Monday, August 3, 2009

"A Watershed Battle for the Life Community."

Said Charmaine Yoest, President of Americans United for Life, about health care reform.

Just so there's no doubt what this is all about.

Reported in a helpful summary piece at Lipstick Alley.

Organized Heckling on Health Care.

"If the government can't even handle Cash for Clunkers, how can they possibly handle health care?"

Where did this come from? Michelle Malkin, Limbaugh, Beck, Health Care Corporations? Must have been someone with reach because first I heard it was three days ago from a super-conservative (but not exactly independent thinking) friend-of-a-friend who likes to spar with me on health care reform. Now Sebelius and Specter have been asked this question at town hall.

ThinkProgress reports that the heckling is part of a partisan, medical industry campaign to malign health care reform.

Problem is that Cash for Clunkers didn't stump the government. In fact, it was wildly successful and when the money ran out (which is the only vague detail most conservatives tend to retain) the program was refunded.

Whatever does that have to do with health care reform? Beats me. Not at all similar in purpose, structure, cost. The only thing these two programs share is an administrator, remotely. (I don't think the admin put in place to handle health care will be the same folks collecting ancient, gas-guzzling cars.)

Unfortunately, a talking point requires only that "Ooh, we got you this time" quality. Fact has nothing to do with it. Nether does rational thought or maturity. The media love these taunts because it means more easy reporting for them, no serious journalism. Hell, even the LA Times is letting contributors go soft on the euthanasia lies.

The irony is that the bad examples of goverment ineptitude so strong in our mind are from the Republican years. Gross over-spending, ethical over-reach, corruption and incompetence. If government intervention has a bad name, Republicans primarily, at least in recent history, made it so. And they don't have a health care reform plan even today!

Here's some scary conservative blogging with video of Specter/Sebelius heckling. Read the comments if you can stomach them.

There's no adult around to tell our populace that they need to think a little harder about this stuff. Except maybe our president, and he's a racist black man who wasn't even born here.

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Sodomized to Protect Our Freedoms.

Discussions about torture have been focused on the nature of waterboarding - and the right has even made t-shirts that call into question the horror of the practice. But Allan Uthman reminds us that far more torture techniques were used - and approved - by our US military than we discuss.

From the article:

That's right; sodomy. Forcible anal penetration. The documentation of this and other forms of sexual humiliation is too extensive to be denied or pawned off on a couple of redneck privates. And we know now that sexual humiliation techniques were among those discussed and approved by the National Security Principals Committee, a White House group including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet and John "History will not judge this kindly" Ashcroft.

I don't want to come off as minimizing the horror of controlled drowning. It's just that there's something about anal rape that brings the torture issue into sharp focus.

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Health Care: Worth Reading.

Two articles this morning from the superb alternet.org:

The 13 Tyrants of Health Care by David Sirota about the 6 senators and 7 blue dog commerce committee democrats who are highjacking health care. They primarily represent non-diverse, white, sparsely populated areas not representative of most of our country.

And commentary by Joshua Holland called, Conservative Health Care Rationing Made Simple, hammering home the ways in which republicans wish to ration health care for all of us even as they yell rationing at the reform bill.

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