The GOP 72 Hour Lie-a-thon Rolls On!

We’ve heard it all this week, but not one statement of truth uttered in 72 hours.

Ryan chastised Obama for doing nothing about the recommendations to reduce the deficit provided by the bi-partisan Simpson/Boles committee. Yet Ryan was on that committee and he voted against the recommendations.

The Republicans are claiming that Obama is cutting Medicare by 700 billion over 10 years. Since when are Republicans opposed to cutting Medicare?! Only when the cuts are to their private for-profit health insurance cronies who have been getting federal subsidies for the Medicare Advantage program that is designed to kill traditional Medicare by making private insurers “appear” more competitive than they really are. The Republicans are honor bound to fight against those  cuts because they’ve been paid by the lobbies to keep those subsidies flowing. 

The Republicans are running ads that claim Obama has eliminated the “work for welfare” requirement that has been in force since Clinton. That is an outright lie. The requirement has not been eliminated. The states wanted relief from the requirement and federal government has said they will consider waivers if the states make a case for doing it that still shows an increase in work for welfare. That’s the farthest thing in the world from eliminating the work  requirement. (I personally believe that forcing a single mom with kids to work for welfare is has negative consequences. If she gets a minimum wage job she has to use it all to pay for childcare while she’s working.)

The Republicans say the whole campaign is about jobs, yet they have nothing to offer that will create jobs  except saying that Government should get out of the way so they can do what?Underpay workers, ignore health and safety regulations, avoid inspections, pollute the air, ground and water with no liability, and kill unions so workers are at the mercy of the corporations and government whims to name a few.

And while they want Government to get out of the way of business, they’re busy getting in the way between doctors and patients by  pushing for anti-abortion laws that require procedural rape with mandatory vaginal probes prior to receiving an abortion, except of course unless it’s a “legitimate” rape.

They also want to slash spending, except for the defense budget, which they want to increase to record levels.  The military industrial lobby is paying politicians dearly to ensure that  defense spending stays untouched. Which means social programs would be the sole means to cut spending, but hey, yet they seem to want to keep Medicare untouched by the way they accuse Obama of cutting Medicare spending. So how are they going to cut spending and reduce the deficit? They aren’t.  They can’t.  Only higher taxes will balance the budget and Republicans will never agree to do that.

Finally, one truism in Tampa. The National Debt is flashed in real-time and below it in larger letters is a declaration, “We Built it!”.

GOP’s Relentless Goal to Privatize America

 Let’s face it, Republicans want the least amount of government. That’s the Republican credo. They’re proud of it. They want an unregulated free enterprise economy where they can earn as much money as their hard work will produce, and keep what they earn.  That sounds like the America we all live and die for, but what if we look a little deeper? 

While these hard working people are seeking the American Dream, other people are suffering, many through no fault of their own, and through no fault of these hard working folks either, but they are suffering. I assert that we have a social contract with each other, some would also say a religious obligation, to care for these people in need. Before Social Security and Medicare (that are self funded), before Medicaid, before school lunch programs came along, sure, some people were cared for by family and friends, but many were not. And they suffered. As a nation we benignly stood by and looked the other way as they suffered. That was socially irresponsible. 

When these safety net social programs were enacted by the Democrats, people were finally able to live out their lives with a little dignity; the children were cared for; people finally received healthcare they were either too poor or too proud to seek through “handouts”, and our great country became a better place by taking the high road of accepting social responsibility. 

Republicans like to think social responsibility is an individual thing and should be dealt with totally within the private sector, or at the local level, but it clearly didn’t work before Social Security was enacted. As a country, we were morally negligent. 

When President Obama says Republicans want to end Social Security and Medicare “as a we know it”, this is what he means- the private sector had over a hundred years to make it work and they failed to do so. Going back to a dependence on the private and local sector to meet our social obligations is a giant step backwards, from the current system of “we’re all in this together”, and back to a system that never worked. That’s what ending these programs “as we know it” means. Americans should fight these relentless Republican attempts to “privatize America” and work to make these programs that have proven to be effective even better in the future.

