oh, don’t assume he got this award because he agreed with everything I said, he absolutely did not, or that he praised me for my insightful opinions on politics and our new president, which he should have. You see, me and Uncle Rick are as about as opposite in political views as two human beings can be, but the fact is he commented, and that is the reason that I created NorthShoreDad.com in the first place, to encourage the debate.  I created it to encourage the intelligent exchange of ideas that makes this country a great place to live.  Here we can say anything we want about what ever we want with no fear of censorship.  I don’t think there has ever been an occasion where my Uncle Rick and I have agreed on anything in politics but that is ok.  How boring would this world be if all we did was agree on everything!  So please follow Uncle Ricks lead and comment.  Below each article is a link that says “Comments.”  If you read something you like or dislike about what I write, or just want to add some incite, comment.  It makes this world and this blog a more interesting place to visit.  So congratulations Uncle Rick!  You are the 2009 “Reader of the Year!”  Dont get too excited.  There's not actually a statue or monitary award.
 
And that wraps up this years 2009 North Shore Dad “Daddie” awards!  Untill next year this is the NorthShoreDad, Brian Dann saying thank you for the past year!  Have a Very Happy New Years, and remember I’ll turn this blog around right now kids, So Sit Down!

 

President Obama Can Kiss My A$@!

 

President Obama can kiss my A$@!  Anyone who voted for this guy should have his head examined.  He promised this and that and is showing us he can’t deliver! Oh, if you’re thinking these are my sentiments, you are wrong.  These are the types of things that I have been hearing normal Americans say on the radio to various call in shows.  But I’m not talking about the conservative right wing call in shows like Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck.  I have been hearing these things on liberal, progressive left wing call in shows like Tom Hartman, or Ed Schultz.  It is amazing to me the short attention span that we have in this country.  A year ago we were dancing in the streets and today progressives are picking up torches and getting ready to stone the white house, while conservative are lighting the torches and handing it to them.  Have we gone insane?  Ok, so the Senate has passed a health care bill that does not include a public option.  And OK, President Obama did not seem to be very aggressive in making sure this did not happen.  And OK, we have video footage of both Senator and President Obama saying that he will not sign any health care bill into law that does not include a public option.  But I ask you this.  Did I miss the event where President Obama signed a health care bill into law? No I did not because, there is no bill to sign!  President Obama has yet to go back on this promise.  Two bills exist, a House bill, that includes a public option, and a Senate Bill that does not and these still have to be merged in to one final bill.  It could be weeks before this is resolved.  But let’s say, for arguments sake that this bill goes through and is signed into law with no public option.  That would suck, big time, and if you want to know why, read my other blogs.  I’m not going to into that here. Should it mean that those of us who voted for this president should declare our utter disappointment and announce that he has lost our trust and confidence?  Well truthfully, this was something that I was wrestling with in my mind.  What would not getting everything we need in this health care bill mean for my own support of this president?  Then this morning I was driving into work and I put on the Stephanie Miller show.  They were running a repeat of her show that aired the day after the President was sworn in and I was listening to the tone of the callers from that day and how excited and hopeful everyone was.  And it reminded me of three things.  First, that this man, thank g-d, is not George W. Bush.  This man can form a complete sentence without it being prepared in advance.  This man did not destroy our image on the world stage and put us on the road to economic ruin.  This man did not get us into a war based on lies and deception.  This man did not neglect to include the billions of dollars, needed to support two wars, from his budget every year.  This man did not make national policy decisions based on his personal Religious beliefs.

Second, it reminded me that the mere fact that we elected this particular individual president, by a overwhelming majority, was a major victory for this country on both the national and international stages.  The world never thought that the United States of American would ever elect a black man with the middle name Hussein, and the first name Barack, President of their country, but we did, and doing so we instantly regained an incredible amount of credibility on the world stage. 

And the third thing that I was reminded of was that this President has accomplish a huge number of things that never were accomplished under our previous administration and never would have been accomplished under the McCain administration.  These included:

• Two days after being elected he banned the use of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.”
• One day later he opened up funding, that was closed by George Bush, to overseas, planned parenting organizations.
• Three days later he gave California authorization to enact car-emissions standards that would lead to cleaner air quality, which Bush had been blocking for six years.
• Two weeks after that the President signed the $787 Billion dollar Stimulus Bill.
• In March the President opened up funding, that was previously restricted, to Stem Cell Research by George Bush.
• In April and June, the President engineered the restructuring of Chrysler and GM through bankruptcy, and avoided there shut down and massive loss of jobs that would have gone with it.
   
