Noah, pondering Congress's do-nothing approach to health care reform, asks: When is enough enough?

The president said in his weekly address Saturday,

"Health care reform cannot wait."

by Noah

I have a very good doctor. He has taken very good care of me over the years. One of the first things I liked about him, besides the recommendations that steered me in his direction, was that, unlike many doctors, he has a degree of warmth, a personality, and exhibits a slightly warped sense of humor, all things I appreciate in anybody. This is good because circumstances dictate that I have to see him fairly frequently.

On my last visit, however, I could see that he was down about something. Since he hadn’t examined me yet, I knew it wasn’t about me, so I just asked him why he seemed depressed. He looked right at me and said that more and more of his patients have lost their insurance or can no longer afford it. One such patient that he had seen that day had waited too long to come see him and there was now nothing he could do for him.

The people who run our government in Washington never have to worry about the cost of a visit to the doctor or the cost of treatment. Because of their health care, they get to live a better quality of life than millions of Americans, people who are nothing more to them than a vote, second-class citizens compared with the people that really matter to them, the cash cows of K Street.

Next time you see someone on TV that is thrilled that they got to shake the hand of a senator, ask yourself, how deluded does someone have to be to find joy in such a thing? I’d be washing my hand like Lady Macbeth for a week.

WE EXPECT TREACHERY FROM REPUGS.

SHOULDN'T WE TREAT DEMS THE SAME WAY?

This past weekend an e-mail from Howard Dean’s Democracy for America (DFA) crossed my screen, asking me to vote on a list of eight senatorial status quo gatekeepers. (Howie wrote a post on it.) The winner was announced today, and it's Max Baucus. He wins the well-deserved booby prize of having a series of pressure TV ads that have been running in Washington, DC, start running in his home state. Way to go Max! You must be very proud! The ads will pressure him on his (and presumably similar senators') continued foot-dragging and blocking of real, as opposed to trick, health care reform.

The campaign was originally started by a smaller group called Progressive Change Campaign Committee a few weeks ago. The joining together of the PCCC with the larger DFA vastly increases the clout of the project. No wonder corporatist, alleged-moderate Dems like Harry Reid and Rahm Emanuel have always given the cold shoulder to Governor Dean.

We expect treachery from Repugs, and disdain them. If Dems act the same, why should they not get the same contempt? Reid speaks for many of his kind when he expresses irritation at the idea of Dems running ads against Dems. Will he ever get it? Will he ever understand that calling yourself a Dem and acting like a damn Repug is death in so many ways, and that it is fooling fewer and fewer of us across the country every week?

As Bob Dylan said in a previous era of turbulence:

Come senators, congressmen,
Please heed the call.
Don’t stand in the doorway,
Don’t block up the hall.
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled.
There’s a battle outside,
And it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls,
For the times they are a-changin’.

The voting ended today, but you can still click here to see who Senator Baucus's competition was. The page gives you some “degree of slime” details (including current K Street bribe totals), boxes to check off your selections, and a lovely, suitable-for-dart-board photo of each miscreant.

Here’s the list:

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE)
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)
Sen. Joe Lie-berman (I-CT)
Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN)
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT)
Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA)
Sen. Kurt Conrad (D-ND)

I've done the traditional thing above and included the party affiliation of each of these K Street Cash Vacuums, but really, their only affiliation and loyalty is to themselves and their bank accounts. Ironically, the one "Independent" listed above is the very definition of lack of loyalty, as evidenced by his very public actions. Does that make him the most honest on the list? That certainly puts it all in perspective.

It’s hard to choose from so much slime, but I ended up selecting Ben Nelson for his extra efforts in secretly conspiring to end health care reform while publicly saying he was for reform. He gets my "Filth of Filth" award for this month for also helping to mastermind a letter from himself and five other Big Insurance hand puppets (more on them later) of both parties to Majority “Leader” Harry Reid and Minority Queen Bitch McConnell. The letter calls for a delay in health care reform. Since Nelson is from Nebraska, I might also vote him a special Stephen King Prize: some face time with the children of the corn.