Ryan/Romney on Medicare- More Profiteering on the Sick and Elderly

Democrats enact cuts to a social program and the Republicans are complaining about it? That's backwards. Let's think about why Republicans are opposed to Medicare cuts and why they want to implement vouchers to the states. 

First of all, it is absurd to think that converting Medicare to a voucher system and having the states provide private for-profit insurance programs for the elderly will provide better healthcare. All private for-profit insurance programs are more expensive than Medicare. The cost of administration, the high salaries of the insurance corporations, the advertising and most significant of all, the profit motive, all make private for-profit insurance plans more expensive than Medicare.  

The only way private for-profit insurance companies can reduce the cost of healthcare is by reducing healthcare. That's what they do. They deny services. They drop sick people from their policies. They refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions. They are the gate-keeper between you and your doctor. They do everything they can to minimize services and maximize their profit. 

Yes, private for-profit insurance companies can save money and reduce cost, but the victims of reduced cost are the patients, you and me. How else can a for-profit healthcare insurer, with a 20 to 30% higher overhead  produce a lower cost? They can't. 

The elements of Medicare that the Affordable Care Act is phasing out is not traditional Medicare (Plans A and B). It's the Federal taxpayer subsidies to private healthcare insurers for Medicare Advantage (Plan C) that are being eliminated. The private for-profit insurance companies can not compete with Medicare without these subsidies. This was a Bush era GOP plan designed to privatize Medicare and begin to "wean" the seniors off traditional Medicare by making private for-profit insurers "appear" to be more efficient. But they are not, and they should be eliminated.  

Ask yourself why Republicans are complaining about Medicare cost reductions? Doesn't that smell fishy? Isn't it ideologically backwards that Democrats proposed cost cuts to a social program and Republicans are complaining about it? It's because the subsidies to their big health insurance corporations are being cut, and the political payola they receive from these fat cats demands that they fight back.That's why Republicans are acting all pious and critical about the cuts.

And some states (all in the south) would take the vouchers and buy dump trucks with the money. They'd exercise their 10th Amendment states right to do nothing, or worse, implement a program that takes care of the rich and ignores the poor (immigrants and African-Americans), as they do today with education.

The healthcare system will continue to be broken until we adopt Medicare for everyone and eliminate all private for-profit health insurance companies.  The very notion of profiteering on the sick and the elderly is obscene, unethical and shameful. 

Focus on Air Pollution, not Climate Change

I'd like to digress from the debate about anthropological vs natural global warming, and challenge our thinking about why we should care.  Does it really matter whether the planet is warming naturally or because we played a part in stoking the global furnace?  Consensus is building that the planet is getting warmer. But just because the planet is getting warmer, are we compelled to do something about it, regardless of whether it's a natural event or manufactured by human activity? 

I remember when air pollution was the rallying cry of environmentalists.  And so much has been done to clean up our air. But when did the world turn away from our seemingly united focus of fighting air pollution and redirect all of our energy towards  fighting climate change?  I don't understand what happened. The arguments for and against climate change, and what, if anything, should be done about it seems to obscure a more fundamental problem- good old fashioned air pollution. I realize that there are health impacts of having a warmer planet, but hey, we lived without air conditioning for all but the last fifty years. We can adapt to temperature change, but we can't adapt to poison in our air.

We've been living with the Clean Air Act for over forty years.  Our air is cleaner today than it was back in 1970, despite our continued and much greater use of fossil fuels. The cars and power plants are all running cleaner today than ever before. Is that battle won? Is it good enough?  Is that why we have swung our  focus over to climate change?  

I don't know.  But dirty air is something everyone could rally behind and did support for the most part. Climate change isn't. The pros and cons of climate change are vigorously defended, and we seem to be in a political stalemate. Perhaps the naysayers are on to something here. Perhaps climate change isn't the life or death issue that air pollution is.

