Tag Archives: health care

Mentally challenged unfit for insurgency

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Indignity at the barrel of a gunUS disinformation forces in Iraq pointed recently to an insurgency so in its last throes, that it was desperate enough, and dastardly, sure enough, to press mentally retarded girls into service as suicide bombers. Soon enough our military was forced to recant that report. The young Iraqi women may have been bipolar, or depressed, but they didn’t have Down Syndrome, as cranial deformities caused by the bomb blasts had led the US forensics to conjecture. But the false accusation had its desired effect and there was worldwide condemnation of the Iraqi resistance. This story has irked me in both incarnations.

Namely, why in the name of the Special Olympics is it alright to presume the mentally handicapped could not rise to the challenge faced by their fellow insurgents?

That there would need to be suicide bombers is sad for anyone to contemplate. But a people oppressed by overwhelming military dominance have little recourse. The US drove the Japanese to resort to recruiting Kamikazis. The French pushed the Algerians to the most desperate efforts. The Soviets, the US and Israel have since left Afghans, Iraqis and Palestinians no option but “terrorism.” We don’t label carpet-bombing, detainment or torture as “terrorism,” but freedom fighters and their asymmetrical warfare is enough to terrorize us.

And so, to many Iraqis, maybe especially those orphaned by our invasion and occupation, to be a suicide bomber is to be put to the only strategy which may yet prove effective. Rocks thrown against tanks do nothing. Shots fired against armor-clad troops yield naught but a hail storm of higher caliber bullets. IEDs are now up against heavier mine-resistant vehicles. Civilians without access to artillery or high-tech triggering remotes have no choice but to deliver their angry message in person, guided and detonated by their brave partisan selves prepared to pay the price with their lives.

Of course a mentally disabled person cannot reasonably be considered to have understood enough to make such a profound sacrifice. But I’m surprised the PC crowd wouldn’t allow them the dignity to aspire to contribute to the cause of their fellow Iraqis. I’d venture to ask if their lives could have served a more honorable service. It must suck to be mentally handicapped in Iraq, considering the US has destroyed every semblance of health care service, and refuses to rebuild it. The US is killing the health-needy of Iraq, even as they accuse the insurgency of the exploitation/murder.

And which side cannot deny preying upon the retarded from which to recruit its troops? With casualties on the rise, American motives unmasked, the timetable interminable, and the prospect of surviving intact virtually null, who but the mentally challenged are signing up to “defend freedom” for Uncle Sam?

Scientists find abundance in scarcity

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I heard today about an Abundance Study of sharks off of Catalina Island. Knowing that such studies are finding sharks no longer in abundance, the title seems contrived to suggest otherwise. Yes, frequency and abundance are scientific measures, but they mean count, don’t they? These days we’ve come to expect government scientists to politicize what could otherwise have been called a population survey. Here “abundance” is a scale that also implies a measure on the scale, in this case positive. As with “number” or “charge,” we infer there is one. Perhaps the shark researchers opted not to call it a scarcity study for fear of jinxing their sharks.

Unfortunately by misrepresenting the “abundance” of sharks, the scientists do nothing to arrest mankind’s Jaws-inspired crusade to hunt down every last one.

A similar measure could be health, aka our nation’s Health Care System. Our health could be terrible, but in advance of declaring a condition, it can be surmised that we have health.

Can you think of other examples? Height? Wealth? Potential? Confidence? Stability? As a measure of our economy, these terms should be declared inviolate. Guard them from the machinations of media think tank word-smiths who find themselves needing to spin our economic collapse upward.

‘Health Care Reform’ that is not a real reform will just not work

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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?

Doctors Give Massachusetts Health Reform a Failing Grade – Poor Early Outcomes Raise Red Flags, Only Private Insurers Profit

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.

Who’s your daddy?

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It is the mainstay of both standard American law and the afternoon talk show and TV judge programs. It is the sad and sick concentration on tracking down the biological dad and making him pay…. literally.

It is the cornerstone of a society that takes no real responsibility itself in taking care of its own children…’ Who’s the daddy? You’re going to have to pay!’

I wonder always at how sick we have become as a group when watching these sick shows that concentrate so much on opening the envelope with the official DNA analysis results of who’s the daddy? Men start to clap when the tests clear them, and women weep, too, if they have not succeeded in putting some man or other into officially sanctioned financial bondage.

And to listen to the sanctimonious talk show host, TV judge, or real judge dispensing that moral condemnation at the fingered ‘dead beat’. It’s sick to think of children being raised in such demented sickness passed off as being justice. Rich dad, rich kid. Poor dad, poor kid. Government demanding that the wallet be grabbed, even as the government itself takes about ZERO responsibility in doing what it should be doing for kids.

