Sure, there have been tin-foil hat conspiracy theories aplenty for as long as anyone alive can remember. The Jewish bankers got together with the German Illuminati and plotted the ‘New World Order’, getting its first nail in the coffin in 1913 with the Federal Reserve, going straight from there to instigating WW-I with a well-planned assassination in Sarajevo, culling the first wave of accumulated wealth in 1929 to start the Great Depression, which could only be alleviated in the end by WW-II.

And they needed an excuse to overrule America’s strong isolationism at the time, so they didn’t bother to do anything about the incoming Japanese fleet as it sailed en masse toward Pearl Harbor. Not exactly a “false flag” operation, but certainly despicable. REAL false flag operations got famous when the wholly fictional Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ allowed the US military to ensconce itself in perpetuity in South Vietnam, admittedly (by several ‘memoirs’ since, by people who could know) for the purpose of testing the nifty new armaments and chemical warfare agents amassed when they ‘forgot’ to cut the wartime military budget after Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war.

Then there was 9-11. A textbook case made for tin-foil speculation, undoubtedly. Huge skyscrapers imploding perfectly from jet fuel in the upper stories, a whole different, un-damaged skyscraper that mysteriously collapsed in the same fashion late that afternoon for no apparent reason, a hole in the danged Pentagon but zero signs of anything that might have caused it, etc., etc., etc. I doubt anybody’s unaware of the grand conspiracy theories for that dreadful day.

Then, just a week later, some journalists and a congresscritters received letters in the mail containing weaponized anthrax spores and badly printed notes from what we were told was just another Arab terrorist. Only that wasn’t true either, as quickly became known. Why, it turns out that the weaponized anthrax spores came from the US Army’s own bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

At first the FBI fingered an Egyptian researcher for the dirty deed, but couldn’t make a case of it. They looked for a short time at an Israeli researcher too, but backed right off that one quick. So they went after a regular American researcher in the lab, and paid him nearly $6 million just a couple of months ago for ruining his life. Desperate, they settled on another guy, and he is said to have killed himself last week with Tylenol (something not fun, takes about 5 days to die). Which must of course make him the lone gunman in this particular incident, right?

If you agree, you’ll just love the incredible amount of gossamer ‘evidence’ being used to convict a dead guy who held high enough clearance to work in an Army bioweapons lab for 28 years, was in all appearances an upstanding family man, and had ZERO run-ins with the law – all on the highly dubious ‘testimony’ of a highly suspicious non-professional psychiatric ‘babysitter’ (now in hiding) with a rap sheet for DUI and domestic violence as long as your arm – is quite absurd. They’re really losing their touch at this late date. This stuff is way, way flimsier than magic bullets, perfectly ‘dropped’ skyscrapers and dead terrorists that turned up alive and well.

For those of you who like a thoroughly twisted Ludlum plot as well as a seriously holey conspiracy theory, don your tin-foil beanies and follow some of the links below to the ongoing drama. Looks like I’m not the only person who keeps a big salt lick handy when the gub’ment starts handing out badly crafted lies…

Links:

WSJ: Bruce Ivins Wasn’t the Anthrax Culprit [Opinion, Richard Spertzel, head of biological weapons section Unscom '94-'99]
NYT: Anthrax Evidence Called Mostly Circumstantial
Salon: Glenn Greenwald on the anthrax investigation
John McQuaid: Bentonite and ABC’s credibility
BuzzFlash: Jean C. Duley… tell us again…
Anthrax Vaccine – Meryl Nass
The Hidden Anthrax Letters Suspect
The Death of Mr. Ivins

The US Supreme Court ruled on April 28th that voter ID laws are constitutional despite the fact that they disenfranchise at least 11 million eligible voters, expand restrictions on felony voting to millions of people who have unpaid parking tickets or minor moving violations that haven’t been taken care of, or have lost their auto insurance for some reason. It also amounts to an onerous poll tax for millions more Americans whose crime is simply being poor, elderly or disabled.

The justices split on the decision along entirely political lines, not surprising because these laws that require voters to produce a photo ID with a future expiration date primarily affect traditional Democratic Party voters. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the majority opinion, citing the usual Republican fear of voter fraud as the state interest. Yet according to a survey by the Center for Policy Alternatives, voter fraud is extremely rare. From 2002 to 2005, an Ohio survey showed a total of 52 people convicted of any type of voter fraud, while just a tad less than 200,000,000 votes were cast in general elections by Ohio voters.

That’s half of one ten-thousandth of 1 percent. This is not a big issue.

Our household – with three workers who don’t quite make 150% of poverty level put together (this is Appalachia) – recently were pressed to get a photo ID for my teenage grandson so he could take the SAT tests. He starts college next year, but does not yet drive. We put a rush order on his birth certificate (original got lost) from another state. The copies and rush cost $55. It took longer to get a replacement SS card (required for ID along with birth certificate here), which cost another $15. Then our daughter had to take a day off work to spend the hours at DMV to get the stupid thing. That cost $80 plus the $20 price of the ID, a total of $170. A considerable cost and if your boss won’t give you time off, nearly impossible to accomplish. Grandson turns 18 three days before the May 6th primary in NC. He is registered and will be voting.

