COLORADO lost some of its square state stature today when the national teabaggers tour bus took a turn in Albuquerque and went south. The Tea Party Express is headed to DC to protest health care reform, but its two week schedule is going to exclude Rocky Mountain crackers. Coloradans feel the mouth-breathers down our necks everyday, but this marks an evolutionary shift, as ideological cul-de-sac becomes dead end.
According to CSAction, snively congressman Doug Lamborn has sent out 70,000 mailers, billed to the taxpayer, to disseminate the insurance biz wingnut falsehoods about health care reform. He’s hoping to reconstitute a teabagger assembly at a public meeting on Thursday evening, August 27, at the Valley Hi Golf Course on Colorado Springs’ Southeast side. Get there early with YOUR message. 5PM, Chelton and Airport. The anti-tax teabaggers hate standing next to signs that don’t represent them, so think of some slogans that do. How about: DO UNTO OTHERS, or
FAITH HOPE CHARITY, or “as you did to the least of My brethren,
you did it to Me.” -Matt 25:40
CSAction has posted talking points and updates. Here are Mark’s arguments:
Representative Doug Lamborn has just sent out an estimated 70,000 mailers “prepared, published and mailed at taxpayer expense” that are full of LIES and disinformation about the healthcare reform bills. It’s only estimated to be 70,000 because, when asked about the total number mailed, LAMEborn’s Communications Director Catherine Mortensen, “I have the figures, but I don’t have the authority to give them to you.”
Actually they don’t have the authority to withhold that information because it’s public record, given that this pack of LIES was “prepared, published and mailed at taxpayer expense.”
The mailer says “114 million could lose their current health care coverage under the bill”. This is a LIE!
This absurd figure comes from “The Impact of the House Health Reform Legislation Coverage and Provider Incomes,” by the Lewin Group. The Lewin Group is a “research” and management consulting (lobbyist) firm owned entirely by the second largest health insurer in the nation, UnitedHealth Group.
Furthermore, the “research” does NOT show 114 million LOOSING healthcare but CHANGING insurers, AND an additional 9.4 million being insured that are not now. It’s a total guess as to how many would change over to the public plan, if offered. The 114 million was a figure the Lewin Group published in June, which they revised DOWN to 88.1 million in July, so it’s not even their most current LIE.
The Congressional Budget Office came to a different conclusion, saying that enrollment in the House Democrats’ proposed public plan would total 11 million to 12 million people.
The Lewin Group is part of Ingenix, a wholly-owned UnitedHealth subsidiary that was accused by the New York attorney general and the American Medical Association of helping insurers shift medical expenses to consumers by distributing skewed data. Ingenix supplied UnitedHealth and other insurers with data that allegedly understated the “reasonable and customary” doctor fees that insurers use to determine how much they will reimburse consumers for out-of-network care.
In January, United Health agreed to a $350 million settlement with the AMA, and a $50 million settlement with the New York attorney general, covering conduct going back as far as 1994, when they were distributing skewed information to fight President Clinton’s healthcare reforms.
Next LIE in this mailer: “4.7 million jobs that could be lost as a result of tax hikes on small businesses”.
This absurd figure comes from an op-ed piece written by House minority leader John Boehner, who admitted to distributing bribes from Big Tobacco on the floor of the House. He says got the figures according to the methodology developed by Christina Romer, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration. She NEVER said such a thing, and he obviously he doesn’t understand her methodology.
“The current healthcare system does not work well for small businesses.”
“They pay about 18% more for comparable coverage than a big firm, and that puts them at a competitive disadvantage.”
“Healthcare reform is ABSOLUTELY aimed at easing those burdens.”
“The plan has a tax credit for small businesses.”
Watch her entire statement here.
Lewin Group Vice President John Sheils admits 114 million would NOT lose their employer-sponsored coverage AND they wouldn’t be forced into a government-run health plan. Rather, they would be able to choose between the government plan and other private options, through the exchange, and “they might very well be better off,” he said.
But not all of the firm’s corrupt reports see the light of day. For example, a study for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association was never released, Sheils said.