So little love going around… so much… ‘Who’s your daddy?’ Pity the children. Don’t they deserve not having The State doing this to their dads. Dads that have to be forced to pay are certainly not going to be happy and loving dads. Especially when there is no other involvement in the kids lives due to often times the government mandating that there be little or no involvement.

‘Who’s your daddy?’ asks the government. We need to get the government to stop forcing kids into poverty and to stop haranguing dads. We need a government that makes cities safe for children and that funds real education and not just the pretense of it. We need a government that covers all children with full health care benefits. We need a government that stops stealing from the kids to fund police, soldiers, and the industries that profit off war and excessive prisons. We need a government that cares for the people, children included, and that doesn’t just steal off them.

‘Who’s their daddies?’ I don’t care who they biologically are. I care about them all and it makes me sick to see a government treat the kids, sick, and elderly as bad as ours is doing and plans to continue doing. ‘Who’s the biological dad? You should be ashamed for wanting to know. It makes no difference, Uncle Sam.

US preventable deaths can be prevented

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The US leads the industrialized world in killing off its own citizens via its idiotic health miss system. France best, U.S. worst in preventable death ranking That’s right. We lose about 101,000 Fellow Americans per year by allowing our corporations to fuck up health care delivery. And you know what? That is a severe undercount.

So do you really still think that this is the best health care system in the world? Then I’d like to sell you some land in the state of Lousyanna. Why do we allow so many preventable deaths at such a high cost? Don’t we care about things like our aging relatives in the nursing homes, for example? Or our kids that need a doctor or dentist but whose parents have no access to get it for them? Don’t we give a damn?

These preventable deaths can be prevented from happening. All we have to do is look at what other countries are doing right, and then copy them. America is no pace setter in the medical field any more at all. Cuba is. But to be real, all countries in the industrialized world deliver health care more responsibly and efficiently than the US does.

I’ve cured AIDS !!!

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The Cure for AIDS
1. If you are gay/str8/lesbian/trans/bi and have tested for HIv and been told you are positive for the antibodies to HIv, (using Western Blot type test which register as much as 70% false positives) or been told due to a low T-cell count or high viral load count with PCR test, you are at risk for AIDS, and that HIv is the cause … you need to first thing, look your doctor or AIDS org. counselor in the eye and say: I’m not taking the AZT, HAART, Protease Inhibitors, chemo poison drugs that are the main regimen for treatment and that will destroy my immune system and internal organs (depending on dosage and length of time on the meds). Nor will I be a guinea pig for any new untested drugs or vaccines. Nor will I take any drugs for HIv because HIv is not cytotoxic nor can it destroy my T-cells. Over 60 known diseases cross react with the unreliable Elisa or Western Blot type HIv tests giving false positives. Don’t believe the HIv=AIDS “death sentence”. Sources: Help For HIV and Living Without HIV Drugs.

2. If you are pregnant and test “positive” for the HIv antibodies (meaning your immune system has destroyed it and you’re actually HIv negative) or the PCR viral count/low T-cell farse, refuse the drugs vehemently. HIv in infants passes in 90% of cases. In the remaining cases it really doesn’t matter as HIv can do nothing being a non-cytotoxic retrovirus and will likely soon be passed by healthy immune system. AZT drugs cause many different birth/developmental defects! Retroviruses cannot destroy the cells they infect. Long known in virology. See African Treatment Information Group (a PDF)

3. If you are a gay male, stop having unprotected sex especially if promiscuous because multiple std’s and then resistance to antibiotics cause immune suppression. And possible immune destruction if in combination with this you are doing poppers, I.V. drugs, meth, heroin etc……heavily. And not getting sleep. Foreign proteins from sperm that may enter through torn anal lining are more serious as this may be a causation of autoimmunity where the immune system attacks itself.

4. If you are a hemophiliac getting blood transfusions, know that HIv is a retrovirus, cannot cause anything and that you are more at risk of foreign proteins or other real viruses in donor blood reacting in your body and overwhelming your immune system. You need to be extra ambitious in taking care of your immune system. Don’t buy into HIv.

5. For all; Stop all heavy drug use as in I.V.drugs like heroin, meth, cocaine. Limit marijuana and also alcohol, and take care of your immune system with regular exercise, laughter, lots of water, avoiding stress, avoiding refined sugars, flour, cut down or quit dairy, and get as close to vegetarian diet (i.e. raw foods, organic) as possible. Stop worrying about HIv. Personally I will never worry about HIv testing again. In 1st world nations supposed HIv infecteds live long healthy lives without AZT or any HIv drugs.

That’s it. I’ve just cured American, European and other 1st world nation “AIDS!” You’re welcome.

AIDS in Africa, Distinguishing Fact from Fiction (a PDF)
African and other similar circumstance countries with many poor living in squalid, unsanitary, overcrowded slum conditions with rampant malnutrition, unsanitary water, parasitical disease and lack of access to health care …well we all know their fate. Because no one cares about them. UNAIDS, WHO and CDC can however count their deaths and diseases as AIDS by their own permission and rules, without HIv.