It’s a new burden, and it’s too expensive for many people who should have a voice in their representation. It’s a complicated bother for people who don’t drive, and there are 11 million adult citizens in this country who don’t have birth certificates (born in countries that no longer exist or have lost records due to disasters or wars, are elderly and/or born at home and never got one, etc.). They have been flatly disenfranchised because one half of one ten-thousandth of one percent of voters might try to vote twice. Which would add up to half of one thousandth of one percent of votes. Only in Florida would that tip a close election, and even then the court would step in and declare a winner regardless of the votes. As they did in 2000.

It’s a poll tax, forbidden by the 24th Amendment to the US Constitution. The Bush Supreme Court has now abrogated yet another of the established amendments to our governing charter for purely partisan political reasons – our rights. We need new leadership immediately, and the makeup of the court must change. Volunteer to take some neighbors to the polls this year, maybe help someone negotiate the gauntlet to get a valid photo ID. This election will make or break us.

If you’re middle class (like most of us), you know about how health insurance premiums keep going up, covering less, and robbing you of more than your COL increments every year. In my post Health Insurance Racket as Organized Crime I outlined the details of how two of New York City’s major public health care providers filed RICO suits against UHC and its underlings.

Because it is a racket, it’s bankrupting citizens everywhere, and now it’s all the way to closing important hospitals DOWN because they can’t get insurance to pay for care to patients who *are* insured. A case study in how Corporate Greed and Unbridled Lust for Profit can end up destroying the entire fabric of the nation on which these corporate raiders depend for their very life.

Today New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed a formal Intent To Sue action against the database company Ingenix – owned by the same parent company as UHC – for its fraudulent manipulation of the database most insurance companies use to set reimbursement rates for out-of-network medical expenses.

The United insurers and many other health insurance companies relied on the Ingenix database to determine their “reasonable and customary” rates.  The Ingenix database used the insurers’ billing information to calculate a “reasonable and customary” rate for individual claims by assessing how much a similar type of medical service would typically cost, generally taking into account the type of service, physician, and geographical location.  However, the investigation showed that the “reasonable and customary” rates produced by Ingenix were remarkably lower than the actual cost of typical medical expenses.

Links:

Cuomo Announces Industry-Wide Investigation Into Health Care Insurers’ Fraudulent Reimbursement Scheme

The Health Care Plans: Worthless

The Health Insurance Racket as Organized Crime

The Truth About Insurance

NY Atty. Gen. announces investigation into health insurer fraud

For the fourth time during his reign of terror, George Bush used his veto pen to reject reauthorization and expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance program [SCHIP], in defiance of the wishes of a solid 72% majority of the American people and a Veto-Proof majority in the Senate on this completely bipartisan bill.

The 6.6 million children who were covered did have their coverage extended through November, the SCHIP funding from last year expired this past Sunday. The 4 million more children this bill would have covered are SOL, as usual.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders are scrambling to come up with the two dozen extra votes they need to override the veto, but it’s not looking very hopeful. Senator Edward Kennedy weighed in over at Daily Kos with a challenge to the President, but then he’s a Senator holding a veto-proof majority on this legislation.

There’s a heart-wrenching diary by a mother who is out of work, whose husband committed suicide just this past July, who is now facing a future being unable to insure a teenage daughter under SCHIP until that daughter can get safely graduated and into college (or Mom can find a job with health benefits). SCHIP and my husband’s suicide is there if you really need it to convince you what a travesty this veto represents, but I find New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s double post to Kos and Huffington Post a probably more effective strategy than trying to tug the heartstrings of people who have no hearts.

Why I’m Suing the Bush Administration is Spitzer’s message to the outraged nation about what he plans to do about the 400,000 uninsured children in New York, and that doesn’t include waiting until they’re sick enough to “just go to the emergency room” as Bush flippantly suggested.

“Somebody had to do it,” Spitzer said in his opening statement. Spitzer says he has joined with both Democratic and Republican governors of Maryland, Washington, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Illinois to challenge the new restrictions on SCHIP eligibility the Bush administration imposed by regulatory action, which blocks states from expanding coverage to more uninsured children.

With the veto, Bush has taken away insurance from those who were covered (after November), and the state caps on Medicaid have ensured that coverage isn’t even extended to all the children of the working poor who qualify for that much.

The reason Bush has defied a solid majority of U.S. citizens as well as both the House and Senate? He said he’s worried that children who already have insurance (inadequate, high-deductibe and often useless insurance through their parents’ employers) will choose to give up their coverage in order to join the program.

It doesn’t get any more WRONG than that. While we debate the shortcomings of for-profit health care in this country, the gross shame of “Murder by Spreadsheet” policies of those for-profit insurers, and whether we can join the ranks of all other democracies on the planet to offer basic health care to citizens as a right, the very least we can do is make sure the children get their health care needs addressed. Without forcing parents into bankruptcy, without forcing them to wait until they’re sick enough for the ER, without turning our backs on their suffering because of class or the status of their parents.

Write your Congress Critters. Send a wire to the White House. Vote in polls when they ask the question. Make your opinion known. This is an outrage.