2009: The Nobel Hope-’n'-Hype Prize

Wow. I think I was as shocked in my pre-coffee stupor this morning as Barack Obama must have been to discover that he’d won the million-+ dollar Nobel Peace Prize for nothing more than running a campaign on deception, cleverly labeled ‘Hope’. Surely, thunk I to myself, they must be kidding! Since when did Alfred Nobel authorize his endowed prizes for great contributions in science, literature and politics to people who haven’t done a damned thing other than maintain the bad old status quo?

I mean, it’s not like the U.S. has turned Iraq over to the puppet government we installed there after invading the country for lies in the last administration, as if Saddam Hussein (who got hanged years ago) was responsible for 9-11 or was any threat after years of embargo that had hundreds of thousands of Iraqis starving after Daddy’s bullshit mercenary war in the early ’90s. Last I checked, which was this morning, ridiculously overstretched U.S. troops and well-paid mercenaries were still there and still dying.

Nor is it like the U.S. isn’t still negotiating with warlords and drug kingpins in Afghanistan, or that the puppet government we installed there is in charge of anything other than the pallets of cash passed out to those drug lords. And yes, our troops and mercenaries are still dying every day there too. Why, last I checked – again this morning – Obama was still trying to get a troop surge there, despite not having any troops to work with after 8 years of decimating our vaunted “All-Volunteer” force.

Oh… and civilians by the multi-thousands in both countries are still being slaughtered wholesale, while our overstretched troops play the old game of “take this hill today, abandon it to the enemy tomorrow” that lost us Korea and Vietnam. Then there’s Pakistan, which Obama is bombing regularly with drones and slaughtering thousands of innocent civilians we’re not even at war with. And of course there’s Iran, which Obama is threatening daily with carpet-nukes because he doesn’t like their diminutive not-really leader’s rhetoric as our troops surround his nation. Oh, and then there’s Columbia, and Obama’s troop build-up there to ostensibly take on the drug cartels he’s supporting out in the open in Opium-Land.

The whole world is topsy-turvy crazy, and the Nobel committee is leading the pack. Wow. Just… wow.

Wake me up when Barack Obama does anything real in this world to end and/or prevent war. Until then, I’ve just got to consider this as being just what it is. The Nobel Hope-Against-Hope Prize.

Angry Letter to My Blue Dog CongressCritter

[cross-posted at Docudharma and randallt]

Last week we (or “current resident”) received a slick 4-color 6×10 card stock mailer that looks at first glance to have come from our NC-11 congressional rep, Heath Shuler. At the top the reverse-on-blue header reads:

“Congressman Shuler Is Fighting To Make Medicare Prescription Coverage Even Better”

and on the bottom reverse-on-red the italicized message reads:

“Call Congressman Health Shuler today at 202-224-3121. Tell him thanks for fighting to improve Medicare without making seniors pay more, and ask him to keep on fighting until we get the job done.”

The wording struck me a little odd. Why would Heath tell me to thank him for his notably atrocious Blue Dog position on health care reform? I mean, it’s not like he cares what Democrats in his district have to say about the issue. So I flipped the mailer over and read on the bottom of the address/postage space:

“Paid for by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.”

Whoa. Billy Tauzin’s notorious PhRMA lobby. The one that got a secret back-room deal with Obama before this issue ever got to committees in the House and Senate. And who are now sending deceptive mailers like this all over the country as part of a $150 million PR campaign to promote their continued obscene profits on the backs of senior citizens, while the mandate to force all citizens to purchase junk policies from the for-profit insurance industry amounts to a ~$12,000 per year (plus steep annual hikes at four or more times the rate of inflation) tax increase on the middle class. Earmarked directly to the Murder-by-Spreadsheet crime syndicate, this porker is uglier than Hogzilla.

FACT: According to an analysis of the proposed Part D changes by the Wall Street Journal, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that any decrease in average spending on prescriptions by seniors will more than be made up for by an increase in premiums seniors must pay for Part D. CBS News reported that CBO has confirmed seniors will be paying 20% more for Part D coverage by 2019 under this giveaway to Big Pharma.

FACT: The Baucus plan also abets another huge giveaway to insurers by allowing them to charge older people (age 50-64) up to five times as much as younger people for the insurance policies everyone will be required to purchase.

FACT: The per capita (per person) cost of ALL health care in the U.S. per year comes to right about $3,750. That is all care, for all people, insured and uninsured, Medicare, VA, Medicaid, SCHIP and charity. Why would anyone want to pay $12,000 a year for what actually costs $3,750? A government-run single-payer system could be paid for by graduated taxation based on actual costs and those taxes would be far cheaper even to the richest of the rich than the cost of a single for-profit insurance policy.