My personal view of climate change is we have to live with it, whether we created it or not, and little can be done to avert it except to reduce future greenhouse gas emissions.  The carbon stored in the ground originally came from vegetation. Granted, it took a long time to collect and store the carbon - possibly millions of years - and we're hell-bent to pull it all out of the earth in hundreds of years. That could be a troublesome discontinuity for the planet. But the earth  has endured continuous and dramatic climate change in the past, without us.  

Our moral outrage today seems to stem from a view that we sinned against the planet, and therefore we should undo it, as some kind of mea culpa to mother nature. From my perspective, that alone is not a good enough reason to spend inordinate amounts of time, resources and money to try and make amends. We have better and more life threatening issues to deal with- like poverty, literacy, healthcare, infrastructure, and human coexistence on a shrinking planet.

So I really don't care if the planet warms up. Actually, I don't even mind if gets warmer. I'd care a lot more if the planet cooled down. But I'm from New Hampshire.  I watch videos of melting glaciers and see nothing unnatural about it. What is the impact of melting polar caps? More water, less ice. What is the impact of polar bears and penguins? They move and yes, some may be lost to climate change, but didn't we also lose all of our dinosaurs? Polar bears have been migrating across the earth in search of food in the midst of climate change for a very long time, and they're still around. 

OK, if the sea level rises we have a problem. There will be low land flooding to fend off, but Venice, Holland and New Orleans have been dealing with that for hundreds of years. If we have to address rising seas, it isn't  today's problem, or next year, or not even in ten years. Fifty or a hundred years from now the rise in sea level could be significant, but we're the most adaptable animal on the planet. We can deal with that. There's time to deal with that.

People warn about the cost of climate change. Good point. It may very well have a huge cost impact. But in political terms, that means jobs. Who pays for the jobs will be a long unending debate, but if anything, climate change will be a major economic engine in the next hundred years. And I'm sure that any island or country that is too poor to deal with rising sea level will survive by migrating inland, just as humans have done for 30 thousand years or more. 

We forget that civilizations are building on top of older structures all the time. That's why archeologists have to dig so deep to uncover thousand year old relics and cities. A thousand years from now  archeologists will likely be doing under water exploration of many current seaside communities.

So,  why should we be concerned about global warming or climate change??? I'm not. I will fight for cleaner air, but not against  warmer air.  I can live with warmer air, as long as it's clean.

America- The Best Democracy Money can Buy

This presidential election will likely set a new record for the cost of buying presidential influence. Both candidates may spend close to a billion dollars. When you include the Congressional races, the total cost is closer to 2 billion dollars. And, we the people, are forced to endure a continuous gauntlet of mudslinging TV commercials (where most of the money is spent)  that are mostly lies or half-truths, and all viciously attacking the opponent.  I'm fighting back. I'm turning off commercial TV until after the election. At least there is some solace in knowing their money isn't reaching me.

One has to ask, why do people and corporations donate so much money to campaigns? The answer certainly isn't for unconditional love of our country. Obviously, they expect favors - big favors - or legislation that makes their political investment pay off. Or worse yet, they expect to manipulate the arms of government to bend regulations, ease up on audits and inspections, or have key government employees look the other way so they can maximize their corporate profits at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment, and posterity.

One also has to ask, when did politics become so sleazy, and has it always been like this? I'm afraid to say, "Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus". In fact there are 535 Santa Clauses in Washington. But unlike the real Santa, all the letters to these Santas are stuffed with money. 

Why aren't people doing anything about political corruption? The answer is they are at the state level, to some extent, but not where it really matters, at the federal level. Public financing of state elections is taking hold little by little, but public financing at the federal level is just never gonna happen. The stakes of special interests are way too high, and their pockets are way too deep to win that fight. Time after time, legislation to reform federal election financing fails to even make it out of sub-committees. The special interest lobbies are in effect, "too big to fail" and too big to kill.

The system is so corrupt, the very idea of election finance reform is shot down as being un-American -- even labeled as a socialist agenda that would undermine the foundation of our American election process. They even accuse politicians who support grassroots election finance reform as demagogues- exploiters of the poor and undereducated class- for their personal gain. They paint the enemy to be the villain so the people won't see the real bad guys- the manipulators of our democracy.

