Bad Deeds for 3-12-2009

To Conservatives, Bipartisanship is Forcing Others to Agree With Them – From the Conservative Political Action Conference, “To us, bipartisanship is them being forced to agree with us, after we have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them.” Yes, that proclamation was greeted with wild applause from the same Conservative crowd that complains that Democrats are not being bipartisan enough. Well, now that they have defined bipartisanship for us, maybe we can accommodate them. (Not really. We don’t want to become like them.) See the video at the link.

 

How Republicans Burned Down Our National Home and Are Preventing It From Being Rebuilt – The following is from an Open letter from former Republican, Frank Schaeffer, who is the author of CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back :

Dear Republican Leaders: The Republican Party has become the party dedicated to sabotaging the American future. … You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the “architect” America just hired — President Obama — to rebuild from the ashes. You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created.
I used to be one of you. … In the mid 1980s I left the Religious Right, after I realized just how very anti-American they are, (the theme I explore in my book Crazy For God). They wanted America to fail in order to prove they were right about America’s “moral decline.” …

For the party that created our crises of misbegotten war, mismanaged economy, the lack of regulation of our banking industry, handing our country to rich crooks… to obstruct the one person who is trying to repair the damage is obscene.

Just imagine where America would be today if the 14 to 20 million voters — “the rube base” who slavishly follow the likes of Limbaugh — had not voted as a block year after year thus empowering the Republican fiasco. We would have a regulated banking industry and would have avoided our current financial crisis; some 4000 of our killed military men and women would be alive; over to 35,000 wounded Americans would be whole; we would have been leaders in the environmental movement; we would be in the middle of a green technology boom fueling a huge expansion of our economy and stopping our dependence on foreign oil, and our health-care system would be reformed.

 

Conservative Talk Show Host Blames Problems on Lack of Individual Responsibility, Except for His Problems – Conservative radio talk show host Mike Gallagher, a fierce proponent of ‘individual responsibility,’ [Conservative worldview] recently lambasted home buyers facing foreclosure who had purchased homes they could not afford and were seeking bailout money or to have the federal government intervene and stop foreclosures. Last week, Gallagher highlighted the story of a bus driver who had purchased an $800K home, which is now only worth $600K:

I dare you to feel sorry for her…how about this, honey? Pay your mortgage!

In short, Gallagher believes in individual responsibility and the importance of micro-economic behavior when it comes to people who can’t afford their mortgages, but attributes (Democratic) macroeconomic governmental policies for his inability to sell his own house. Gallagher lamented that his failure to sell his own house, that he recently placed on the market, was due to the psychological effects burdening the wealthy resulting from the class warfare propagated by President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats:

I decided to put my house on the market. Three weeks. And it’s a house – and I’m not bragging – it’s a house with a ‘wow factor.’ You walk into the house and you go, ‘Wow.’ It’s got all the nice little bells and whistles, it’s got the electric shades that go up and down, and the sound system, and the beautiful pool. I’m a lucky guy. Three weeks – not a single phone call.

Hey, Gallagher, take your own advise and assume some individual responsibility before you blame others for the situations they find themselves in.

 

Existing U.S. Health Care is a Bad Deal, According to Study – A report from the Business Roundtable, which represents CEOs of major companies, says America’s health care system has become a liability in a global economy. Concern about high U.S. costs has existed for years, and business executives – whose companies provide health coverage for workers – have long called for getting costs under control. Americans spend $2.4 trillion a year on health care. The Business Roundtable report says Americans in 2006 spent $1,928 per capita on health care, at least two-and-a-half times more per person than any other advanced country.

When benefits are factored into the equation, the United States is 23 points behind five leading economic competitors: Canada, Japan, Germany, Britain and France. These five nations cover all their citizens, and though their systems differ, in each country the government plays a much larger role than in the U.S. The cost-benefit disparity is even wider – 46 points – when the U.S. is compared with emerging competitors: China, Brazil and India.

