Bad Deeds for 8-28-2009

 

Man Holding “Death to Obama” Sign Outside Town Hall Meeting on Health Care – A man was holding a sign reading “Death to Obama” Wednesday outside a town hall meeting on health care reform in Hagerstown, Md. Washington County Sheriff’s Capt. Peter Lazich said the sign also read, “Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids.” There were also signs comparing President Obama to a Nazi and showing him with an Adolf Hitler-style mustache.

Is it heath care, or is it something else with these people?

 

Race-Based Protests Directed At Obama Go Beyond Health Care Town Halls – Race-based attacks and criticism of President Obama have been on the rise during the dog days of August. And they’re not just happening at health care town hall protests.

A group of protesters camped outside Rep. Susan Davis’s (D-Calif.). “Neighborhood Day” event this past week were brandishing signs calling the president a Black Supremacist and suggesting he’s a Nazi disciple.

“Black National Socialism Is Not Utopia,” reads one poster.

Another has a picture of Obama’s former preacher, Jeremiah Wright, juxtaposed with a picture of Adolph Hitler and one of picture of Obama and Wright together. It read, “Obama’s Church: Black Supremacist.”

 

Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Says He’d Buy a License to Hunt Obama – Earlier this week, Idaho Republican gubernatorial hopeful, Rex Rammell, said he’d buy a license to hunt Obama. At a Republican rally Tuesday in Twin Falls where talk turned to the state’s planned wolf hunt, for which hunters must purchase an $11.50 wolf tag, an audience member shouted a question about “Obama tags.” Rammell responded, “The Obama tags? We’d buy some of those.”

 

Confused in Conroe – An attendee at the town hall meeting in Conroe, TX, said, “I don’t want it (health care system) to change.” Then she said she just dropped her insurance two months ago because of a lack of income, which she blames on the current government.

Let’s see, she blames her job loss on the current government although the recession set in under the Bush Administration and she doesn’t want the health care system, which she now can’t afford, to change. Brilliant! NOT!

 

Health Insurance Exec Admits Her Industry Rations Care: “We Believe In Controlling Utilization” – Cheryl Tidwell, Humana’s director of commercial sales training said, “We believe there’s a better way to control costs by controlling utilization and getting people involved in their health care.”

Now, I know we’re supposed to think that private for-profit health care companies don’t ration care, while government-run programs like Medicare do – but as the insurance industry admits right here for all to see, that’s just not the case. The obvious truth is that the health insurance industry works hard to “control utilization” – that is, it works hard to make sure that when you need a costly medical service, you are “controlled” (read: prevented) from getting it.

 

Americans Need Help, Republican Senator Coburn Needs a Heart – At a town hall meeting in Oklahoma hosted by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), a constituent begins her question with a desperate plea, “Senator Coburn, we need help!” Her voice is then overwhelmed by the kind of choking tears that reveal a person reduced whose frustration and suffering has brought them to the last possible chance to save the life of the person they love more than anyone else in the world. She then explains her situation:

My husband has traumatic brain injury. His health insurance will not cover him to eat and drink. What I need to know is, are you going to help him so he can eat and drink?

As the questioner’s courageous voice fades into heaving sobs, Senator Coburn calmly responds,”Yeah, we’ll help. The first thing we’ll do is see what we can do individually to help you through our office.” Initially, Coburn seems headed towards a reassuring resolution, but then he concludes with the following:

But the other thing that’s missing in this debate is us as neighbors helping people who need our help. We tend to–the idea that government is the solution to all our problems is an inaccurate, a very inaccurate statement.

Coburn answers an American’s desperate plea for help to care for her husband, in other words, by repeating the anti-government mantra of the Republican Party. The political calculus in Coburn’s words hang in the room like an icy cloud. There are millions of Americans with problems like this, and neighbors and Coburn’s office staff can’t help them much. If Coburn cared, he wouldn’t be trying to defeat health care reform legislation.

 

John McCain Promises and Plans Don’t Match – After John McCain opened his town hall up to questioning, one man angrily pointed at him and asked the senator why he deserves a better health care plan than him.

“I’m trying to get it for you,” McCain told him. “We’ll do it for you. We’ll make it affordable and available to you.”

But, here’s an analysis of McCain’s plan:

John McCain’s health care proposal is similar to President Bush’s failed plan. Like Bush’s, McCain’s plan undermines existing employer-based health care and pushes workers into the private market to fight big insurance companies on their own. It will reduce benefits, increase costs and leave many with no health care at all.

