Colbert on health insurance rackets
Stephen Colbert uses his well-honed stiletto to satirize health insurers abuses.
Harry Reid, Democratic Leaders and the White House Still Faking the Funk on Universal Health Care
The fraud continues while the media pretend not to see it
Crossposted with Black Agenda Report (BAR) on 10/28/2009 [print_link]
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Obama, the Great Mesmerizer, listening (?) to doctors pleading for solutions.
This week the Senate’s Harry Reid announced the consolidation of the Senate Democratic caucus version of health care reform. How central the “public option” is or is not depends on who you ask, as do precisely how many people it would be offered to and on what terms. What is clear is that it remains a Massachusetts-style bailout plan to subsidize private insurers, rather than one providing universal care at affordable rates. Meanwhile the gap between the actual public option and the imaginary ones sold by progressive Democrats is growing. How long it can be concealed, and what will happen when it is revealed are anybody’s guess.
This Halloween a couple of persistent spooks haunt Congressional Democrats and the White House on the health care front.
The first is the overwhelming public sentiment in favor of a government-run, everybody in nobody out Medicare For All type health care system. The proper name for this kind of setup, single payer, is rarely mentioned or acknowledged directly, except in tandem with exculpatory phrases like “…but it’s politically impossible…” or “…I’m in favor of it but we don’t have the votes…” or dismissed with in favor of some “…uniquely American solution…”
The fact is, single payer is so popular that Congressional Democrats have taken to describing their so-called public option to voters in terms that make it hard to tell the difference between it and a real single payer system. This deliberate falsehood has been perpetrated by some Democrats in the progressive caucus from the beginning of the current congress, and it continues to this day.
Single payer partisans were the first to call it. Back in May Kip Sullivan of Physicians for a National Health Care Plan detailed the differences between the real public option and the one described in glowing terms by progressive legislators. He called it a “bait and switch” job. And when Howard Dean declared on Democracy Now that the public option is best thought of as Medicare, Harvard’s David Himmelstein labeled him a liar. That kind of deception works fine as long as there are multiple versions of the Democratic health care bill, each well over a thousand pages long in dense legalese, studded with hundreds of cryptic references to other legislation. It holds up as long as most people don’t know the effective date at which the uninsured will begin to be covered under the president’s plan is 2013. It’s good enough as corporate media stick to the script and mention few or none of these things, and the day of reckoning is months or years away. Lies are good and useful things, until you get caught.
Thanks to the relentless work of single payer forces, including some members of the Congress, the web of deception around the public option is unraveling. The day the Senate version of the health care bill was finalized even Rachel Maddow got around to posing many but not all of the same deal-breaking questions Kip Sullivan, PNHP and others single payer activists were asking five months ago, questions that the public option’s sponsors couldn’t answer then, and can’t answer now.
- How can the public option “compete” with private insurers to lower their costs when it will be limited to only a few million people?
- How can the public option “compete” with private insurers when its pool will be disproportionately poor and sick?
- Why must we wait until 2013 for the Democratic plan to cover the uninsured?
The behavior of some leading Democrats on single payer is positively schizophrenic, poo-pooing, downplaying and dismissing single payer while they describe their incredibly complicated some-of-you-in and most-of-you-out versions of the public option and the “robust” public option as Medicare For All in everything but name and unique American-ness. There are, of course other questions Maddow and company could ask whose answers, or non-answers would be even more damning. But these are a good start.
The second scary trick looming ahead of Democrats is of course the 2010 election cycle. When the truth comes out, and voters eventually see the gap between what they want, what Democratic leaders are claiming for their versions of the public option, and what they seem likely to get, it’s easy to envision a lot of very unhappy Democratic voters, and not so easy to predict what they might do. Many of them won’t vote Republican in any case, but might stay home in numbers big enough to tip the balance in some congressional districts.
The foundation of the president’s plan, and the plans of Democratic leaders isn’t single payer, it isn’t Medicare For All, and it’s not even any kind of public option, robust or otherwise. The foundation of of their health care reform remains bailing out the private insurance companies, guaranteeing them a lucrative market by forcing Americans to buy their policies, some of them with taxpayer subsidies and funds squeezed from existing Medicare, Medicaid and other care for those at high risk and low incomes.