No wonder we’re fooled into believing that they are dying of AIDS. It is indifference they are really dying of. And all the old diseases and conditions of developing poor countries, now categorized as AIDS cases or deaths. All of UNAIDS, CDC and WHO HIv/AIDS case numbers are projections that never develop into real numbers. Or outright lies. Death by HIv caused AIDS is a lie.

What Killed Makgatho Mandela?
Did Nelson Mandela’s son really die of AIDS?

AZT -Shouldn’t we ask, why give a drug that mimics the symptoms of a “probable” causation HIv, that you’re trying to cure with same drug? I know the answer:

Glaxo Wellcome puts the following warning in large, bold-faced, capital letters at the start of the section in the 1999 Physician’s Desk Reference that describes AZT (referred to under the name Retrovir or Zidovudine).

“RETROVIR (ZIDOVUDINE) MAY BE ASSOCIATED WITH SEVERE HEMATOLOGIC TOXICITY INCLUDING GRANULOCYTOPENIA AND SEVERE ANEMIA PARTICULARLY IN PATIENTS WITH ADVANCED HIV DISEASE (SEE WARNINGS). PROLONGED USE OF RETROVIR HAS ALSO BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH WITH SYMPTOMATIC MYOPATHY SIMILAR TO THAT PRODUCED BY HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS.”

An earlier version of the Physician’s Desk Reference, published in 1992 made the connection even clearer:

“It is often difficult to distinguish adverse events possibly associated with Zidovudine administration from underlying signs of HIV disease or intercurrent illness.”

Happy World AID$ Day !!

Liberals and Labour

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The Labour Party of Britain has changed nothing at all from Tony Blair under PM Gordon Brown, just as the Democratic Party has changed nothing 7 years into the Bush presidency. Both still are corporate creations masquerading as popular parties of the common folk.

The latest political scandal in Britain shows that ‘The Labour Party’ should actually be called The Property Developer Party.

In the US we really no longer have even the semblance of a Labor Movement, after its stagnant and corrupted leadership has spent decades after long decades monetarily supporting The Property Developer Party aka as The Corporate Trial Lawyer’s Party, etc. Union dues promoting corporate views, in short.

There is nothing democratic at all about The Democratic Party so this strategy of top down nothing (voting DP candidates) has led all of us into the dead end alley of total corporate control over ALL. We now hardly have a hint of what alternative direction would be like.

Because of this labour misleader co-option, all real organizing of the US Labor Movement will now have to be essentially a totally illegal activity if it is to have any chance to succeed at all, and American (and British workers, too) have gotten way too soft for this sort of battle. It was always the industrial workers that were the backbone for tough fights anyway, and much of that base has been ‘outsourced’ to outside the national borders of ‘The Homelands’. So what we have today, is a Labor Movement where Starbucks’ and Borders’ clerks make up some of the more militant sectors of the Anglo-Saxon working class. Oops!!! I hope I didn’t scare anybody with that word?… working class…

Liberals are now not from Labour, but are from the middle class, and worry about their food intake (healthy or not?), bowel movements (regular or not?), and image (polite or not?) while ‘protesting’. They are non-violent, turn the other cheek types, and not picket sign carriers walking the line subject to the company’s goons coming their way. Liberals now come more from churches than they do from blue collar jobs, so they are not going to bruise it out ‘violently’ witht he companies, as actually ultimately this has to be done again for progress to be made on class issues.

US Labor is now isolated,tasered, jailed, and sick (due to worsening health care and job conditions, worsening diet, and worsening ‘entertainment’ options). The only help for this sad situation might just have to come from workers in foreign countries actually standing up to the corporate goon squads (US military) we now, in America, consider absolutely normal to have all around us?

OK, that’s all I got to be said about Liberals and Labour… I gotta go shopping now! I got some coupons I need to use. Workers United For Good Coupons!

Torturing the universities, future feminine possibilities for Colorado College

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Pity the universities these days. They have become wildlife havens for America’s torturers. Southern Methodist University in Dallas is to house the papers of the head torturer advocate of them all, George W. Bush, in his ‘presidential library’. Stanford gets Donald Rumsfield. And now the University of Florida took it upon itself to take up the media rehabilitation program of Alberto Gonzalez. Whoopee, Students!

Here at home the local rag, The Gazette, today continued in its campaign to pretend that Global Warming is nothing to be concerned about, health care for all is too expensive to be implemented in the US, and YES, that water boarding is ‘uncomfortable, not torture’. So what, since at least local students have the ‘liberal’ Colorado College to find refuge in, right?

No, this local institution has graduated Dick Cheney’s wife and both his daughters, too (Lynn, Elizabeth, and Mary). And the college’s board of directors has Suzanne Woolsey , wife of super neo con advocate of fighting a continual, decades long ‘world war’ against the Muslim World, exCIA Head James Woolsey, sitting in as Vice Chair of the Colorado College Board of Trustees, emphasis on VICE.