  
• In June he made a historic speech to the Arab world on their own soil that reset the tone of our relations with that region and open up communication and understanding that previously was non-existent.
• Also in June The President announced the Cash for Clunkers program that re-energized the auto industry and gave Ford a billion dollar profit.
• He appointed the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice.  He signed the Lilly-Ledbetter Act that guaranteed fair pay for women.  He ordered the Open-Government-Directive that enacted his Transparency in Government campaign promise, where-by the president can no longer declare information withheld simply because the president says so.  It can only be withheld after a review by a senate committee that declares the request constitutional and within the bounds of the law. He invited gay couples and their children to the annual Easter egg hunt on the white house lawn, and ordered law enforcement to no longer peruse cases of licensed individuals selling marijuana for strictly medical use in states where it is legal to do so.
• And lastly, he promised health care reform.  He pushed for this and would not let the House and the Senate push this initiative aside.   We will no longer be denied due to a pre-existing condition.  A child with a chronic illness will no longer loose there insurance due to a lifetime cap.  And if as citizens we voice our opinion that a Public Option must be part of this final bill, we may have a real choice in our health insurance at prices that are affordable to everyone.

 

But if the Public Option does not go through, I am not going to regret the decision to vote for Barack Obama because I have seen real change and I know that we will see much more.  I may not agree with every decision that his administration has made but I know that none of the things that have been accomplished could have been accomplished without this president.    As President Elect Obama said in his acceptance speech on that night in Grant Park, “The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.

I promise you, we as a people will get there.”

Is There a Doctor in the House? What About the Senate?

 

Emergency!  It looks like our health care bill is coding!  NURSE get me 2 liters of Public Option on the rapid infuser, STAT!  Doctor its flat lined!  Someone get me the paddles!...CLEAR!!  There’s barely a pulse!  We’re going to have to intubate!  Will somebody shut up Joe Lieberman, I need to concentrate here!  I see what’s wrong nurse!  Blue dog concessions are blocking the bills progress!  Can you save it Doctor?! Nurse, In the words of President Obama, “Yes we can, Yes we can!” 

Oh if it was that easy!  I hope I understand this correctly.  For the first time in ages we have a Democratic Congress, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic President who promised us real change, but they can’t come together to pass a simple sweeping health care reform bill that puts the people first and the corporations second, and includes a true Public Option?  If all the Democrats united they could basically do whatever they wanted to, but, Noooooooooooo!  Democrats just can’t agree on jack squat! 

“But why in the world would any Democrat not want a true Public Option included in this health care bill?  Could it be because some Democrats have the Insurance Company Lobbyists in there back pockets and the money is more important to them then the interests of the people they represent?”

Nah!  But maybe some of them just don’t know what a Public Options is.  First let’s define what it is not.  It is not Socialized Health Care.  In fact it is not health care at all.  In fact it is not even socialized.  It is health insurance.  Doctors won’t be working for the government, hospitals won’t be government owned, except of course for the ones that are already government owned.
 
“But wait, isn’t health insurance what we have right now? Am I missing something?”

Well no you’re not.  It is health insurance, but not like we have right now.  Let’s call it Health insurance version 2.0, or New and Improved health insurance.  This health insurance slices and dices and even makes Julian potatoes.  This health insurance is very similar to what we have today for seniors, called Medicare.  It is a government sponsored health insurance program, or a Public program, hence the word Public in Public Option.  Ahhhh, now you’re getting it?

“But why, would I want this Public Option health insurance, if I already have health insurance?” 
 
Well you see, it will be less expensive, a lot less expensive, and the awesome thing about it is that you get health insurance that's just as good as all of the other big corporate health plans.
 
“But how will it be so much less expensive if it offers the same quality insurance as the expensive corporate plans?”
 
I’ll tell you how.  You see the big corporate plans are “for profit.” There goal is to make the most money from you they can even if they have to refuse coverage to you in the process.  In addition the big corporate plans pay 30% of what you pay in premiums to there executives in multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses.  The Public Option, on the other hand, is not concerned with profit.  It is concerned with paying your medical bills, and government employees don’t make multi-million dollar salaries.  Hmmm imagine that, an insurance plan that puts you first.  Its starting to sound pretty good, isn’t it?  