Links:

NYT: Drug Makers to Back Baucus Plan With Ad Dollars

NYT: How Much Should Older Americans Pay for Insurance?

WSJ: Part-D Offsets

CBS: 20% increase in Part-D premiums

According to figures from the Center for Responsive Politics Shuler has received the following contributions from shady players:

$195,262 from the health sector employees and PACs.
$13,750 from health insurance companies.
$74,800 from Big Pharma.
$77,062 from health professionals.
$27,900 from hospitals.
$10,500 from the nursing home industry.

$399,274 in total. Now, the figures from CRP are what the Blue Dogs (individually) have received since 1989 from the PACs and pools of various health related industries, but Shuler’s only been in office since 2007. So that’s quite the hefty haul over less than three years!

Below is the letter I have written in response to this blatant insult from the Drug Pusher’s Union Propaganda Squad…
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Notes to Sarah’s Ghost

Soon to be ex-Alaska governor Sarah Palin has an op-ed published in the WaPo today [July 14] that obviously wasn’t written by Lady SaladMaster, and which derides Obama’s cap and trade policy while promoting ‘the usual’. Drill, drill, drill plus mountain destruction for un-clean coal and going nuclear. While I understand this attempt to keep herself in the ‘Puglican lineup of erstwhile power brokers even in her new persona as a Quitter Extraordinaire, I’d like to take on some of her ghost-writer’s points.

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The Palin Soap Opera Continues…

Despite beauty queen-like blustering, circular speech patterns full of airhead nonsense, and empty threats against bloggers (like me), Sarah Palin’s hilarious family soap opera got even funnier over the past week. It’s not “Troopergate” that finally ended her quest for national prominence and the highest office in the land – from whence she could dictate how the rest of America’s families should be just as dysfunctional as her own – it was that lovely free house she got in exchange for a cushy construction permit way back when she was just the Mayor of Wasilla.

Seems that fancy big sports complex and hockey rink built with ample taxpayer Pork looks suspiciously like the lake house hubby Todd says he built with his own two secessionist hands (with a little help from some ‘builder buddies’) used building materials ordered at the same time from the same suppliers by the same company that ‘won’ the contract for the complex. Same siding, same windows, same roofing, etc.

And while my grandson who voted for the first time last election thinks that’s rather a nifty perk for being a politician, we did have to explain to him that it qualifies as a bribe – quid pro quo – and is illegal and always has been illegal. As in breaking the law, even in Alaska.

Thus did Sarah hold a hastily called press conference on the weekday federal holiday we euphemistically call “Independence Day” and announce that she will not be finishing out her first (and only) term as governor of the Great State of Alaska. Her reasons were several, they are disjointed, they make no reasonable sense, and if the boredom factor is in any way true, she’s got no business ever having gotten into politics in the first place.

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Rewarding the Turncoat

ARGH!!! So now that Democrats will in January have the White House, the House and the Senate, Joe Lieberman (Lieberman for Lieberman Party-CT) gets to keep his Senate committee chairmanships as if he were a Democrat. This after Lieberman campaigned for Republican John McCain and several other Republicans for Senate.

Now, far be it from me to try and define regular, ordinary words for politicians, who don’t seem to understand the meaning of regular, ordinary words. Words like “Party” and “Loyalty” and “Procedure” and “Majority” and “Governance.” Politicians don’t want to know these things, preferring instead to make things up as they go along.

During these past couple of years when Democrats didn’t have an actual majority in the Senate, Lieberman has been allowed to be a Republican mole in the Democratic Caucus, reporting to his puppeteers and financial backers every move planned by members. He has been allowed to hold several committee chairs, including Homeland Security, where he has steadfastly refused to enforce subpoenas, investigate illegalities of the Bush administration, or even to investigate FEMA’s horrendously inadequate response to hurricane Katrina.

So Lieberman has been rewarded with a pass from the now-actual Democratic majority, encouraged to do more of the same obstructionism that has made him so immensely unpopular outside of Israel.

One day soon, as the public wakes up to realize the Republicans are now a fringe party of right-wing wackos and religious nuts and the Democrats are what the Republicans were before they purged everyone with any sense, there will be a new Progressive Party for the “rest of us.” And it will, within 8-12 years, be electing more than a handful of representatives and Senators, way more than the fringe Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, Communists and Nazis can ever manage.

Sigh. The more things “Change,” it seems, the more they remain the same.

Oh. My. God.