Of the above list, you might have voted for Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh. Some of the biggest Big Pharma corporations base themselves in Indiana, and their guy Senator Bayh, as Howie pointed out, is up for reelection too, so… Well, the day he leaves office, whenever that is, he will no doubt segue to a place on the board of one of those Indiana pharma corps. For me, that can't come soon enough. For all intents and purposes he is already “on the board.” It’s not very comforting that he was on President Obama’s short list for VP.

The K Street bribery figures on the PCCC-DFA “We Want the Public Option" page certainly show why Senawhore Baucus refused to give those in favor of single-payer or a public option a seat at his table, but we already knew how corrupt he is. Is it any wonder that he was the contest winner?

The amount of filthy lucre, almost $9 million, that Kerry has been stashing in his shoes and file cabinets is astounding, and surprised me, but I don't see him losing in Massachusetts, not unless a scandal involving a five-way orgy with him, Mark Sanford’s Argentinian news bimbo, and three llamas on the pampas breaks. Some others are more vulnerable. Lie-berman? More and more Connecticut voters are feeling pretty betrayed these days by McCain’s personal ass-smoocher. Conrad? Now we see why he tried to substitute a shifty coop scam on us instead of a public option. Feinstein? Really, what else should we expect from someone like her, but with that kind of money coming in, you might think she’d get a better hairdresser and do something about that DEVO hair. Landrieu? Hell, I’d just get a nice old Louisiana voodoo doll, a real one from the Voodoo Queen herself, and go to work on it. I have plenty of nice sharp pins.

All in all, this band of assclowns cares a lot more about their bales of cash than they do about the people they were supposed to represent. Maybe they need some time off to count their money, like the rest of their days -- that kind of time off.

NOW ABOUT THE AFOREMENTIONED LETTER:

THE TACTIC IS DELAY, DELAY, AND THEN --

Huffington Post obtained a copy of the letter sent to Reid and McConnell. The letter demands a delay in the consideration of health care reform, ostensibly to make the reforms more effective and less damaging to the economy, which these bozos have already damaged so much over the years with their war in Iraq, their tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of the financial sleazos, NAFTA, CAFTA, etc. Suddenly they care? It’s all a crock. In other words, it’s no public option, or any reform. I can’t help but think of the mere coincidence that this letter happened about ten days after Rahm Emanuel indicated his negative feelings about a public option.

The letter was signed by six so-called centrist senators, Democrats-in-Name-Only Nelson, Feinstein, Landrieu, Ron Wyden from Oregon; "Independent" Lieberman; plus Maine’s Repug duo, Olympia Snowe and Susan “I Worship Bush” Collins. Each and every one of them has received more than one million smackers from the medical-industrial complex in their careers. What a surprise!

President Obama knows he will need their votes if there is to be real health care reform. He also wants action before Congress goes on its monthlong August vacation. He knows that the window is closing, due to the fact that once the end of the year comes around, Washington will go into 2010 election mode and the time for meaningful legislation will have passed. Opponents of reform also know this, and intend to use it. Hence the real purpose behind this delaying action.

Sen. Jim DeMint (Nutter-SC) put it best on a conference call late last week when he said, “I can almost guarantee you this thing won’t pass before August, and if we can hold it back until we go home for a month’s break in August…” He then predicted that his colleagues on both sides of the aisle would hear enough outrage about possible health care reform that both houses of Congress “will come back in September afraid to vote against the American people.” Hopefully, they will hear a lot of outrage, but not the kind DeMint is expecting or hoping for.

BY THE WAY, WHY DO THESE CLOWNS

NEED AN AUGUST RECESS?

It’s not an election year. Think about it. Forty thousand factories in this country have closed in the last ten years. How many jobs was that? Unemployment is nearly at 10 percent. People are suffering big-time. Family USA reports that over 143,000 of our fellow Americans will lose their coverage in just the three weeks that Congress goes off on its corporately financed vacations. More than 53,000 of our fellow Americans will be forced into bankruptcy due to out-of-control health care costs, and another 1265 people will die during the time Congress tans its flab in the sun. The people’s work urgently needs to be done by the politicians in Washington and what do they do? They thumb their noses at us and go on vacation! Nice folks, eh?

Anyway, at this point Senator Dementia, er, DeMint goes completely off the rails, like the total heinous, babbling headcase he is, adding, “This health care issue is D-Day for freedom in America.” I can just hear the band and the fireworks going off in what’s left of his inbred mind. It gets better (worse):

“If we are able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will BREAK him.”