“But if it’s less expensive won’t everyone want to have it?  And if every one has it won’t that put the corporate insurance companies out of business?”
 
Congratulation, you have just arrived at the essential reason why we must have a strong Public Option.  You see, right now the big corporate insurance companies have no reason to lower your premiums.  Why would they, there is no competition.  They can charge you what ever they want and we have no choice but to either pay it or have no health insurance.  But if the government offers everyone a Public Options insurance plan that offers you the same or better insurance that you get from the big corporate giants like Humana, Blue Cross/ Blue Shield, or Unicare, at prices that are drastically lower, now we have competition and if the big corporate insurance companies want to survive, they will have to lower there prices to stay in business.
 
“This sounds great!  A great insurance program, guaranteed by the government, at low prices and available to anyone!  But we will be forced to have this “Public Option”, right?  See it is socialized health insurance!  Down with big government!!” 

Woa! Hold on Rush Limbaugh, this is where the word “Option” comes in.  You see, it’s optional, hence the word Option in Public Option.  No one will ever be forced to have the Public Option.  You can choose any insurance you want.  You can even keep your current insurance.  You won’t have to change doctors, go to different hospitals, and even your current insurance will cost less because competition will drive down prices!

“ Woo Hoo !  Let’s celebrate!”

...Uh, hold on there cowboy.  You see, there is one little problem.  Since the Democrats can’t seem to agree on jack squat, certain itsy bitsy, teeny weeny little compromises had to be made, like eliminating the Public Option from the health care bill.  Ok bye, have a nice day!

“WHAT!”

….Hmmmmm?  Oh yea, you heard me right, they eliminated the Public Option in order to make certain other Democrats vote for the health care bill.  

“But what about competition, and lower prices and all that stuff?”
 
Yeeeea,…um,…well, you see, that’s all gone.  Oh were going to have other really good things like, you can no longer be denied for pre-existing conditions, or there are no longer going to be caps on how much your insurance company will pay out if you get sick, or your insurance can no longer be dropped because you are simply costing them too much money, but, and this is the reason that the insurance company executives are all having a big, all you can drink martini party right now,  no Public Option will mean that the big corporate insurance companies will be able to charge us what ever the hell they want to since there will nothing to drive down costs, and they will have around thirty five million more customers that they can do this too.  To put it bluntly…We’re Screwed.

“You mean to tell me that if the Democrats would simply include a Public Option all of us could have a real choice in our health care insurance at prices substantially lower then it is now, but with out the Public Option prices could actually go up, and the only choice we will have in insurance is the big corporate insurance giants or nothing?!”

Yes. That’s exactly what I am saying.  But there is something you can do.  You can call your congressman and senator today and tell them that you want a strong Public Option included in this Health Care Bill or they will loose your support.  If they are a Republican, tell them at the next election you will be voting for a Democrat, and if they are a Democrat tell them you will be voting for there Democrat opponent!

“Why wouldn’t I tell the Democrat that I will be voting Republican?”

Yea…Um, I’m just going to ignore that question.  Anyway…The other thing you can do is call the White House and tell President Obama that you do not what him to sign this bill with out a Public Option.  The bottom line is that this Health Car Bill must include a Public Option or it is not worth the paper it printed on.  We do not just have to be bystanders in this process.  This is a democracy and we can always be active participants.  Take a stand.  I’m glad we could have this talk. Nurse, I'm scrubbing in.

To contact your senator go to http://www.democracyforamerica.com/activities/268.  To contact the White House call 202-456-1111 or go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/.

Bushes Afghan, What NOT to Wear

 

Sit down, get ready, because here it comes.  President Bush did something right.  Whew, there I said it, I admit it, and I am not ashamed of it, and don’t ask me to say it again.  Oh, what is it you are wondering that he did right?  President Bush invaded Afghanistan with a clear purpose and mission, first, to break up the Taliban, second, to disable the Al-Qaeda organization, and third, to capture Osama Bin Laden.  Well, as Meatloaf said, two outta three ain’t bad.  I will give credit where credit is due.  After 9/11 the president took charge, the enemy was clear and we knew where they were.  The Taliban was harboring the criminals, Al-Qaeda, who were responsible for the atrocities of 9/11, they were allowing the Al-Qaeda to run terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and we put a stop to it. We succeeded in dismantling the Taliban and reduced Al-Qaida to a mere shadow of what it once was.  For that I give President Bush credit.  But President Bush did make one mistake though.  He failed in capturing Osama Bin Laden.  He diverted our resources to Iraq and did not complete the mission set out at hand.  Now I could go into all the recent reports of how we had Bin Laden cornered and let him slip through our fingers at Tora Bora, or the speculation that President Bush may have let Bin Laden go on purpose because if he actually captured him there would have been less of a justification to invade Iraq in the first place to get rid of fictitious weapons of mass destruction and line the pockets of Haliburton and Blackwater.  So I won’t mention those things, because that is really not what this article is about.  What it is about is what is going on today.  To be more specific, it is about President Obama’s recent announcement to send in 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan and increase our presence there to around 90,000 troops.