These women folk ‘belonging to’ such noted torturers and torture advocates, Dick Cheney and James Woolsey, make it just right, that Colorado College and its Department of Political Science should house a proposed ‘Library of Women That Love Torturers’. There, we could see the love letters between these prominent ladies and their torturer husbands, dads, and lovers!

It would be a credit for the local military community’s institutions, too! Visit the Air Force Academy, then step over to Colorado College to see the more feminine side of US militarism, and women who love the torturers behind it. Other cities have their water parks, but Colorado Springs could have their waterboarding park!

Maybe our mayor, Lionel Rivera, and the entire city council will get behind this idea? We can only propose… but Colorado College should not let itself fall behind in the academic love affair with noted American torturers! Now can it? Maybe it could open up by next Halloween?

Killing those jailed

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Nobody cares. And that is just plain stupid. The prisoners in the US’s gulag of prisons are treated like pieces of crap and denied adequate medical care, and they in turn get sick, get worse, and even come back out into the communities with their jail bred diseases.

Then who gets the bug? The get tough on crime nitwit does. The families of the get tough on time nitwits do. We all do, simply because bad jails with bad or nonexistent medical care breed infectious diseases that later pass into the communities.

Alternet published an article touching on this issue which is educational about the tough on crime nit wit mind set that gets us all more endangered instead of made safer. For Women Behind Bars, “Health Care” Can Be Deadly

Health Care for all

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Hundreds of thousands of people a year in the US are injured in some way due to our crumbling and insane health care system’s defects. Thousands upon thousands die.

For-profit medicine just does not work contrary to what the pro business propaganda constantly tells us. We can do much, much better.

First step would be to declare health care a human right for all, and then to seek to make that a reality. Insurance companies have been perfectly happy to not deliver care to so many people that they should now just be totally removed from the equation. There is just absolutely nothing that they give to the delivery of medicine.

Health care for all is easy to bring about. Just remove the insurance companies entirely. The public doesn’t need them interfering with delivery of medical care in the US.

And when that is done, get these companies entirely out of providing retirement income to the elderly, too. The public sector could and would do it better too.

Why the US Lacks Full Health Care is a good article online at the California Nurses Association website.

Days of Cholera ahead for Iraq?

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One thing of America that the US has brought to Iraq is its breakdown of its medical system. How fitting that as Bush prepares to veto better health care for America’s children, that Iraq seems poised to drop into a cholera epidemic. This is what trillions of US dollars now buy.

Beware of Hillary Care!

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The local business idiots’ rag here in Colorado Springs (The Gazette) has been warning us all about something they call “Hillary Care’. It’s socialized medicine they scream!

The editors of the Right Wing chain mislabeled ‘Freedom Publications’ of which The Gazette is one sheet of, even hate enrolling the poorer of the nation’s children into a government paid health care plan. That would be the first step toward a World Communist government in their opinion. But just what is Hillary Care anyway? In fact, it’s the same thing it was the first time around, or in other words, it’s a sucker punch to the general public.

The original health care proposals by Bill Clinton and wide were a band aid meant to get infected, and infected the American public’s wound became. Things just got worse and the Clintons walked away playing like they were visionaries before their time. Hardly. What their proposals did was set into motion yet further cannibalization of American medical and nursing care by the insurance companies. And they sat by and sat by and sat by.

Hillary has no plan for a single payer system guaranteed by the government such as today vets and some senior citizens get, and a few kids under Chips programs, too. She is not going to propose that the nation be put under one umbrella of equal care equally applied. She is just as much for tiered care under corporate control as George W. Bush is. But she is running her campaign as if this were not true.

Do not get sucker punched by the Clintons again. If you vote for her thinking that at least she will reform the way medical care is delivered in the US you will be voting for change, all the while guaranteeing that it will not come in a way you will like or want. She wants insurance control over your health, not taking away their control over you and your family.

Here is a well written article about the Clintons’ proposals. What went wrong with the Clinton plan? Health Care non-reform the last time The answer is that nothing really went wrong from ‘the vision’ that the Clintons had back then. The insurance companies kept running the entire show.

After opposition to reform quickened as surely it had to, while still in office they dropped any opposition to the big medical corporations they might have ever had, just like it was one big hot potato for them. Hillary is not about to oppose the insurance companies today any more than back then, and is a poor, poor choice to hang hopes on for even the most meager reform of the US Lack of Health System. Vote for her if you want a dirty band aid to be applied while actually wanting and needing major surgery. Hillary is quite a little sugar pill.

The Science of Fools

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I’m sure you missed it, since most of us have long since given up on reading the idiotic editorials of The Gazette, our Far Right Wing local daily paper. But there it was this Tuesday morning as they attacked the notion of giving our country’s children government guaranteed health care. Oh horror of horrors they said, ‘This will keep people from buying health insurance for the tiny tots!’

