Speaking of Sarah
Speaking of former Governor Palin, this is the best synopsis that I’ve seen of the incoherent babbling she called a farewell speech. From Gawker:
“It’s like Peggy Noonan, Jack London, and William Faulkner wandered into the woods with three buttons of peyote and one typewriter, and only this speech emerged.
And she wrote this speech! In advance, on paper! What does any of it mean? It is amazing.”
You betcha!
Shatner Does Palin
“There Isn’t a Health Care Crisis”
I guess not. “July 3, 2008 (Reuters) – Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh signed an eight-year contract extension worth as much as $400 million with Clear Channel Communications Inc, The New York Times said on its website on Wednesday. Limbaugh’s paycheck of $50 million a year represents a raise of about $14.4 million a year over his current contract, which was paying him $285 million over eight years and was set to expire in 2009, the newspaper’s website said.”
“How is This Black Guy Running the Country”
The meaning of “I want my country back,” from Roland Martin of CNN.
“Not Documentation, But Pigmentation”
Chris Matthews gets to the real reason behind the “birther” nonsense–racism. From Media Matters.
“Birthers” Hit The Big Time
The “birthers,” that formerly fringe element of the Republican Party who still question the citizenship of President Obama, are back in the news because of this video from a townhall meeting held by Congressman Mike Castle of Delaware.
The disturbing part of this clip is not the lady waving her own birth certificate around and screaming “I want my country back,” but the cheers she gets from the others in attendance, and the boos Rep. Castle receives when he says that President Obama “is a citizen of the United States.”
The reason I say this is a formerly fringe element is that this view is quickly becoming the mainstream of the Republican Party and the right.
Legislation has been introduced by Rep. Bill Posey of Florida, and co-sponsored by nine other Republican members of the House, five of whom are from Texas by the way, that would “require the principal campaign committee of a candidate for election to the office of President to include with the committee’s statement of organization a copy of the candidate’s birth certificate.”
De facto leader of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program that “Barack Obama has yet to have to prove he’s a citizen.”
When a caller to Lou Dobbs radio show said President Obama was “rushing all these programs through by whatever means, knowing he will soon be exposed as a fake, a fraud, a . . . Kenyan,” Dobbs’ response was, “Certainly your view can’t be discounted.”
Then there was Liz “Baby Dick” Cheney, who was on Larry King Live with James Carville. Instead of saying outright that the “birthers” are, to use Carville’s word “ludicrous,” Ms. Cheney tried to elude the issue by saying,“People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas.”
When later asked for a clarification, Cheney gave the equally slippery answer, “I don’t have any question about Barack Obama’s right to be President of the United States.”
What these “birthers,” and those who continue to aid and abet their lunacy, are doing is to not only question Barack Obama’s citizenship, but his legitimacy as president of the United States. Let’s see, what could be their motivation? What is the difference between the 44th president and the previous 43.
Let me think about that, I’ll get back to you.
Bachmann Too Wingnutty For The Wingnuts
Times are tough in Bachmann-land ladies and gentlemen, even fellow Republicans are asking the Minnesota Congresswoman to put a lid on her babbling about not properly filling out the Census form.
“Three Republican members of the House subcommittee overseeing the 2010 census are asking a fellow Republican, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, to back off her boycott of the national population count.
Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia and John Mica of Florida, members of the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Achieves, are afraid that her repeated threat to ignore the forms could be contagious.
“Boycotting the constitutionally mandated Census is illogical, illegal and not in the best interest of our country,” they said in a statement Wednesday.”
As if Rep. Bachmann being called out by her Republican colleagues wasn’t bad enough, two of the three, McHenry and Westmoreland are not exactly the more reasonable members of the Republican caucus themselves.
Here’s Congressman McHenry on the mission of the GOP between now and the mid-term elections:
“We will lose on legislation. But we will win the message war every day, and every week, until November 2010. Our goal is to bring down approval numbers for Pelosi and for House Democrats. That will take repetition. This is a marathon, not a sprint.”
And it was Congresswoman Westmoreland who said this last November when asked about Michelle Obama:
“Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Senator Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity.”
When these 2 tell you to rein it in, and call you “illogical,” you’re really out there.
The response from the Bachmann camp comes via spokeswoman Debbee Keller:
“Congresswoman Bachmann can not be reached, but we appreciate their views and hope to be able to work with them to keep ACORN — which has earned public mistrust through its repeated voter registration fraud — out of the Census.”
Wait a minute, “cannot be reached?” Two questions come to mind. Does the Appalachian Trail run through Minnesota, and has anybody seen Governor Sanford?
A Public Option Will Destroy Competition? What Competition?
The next time you hear one of our elected officials in Washington rail against President Obama’s proposed public option on health insurance by saying it will “destroy the marketplace” (Richard Shelby) or that there’s “plenty of competition in the private insurance market” (Joe Lieberman) remember this report from Heath Care for America Now (HCAN).