To put it simply, this is a mistake.  I do not support President Obama’s decision to increase troops and escalate this war.  I hope to G-d he proves me and everyone else wrong because if he succeeds we will all win.  The problem is I do not see how success is possible.  I think the president is misguided. To have a troop buildup in Afghanistan at this time is unnecessary.  If anything we should be pulling our troops out with possibly a small UN coalition left behind for observation only.  Before 9/11 the Taliban were not our enemy. They did not bother us and we did not bother them.  Then 9/11 happened and we had reason to retaliate against them.  They were harboring the criminals that attacked us, Al-Qaeda.  Today the Taliban are no longer in power.  Today the Taliban that are left are not harboring Al-Qaeda and are not letting Al-Qaeda run terrorist training camps.  The Taliban were defeated 8 years ago, are no longer in power, and Al-Qaeda has been reduced to a shell of what once existed.  The only thing left to do is capture Osama Bin Laden and what ever is left of the Al-Qaeda high command, and most intelligence organizations agree that they are most likely in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.  These days Osama Bin Laden is probably running a falafel bar just outside of Islamabad and Al-Qaeda is just his side job.  We do not need 90,000 troops and an estimated $30 billion extra dollars this year alone on top of what is already being spent for this war to find and capture the remaining Al-Qaeda terrorists, not to mention the additional U.S. lives that will lost in this action.  According to iCasualties.org, to date we have already lost 1533 soldiers in Afghanistan, with 486 this year alone, the highest number in a single year since the war started. And in Iraq we have lost 4685 soldiers, and since this war started 31,557 soldiers have been wounded.  These numbers do not take into account the men and women who are suffering from PTSS, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, or the civilian workers in Iraq who have been killed, (about 456) or wounded. The money that is being spent on both of these wars is being diverted from where it needs to be spent, here at home.  We have a country that is falling apart.  We have infrastructure that needs to be rebuilt.  We have businesses that need loans to survive.  We have people loosing there homes to foreclosure, school systems that can’t afford books, supplies or to pay there teachers what they deserve.  We have school buildings that need to be rebuilt.  We have sky rocketing unemployment and we have men, women and children who are dying because of lack of health care.  We have police forces that need to hire more officers but can’t afford to.  Last year in Chicago alone we had 509 homicides, 38 of them being with in the Chicago public schools.  In Iraq we had 486 U.S. fatalities in our armed forces.  It was safer for a soldier to be in Iraq last year then it was for him or her to be in Chicago.   Here is where we need the rebuilding. Here is where the real human tragedy exists and here is where we need to focus our efforts.  We need to stop being the world’s policemen and start cleaning up our own back yard.  President Obama I do not support this action.  You promised us and the world change.  Now prove it.

State Dinners, Apparently Everybody's Invited!

 

OK, so let me get this straight.  Two people, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, who are auditioning to be on the Real Housewives of D.C., simply walked in off the street and strolled right into the White House State Dinner for India’s prime minister, mingled with politicians and movie stars, and actually walked right up to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, and India’s prime minister, introduced themselves, and shook there hands!? And you mean to tell me that no one from the secret service, the agency that is supposed to be protecting some of our most important leaders and family members, did not think to check to see if they were actually invited to this state dinner?  No one thought to look at a list, check a name, or ask for ID?  Do you realize that right now there are meetings going on all over this country and the Middle East of Klansmen, Neo Nazis, and Al Qaeda terrorist, who are kicking themselves in there asses, and telling each other, “It’s that fucking EASY!  All we had to do was rent a tux, buy a dress, and walk in!  ALLAH DAMMIT!”  You would think that for this president, in particular, the secret service would be stepping things up a notch.  I mean after all he’s just the first ever African American president we have ever had.  And you know that the day that President Obama won the election every white supremacist in this country was slapping them selves in there red neck faces while praying to their white Jesus that this was simply a bad dream and they would soon wake up to see President McCain, and V.P. Sarah Palin!  Is the secret service really this inept and if they are, President Obama should be very worried.