 

Cancer Patients Die While “New Democrats” Help Bankers Get Billions – Yesterday, Rep. Alan Grayson, member of the House Financial Services Committee, said that “AIG blew up because it was a casino that dabbled in insurance on the side.” To date, AIG has received $173 billion — billion — and we’ve got no idea what they did with it. And what are Americans–who are losing their jobs and their homes because AIG acted like a casino and taxpayers paid off all their gambling debts–getting? They get to die:

21% of Americans scramble to pay medical, drug bills
Denise Prosser, 39, has battled cancer since she was a toddler. Yet Prosser can’t afford her next cancer treatment — a radioactive therapy that she’s supposed to receive once a year — because she and her husband lost their jobs in December. Without insurance, she has postponed the radiation indefinitely and is taking only half of her asthma medications — sacrifices that often leave her gasping for air and could allow her cancer to come surging back.

Meanwhile Ellen Tauscher is bragging that she and her New Democrat Coalition come from Wall Street, and work as henchmen for bank lobbyists. Of course they are — the New Democrat’s Executive Director, Adam Pase, was a lobbyist for predatory lenders. And bank lobbyists love them back, cooing about how the New Dems will keep Congress from “punishing” banks with new regulation of the financial system. Ellen Tauscher even voted for the bankruptcy bill that made it more difficult for people with bills from catastrophic illness to file for bankruptcy, saying it “encouraged personal responsibility.” I’m sure Denise is touched by Tauscher’s concern for her moral fiber.

 

Sean Hannity Thinks There’s No Health Care Problem Because He Gets Health Coverage from Fox and His Union – Sean Hannity doesn’t understand much about health care, and why should he? Disease has always existed, yet AMERICA has endured! Doesn’t that mean that universal health care is just unnecessary? Hannity calls to mind a simpler time, where men were men, and women were respectful, and people with scarlet fever and tuberculosis had the decency to say, “No, no! Let me just quietly die in this alley! I don’t want to be a part of some depressing set of statistics!”

Fox News Senior Political Analyst Bob Beckel, on the other hand, thinks that health care is “a right,” and so he gamely argued for it on Sean Hannity’s radio show:

HANNITY: I’m on the Fox Plan and the AFTRA Plan. I have no clue what insurance I have. I don’t have a special health care plan! I have the same plan that you do.
BECKEL: No you don’t. I don’t have a health insurance plan.
HANNITY: You work for FOX, you’re on the FOX plan.
BECKEL: I don’t qualify for the Fox plan, because I have a pre-existing condition.

And then, Hannity made light of people with pre-existing conditions, curing them all with ridicule, the best medicine.

By the way, the AFTRA Plan? That refers to the health benefits extended by being a member of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, a union.

Please listen to the recording.

 

Employee Free Choice Act Opponents Received Millions Upon Millions From Business PACs – Republicans are charging that the lead sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), received $1.64 million from the labor sector. However, they are not telling us that Republicans have received millions upon millions of dollars from business interests over the course of their careers. This includes the top ranks of the Republican Party. Here are a few examples:

House Minority Leader John Boehner – since 1989
$7.48 million from business PACS

Minority Whip Eric Cantor – since 2000
$5.34 million from business PACS

Sen. John Ensign – since 1994
$5.4 million from business PACS

 

Somebody’s Bad Deed; Somebody is Not Telling the Truth – Police say former Cook County Republican Chairman Gary Skoien admitted having two prostitutes in his children’s playroom when his wife walked in on him early Sunday morning. The allegation is in a domestic battery report from Skoien, 55, against his 36-year-old, 5-foot-4-inch, 110-pound wife. He said she beat him with her fists and an electric guitar. But Skoien said the police report inaccurately stated that he had prostitutes in his home. Skoien said he and a friend were talking in the playroom when his wife came down and began beating him.

Regards,

Jim