This all from a paper that has no problem with giving trillions of government funds to the military industrial complex. They call their ideology ‘Libertarian’, too! But what about the science of these fools, the Science of Libertarian Fools?

Well lets see…..? Just at the moment that scientists see an explosion of infectious disease epidemics as being likely in the near future (in fact they see it as already underway), these fools of The Gazette ignore scientific opinion. They don’t give a shit that the Medical System of the US if more full of holes than Swiss Cheese.

They pooh pooh the idea that there is such a thing as Global Warming, too. Or that there is any planetary ecological crisis currently underway! They practice the Science of Fools, Pretend Libertarianism, so they oppose strengthing medical coverage at the time it is most needed! That’s how they support ‘national security’. They ignore common scientific sense.

Speaking of ignoring science. The Gazette Gang of Editorial Clowns wrote their editorial against providing federal medical coverage for America’s children almost exactly 2 years after Katrina. That was when political clowns such as The Gazette always supports had completely ignored scientific advice calling to strengthen the levees of New Orlean, scientific advice that had been given for decades.

Ignoring that scientific advice led to the Great New Orleans Flood, which no doubt the ignorant a-holes at The Gazette consider to be God’s will. It wasn’t, but New Orleans got washed into the gutter because of dumb dicks like the Gazeete editorial writers that always support what they call “Free Enterprise,’ while condeming and ignoring realy important scientific opinion. Goodbye, New Orleans.

Boy that paper sucks! Every time The Gazette writes editorial comments on ecology, medicine, or anything at all dealing with science, they just are on Cloud Nine. They are lost dealing with Political Science, too. In fact, they are as corrupted as you can get.

The ‘free market’ doesn’t like science at all. It just gets in the way of maxing out making profits for the well-to-do. Our children deserve more, and they deserve guaranteed federal mandated medical coverage. This is the science that will stop the spread of disease. Big Business hates it. They prefer the Science of Fools instead.

PS- See where these unoriginal editorialists of The Gazette got their unoriginal opinion from. A Socialist Plot

Damn hippies

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Hillary and President Clinton circa 1970
Is the jury still out on the Clintons? Bill presided over huge tax giveaways to the rich, NAFTA and other concessions to globalization, the US war crimes of bombing Kosovo and the Sudan, media consolidation, and building the platform which launched George W. For her part, the first lady delivered squat on health care. Since then, have either been anything other than apologists for the current regime? Hippies my ass, those are Halloween costumes! Bill and Hill of That 70s Show were just social climbers attired in whatever folks wanted to see that day.

Impeach! Goodbye Dems.

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Bush is claiming Executive Privilege in refusing to shed light on the possible nefarious dealing of his underlings. The press describes any investigation at an impasse “until one side or the other blinks.” Nonsense. Impeach!
 
Cheney surprises everyone by declaring that the Vice-Presidency is actually a fourth branch of government, out of reach of the checks and balances familiar to all. Congressmen want to joke about cutting off his funding, etc, meanwhile Cheney’s boys elude oversight. Impeach!

The Justice Department acting politically? Impeach! The Supreme Court behaving like cronies? Impeach.

Congress pretending to oppose endless war, yet refusing to cut off the funding? And eschewing that power, preferring false “impasses” to the option(s) above?

Apparently it’s the best they can do, at least that’s how the corporate media has it. But why let the corporations tell us what is or isn’t our prerogative? It’s time to impeach the lot of them. If the Democrats don’t want to do what they were elected to do, let’s leave them. And turn away from the TV.

It’s time for real bipartisanship. Real conservatives and real progressives need to bail from the two imposter parties and opt for representatives of their own. If big-oil interests can conspire with big-pharma, insurance, multi-national, communications and agri-biz to plunder America’s wealth, I’d hope from the people’s side, the Greens could join the Socialists could join the Libertarians could join the Reformers could join everyone else, Ross Perot’s upstarts perhaps. We can address our differences after we’ve wrestled the reins from the corporate greed parties. If even that will be possible. But we’re not going to see national health care, less war, or more equitable and just policies until we do.

And to those Democrats who fear that abandoning their so-called representatives will release them to the dark side, it shows what little faith you had in your candidates in the first place. The results are already in from last election: having a Democratic representative in Congress, unless it’s John Conyers, is like having no one at all. If the politician you elected really has firm intentions, he’ll have them without you. It’s time to nurture someone else, someone with potential, into power.

Have you seen Barack do anything? Hillary? You’ve seen Edwards capitulate to a fraudulent election. Gore too. You’ve seen Kucinich pretend that the Democratic tent was inclusive enough for voices against the war and that turned out to be a lie. The Dems have no one unsuited to do their bidding, and what a surprise, it’s not yours.

