Bad Deeds for 5-20-2009

Republican Health Care Plan Lets Patients Choose To Spend Their Own Money – The Republican Party has a deal for you: Under the health care proposal the GOP released Wednesday, you are fully entitled to spend your own money in the free market to purchase health insurance, a chief backer of the plan, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), said Wednesday.

Under the rubric of choice, the plan treats employer-based health insurance as income and taxes a worker’s benefits. If it costs an employer $12,000 to cover your health care, for instance, you’d be responsible to pay taxes on that $12,000 as if it were paid out to you.

To offset the tax, the plan provides a $5,700 tax credit. If a family doesn’t have insurance, that money can be used to buy it. But Burr acknowledged that the credit would be far less than the roughly $12,000 cost of health insurance.

 

Waterboarding is ‘tip of the iceberg’ According to Military Attorney – A military attorney who represented a now-freed Guantanamo detainee told CNN on Wednesday that waterboarding is only “the tip of the iceberg.” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley said that when her client was first held at a CIA prison in Morocco, “They started this monthly treatment where they would come in with a scalpel or a razor type of instrument and they would slash his genitals, just with small cuts.”

 

Air Force Fires a 25 Million Dollar Hero Pilot (He’s Gay) – Lieutenant Colonel Victor J. Fehrenbach, a fighter weapons systems officer, has been flying the F-15E Strike Eagle since 1998. He has flown numerous missions against Taliban and al-Qaida targets, including the longest combat mission in his squadron’s history. On that infamous September 11, 2001, Lt. Col. Fehrenbach was handpicked to fly sorties above the nation’s capital. Later he flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has received at least 30 awards and decorations including nine air medals, one of them for heroism, as well as campaign medals for Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is now a flight instructor in Idaho, where he has passed on his skills to more than 300 future Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force weapons systems officers.

Since 1987, when Fehrenbach entered Notre Dame on a full Air Force ROTC scholarship, the government has invested twenty-five million dollars in training and equipping him to serve his country, which he has done with what anyone would agree was great distinction. He comes from a military family. His father was a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, his mother an Air Force nurse and captain. Lt. Col. Fehrenbach has honored that tradition.

And the Air Force is about to discharge this guy, a virtual poster boy for Air Force recruiting, because he is gay? Someone has to be kidding. This is sheer madness.

 

Texas Rep. Barton: We Shouldn’t Regulate CO2 Because ‘It’s In Your Coca-Cola’ And ‘You Can’t Regulate God’ – Discussing the bill on C-Span’s Washington Journal this morning, Rep. “Smokey Joe” Barton (R-TX) defended his head-in-the-sand approach to climate change by fundamentally misunderstanding the science, misstating the reality of carbon dioxide emissions, and mocking fuel-efficient cars. Some highlights:

I would also point out that CO2, carbon dioxide, is not a pollutant in any normal definition of the term. … I am creating it as I talk to you. It’s in your Coca-Cola, you’re Dr. Pepper, your Perrier water. It is necessary for human life. It is odorless, colorless, tasteless, does not cause cancer, does not cause asthma.

And something that the Democrat sponsors do not point out, a lot of the CO2 that is created in the United States is naturally created. You can’t regulate God. Not even the Democratic majority in the US Congress can regulate God.

Regards,

Jim