This is what the delaying action is about. These senators see Obama as a threat to the K Street gravy train. Their masters see Obama as a threat to their unfettered profiteering off of illness, pain, and misery. President Obama’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, said Sunday on CNN State of the Union program that delaying tactics are “a typical Washington bureaucratic game of if you don’t have a better alternative, just delay in hopes that that kills something.”

If you hear anyone in Washington or any media hack saying anything otherwise about what this delaying action is, you will instantly know where they stand on health care reform.

You will know that they are the enemy of you, your family, and economic recovery. You will know that they don’t care that one out of every six of your dollars goes to health care and that soon it will be one out of every five and then worse as the whole economy goes to hell from the weight of a growing debt, just as your family’s economy will have already done. You will know they don’t give a damn that health care costs in this country are growing four times faster than your wages, if you can even find a job to replace the one they voted to take from you and shipped overseas to please some bribing corporate-slimebag “campaign contributor”! You will know, as if you didn't already know, that they and most of their fellow deviants don’t give a rat’s ass about the quality of your life or whether you live or die, in pain or not in pain. They don’t give a damn about the size of tumor that my doctor’s other patient has, or whether his cancer has spread. This is the kind of vermin they are.

They will arrest you and laugh like Max Baucus did if you ask to speak at their staged hearings no matter how professional you are and what your credentials are. They have their government health care, and they will continue to mock those who ask them questions, just like Senator Baucus’s buddy, Sen. Charles “Grasshole” Grassley (R-IA), did a week ago, when he dismissively told a constituent to go get a government job if he wanted health care like his. Sounds like a Repug promoting Big Government, doesn’t it? I mean if everyone in this country who doesn’t have health insurance, all 40 million-plus of them, could actually get the government jobs that Senator Grasshole suggests, that would be Extremely Big Government!

WHY DO WE ALWAYS HAVE TO DO

THE MATH THE REPUBLICAN WAY?

One of the favorite anti-reform talking points is about not wanting the government to come between us and our doctors, but that’s what we have right now when these “people” block reform. Ask that guy my doctor was talking about, and millions of others. Everyone knows someone in the same predicament. Meanwhile tens of thousands of Americans die unnecessarily before their time. Where are all those loudmouth pro-lifers on this one? Over 18,000 died unnecessarily in 2002, Bush’s first do-nothing-about-it year, alone. Now the figure has grown to 22,000 a year. Since Obama and the Dems took over, 9961 have died; 50 have died just on the day I write this post (Institute Of Medicine-Families USA), simply because they have lost their insurance, either because they can no longer afford it or they've lost their job.

Another of the anti-reform talking points is that health care reform will cost $1.2 trillion over 10 years. So? We’ve just spent $4 trillion on military escapades over only the last eight years, and we did it while tax revenues were reduced far below the historical norm. Right now the anti-reform mob is making a big deal about the congressional testimony of a Congressional Budget Office official who delineated the large costs of current reform plans. According to him, the House plan does not plan for all of the costs. In other words, it doesn't pay for itself. However, it is incomplete. The Senate Health Committee plan does meet all of the costs, but the anti-reform mob and the media dopes jumped all over the bit about the House plan, using the testimony as a reason to kill reform.

So where do we get the money to pay for health care? Well, there are a few options but I’m liking this one. The righties are spending a lot of effort on scaring the middle and working classes about increased taxes, and many people are, as usual, falling for this fear tactic. But there’s one quite large revenue stream that could and should be restored. It also doesn’t affect the bank accounts of the middle and working classes, who are the targets of the fear campaign. In fact, it doesn’t take money from over 98 percent of the population:

Repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy!

Here’s the math:

(1) Cost of health care reforms over ten years = $1.2 trillion.

(2) Tax the top 1.2 percent of the population, who make over $1 million a year, at the pre-Bush rate. That will bring in over $540 billion. People now making a million a year will have to find a way to eke out a living on only $9,000 or $10,000 a week. They’ll have to tighten their reenforced belts.