Kurt Vonnegut goes

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Kurt Vonnegut lectures at HarvardM and I just read Harrison Bergeron together two nights ago. I remembered the story from high school, where we also read Slaughterhouse Five to my father’s consternation. I like to think it was just the language he objected to.
 
My favorite essay of KV’s at In These Times was about governance guesswork.
 
Kurt Vonnegut could say it all and I don’t think he was through.

I just came across an excerpt someone posted from Jailbird:

“What could be so repulsive after all, during the Great Depression, especially, and with yet another war for natural wealth and markets coming, in a young man’s belief that each person could work as well as he or she was able, and should be rewarded, sick or well, young or old, brave or frightened, talented or imbecilic, according to his or her simple needs? How could anyone treat me as a person with a diseased mind if I thought that war need never come again–if only common people everywhere would take control of the planet’s wealth, disband their national armies and forget their national boundaries; if only they would think of themselves ever after as brothers and sisters, yes, and as mothers and fathers, too, and children of all other common people–everywhere. The only person who would be excluded from such friendly and merciful society would be one who took more wealth than he or she needed at any time.”

And this from an interview with Joel Bleifuss in 2003:

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is “The Mask of Sanity ” by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

He rubbed the guy’s head….

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In a display of Plantation Redneck buffoonery, the President of the United States RUBBED A GROWN MAN’S HEAD!!

I grew up in Texas, unlike Georgie Porgie the Boy King…

He never grew up, anywhere.

But even in Texas, even in the 60s nobody would do stupid shit like that. It would be considered so shamefully ignorant that the reddest red-state redneck of them all wouldn’t do that.

To make matters even more messed up, this was not only a grown man, he was (unlike Bush) a war veteran who was at Walter Reed because he had his legs blown off… Bush was at Walter Reed because he had gotten his career blown off… Telling some of the young people there that he apologized, but not for anything he himself had done, like cutting the funding for health care and the rest of Veterans Benefits as well.

No, he was apologizing to them because the “system had let (them) down”…

So let’s see, patronizing speech, patronizing attitude, what could be possibly worse than coming off with such mealy mouthed bullshit as that?

OOoooOOO I know I know.. pick me, I know!!!

Rubbing a Grown Man’s Head…

Reality sucks for the right… Right Michael?

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Now, our resident Provocateur, Slivka, has been talking (or writing) much smack lately about Walter Reed and comparing it to one of the Right Wingnut talking points, publicly funded health care.

On the other other hand,

Now this is a link to an Army newspaper, The Army Times. As everybody knows, a hotbed of Socialists and Liberals.

What it essentially means, (the story is about an Army General being silenced, by the Pentagon, but subpoenaed anyway to testify in Congress)
is that there seems to have been a little teeny small wee itsy bitsy thing Michael Slivka and his right wing Keyboard Kommando buddies didn’t want us to know. If Michael pleads ignorance, I for one am almost prepared to believe him.

You see, the health care at Walter Reed was privatized. To people with strong links to our old friend, Ali Burton, the Thief of Baghdad.

The righties got all wound up that it was a clear case of socialized medicine, and the failure thereof, and how a private health care scam ooops i mean “plan” would have made all better…

And then that bad ol’ wicked reality jumped up and bit them squarely on their right buttcheeks.

Amazing George, the Health Care magician

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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.

Another local political rally shot down in flames

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Cripple Creek memorial ride 2006According to the Omygodzette, The City Fathers of Cripple Creek starting putting so many restrictions on the Annual Veterans Memorial Bike Rally, the usual organizers for the event said freak it, and are moving the Rally to Winter Park.

Everybody who they interviewed said they (the people of Cripple Creek and Victor) loved the bikes, the bikers, and noted that these guys spent buttloads of money there, and there wasn’t any of the crap you usually see associated with say, Sturgis. So what was the problem? The city manager said there was no prejudice on their part against the bikers (yeah, right!) but the outgoing Decider for who gets a permit had messed up the deal, because the rally was “too biker, not enough veterans” like that really makes one huge difference. There isn’t a law that says how much a Veterans Memorial ANYTHING should reflect the Government Ideal for a Veterans Memorial.

Here I have to insert, the Omygodzette reporter was obviously digging for somebody who would speak against the bike rally. It’s just how they “fair and balanced” report the news. And I would also like to add, I wouldn’t buy their paper by the ton lot to be used as a firewood alternative. Although I might steal it from their recycling dumpsters for that purpose….