“Let’s just say, sometimes studies come out that don’t show exactly what the client wants to see. And in those instances, they have [the] option to bury the study — to not release it, rather,” Sheils said.
CSaction reminds everyone present to be peaceful in word and action and not behave like the industry stooges disrupting town halls and shouting down citizens.
America needs an Odysseus, obviously, to outwit the Cyclops and put out his eye. Against the all-seeing American health insurance lobby, our politicians are virtually powerless. To overcome this omniscient villainy without an Odysseus, the only hope is to rush the monster all at once — and all at once, put it to the sword. Senators and congressmen may say the industry is too powerful to defy, I do not doubt it. But if all act in unison, the beast’s threats will be its last, and come to naught.
But isn’t that courageous scenario as plausible as hoping Obama could be our Odysseus? Greed is so much more persuasive than cooperation. Pitted against each other, the Senators collect huge bounties from their lobbyists. If they slay the great Insurance dragon, to the jubilant acclaim of their constituents, they gain nothing. A big, collective nothing for their pains.
But it’s a lovely fantasy. Eradicate the damn thing entirely. Exterminate it from root to tentacle. Decapitate the leaders, parade the profiteers before their angry victims, strip their families of their riches, make examples of them all. Put every last of their agents on the unemployment line. Or better, hold truth and reconciliation hearings to let the Little Eichmans face the aggrieved survivors of insurance casualties.
I’d like to see the insurance company employees squirm, in particular those attending the health care town halls, pretending to speak for common citizens, in reality trying to protect their miserable jobs. What if instead they feared for their lives? If we cannot reach their consciences, let us tickle their throats.
If the health care reform debate is going to raise mobs, it should rouse lynch mobs. Call for the blood of the 3rd party criminals, who feather their planes and yachts and mansions with the last breaths of millions.
The media are quibbling about the 46 million uninsured, belittling the number because it’s really only “everyone’s best guess.” What about the rest of us, the uninsured insured, and the under-insured insured. The health insurers take our money, but offer, when a claim must be made, only mediocre coverage, if any at all. Of course only the sick learn they have inadequate coverage.
If you worry the sick do not number enough to sway the American public, be assured the number will only grow bigger. But even if you count only the sick as victims of the insurance crisis, you must consider that the sense of security of the healthy is lost as well.
Until such time that angry Americans can storm the insurance monoliths, because their representatives in DC won’t do it, we hold out hope for a passing Odysseus. Unfortunately what we got was an Othello, against an Iago far too cunning.
Would you believe it? Not My Tribe is “nonpartisan!” We favor neither Republican or Democrat, although current usage presumes you are of course one or the other, it’s just that you’ve agreed not to show bias. Nonpartisan is not “non-aligned.” It does not mean you are neither. Nonpartisan has become more like “nondenominational.” Which means not of a specific religious adherence, but certainly belonging to one of them. And like nondenominational, isn’t it a ruse?
Religious events billing themselves as nondenominational are casting a big net hoping to lure other believers, making the implication that they need to escape their more demarcated sect. They’re after the heathen too, but make no mistake, that doesn’t mean they adjust their platform one iota.
Nonpartisan political groups cast themselves as aligned to neither major party. Laws governing nonprofits forbid party allegiance, but regulations don’t address the socio-political aims of their missions. Just as the term “nonprofit” describes just that entity’s balance sheets. It doesn’t reflect the nonprofit’s goals, from which sponsoring organizations definitely plan to profit.
The insurance company think tanks weighing in against health care reform are all nonpartisan non-profits. You can be a fully-owned research division and because you are neither particularly Republican nor Democrat, you can label yourself not of the fray.
Fox News although shamelessly willing to pervert “fair” and “balanced,” does not have the temerity to call themselves nonpartisan. It would expose the ruse. Propagandist Bill O’Reilly instead hides behind the less inobjective “independent.”
And so Not My Tribe is more accurately independent, because we keep company with neither corporate party, the left or the right.