According to a resent report on CNN, since President Obama’s inauguration, death threats against the president has gone up by 400%.  The president receives on the average 30 death threats a day!  Yes you read that right, 30 a day.  The rise in the number of hate groups in this country has sky rocketed and there memberships have gone up as well.  Maybe the secret service missed the meeting on the day when this information was talked about.  Honestly, I have never seen such venomous opposition towards a president last for so long as it has for this president.  And I’m not talking from hate groups either.  That insane craziness I fully expect.  It’s the ongoing day after day opposition rhetoric that one hears on talk radio, FOX “News”, and the political arena that spills over into the general population. It’s normal and even healthy for our politicians to be challenged and questioned, but for some reason with this president I have seen some of the most hateful characterizations and often out right lies told about his actions and status and decisions.  I hear individuals still questioning his citizenship.  I hear people still insisting that he is a Muslim.  I hear people questioning his love and loyalty to this country.  I hear people accusing him of being a Nazi (show me a black Nazi, I’ll show you a kosher pig), a Socialist, a Fascist.  I understand that we had republican rule for the last 8 years and now this is a big change, and it’s quite a shock to those who liked that status quo and wanted Sarah Palin to be just deaths door away from the presidency.  But I believe that there is some thing much more dark and deep seeded about what is going on here.  I believe that there a lot of people out there, who even though they would never ever admit it to anyone, and maybe not even to them selves, simply do not like our president because he is black.  There are a lot of individuals who will claim until the day they die that they are not racist, truly believe they are not, and maybe by comparison to a KKK member or Archie Bunker, they are not, but still have issues with race.  That is not to say that those same people may not also have issues with the Presidents views and policies, but something deep down inside makes some individuals that much more opposed to and venomous about what is going on today then they would be had our president not been black.  And of course there are many people out there who simply oppose the president’s views regardless of his race, but let’s be honest, we live in America, and whether we like it or not we live in one of the most racist countries on this earth.  And if you don’t believe me, go live in Europe for a while.  I spent six months there in the late eighties and it was shocking how normal and accepted inter-racial couples were at that time.  It was an eye- opener as to how segregated of a society we really live in.  This country had slavery.  We placed Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.  The Civil Rights act didn’t come about until the 1960’s. Gay people still can’t get married in most states, and have to pretend they are straight in our armed forces or get dishonorably discharged.  And women still don’t get pay equal to men in most cases.  We live in the greatest nation on earth, but often we don’t act like it.  We need to stop acting like we are at war with each other and start realizing that we are all in this together.  I would like to see Republicans and Democrats vote there conscious, instead of there party.  I would like to see news reported with integrity and the facts, and commentary kept separate.  I would like to see people make up there mind because they researched the issues, not because some talk show host or neighbor “claimed” it to be so.  I would like to see us battle the hate not just around us, but also the prejudices that knowingly or unknowingly exist in all of us.  I would like us to see if this President over the next four years can do something, anything to tackle the monumental problems we are facing, and make this country better then it was before he took office, but also not judge him only by his first year.  And if he can not make this country better, I would like to see someone else elected to replace him who we truly believe is better, not because of the color of his skin, or what party he belongs to, but because we believe in what that person stands for, and that what he stands for is better then what we have seen.    The health care debate has brought out the worst of us in this country.  We are better then what I have seen and we need to show it, not just to us, but to the world.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go drop in on a White House cabinet meeting.

Miss Alaska, If I were President...