 

What You Can Expect From Unregulated Private Enterprise (Investment Firms, Insurance Companies, etc.) – The former finance chief for jailed Texas financier R. Allen Stanford said his boss created a business empire where blood oaths were taken to secure loyalty, bribes were paid from a secret Swiss bank account and investor profits were more fiction than financial genius.

Investors were promised their investments were safe and were scrutinized by Antigua’s bank regulator and an independent auditor. But Davis said in the court documents that the bank’s balance sheets were made up and the work of “reverse engineering.”

“Sometime in 2003, Stanford performed a ‘blood oath’ brotherhood ceremony with King and another employee of the FSRC … This brotherhood oath was undertaken in order to extract an agreement from both King and the other FSRC employee that they, in exchange for regular cash bribe payments, would ensure that the Antiguan bank regulators would not ‘kill the business’ of” the bank,” according to the plea agreement.

 

Republican Dirty Tricks Are Not New – Tape recordings from the Nixon White House betray a preoccupation with the Kennedy mystique and how that advantage might be used against the Republican president by the last surviving brother, Ted Kennedy, who died Tuesday at age 77. Nixon wanted a sharp and private eye kept on Ted Kennedy’s movements after the Chappaquiddick scandal, hoping to expose another misstep with a woman other than his wife, Joan.

Nixon’s men had investigators tail Ted Kennedy on a Hawaii vacation and when he was at his Martha’s Vineyard haunts.

Mortified, they told Nixon that Joan Kennedy wanted to wear “hot pants” to a White House function until her husband talked her out of it. But Ted’s behavior? In the aftermath of his scandal, he was careful not to step out of line, the tapes suggest.

“Does he do anything?” Nixon asked in a September 1971 meeting. “No, no, he’s very clean,” Ehrlichman replied. “He was in Hawaii on his own. He was staying in some guy’s villa. He was just as nice as could be the whole time.”

Nixon shot back: “The thing to do is watch him.”

Nixon pressed for more wiretaps and a combing of tax records, not only on Kennedy but other leading Democrats. “I could only hope that we are, frankly, doing a little persecuting,” he said.

Because Kennedy was not a presidential candidate in 1972, he did not qualify for full-time Secret Service protection. But Nixon offered it to Ted Kennedy.

But Nixon’s motives for the offer were not pure. He worried that if a third Kennedy were shot, and while not having Secret Service protection, he’d be blamed.

Plus, he wanted dirt. And the best way to get it was to have a Secret Service agent rat on the senator. There is no evidence an agent turned into such an informer.

“You understand what the problem is,” Nixon told Haldeman and Ehrlichman on Sept. 7, 1972. “If the (SOB) gets shot they’ll say we didn’t furnish it (protection). So you just buy his insurance.

“After the election, he doesn’t get a … thing. If he gets shot, it’s too damn bad. Do it under the basis, though, that we pick the Secret Service men.
“Understand what I’m talking about?”

 

Pete Olson Filters Town Hall Questions But Still Gets Punked – At Congressman Pete Olson’s Town Hall meeting in Sugar Land, audience questions to Olson were entered on 5 x 7 cards that Olson’s aides collected and then filtered. They literally handed them to him one at a time. So Olson’s questions were largely tailored to Olson much like his ridiculous “polls.”

For example, here is one “poll” question right off of one of his recent glossy mailers: “Do you support or oppose limiting access to health care by placing a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor?” (He might as well asked if you’ve stopped beating your wife.)

Things started out pretty calm, as a result. The heat was turned up a little after Olson read the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. Someone asked him to read the Preamble to the Constitution, and Olson complied. Olson began with the words “We the people…” until he got to that part that says “promote the general welfare.” At that point several people in the room broke out into vigorous and loud applause.

Olson paused and looked genuinely surprised, realized at that point that he had been punked.

 

Health Care Poll Shows Republicans Say the Darnest Things – Democrats and Independents want health care for all, Republicans don’t care about other people’s problems.

 

George W. Bush Questions Brevity of Obama’s Vacation 😉 – Former president George W. Bush criticized President Barack Obama today for taking such a brief August vacation, arguing that the brevity of his summer break “sends the wrong message to terrorists.”

“The one way to let the evildoers know that they don’t have you all stressed out is by taking all of August off,” Mr. Bush told reporters at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. “I always made sure I did that.” The former president called Mr. Obama’s golf game in Martha’s Vineyard today “a positive step,” but added, “It may be a case of too little, too late.”

Regards,

Jim