(3) That still leaves a shortfall of approximately $700 billion, but guess what. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire in 2011. Let them expire, but keep the middle-class tax cuts. The amount of money that that will be once again going to the Treasury instead of secret Caiman Island accounts? $700 billion. And, the tax rate will still not be as high for these downtrodden folks as it was 29 years ago. Need I mention that many of these downtrodden folks just happen to be senators who don’t want to see their taxes go back to where they used to be?

On the Repug side, they always want to go back and live in the 1950s. But, the top tax rate for the wealthy then was nearly 90 percent. In the 1960s, it was 70 percent. Reagan lowered the top rate to 27 percent, then turned around and raised taxes on everyone making $40,000 or less. How was that for fair? Bush went further. His top rate even went down to 19.6 percent! Just raise tax rates back to the sainted Reagan's rates and we'll have the money. Under this scenario, the downtrodden, abused rich folks would still be under 30 percent and would be contributing a fairer share. Screw 'em.

The math is so simple, even a Hannity fan could figure it out -- with a calculator, of course. To put all of this into perspective, not only have we have spent $4 trillion over the last eight years, but in the 1960s we had the costs of a similar war and we had the money left over to launch a crash program to develop the technology to send people to the moon and back.

Hmmm. Maybe we could send some of these senators to the moon, but not back.

AT THIS LEVEL OF CORRUPTION, WE'RE

LIVING IN A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY

Make no mistake. Strip this all down to its bare essence, and you will see that our government is as nearly corrupt as that of any Third World country. The K Street bribery figures do not lie. Sure, we call K Street’s largesse legal, but look who made it legal. The only thing that is different is the fairy tale about how good those in DC are and how they are deserving of our adulation, which is drummed into our heads when we're schoolchildren, and which far, far too many of us still believe in as adults. Our Congress decided long ago that they would vote to make bribery legal, calling it “campaign contributions” (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), and they spend most of their time enjoying the gravy-train cash spigot they set up for themselves.

While they do nothing, people die. More people die than Pablo Escobar killed in all of Colombia during his entire reign as a drug lord. Escobar’s mistake was that he killed people with power, or he’d be alive today. So how are these “people” in Washington any different from Escobar? Except for the class status of the victims, the result of their actions is every bit the same. So who has more “blood” on their hands? Thousands of people die before their time because of the endless greed of our politicians. That includes children who die of cancer even after their distraught and desperate parents sell and mortgage everything the family has and still don’t have enough to pay for the treatments. Would these senators look at things differently if that happened to them?

Meanwhile politicians continue to make a few speeches on the floor for the cameras and then it’s off to the golf course with some pig from Chevron or Bayer. We probably even pay their greens fees. At night, it’s off to the C Street sex-and-Jesus frat houses -- you can bet money (to fund your own health care) that that newly revealed Repug "praise Jesus and pass the pussy" house on C Street isn't unique. I guarantee you that whatever predilection any politician, regardless of party has, there is a safe house in Washington organized with them in mind. D Street, F Street, G Street, L Street, whatever.

************

Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend a hand,
For the times they are a-changin’.

-- Bob Dylan

A reminder: One way to make our true wishes known, even to evil über-loons like Jim DeMint and his fellow senators is to support advertising like the ads the PCCC and DFA are running, and ActBlue progressive politicians, not the kind of self-servers mentioned in this post. We know the Repugs won’t listen. If Dems won’t listen either, then a pox on them too, and let’s have a third party, one that doesn’t just hang out with a bunch of pimps all day. Already the largest group of voters describe themselves as independent, with Dems second and Repugs a distant third.

Dissatisfaction and unrest permeate the political landscape. It’s not too early to start building and supporting a new generation of representatives in Washington that actually represent and work for the voters. If the two-party system continues to fail the people, then it has no right to continue. The politicians in Washington long ago sold out their right to our respect when they began stuffing the Franklins in their pockets. For every Dennis Kucinich, there’s a hundred Jim DeMints or Evan Bayhs.

The biggest war we have is right here at home. It’s a war on Washington. It was bad enough that 99 percent of them protected Bush by keeping impeachment off the table. Now, they will let health care costs run amok until there's nothing left but their ever-swelling bank accounts; just like the Easter Islanders who stripped their land of anything that grew just so they could keep building their statues to themselves and their gods. In the end, there was nothing left to even build a boat to get off the island with. It’s a lesson for our time.

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