 

When I was in my twenties, often I would be flipping through the channels and I would come across an episode of Saved By The Bell.  Now I don’t know what it was about this show, because it had unbelievably bad acting, the most contrived story lines since Three’s Company, and was about all the type of high school kids that I hated when I was in high school.  But for some reason it just drew me in and no matter what vitally important task I had to do at that time, it went on hold so that I could see if this was the week that Kelly would finally kiss Zak, or what wacky thing Screech would do to annoy Principal Belding.  I could not stand this show but for some odd reason I could not take my eyes off of it.  I’m sure it had something to do with Tiffany Amber Thiessen, and the thoughts that I was having, that I could be arrested for since she was only 16 at the time (I cannot tell you how stoked I was when I found out she was going to be on 90210.  Now I could think perfectly legal thoughts about her!  Well, mostly legal thoughts about her.)  But the reality was it was something more than that.  It was the same reason why when we see an accident on the highway we all slow down to look, hoping to see something incredibly horrific that we can ooo and ahhh about, such as an airplane that fell from the sky on a van filled with nuns, or that the Oprah’s Dream Bus had run over Dr. Oz.  But normally it’s your usual fender bender and we drive past disappointed because our time was just wasted with nothing to show for it.  This is exactly how I feel about the three ring circus that we call Sarah Palin.  She is currently on her U.S. book tour to promote her book, Going Rogue, which apparently explains why it was everyone else’s fault that John McCain lost the election, except hers of course, and other beauty queen answers to the question, if you were president, what would you do?  Is she selling lots of books?  Well of course she is.  If Jeffery Dahmer wrote a book about cooking he’d sell millions!  No one would want to eat anything in it, but we sure would want to see what he could to with a marsala sauce.
 
But what exactly is it that makes this woman relevant in any way shape or form?  The answer is nothing.  She is the train wreck that we simply cannot take our eyes off.  She became famous for being the biggest mistake that any Presidential Candidate had ever made since…well since no one!  She is unprecedented! What the H. E. double hockey sticks, was John McCain thinking, YaBetchYa!  If he wanted to pick a woman as his running mate, well that’s all fine and dandy, but with all the well respected, intellectual, experienced republican women in this country that he could have picked from, he chose a unknown, former beauty queen, with no experience on the national stage, who shoots buck, and whose only foreign policy experience is that she can see Russia from her porch.  Let not forget that this is the woman who could not name a single magazine or news paper, did not know what the Bush Doctrine was, and who in recent interview on FOX kept mixing up Iran and Iraq.  Apparently Sarah told Sean Hannity that she wants to crack down on IRAQ’s nuclear plans.  Maybe Sarah isn’t aware that we already had one idiot president crack down on IRAQ’s mythical weapons of mass destruction.  So now Sarah has been on every talk show that she can get her perky little face on.  She’s been on Oprah, Hannity, Glenn Beck, O’Reilly, Good Morning America, The Today Show just to name a few and so far all she has shown  us is that according to poor little, I’m the ultimate victim, Sarah Palin, she was wronged big time.  She was taken advantage of, her good untarnished name (yea, right) was dragged through the mud.  Apparently everyone in the McCain campaign was out to get her and if they just let sweet perky Sarah, be Sarah, everything would have been just fine.  To this I say, Sarah P, get a clue.  Take ownership for once in your life for what you have done, for the answers you gave, for the mistakes you made.  Being cute and perky is not gonna get you through this one.  Politics is a dirty game and apparently you were not prepared to play.  You wanna be president some day?  Well maybe you should not have quit your day job as governor of Alaska and wrote a, I’m rubber and your glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you, book!  Maybe you should have spent the next few years staying in politics, leading the people of Alaska, built up somewhat of a record, unlike, as you claimed your democratic rival, who is now president, did not.  But instead, now you are a ex-Governor Palin who quit half way through your term so that you could go do personal appearances, and write a book, and get rich. You choose money over the people of Alaska.  Do you really think that is the best position to be in going into a presidential race?  You have effectively now become known just for being you.   You have become the Paris Hilton of politics. 

But just when I thought I had seen it all, I was wrong.  The other evening I had fallen asleep on the couch.  I woke up and it was just past 3 am, and Larry King was on CNN.  I was half asleep and without really paying attention I heard Larry ask his guest, “Do you think Sarah Palin could win in 2012?”  I heard the man start to give his answer and turned my head to see who it was.  I rubbed my eyes and squinted at the screen, and then I saw his name and thought to myself, “No it can’t be.  Is Larry King really asking this guy that question?  I’m half asleep so maybe I just read it wrong.”  So I looked again at the name under the picture, and answering Larry Kings question, was none other then Joe the Plumber!  Joe the bleepin’ plumber!  Joe, I’m not even a plumber and Joe is not even my real name, the Plumber!  The only thing that I care less about then what Sarah Palin has to say, is what Joe, my 15 minutes of fame expired 20 minutes ago, the plumber has to say about Sarah Palin!  There was no way in hell I was going to waste any time listen to Joe the Plumber’s opinion of Sarah Palin, and then it happened!  I changed the channel as fast as I could and wouldn’t you know it, Kelly kissed Zak!  The world was good again.