Democrats can lie about or suppress discussion on these things for a little while to come. But the truth will come out, much of it well before the 2010 elections. The standard alibi of blue dog Democrats has always been that they can’t support any “robust public option,” let alone single payer because their districts are sooooo conservative. But this doesn’t hold water. Many blue dog districts are among the highest in proportions of the uninsured, and rife with bankruptcies, caused in large part by unpayable medical bills. These blue dogs have been shielded from progressive challengers in primary elections by none other than Rahm Emanuel for two or three terms now, and they expect that protection again for standing with private insurers against the voters of their districts.
2010 is beginning to look a lot more like Clinton’s first mid-term election, in which Democrats lost dozens of seats and the political initiative passed to Republicans for the next 14 years.
If Democrats refuse to pass a health care bill that is very close to Medicare For All, they are storing up trouble for the near future. They only thing, increasingly, that congressional Democrats have to recommend them is that they aren’t Republicans. Whether that will be enough to re-elect them in 2010 is anybody’s guess.
Private insurance companies have a business model to protect. They are making a killing. 120 killings a day, in fact, and 45,000 a year. Single payer activists, whose aim is to take private insurance companies out of the health care equation, aim to raise the price of doing business for private insurers to unacceptable levels with tactics that have begun to include nonviolent civil disobedience in and around the offices of insurers, who are the only real death panels.
Congress and the White House are continually bombarded with letters, phone calls, faxes and emails demanding the consideration of Medicare For All, HR 676, simple and effective single payer legislation introduced by Congressmen Conyers and Kucinich, and sponsored by 90 of their colleagues in this congress. The initiative in the struggle for universal health care remains where it always has been, in the streets and in the public and private meetings of single payer advocates. The harder they press, the more divided congressional Democrats become, between those who adamantly oppose single payer AND the imaginary public option, and the faction that keeps telling us their “robust public option” is so much like single payer that we’ll hardly know the difference.
If you want to become involved in the fight for universal, everybody in, nobody out health care, go to www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org [1] and sign up to be included in the flow of information and connected with like minded activists in your city or town. It’s time to demand what most people voted for last year. Health care for everybody. Now.
Brother Bill Dixon has devoted his life to social justice activism. With fellow radical journalists Glen Ford and Margaret Kimberley, he manages BAR, by far one of the most authoritative and indispensable news and commentary sites with a multiracial audience. TGP is proud to feature their commentary.
Links:
[1] http://www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org/
AARP: Reform advocate and insurance salesman
The “nonprofit” AARP has long played both sides of the street, and often acted as a stealth partner of private insurers.
Seniors group makes millions from royalties on health plans
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer // Dateline: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 [print_link]
"Weak Reid" holding forth on health care. The AARP has published numerous features on the healthcare reform debate, but its position remains almost a carbon-copy of the non-single payer Obama approach, and hence useless to the nation. The organization is far more about business than protecting the interests of its members. In fact, since AARP makes the bulk of its money from selling "supplemental plans" to cover the gaps in Medicare and other insurance programs, it has a pronounced interest in seeing the continuance of a leaky and grossly inadequate system. If this is not a huge conflict of interest, we don't know what is.
The nation’s preeminent seniors group, AARP, has put the weight of its 40 million members behind health-care reform, saying many of the proposals will lower costs and increase the quality of care for older Americans.
But not advertised in this lobbying campaign have been the group’s substantial earnings from insurance royalties and the potential benefits that could come its way from many of the reform proposals.
The group and its subsidiaries collected more than $650 million in royalties and other fees last year from the sale of insurance policies, credit cards and other products that carry the AARP name, accounting for the majority of its $1.14 billion in revenue, according to federal tax records. It does not directly sell insurance policies but lends its name to plans in exchange for a tax-exempt cut of the premiums.
The organization, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, also heavily markets the policies on its Web site, in mailings to its members and through ubiquitous advertising targeted at seniors.
The group’s dual role as an insurance reformer and a broker has come under increasing scrutiny in recent weeks from congressional Republicans, who accuse it of having a conflict of interest in taking sides in the fierce debate over health insurance. Three House Republicans sent a letter to AARP on Monday complaining that the group was putting its “political self-interests” ahead of seniors.
GOP lawmakers point to AARP’s thriving business in marketing branded Medigap policies, which provide supplemental coverage for standard Medicare plans available to the elderly. Democratic proposals to slash reimbursements for another program, called Medicare Advantage, are widely expected to drive up demand for private Medigap policies like the ones offered by AARP, according to health-care experts, legislative aides and documents.