The only thing in danger of being destroyed is the monopoly the large insurance companies presently hold, and which they are willing to make any amount of campaign contributions (aka bribes) to continue.
Consider the following:
“In the past 13 years, more than 400 corporate mergers have involved health insurers, and a small number of companies now dominate local markets but haven’t delivered on promises of increased efficiency. According to the American Medical Association, 94 percent of insurance markets in the United States are now highly concentrated.”
“Highly concentrated,” according to the U.S. Justice Department means that one company holds more than a 42 % share of the market, a level reached in 31 states.
“In Hawaii, Rhode Island, Alaska, Vermont, Maine, Montana, Wyoming, Arkansas, and Iowa, the two largest health insurers control at least 80% of the statewide market.”
In Senator Shelby’s own state of Alabama, Blue Cross Blue Shield controls 83% of the statewide market, the highest rate in the nation for a single company. Is this what he is intent on preserving? Apparently so.
Right here in Texas, two companies, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Aetna, control 59% of the market. Our own Senator John Cornyn was one of 9 GOP senators who sent a letter to President Obama which said “a federal government takeover of our healthcare system would take decisions out of the hands of doctors and patients and place them in the hands of a Washington bureaucracy.” I suppose placing those decisions in the hands of an insurance company “bureaucracy” is acceptable.
But having a monopoly can be a very profitable enterprise:
“Profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007. In 2007 alone, the chief executive officers at these companies collected combined total compensation of $118.6 million—an average of $11.9 million each.
That is 468 times more than the $25,434 an average American worker made that year. Moreover, the health insurance industry invests more in buying back its own stock and rewarding its shareholders than in improving system operations, reducing premiums, or in developing ways to pay doctors and hospitals fairly.”
For those of us who pay premiums however, it’s not such a sweetheart deal. They have risen more than 87%, on average, over the past 6 years. From 1999-2007, while the average U. S. wage growth was 29%, the average premium growth was 120%.
This is the status quo that Shelby, Lieberman, Cornyn, the big insurance companies, and their lobbyists want to maintain. It’s up to us to let them know that another 15 years of business as usual is unacceptable.
White House Considers Executive Order on Indefinite Incarceration
With most of our celebrity-crazed media and public focused on the death of Michael Jackson, I guess it was the perfect time for a Friday night news dump like this:
“Obama administration officials, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.
Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war.”
Then came the non-denial denial and the and semantic games from the White House:
“White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said that there is no executive order and that the administration has not decided whether to issue one. But one administration official suggested that the White House is already trying to build support for an order.”
Notice the difference in language? There “is” no executive order. The WaPo article didn’t say there “is” an order, it said officials “are crafting” language for an executive order. I had hoped we were through with these kinds of slippery word games.
But the statement by “one administration official” gives it away. I assume the White House wouldn’t waste their time “trying to build support” for an action that they don’t intend to pursue.
There was also this strange claim:
“Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order,” the official said.”
One such civil liberties group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, told TPM:
“Prolonged imprisonment without trial is exactly the Guantanamo system that the President promised to shut down. Whatever form it takes – from Congress or the President’s pen – it is anathema to the basic principles of American law and the courts will find it unconstitutional.”
The ACLU released this statement:
“This is not change – this is more of the same. If President Obama issues an executive order authorizing indefinite detention, he’ll be repeating the same mistakes of George Bush, and his policies will be destined to fail as were his predecessor’s. How justice is served in America should not be an open question in a country where we have a rule of law and a time-tested criminal justice system. Throwing people into prison without charge, conviction or providing them with a trial is about as un-American as you can get. While President Obama might be experiencing difficulty with Congress when it comes to implementing his decision to close Guantánamo, the answer is not to issue an executive order authorizing a system which is unconstitutional and counter to the most fundamental American values.”
That doesn’t sound to me like they “encouraged the administration” to “do it through executive order.”
To me this issue, call it indefinite incarceration, preventive detention, or any other name, goes beyond Barack Obama’s presidency, the “war on terror,” or the closing of Guantanamo. This is a fundamental question of what kind of country we are.
We are the United States of America, damn it. We don’t hold people indefinitely without charges and without trials. If we don’t have enough evidence to bring people to trial, or if the evidence we do have was obtained through torture, we release them, plain and simple.
The danger in this is the precedent. What happens the next time we have a President Nixon, who draws up an enemies list and decides to imprison people indefinitely, and what happens if not just alleged terrorists but American citizens are among those “certain people” who are imprisoned based on nothing more than suspicion. His or her reasoning will be, President Bush got away with it, President Obama got away with it, who is going to stop me?
It’s time to put an end to this before it goes any further.
-
Archives
- July 2009 (7)
- June 2009 (10)
- May 2009 (12)
- April 2009 (8)
- March 2009 (6)
- January 2009 (6)
- December 2008 (2)
- November 2008 (3)
- October 2008 (21)
- September 2008 (13)
- August 2008 (4)
-
Categories
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