1990 pages of Woop-Ass!...and a Public Option

 

Today the House officially released their Health Care Bill.  Frankly I do not have the time to read the full bill since it is 1990 pages long, but I did have time to read the official summery that all of us have access to. The summery is only 4 pages long. I have placed links to these at the end of this post.  Upon hearing that the Official House Bill was released I have to admit I was skeptical.  This is not the type of reform that I would have preferred.  I am a supporter of Single-Payer Health Insurance.  Single-Payer is when there is only one health insurance company which is sponsored by the Government.  It is commonly called Medicare for everyone.  Just like Medicare it keeps the doctors and hospitals private just like they are now, nothing changes, no socialized health care.  (Socialized Health Care is when everyone who works in the health care system is employed by the government.  Nothing like this has ever been proposed by any bill in this country.)   Just like Medicare it allows everyone to choose any doctor they want, no matter where the doctor is located.  It eliminates pre-existing conditions, caps on coverage, and cancelation of coverage due to getting sick or losing a job.  No one would ever go bankrupt because they can’t afford their mortgage due to medical bills, and businesses would not lose profits due to high insurance premiums for their employees.  It is Guaranteed Health Insurance coverage from birth to death whether you are employed or not.  But why won’t this happen here.  One reason, it would put the health insurance companies out of business, and that is way too big of a change for most of this county and way too risky for politicians who want to get re-elected next term. But the question I have is why aren’t there riots in the street over the practices of these insurance companies, people with torches marching towards the homes of insurance executives who have denied everything from cancer treatments to coverage for rape victims.   Why do we need companies in business that cancel our coverage when it is costing them too much, deny coverage if they determine that a pre-existing condition isn’t in their best financial interest, exponentially raise rates to the point that some Americans can no longer afford their coverage, where business have to drop coverage or limit what is covered in order to be able to provide coverage to their employees, all of this while salaries of the top executives at these insurance companies have skyrocketed over the last 10 years.  The one thing that has been undeniable by almost everyone on both sides of the playing field is that reform is necessary.  We can’t go on like this.  How any Senator of representative of Congress could justify not being for some kind of major reform, regardless of what party they are part of, is beyond me.  How many stories of suffering at the hands of insurance companies do they have to hear?  How many people have to die because of no health insurance?  How many families have to lose their homes because they can’t afford their medical bills before they are going to simply do what is best for all Americans, and stop putting their self-interests first? 

 
But for the ones that understand that reform must happen, the debate has been over what form the reform should be.  So here we are today with the announcement that the official bill from the house has been released.  It is not a bill for Single –Payer Health Insurance, but I did not expect it to be.  It is basically what was expected, a major health reform bill that includes the next best thing we could hope for, a Public Option.  And after reading the summaries about this bill, I have to admit, it’s a good bill, not perfect, but good.  It does what it should do and accomplishes the goals laid out by President Obama.  I’m not going to go into what those goals were or the details of this bill.  If you want to know that you can read it yourself, but what I will say is that the insurance companies should be jumping for joy, why?  Because they dodged a bullet big time.  They got lucky and I don’t think they really appreciate it.  You see this could have gone a whole other way for them.  If the cards fell differently they could have ended up with a bill that presented America with a Single Payer Health Insurance solution, and these giant insurance companies would have been out of business.  Instead they have been allowed to keep their jobs, their profits, they’ve been given the opportunity to insure more Americans, and given the opportunity to truly serve their customers instead of what they have been doing which is treat them like dogs.  This industry has no shame and now they are going to be held accountable and it is about time.  These companies have been handed a new lease on life.  It’s the equivalent of giving Charles Manson probation for life and an ankle monitoring bracelet for committing murder instead of life in prison.  The only difference is that Manson killed less people.  This is just the beginning.  We have a long way to go before this is passed and becomes law.  Whatever is passed will have its critics.  But in the end they will be silenced because they will see the benefits health insurance reform will have for this country and for their lives.  Yea, I’m talking to you Joe Lieberman.

Links:

4 Page Bill Summary

Public Health Insurance Option

The 14 Provisions That Take Effect Immediately

Woman Have The Most To Gain

Affordable Health Care For America Act