Obviously are Left, Left, Left, and fully partisan. More akin to namesake Partisans who resisted the Nazi onslaught. Just as the capitalist wolves are corporate partisans in nonpartisan clothing.
Much is being made of the irony that the anti-health teabagger who shouted “HEIL HITLER” at a Jewish man who spoke in favor of universal health care, was herself wearing an ISRAELI DEFENSE FORCES t-shirt.
Irony? I think the association originates from more than “irony.”
Thanks to having been interviewed earlier in the evening by a local TV reporter, the nutjob has been identified as Pamela Pilger of Las Vegas, Nevada. Online sleuths record that she and her husband are Sarah Palin supporters, etc, oink oink. Her telephone and address are available online, and I’m not terribly conflicted about disseminating that info. *
From Mrs. Pilger’s interview we learn she is a conservative, who believes in Christian values, excepting charity obviously.
Pilger is likely a Christian Zionist, explained by her cross earings and IDF t-shirt. How could a politically charged t-shirt worn to a political event, be but chosen on purpose? And a Christian Zionist who mocks Jews, really no surprise there.
What interests me about Mrs. Pilger and the t-shirt which seems at odds with her dimly-improvised retorts, is how she represents the American idiot: completely wrong. Pilger doesn’t know enough to keep from making contradictory outbursts, but she does know: health care NO, Israel PRO.
How is it that opponents of health care reform, for example, are wrong-headed about every issue on the table? Environment, war, labor, human rights, civil liberties, immigration, etc; and in Pilger’s case, anti-health care and pro-Israel. These are not uniformly “conservative” values. They do not comprise an idiot’s manifesto.
Yet in practice, these disparate dictum flock inseparably.
How can idiots be so consistent? If their antics reflected real grass roots idiocy, they’d be all over the board. What does an American idiot know of the Middle East, pro-Palestinian or con?
Wouldn’t an idiot xenophobe bigot most likely be anti-Semitic? Aka Pam Pilger? Whose idea, the IDF allegiance? Whose very consistent guidance are the idiots following? There’s nothing idiotic about the neoliberal, exploitive agenda behind the ideological idiots. Are they such idiots that they cannot see that?
Wingbat Pilger’s t-shirt and her opposition to health care reform –in spite of confessing that her husband lacks insurance– betrays that her idiotic fervor is not even her own.
* (Even as idiot pawns, shouldn’t they take responsibility for the Astroturf populist propaganda they are helping to lay? I hope an archive is being kept of their profoundly insensitive rantings. In the future, when these crackers Google themselves, the first thing they should see is their 15-minutes of infamy, yelling about how they don’t want illegal immigrants stealing their tax-dollars, etc. Hold the bastards accountable for reflecting so poorly the average American.
The idiots may never come around, but maybe their neighbors or associates will better be able to size them up. One day, perhaps their grandchild, improved by a marriage outside the family, will see the footage and marvel- Oh my goodness, my Grandma was not a very kind lady.
More practically, imagine trying to eulogize Pamela Pilger one day, with her video performance for all to see!)
Despite giving multiple interviews to KRDO-NEWS13, KKTV5/30 and the GAZETTE, the reform voice of the Colorado Springs health care debate must have been quashed by the news directors, if ever they would have aired. Fortunately Mark Lewis of CSAction recorded the events.
Barack trivializes all serious issues (is he competing with Sarah Palin in the category of doing that?), and the so-called ‘Beer Summit’ is case underlined and in point. He trivializes War and Peace, he trivializes Health Care Reform, and he has now utterly trivialized Race Problems in America with his Bud Light schtick! What’s left for him to trivialize next? CHANGE itself? Nah, WAIT! He’s done that already!
The Beer Summit is the peak show performance for The Main Man, and he did it Jerry Springer like by balancing the total color profile with Joe Biden present, beer in hand, too! Now what happened to Jerry? They made him stop, didn’t they? It just got old, and it was way too violent for us! America can’t handle more of Barack’s style of Jerry and Dr. Phil!
Men, what happens when you drink a beer too many? Don’t you then afterwards sometimes have a beer summit plummet? It’s embarrassing, but I think that Obama just reached that point. He’s going down,,,, this point and out.