But you know the Wall, right? Yeah, that Wall. In Washing Tundy Sea. There was a controversy about the design. Seems our favorite Bill Owens Crony, H Ross Perot, had sponsored a contest judged by veterans for the design. The Wall was overwhelmingly approved, by 3 to one over the runner up, that statue of the soldiers at the monument. Then it was discovered, at the award ceremony photo-op set up by Ross and McCain and other heavy hitting right wing Veterans Affairs Deciders, that the young lady who designed it was ethnically Asian, third generation Chinese American. How to defuse this bomb how do we proceed …

Messieurs McCain and Perot et alia tried to push off the idea that there were some irregularities, tried to replace the Wall with the statue, but they couldn’t come up with enough courage to state their Very Obvious objection, that the Wall was designed by somebody who they consider a “gook”. One reason they couldn’t was Perot was running for President, like he had a chance in Hell of making it.

So they made the command decision to keep their promise, and break it at the same time, by putting in the statue of the GIs.

It’s really tragic that the Government spends OUR money for their Thank a Vet campaign, but we can only show our support or at least lack of animosity in a way that Reflects the Official Policy.

In case anybody has forgotten, the Commander in Chimp has repeatedly tried to cut the VA budget. For such basics as Health Care. Cut it further, I might add, his Poppy and Poppy’s ex-boss Ronnie Ray-gun had already gutted veteran’s benefits. To help finance His War. Which is going to produce even more disabled Vets and disabled Civilians on the Other Side.

Now there’s a Thank A Vet memorial worthy of note.

And ladies and gentlemen, I for sure am going to note it repeatedly.

Gas goes below $2

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This is insane! We are in a global war to secure energy supplies under US control, and all is justified with a mountain of lies. Meanwhile, the price of oil sinks below $2 a gallon! How delusional is all of this?

The US corporate world is completely unable to deal rationally with any social or environmental problems. The same as with energy, so goes our health care. Diseases are exploding forth, more and more with total resistance to antibiotic treatment. And the leading caste of America cannot even arrange minimal coverage for the population! One factor in the proliferation of these resistant diseases is global warming’s effect on the overall environment, and that is in turn caused by the overburning of fossil fuels.

We need conservation and not deadly wars to try to temporarily keep gas below $2 for Americans when its real worth is far, far higher. It’s the healthy thing to do, anyway you look at it to conserve the use of gas. Healthy for the environment, and healthy for your own personal health and that of your family.

This has got to be the most delusional epoch in the history of mankind. Our energy companies should be nationalized and removed from influencing further the absurd political life of our nation. Yes, and a few of those energy executives already deserve to hang for what they have done to America and the world. Pretending that we do not have an energy crisis when in fact we do, is has set us back from dealing with a crisis that can kill us all quite shortly down the road.

If we don’t run out of the oil to keep the world economy moving, the bacteria will get us as they thrive in our overheated world minus much of its ozone. Many of the indigenous tribes predicted that such poor stewards of nature would eventually destroy themselves, even as they themselves got slaughtered off. It appears to be coming to pass as tribal elders once claimed it would,

Capitalism has become exactly like a societal cancer that is now being fed on gas at $2 a gallon. Don’t celebrate this price. Cry.

O no he didn’t…. o no he wouldn’t dare!

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I was reading through the trash Mr Chimp talked tonight. Stay the course = The New Way Forward… mind numbing but expected…. More at Evolve FishGoing to have voluntary programs to cut gasoline dependency by 20%, yeah right, but don’t we already HAVE those and if I remember they have been shuffled under by the R’s for decades… Social Security, starts getting a little deep…. National Health care, well, it’s still a Commie pinko thing and thennnnn…. after a $15,000 dollar deductible Health Care from work is counted as taxable income…. I stopped reading there…

Under a plan like that, and work with me here, that would include MEDICAID payments for work injuries that are not covered by Workmen’s compensation AND workman’s compensation.

In other words, you get hurt at work, can’t work, have monstrous hospital bills, one surgery alone would run 15 grand, then suddenly the health care you get because the Subsidized Corporate Welfare collecting sons of bitches who got you hurt in the first place were not maintaining their workplace standards, yeah THAT disability insurance… Now if you get laid up and have 50 grand worth of surgery bills, that puts you in a higher tax bracket…. you are being charged for getting hurt and your BOSS gets to skate away free. What in the name of OSHA cutting Free Market Corporate Welfare kind of shit is that? And if, like myself, you are left holding the bag while the Tort Reform movement has let your boss skip state and reorganize his LLC…. and the Government picks up the tab, YOU and not the irresponsible “Free Market Entrepreneur” who caused the accident get punitive damages put on you.

Perhaps our resident Provocateur Michael can explain how bankruptcy laws can make it impossible for Corporate Citizens to default on their bills, and you can’t touch any money the officers of the Corporate Citizens make after they reorganize, BUT if you try to default on your Income Taxes, the IRS can garnishee your wages, for the rest of your life, to pay off taxable income like the emergency medical services, repair surgery, therapy, and being unemployed…. how exactly is that tort “Reform”?

And remember, before you frame an answer, Der Scheisse-meister was an avid supporter of Tort Reform, and apparently, still is.

