When I first came to this country, many years ago, I was amazed at the hospitality, honesty, liberal thinking and humanity of its people. It was Iowa, a place of which soon I became very fond and where I experienced first hand the bright side of the American soul. I soon moved to California which, if not Iowa itself, it was still a place of beauty, great dynamism, openness, and the quintessential place to achieve the American Dream. It was still, the bright side of the American soul.
The Conscience of American Journalism, as Bill Maher calls him, Bill Moyers offers us a lucid, reasoned, extremely angry at times, view of the dark forces at work in our country today.
"The Bush administration and a Republican-controlled Congress enacted a Medicare prescription drug benefit that will cost the government almost $1 trillion over the next decade without raising or saving a penny to pay for it. They also passed tax cuts for wealthy Americans that will cost more than $1.7 trillion over 10 years, again without making provisions to offset the costs. Now they are complaining that $1 trillion for health care reform — fully paid for over the next 10 years — is too much to spend on a problem that has been festering for decades. Rather than yield to Republican intransigence, the Democrats ought to resort to a parliamentary maneuver known as “budget reconciliation,” which would allow them to push through most reforms by majority vote". Read the editorial here
"Currently, there is nothing more controversial in President Barack Obama's health care reform proposal than the "public option." Much of the controversy, of course, has been generated by private insurance companies, determined to safeguard their hefty profits, and by Republican politicians, eager to destroy anything that might redound to the benefit of the Democrats. Even so, a little clear thinking on the subject of public programs might illuminate their advantages and disadvantages. In fact, there are numerous "public options" in American life, with many of them rooted deep in the nation's history. In the area of education, there are public schools; in recreation, public parks; in travel, public roads; in fire-fighting, public fire departments; in law enforcement, public police forces; in culture, public libraries; in transportation, public bus and train lines; in mail delivery, the post office; in sanitation, public water supply plumbing, and sewers; in energy, public power; in old-age security, Social Security; in nutrition, public school lunch programs. Where did the notion ever come from that public programs were somehow "un-American"? Even in the disputed area of health care, there exist public hospitals, Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration and the National Institutes of Health".
Now, this is what we should be talking about and not "death panels", "socialized medicine", "we have the best health care system in the world" and other such inane myths product of a great ignorance.
The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.
Read this excellent myth-busting article by T.R. Reid in the Washington Post.
Or as Alan Dershowitz puts it:
"Let us be clear precisely what this means. If a defendant were convicted, after a constitutionally unflawed trial, of murdering his wife, and then came to the Supreme Court with his very much alive wife at his side, and sought a new trial based on newly discovered evidence (namely that his wife was alive), these two justices would tell him, in effect: "Look, your wife may be alive as a matter of fact, but as a matter of constitutional law, she's dead, and as for you, Mr. Innocent Defendant, you're dead, too, since there is no constitutional right not to be executed merely because you're innocent."
“This court,” Scalia pointed out, “has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”
This monstrosity, with the full concurrence of the other monster in the court, Clarence Thomas, is typical of judges of this type because to them, it demonstrates that the law is a nonpolitical and intellectually rigorous practice, rather than a touchy-feely exercise in doing the "right thing". It does not show "empathy" the horrible feeling they accused Sonia Sotomayor of being guilty of.
I hope Sonia, a wise latina, shows how her decisions are far better than those of these two stupid white basterds (one is an Uncle Tom)
Read two excellent articles by by Pail Campos and Alan Deshowitz on this latest aberration here
Professor Reich is right. This is our test. The Obama presidency is on the block. If we lose this one, even when the Democrats have the House and the Senate, Americans will not forget Obama and his presidency will go down in flames beginning with the 2010 mid term elections.
by Robert B. Reich, Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley :
I would have preferred a single payer system like Medicare, but became convinced earlier this year that a public, Medicare-like optional plan was just about as much as was politically possible. Now the White House is stepping back even from the public option, with the President saying it's "not the entirety of health care reform," the White House spokesman saying the President could be "satisfied" without it, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius saying that a public insurance plan is "not the essential element."
Without a public, Medicare-like option, health care reform is a bandaid for a system in critical condition. There's no way to push private insurers to become more efficient and provide better value to Americans without being forced to compete with a public option. And there's no way to get overall health-care costs down without a public option that has the authority and scale to negotiate lower costs with pharmaceutical companies, doctors, hospitals, and other providers -- thereby opening the way for private insurers to do the same.
It's been clear from the start that the private insurers and other parts of the medical-industrial complex have hated the idea of the public option, for precisely these reasons. A public option would cut deeply into their current profits. That's why they've been willing to spend a fortune on lobbyists, threaten and intimidate legislators and ordinary Americans, and even rattle Obama's cage to the point where the Administration is about to give up on it.
The White House wonders why there hasn't been more support for universal health care coming from progressives, grass-roots Democrats, and Independents. I'll tell you why. It's because the White House has never made an explicit commitment to a public option.
Senator Kent Conrad's ersatz public option -- his regional "cooperatives" -- won't have the scale or authority to do what a public option would do. That's why some Republicans say they could buy it. What's Conrad's response? "The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for a public option. There never have been," he tells "FOX News Sunday." Conrad is wrong. If Obama tells Senate Democrats he will not sign a healthcare reform bill without a public option, there will be enough votes in the United States Senate for a public option.
I urge you to make it absolutely clear to everyone you know, everyone who cares about universal health care and what it will mean to our country, that the bill must contain a real public option. Tell that to your representatives in Congress. Tell that to the White House. If you are receiving piles of emails from the Obama email system asking you to click in favor of health care, do not do so unless or until you know it has a clear public option. Do not send money unless or until the White House makes clear its support for a public option.
This isn't just Obama's test. It's our test.
We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems. [more]