He simply never should have had that beer party for the press to record. Now we, America, have a bad hangover, and PLUS, it was just plain wrong. If a less pompous prick than Gates had gotten charged as he did by Cop Crowley, it could have meant many years in prison for him. Why should a President trivialize such a thing? He simply shouldn’t.
The heavily funded campaign for Right Wing Simpletons to call their Congressmen and tell them how afraid they are of Health Care Reform is ramping up, I just heard their Hate Speech commercial from the other room.
It’s like the Tea-Baggers and the “mass protest” outside the Letterman show, Camera Angle is everything.
The “massive protest” outside the Letterman Show on behalf of Simple Sarah was actually FIFTEEN
and they were outnumbered two-to-one by the cameras. You wouldn’t know it from the way it was portrayed, though.
Same with the highly contrived “Tea Parties”.
With the right camera work, it makes the Stupid Parade look like a massive Grass-roots uprising.
It wouldn’t take more than a couple hundred thousand to jam the switchboards at the Congressional Office Building.
The Right Wing “leaders” know that, and they hope their Demented Disciples will call in, and that it’ll look so much like a Massive Uprising even with only a fraction of a percent of 1% of the population actually taking part.
Levin was on the radio a few weeks ago bitching and whining about the Energy and environmental legislation passing in spite of the Rigged Call-in Campaign.
Here’s a thought, Right Wing Losers….
Maybe the Congressmen have caught on to it.
Maybe people who are smart enough to get elected to Congress are also smart enough to get a “heads up” when such a contrived “Grass roots” campaign is about to be launched.
The swearing in of the White House Dog is upon us, as the ever vigilant American press reports that Obama’s dog may debut Tuesday! Unfortunately the President has decided to pick a Portuguese water dog simply because it has a cute and ‘IN’ brand name.
My entire family is certainly deeply depressed about this as we had expected that our very own Colorado Peace Dog, Dirty Harriet, would have made a much better pick, and WOULD HAVE BEEN PICKED, if Dennis Kucinich had only become President instead of the fake imitation liberal the DNC gave us on the sly. A peace dog was considered way too radical by Joe Biden to ever be allowed into the White House, so Dirty Harriet never got interviewed for the post.
At least, let us hope that the new dog is not executed like Hillary eventually did with Socks, the Cat. Though, before Socks died he did get much better medical care than Americans ever did out of the Clinton family. Unfortunately, Socks was no longer able to deliver the proper image for Hillary and so ‘had to be put to sleep’, as the expression goes. He was shedded, in other words.
We have no report yet about whether the Obama family will be getting any official aquarium fish, mice, gerbils, or hamsters? So we must sill wait with baited breath for any sign that other animals will be anointed by Barack, or not?
PETA officials say it is way too early to tell still, and are encouraging the Royal Family to release all chickens, pigs, cows, and frogs as a gesture of goodwill as they consider the animal world and their position about wild and domestic life. If not, they are planning to throw a shoe full of animal blood at the President at the earliest possible opportunity, though the woman doing it will be extremely sexy.
This also will be used as a test to find out if the policy on torture use has been changed any at all, or whether it has all been merely cosmetic words, by the now, not so New, Administration? Good luck, PETA. And good luck, Thanksgiving turkeys.
(NO PETA member was used or harmed in the writing of this report) Please write and let us know how you feel about the selection of the Portuguese water dog for executive dog. A good pick? Or a bad one?
Obama signs bill for kids health care program. But look again! Like Obama’s ‘withdrawal’ from Iraq, his ‘renouncement of torture,’ now his new health care measure is a fraud too! Everything about Barack Obama is a fraud! Here is the gist of his public pretense regarding giving kids health coverage. Obama is going to leave 4,000,000 children uncovered, even 5 years down the road!
Sure, this is better than worsening the situation as the Bush murderers did, but why such a 1/2 measure. Wait! It’s not even that, is it? These parents need coverage, too. What happened? This is not even a 1/4 measure! Might we have a 1/8 measure being announced by Obama then?