Let me summarize that: Go to work without protection of the law.
Boss doesn’t have to comply with EPA or OSHA standards because the enforcement from those agencies have been gutted by the Free Market Capitalists… Get hurt on the job… to the point of being disabled for LIFE… have surgery to save your life and/or limb… COSTLY surgery…
Boss man takes advantage of Free Market Capitalist loopholes in Tort Law, defaults on paying anything for his crime…
the Government steps in and charges you, for the rest of your life, out of your disability payments, or whatever measly work you can scrounge afterward, just by making the health care taxable income.

The underwhelming Barack Obama

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The media is already pushing the delusion to liberal Democratic Party voters, that Barack Obama is their Great Black Hope in 2008. And today he announced he was a candidate for President. They are trying to pass him off as the antiwar candidate, same as Howard Dean was similarly imaged in that manner in 2004.

Not only is he not that, but his positions on almost everything are not liberal, neither. As Colin and Condo are to Dubya and Dick, Barack and Jesse are to Bill and Hillary. Yuck.

I encourage everybody to go to Obama’s website to get a glimpse of his mealy mouthed political approach. He is for education, but not a mention of supporting public schools versus privatization. He is for health care, but nothing about keeping abortion legal, nor anything about supporting a single payer comprehensive national health care system, where all are covered. He speaks out on immigration, but says not a word in opposition to the Border Wall being built. He says not a word about maintaining Social Security, but talks of ‘modernizing’ it. Hell with him. We know what ‘modernizing’ really means. It means cutting SS, that’s what.

Similarly, he blabs on about National Defense, supporting the police, being against sex offenders, crime, and meth. Bullshit is what it is. Pure bullshit. He is for a ‘phased withdrawal’ from Iraq, but not a word about Afghanistan. And what is a ‘phased withdrawal’ to this sort? Over 3 months, or over 10 years? Or over forever? Not a word about cutting our excessive military spending. Why not? This is no liberal speaking, but a mealy mouthed duplicitous worm. Yet another one the Democratic party has spun out.

In the weeks and months ahead, all of America will be encouraged to put their hopes in this man. He was already being touted as the only genuine antiwar candidate tonight on the national news. Lies, lies, lies/ liars, liars, liars. About all the Democrats are hashing up with Barack Obama, is a man to help neutralize the possibility of Condoleeza Rice starting a run for the presidency. That’s about all.

Obama at best would be a return to Clintonism, but this time with a black face in office playing the role of the Slick Willie. Liberals need a better vision than that to offer America, otherwise the slide down hill will continue. And most of all, liberals need a better political party than the Democratic Party. Stuck in that Yu-don’t-go of a vehicle, we will get a wreck of America.

What a demoralized America we have now, minus a genuine third, and anti-corporate, party.

Draft the poor

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The two biggest Democrat- led events in this past century were the New Deal and the War on Poverty, and a lot of liberals say that these were the true glory days of Saint Franklin and Saint Lyndon, heir apparent to Saint Johnnie.

Fact of it was, even though Roosevelt did do a massive restructure of wealth, and the very richest condemned him roundly as a traitor to his class. They did in fact retain the vast majority of their wealth. And the main focus of the New Deal was buying off a pending revolution which would have made Red October seem more like a delicate shade of pink. The Communist party was extremely strong and organized. The anarchists were extremely strong and not so well organized. There had recently been an election where the Socialist / IWW leader Eugene Debs, campaigning from prison, had garnered enough votes in a presidential race to be included in the next election cycle.

The United States Army had recently been involved in a shooting scrape where they fired on a march on Washington of World War One veterans, who were airing their grievance that the US government had fucked them without grease. (This one I learned from that well known liberal hotbed, the VFW and American Legion)

The country was in ruins, financially and spiritually, people were starving in the streets.

People were so very pissed off they were on the verge of storming the mansions of the mighty and dragging them out, and hanging them in their immaculately trimmed trees, by their own intestines, while they were still alive. Saint Franklin saved their sorry asses.

And Saint Lyndon with the Great Society, the so called liberal handout programs the R’s whine about so much today? The ones which collectively wouldn’t amount to the amount of debt accrued just in the afhani/Iraqi conflict, yeah those programs… They were sold to the R’s as an investment in a future draft.

Yeppers. Seems the poor kids the Army depends on to go and secure the money fields for the rich kids, they had some massive health problems that caused a panic amongst the Draft ‘em All crowd. Problems that could be fixed by a comparatively small increase in nutrition and health care and education. Eighteen year old boys who didn’t have enough teeth to pass the physical. Scurvy and rickets, underweight. Poor eyesight from a lifetime of eating trash food. Ok so it wasn’t really trash food, more like just trash.

Now they are babbling about reinstating the draft. stupid stupid stupid.

Don’t they see, can’t they understand, the money the rich have today is phantom cash? Interest paid on the interest from loans made against the interest of IOUs. What are they going to buy the poor off with this time?