Republicans also question the high salaries and other perks given to some top AARP executives, who would not be subject to limits on insurance executives’ pay included in the Senate Finance Committee’s health reform package. Former AARP chief executive William Novelli received more than $1 million in compensation last year.
“We are witnessing a disturbing trend of handouts to special interests like AARP,” said House Republican spokesman Matt Lloyd, referring to Democratic negotiations over health reform. “In return, AARP is lobbying for a government-run health-care bill that will pad their own executives’ pockets at the expense of its own members and other vulnerable seniors.”
AARP officials strongly dispute such allegations, arguing that the group’s heavy reliance on brand royalties allows it to offer members a wide range of benefits — from lobbying for seniors in Washington to discount travel packages and financial advice. The organization notes that even though it offers a Medicare Advantage plan, it has long advocated curbing waste in that federal program.
“We’re a consumer advocacy organization; we’re not an insurance firm,” said David Certner, AARP’s director of legislative policy. “That drives everything we do. It’s got to be good for our members, or we don’t endorse it.”
Added AARP spokesman Jim Dau: “We spend far more time at odds with private insurers than not.”
AARP’s ties to the insurance business date to its founding by former educator Ethel Percy Andrus, who started a group to help retired schoolteachers find health insurance in the years before Medicare; the effort led to the creation of AARP in 1958.
Now, the group relies more than ever on payments from auto, health and life insurers, according to financial statements. From 2007 to 2008, AARP royalties from insurance plans, credit cards and other branded products shot up 31 percent — from less than $500 million to $652 million — making such fees the primary source of revenue for the group last year, the records show. AARP’s annual financial report shows that 63 percent of that, or about $400 million, came from the nation’s largest health insurance carrier, UnitedHealth Group, which underwrites four major AARP Medigap policies. Other carriers with AARP-branded plans include Aetna Life Insurance, Genworth Life Insurance and Delta Dental.
AARP is also a major powerhouse in Washington, spending more than $37 million on lobbying since January 2008. The organization’s close ties with insurers have long attracted criticism from politicians of both parties.
During the health-care debate of the early 1990s, then-Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) held hearings lambasting the group’s business operations. Some Democrats criticized the group for supporting the Bush administration’s expensive Medicare prescription-drug legislation in 2003.
Earlier this year, AARP and UnitedHealth said they were halting the sale of “limited benefit” health insurance policies after complaints from Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) that the plans were marketed in a misleading way.
Dean A. Zerbe, a former Grassley senior counsel who is now national managing director at the corporate tax firm Alliant Group, argues that AARP’s involvement in the sale of insurance plans “really hurts their credibility.”
“Either you’re a voice for the elderly or you’re an insurance company; choose one,” Zerbe said. “They put themselves forward in the public arena as nonbiased observers, but they’re very swayed by business interests.”
Republicans renewed their attacks on AARP this year after the group emerged as a vigorous defender of many of the reforms under consideration by the Democrat-controlled Congress. Nancy LeaMond, an AARP executive vice president, appeared at a press conference Friday alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to announce a new proposal for plugging gaps in coverage of Medicare prescription benefits.
Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.), who has asked AARP to provide him with more details about its insurance-related businesses, said he believes the group is “misleading” its members about the alleged benefits of Democratic reforms. “Right now there’s a feeling among seniors that AARP may not be entirely forthcoming,” he said.
AARP launched a “fact check” section on its Web site this year to counter GOP criticisms of reform, including the discredited “death panels” claim, and argues that wringing savings out of Medicare and closing gaps in prescription coverage will help older Americans.
Several top AARP officials also said they have no idea whether the group might gain insurance business as a result of the proposed reforms. “We wouldn’t know it, and we wouldn’t really care,” Certner said. “The advocacy is what drives what we do here, and not the other way around.”
Teabagging Michelle Malkin
Malkin: née Maglalang, merry intellectual bomb thrower for the Right.