Janis Joplin once sang someone else’s song very poignantly – “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose…” – and that’s semi-true in my experience. We all make choices about what’s important in our lives, and usually become enslaved to that which we choose. At the low end of the scale there’s never enough, just paying the bills is a constant struggle. At the high end of the scale there is also never enough. The thirst for more and more and more rules lives and ruins them too.

As Wall Street melts down we’re suddenly informed we must Spend, Spend, Spend!!! They can never make up their minds. Either we’re not saving enough or we’re not spending enough, it’s always our fault. I call bullshit. Slave wages have not even kept up with the cost of living, they can’t have it both ways.

I read about a 50-something day care worker yesterday who a coworker noticed sitting in the corner crying. When asked what’s wrong, she finally said she couldn’t feel her face. The coworker was alarmed, saw one side of her face drooping as they were talking, speech slurring. She drove her friend to the hospital, but the woman just cried harder and wouldn’t get out of the car. Said yes, she must be having a stroke, but if she walked in the door she’d lose everything – house, car, meager income (job)… she was terrified. Her friend finally talked her into going, she is still in the hospital and her coworkers are trying very hard to raise the tens of thousands she’ll need to pay for the care. There is no insurance at that end of the scale.

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Sarah & Todd Abused ‘Their’ Power

The news from the Alaska State Legislature on their investigation of governor Sarah Palin’s abuse of power was not good. The Branchflower report [pdf] was released last week with some damning conclusions about the Palin’s personal vendetta against her ex-brother in law and Todd Palin’s immediate misuse of state resources and personnel to further their attempt to get Trooper Wooten fired from his job and denied worker’s compensation for an on the job injury. Beginning the very day after Sarah was elected governor.

Sarah Palin, now John McCain’s vice presidential candidate, spent the weekend expressing how happy she is that the investigation showed that she broke no laws, even though the actual report demonstrates clearly that she did violate ethics regulations – which is illegal. Especially in terms of allowing her husband, who was not elected to any office, to use state resources and personnel to pursue his family feud.

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Pretty Little Pig Y’got There…

You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. An old adage of folk wisdom akin to not buying a pig in a poke, not happening until pigs fly, and teenager’s bedrooms likened to a pig-sty. It’s been a coon’s age to a gnat’s ass, he needs to buck up and take it like a man, you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.

Republican John McCain’s campaign flunkies are all over this observation about the situation in Iraq, claiming that Obama called VP hopeful Sarah Palin a “pig” because she likened herself to a “pit bull with lipstick” in her RNC acceptance speech. What a total load of hooey! Looks to me like John McCain’s campaign thinks of Sarah Palin as a pig wearing lipstick, and wants everyone to notice.

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Doesn’t Get Any Weirder than This

Well, I was going to report on the St. Paul RNC this week like I did the DNC in Denver last week, but it never quite caught my attention. Hardly anybody went (including the President and Vice-President of the United States, who are the party’s figureheads), Weather was lousy in Louisiana so the first day got put off altogether, and Fred Thompson makes me go to sleep.

But I’ve honestly gotta say, this whole Alaska Momma mooseburger beauty queen thing with Sarah Palin has me utterly and completely befoozled. Bamboozled. Conundrumated. WTF???

First thing out of the gate was that she’s been governator for less than two years, and before that was mayor of a town the same size as Wilburton, Oklahoma (where Granny lives). Then she violated military regulations and operations security by telling everybody her 18-year old son is deploying on September 11. Then she lied about her close relationship with indicted AK senator Ted Stevens and his “bridge to nowhere”, and ‘forgot’ to tell anyone that her own state Senate has her under current investigation for abuse of power. Oops.

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Oh John, You Handsome Cad!

Well folks, it’s 8-8-08, which of course means it’s the End of the World. Right on cue, it’s revealed that John Edwards, best-looking Presidential Wannabe in this nation’s history, was revealed today to have enjoyed an extramarital affair. Might even have fathered one of America’s many (a majority these days) “fatherless” bastards. Wow. I’m so not frothing.

No, we don’t use the word “bastard” anymore to talk about REAL fatherless children. We call him or her our “Love Child.” It’s been that way since the 1960s, becomes more popular every year. Yet the leftist Democratic blogosphere goes absolutely ballistic over this non-news, as if the socialist-leaning, populist, progressive population is this country isn’t the exclusive enclave of Hippies who managed to live through those glorious ’60s (and their children, and their grandchildren, many/most of them fatherless or on step-father #4 by now).

Suddenly they’re all strict Old Testament moralists of the Pharisee variety, buying fake beards and arming themselves with stones. It’s just enough hard core, disgusting hypocrisy to make me sick to my stomach. Get a life, people!

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