If you compare politics to a baseball game you can get an idea of just how sick and crazy our democracy is. Imagine a baseball game that goes like this. The home team needs a win to stay in the pennant race. The game is tied. It's the bottom of the ninth inning and the home team has the bases loaded with two outs. A walk would bring home the winning run. So the batter comes up the plate, turns to the umpire, and asks, "How much is it gonna cost me for a walk?" They chat about it, and the batter hands the ump a big wad of cash. Then the ump calls four straight pitches "balls", walks the batter and they win the game. 

You might ask, where was the opposition during this? Why didn't they protest? Chances are the other team already had a future deal bought and paid for that was more important to them. They may have even agreed to lose this game in exchange for a win against another team. So they let this one go.  

That would be just like having a Senator vote for welfare subsidies (even though he's opposed to it) in exchange for buying a vote on defense spending (that he cares more about).  It's graciously called compromise, or give and take, but really it's sausage in the making, and it stinks.

If baseball were played like Congress operates, we wouldn't even know the the rules of the game. The rules would change as the special interests funneled their money into every crack and crevasse of government to serve their interests. They are "fracking" the political system in search of the mother lode.

Bill Veeck, the hilarious owner of the old St Louis Browns,  had a field day with baseball rules and did some very funny things to get people into the ballpark. He once set up an outfield fence that was moveable. When his team was at bat, he'd move the fence in. When the opponent was at bat, he'd move the fence out. After that incident, baseball re-wrote the rules to insist the fence stay in a fixed position, but prior to that, there was no rule about the fence, so it was fair game. 

Politics is the same way- all the time.  They manipulate the system for special interests and walk on the very precipice of legality. When it's unethical, yet legal, they try to get away with it, unless somebody makes a big stink. If they get caught, the pious lawmakers scurry around sticking their fingers in the money dike, and extract their pound of flesh by throwing one or more of their own to the dogs as a scapegoat.   The sad thing is, they have to get caught before they'll do anything about it. They know right from wrong. Yet, they have no problem doing the wrong thing if it isn't technically "illegal".

That's how our government works. That's what a billion dollars in election funding is buying. That's the American way. If it was baseball, we'd say they were all a corrupt bunch of sleaze bags. But because it's politics, we accept it. The Supreme Court even endorses the process as an expression of free speech and granted corporations "personhood" so the could contribute unlimited amounts of money to campaigns. 

So, I'm sitting this one out. I plan to write-in Jill Stein from the Green Party. I like her and what she stands for. And you can be sure that a person who has no chance of winning is incorruptible. 

I'll close my rant by quoting what Representative Barney Frank had to say about campaign financing: "We are the only people in the world required by law to take large amounts of money from strangers and then act as if it has no effect on our behavior."

Chick-fil-A Holds a "Let's Hate Gays" Appreciation Day

Conservatives are protesting like crazy and citing how liberals are trying to suppress free speech by boycotting Chick-fil-A. I don't buy it. No one is trying to silence Dan Cathy from expressing his opinion. He is free to say whatever he wants. People are also free to express their support or opposition to his view, and they are. The First Amendment is alive and well. I don't see what the big deal is.

Cathy has expressed a view that many people consider to be arcane, if not bigoted. And like-minded people are showing their support for his bigotry, and other people are also expressing their disapproval of his bigotry. Chick-fil-A (what a stupid name- reminds me of Freedom Fries) held a nationwide Chick-fil-A  Appreciation Day yesterday. People who support his bigoted position showed up in large herds, standing in long (straight) lines, just so they could be seen as "straight and proud of it". 

The whole thing kind of reminds me of the fried chicken owner in Georgia, Lester Maddox, who publicly voiced his bigotry and his opposition to integration back in the sixties. He went on to be elected the Governor of Georgia. Who knows, there are a lot of bigoted people out there. Perhaps Dan Cathy has political ambitions too. 

ps- How does a guy with name like Cathy end up hating gays anyway???