“Many protesters expressed a sense that basic American freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are threatened by new Washington policies seen by many as more socialistic than capitalistic. The proposed taxpayer bailout of homeowners who may have inflated their earnings in order to secure mortgages is one example, says Jeff Crawford, a protester from Dacula, Ga. “The first year after the Mayflower arrived, the colonists tried a communal method of storing and sharing food and it failed miserably,” says Mr. Crawford. “Why are things any different now?” Eighteenth-century symbolism was rife at the Atlanta event as speakers drew comparisons with the Boston patriots who dumped the King’s tea in Boston Harbor to protest taxation without representation, an act that began the American Revolution and the founding of the United States…”—via Michelle Malkin » A Tax Day Tea Party cheat sheet: How it all started.
I HAVE TO SAY, I’m really enjoying this whole teabag thing. It’s really inspiring some excellent daydreaming. For one thing, it’s brought together the words teabag and Michelle Malkin for me in a very powerful, thrilling sort of way. Not that I haven’t ever put those two concepts together before, but this is the first time it’s happened while in the process of reading her actual columns. Michelle Malkin doesn’t have that. She’s just a mean little dunce who’s wedged herself into a nicely paying career as a GOP spokesclown, and she’s going to ride that gig for as long as it keeps gas in her minivan. And that’s fine, good for her. But that doesn’t make her readable. However, this move of hers to spearhead the teabag movement really adds an element to her writing that wasn’t there before. Now when I read her stuff, I imagine her narrating her text, book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy set of balls in her mouth. It vastly improves her prose. See for yourself; just put your thinking cap on and read this:
What and who exactly are President Obama’s homeland security officials afraid of these days? If you are a member of an active conservative group that opposes abortion, favors strict immigration enforcement, lobbies to protect Second Amendment rights, protests big government, advocates federalism or represents veterans who believe in any of the above, the answer is: You.”
[Note: I originally tried to redo that passage and phonetically sound out how the new, improved version might sound, but on the page it came out too offensive even for me. If anyone can figure out a way to do it more tastefully, I’d love to see it.]
Anyway this teabag thing has really gotten out of control. It’s amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn’t until Obama pushed through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In other words, it wasn’t until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided to protest. I didn’t see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And I didn’t see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a company run at the time by one of the world’s biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn’t see any street protests when the government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in “troubled assets” from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico over Christmas.
Look, I’m a taxpayer too. And I’m no less pissed off than any of these people about the taxes I have to pay. Just today I was reading hedge-fund manager David Einhorn’s book, Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, about his battles with a company called Allied Capital. Einhorn was shorting Allied because he found accounting irregularities in Allied’s books after analyzing the firm. Among other things, he found that an Allied subsidiary called BLX was irresponsibly handling tens of millions in Small Business Association loans, shoving this SBA money out to unworthy recipients and costing the taxpayer an enormous amount of money. When Einhorn went to the SBA, they basically blew him off. “We see this all the time; what’s so special about those?” was the SBA official’s response when Einhorn presented him with evidence of loan fraud. Einhorn pointed out that one of the reasons companies like BLX got away with bilking the government was because the enforcement agencies were so understaffed: he routinely found that agencies like the SEC and the OIG could not or would not investigate fraud against the taxpayer because they had no staff to pursue the investigations.
That attitude, that complete and total I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude about taxpayer money, that’s endemic to almost every branch of the government. We saw in the last five years how contractors in Iraq nakedly robbed money from the you and me, running phantom convoys across the desert (some companies called that transporting “sailboat fuel”), systematically risking human life and gouging the taxpayer more or less right out in the open. There was over $100 billion in sole-source, non-competitive contracts in Iraq in 2006; a House Committee identified just 50 contracts totalling more than $21 billion that require “scrutiny,” but not much has been recovered so far. Why did they get away with it? Because there is basically no serious enforcement mechanism, in the military or anywhere else, for preserving taxpayer money given to contractors. In Iraq, the military auditor, SIGIR, had about seventy men in the entire military theater at the time I was there. We just bailed out AIG to the tune of more than $160 billion; its primary auditor, the Office of Thrift Supervision, had exactly one insurance expert on its staff while AIG was falling apart. There were staff cuts at the SEC several times in the last ten years; in fact there was a crucial cut of the SEC budget in an $821 billion Omnibus spending bill at the tail end of 2003 (just in time for the housing bubble) that was packed with plenty of pork and, again, inspired no protests from Joe Sixpack.