When it came to bailing out the gigantic fraudulently operating Bug Guys out, Barack Obama is not for any 1/2 measures, 1/4 measures, nor 1/8 measures or less. He goes all out at throwing public tax monies their ways. Can’t let the Big Guys suffer, he says. But he feels a little different about the poor kids, does he not? They can wait! That’s the Barack Obama con game in full measure.
Shame on you, Democrats!
Are you or have you ever considered enrolling in the Kaiser Permanente Health Care Plan? Please read this before you do, because It just underlines how caring the Kaiser Permanente people will be with your health. I know, because I have had both the fortunate experience at working in Kaiser Permanente facilities and have also been covered along with my family by their caring medical coverage. Checkout and see what nice people these folk really are! Distraught Father Kills Wife, 5 Kids, Self
CNN is leaking inside information that its own TV health care pundit Sanjay Gupta is being tapped for US Surgeon General. What do you suppose Barack Obama would have in mind, to chose a Big Pharma / medical industry / insurance interest / media shill to be the American people’s health care ombudsman?
Were you among those hoping that Candidate Obama was going to bring health care reform, instead of seeking out a second opinion to say we’re all doing just fine?
In 2003 Sanjay Gupta was an embed in Iraq for Chrissakes, reassuring American viewers that our boys were receiving celebrity care and that Hippocratic attentions were being paid to Iraqi wounded too. Did that turn out to be true? CNN embed Gupta was a propagandist! It requires what scruples to do that? Maybe Obama should pick Geraldo for FCC chair. How about Ollie North for Military Industry Czar?
More recently Gupta was the chief critic of Michael Moore’s health care documentary SICKO. Gupta led the corporate media charge to discredit Moore’s scathing assessment of the corrupt US medical system. Ask yourself, pray tell with what arguments could Gupta raise to redeem today’s pitiable state of affairs?
No surprise, Pricko Gupta has also proven to be an outspoken advocate of Gardasil, the tragically flawed inoculation being foisted upon our nation’s young girls.
To call Dr. Sanjay Gupta a quack would do disservice to chiropractors. He’s in a league with Republican Bill Frist. Take two bitter pills and call me an asshole in the morning.
Maybe being a CNN talking head comes with having to shill for whoever are your advertisers. At CNN, that would be the pharmaceutical advertisers, the HMOs and the insurance companies.
If Gupta indeed goes to Washington, will he feel the same obligation to represent his sponsors? It won’t be a matter of changed allegiances, they are the same corporate interests who fund both major parties. This time ’round that would be the Dems, including Barack Obama.
Anyone who had hope that Obama would bring change to America’s health care system, say hello to the brick wall’s new face. It’s the same face.
The press misleads us about the war, the economy, the environment, our health, even our food. Would you care to proffer one topic for which they do not present a perspective skewed by corporate interest? I can’t. Our national media cannot still broach the suggestion that our president is an imbecilic jackass. And now they’re fawning over Obama.
Oh the usual Fox buffoons are raising their objections, but I suspect it’s their turn as good cop bad cop, further building this perfect storm of electoral excitement. Everywhere I go, I hear friends talking about Obama’s speech. Oh it was some speech. Historic? Momentous? But are those their words? To compare it to JFK means to eclipse MLK like he was unsliced bread. Have you heard the speech? Is this buzz generating from you?
As a theatrical chorus setting the tone, the media is showing a wildly selective memory in rationalizing their adulation. Did we/they mean to skip over Reagan? He gave good speech. Many actors have made memorable speeches. And politicians. I favor James Galloway’s speech before the Senate, before that, I remember Oliver North’s.
Men of substance can make great speeches. Literary heros come to mind. What would happen if Americans held the presidential candidates to those standards? Czechoslovakia did. Couldn’t the most powerful elected office in the world command a higher wisdom quotient?
Barack Obama is certainly quick witted and persuasive. Has he persuaded you with the intelligence he’s displayed as a legislator? Going to war, the Patriot Act, Torture, Impeachment? Has he voiced concerns for health care reform, for example? You think Obama isn’t at liberty to be candid about those problems NOW?
Back to the media: who do you suppose our corporations, Wall Street, the World Bank, and the Military Industrial Complex want to see in our highest office? Bush is term limited, so who’s the next “best man for the job?”
I can see Americans voting for a woman, half the population are women, one hundred percent of everybody’s mothers are women. We’ve always entrusted teaching and nursing to women. More and more of our professors, judges, mayors, and governors are women. Hillary Clinton not only has political experience, she’s had a close personal brush with the top job. And to assuage any chauvinists, Hillary will have a male presidential chaperone, the traditional spouse and mentor, himself a role model to chauvinists. Is this woman electable? You have only to look beyond the media defamation to see a fully competent “bitch”.
Barack Obama’s speech may have addressed the issue of race in America with a finesse to make you swoon. So did he resolve it, put it to bed, as the media would like our own excited buzzings to conclude? Racism is in our hands, isn’t it?
I’d like to ask you, if you’ll turn off the telly for a mo, in your heart of hearts, will American voters, 90% of them who are white and can get into the polls unobstructed, will they vote for a black man? Visualize the red state voters who returned Bush to office for a second term. Visualize the ugly operatives, Christians and Blacks among them, who conspire to uphold Neo-conservative power, will they acquiesce to a black challenger?
I too would like to hope, but I’d like to hope Americans wake up to the difficult, self-critical rhetoric it’s going to take to reclaim our democracy. God Damn the anti-democratic corporate mouthpieces for offering us a calculated false hope. When Obama looses, they’ll shame us for not showing faith enough in hope.
How did Massachusetts get to be saddled with such a repulsive governor like Mitt Romney? There is a new governor now, as Romney is off running for the US presidency, and this new governor is endorsing Barrack Obama!
But the new governor, Deval Patrick, is also still running and celebrating the health care ‘reform’ that Romney put into place in that state, which has been a total fiasco. In short, a Democrat is running the Republican platform of Mitt Romney in the state of Massachusetts.
So what might the doctors practicing in Massachusetts think about this pseudo reform bill set into place by a Republican governor, and now run by a Democrat?
Go directly to the web site of the PNHP to learn more about why single payer national health insurance is totally necessary. Plans that only try to work like the already unworkable mandatory driver’s insurance laws will not make things better. Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts legislation has been a disaster on top of an even larger disaster, which is the lack of universal health coverage for America’s population.
Like the Wizard of Oz, Amazing George promises all, yet delivers a rabbit out of his hat. As we watched his State of the Union speech unfold hypnotized in front of our boob tubes, George told us all that it wasn’t right what we have now, that we needed to be empowered, and that we need to be informed consumers of health care. So he said he was going to simplify the health care billing system we all have horror stories about? Well NO. Instead he was going to tie our health care to the the Infernal Revenue System! What genius is that!
Most of America is so befuddled with this tax scheme called (by Dubya) a medical system reform, that few have actually commented on Bush’s proposals. This is a sign of not even taking the whole preposterous thing in the least bit seriously. Heck, who can figure out a health system actually being tied to a nation’s tax codes? Sick? Well now you’re also being tortured. Why not now make the deadline for choosing your health care plan AND paying your taxes, April 1, April Fool’s Day, Amazing George?
Lest we forget, this is Dubya’s 2nd foray into ‘health care reform’. The other rabbit out of the hat trick was to announce the HIPAA ‘medical privacy’ law in 2003. That one generated oodles of paper, oodles of ‘education’, oodles of administrators running in circles ‘implementing’ absolutely nothing, oodles of no enforcement of whateveritwas anyway, and oodles of non relevance to anything including guarding or protecting any sense of privacy we might ever have regarding our health, and the records of it that insurers and employers float about everywhere today, just as they did before the great privacy ‘reform’ took place.
Poof! Smoke and bluff. One step forward, and two steps back. Bush in charge of privacy, no less! Now, the doctor is protecting our health care, too? Too sickening for words.