Meanwhile the federal government has systematically expanded a whole ecosystem of contractor-handout programs, most of them with names the public has never heard of. How many people out there are aware of all the millions in grants given to fortune 500 companies over the years through the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), which basically subsidizes the R&D departments of already rich firms while allowing those same companies to keep the benefits of those innovations? How about the nearly $5 billion in loan guarantees given to Boeing over the years through the Ex-Im Bank? How about the Foreign Military Financing Program, which gives millions of dollars to dozens of foreign countries every year so that they can buy American-made weapons?
Or how about the four or five billion dollars we spent annually for the last decade or so on Federal Housing Authority subsidies? Well, actually, the teabaggers probably would get riled up about those programs, which subsidize mortgage loans to low-income homeowners. The one constant in teabagger outrage is that the whatever wasteful government program they’re freaking out about has to benefit some poor slob, or else they usually don’t give a shit. What they forget, of course, is that FHA loans ultimately benefit the banks a lot more than the poor slobs — a homeowner defaulting on his FHA loan loses his house, but the bank that irresponsibly issued the loan (without fear, knowing they are backed up by the government) is still fully compensated, with you picking up the tab.
So yeah, government waste sucks, it’s rampant at every level, and taxes are a vicious racket, and everyone should be pissed off . What’s hilarious about the teabaggers, though, is how they never squawk about waste until the spending actually has a chance of benefiting them. You will never hear of a teabagger crying about OPIC giving $50 million in free insurance to some mining company so that they can dig for silver in rural Bolivia. You won’t hear of a teabagger protesting the $2.5 billion in Ex-Im loans we gave to GE through the early part of this decade, even as GE was moving nearly a hundred thousand jobs overseas over the course of ten years. And Michelle Malkin’s readers didn’t seem to mind giving IBM millions in Ex-IM and ATP loans at the same time it was giving its former CEO, Lou Gerstner, $260 million in stock options.
In other words teabaggers don’t mind paying taxes to fund the salaries of Bolivian miners, Lou Gerstner’s stock options, deliveries of “sailboat fuel,” the Hermes scarves on Sandy Weill’s jet pillows, or even the export of their own goddamn jobs. But they do hate it when someone tries to re-asphalt their roads, or help bail their slob neighbor out of foreclosure. And God forbid someone propose a health care program, or increased financial aid for college. Hell, that’s like offering to share your turkey with the other Pilgrims! That’s not what America is all about! America is every Pilgrim for himself, dammit! Raise your own motherfucking turkey!
Oh, and there’s one other thing. I heard today from Steve Wamhoff of Citizens for Tax Justice. He had an interesting tidbit to offer on the teabagging movement. According to his research, 39% of respondents with incomes below $30,000 told the Gallup agency that they felt that federal income tax levels were “too high.” Which is interesting, because only 32% of respondents in that income category will pay any federal income taxes at all on their 2008 income. You can draw your own conclusions.
The really irritating thing about these morons is that, guaranteed, not one of them has ever taken a serious look at the federal budget. Not one has ever bothered to read an actual detailed study of what their taxes pay for. All they do is listen to one-liners doled out by tawdry Murdoch-hired mouthpieces like Michelle Malkin and then repeat them as if they’re their own opinions five seconds later. That’s what passes for political thought in this country. Teabag on, you fools.
MATT TAIBBI’S articles have shed clarity on many complex issues. He writes frequently for many venues, including his home base, Rolling Stone.
Dr. J.'s Commentary: Barack Obama, Heaven Sent for GOP, Part I
Dateline: Wed, 10/21/2009 [print_link] This is a crosspost with Buzzflash, featuring selected comments
By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
John and Cindy McCain, the beer fortune heiress who fueled his ascent. Inveterate reactionary and warmonger McCain typifies the utterly hypocritical nature of the Republican party, especially its occasional faux populist claims.
It was likely the GOP would lose the 2008 election, although that was hardly a sure thing. If the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent chain reaction in finance capitalism had occurred on November 18 instead of September 18, McCain might have won. If Hillary Clinton had somehow been able to pull out the Democratic nomination, whether or not the financial collapse and the revelation of the new Great Recession that had actually started some months earlier came before or after November 5, 2008, McCain might well have won anyway. (Given the way that Clinton ran her primary campaign, relying more and more on racism as it progressed, it is highly likely that huge numbers of African-Americans would have stayed home on election day.) But the financial collapse did occur before Election Day and Barack Obama was the nominee and he did win.
GM and Chrysler would have been allowed to go out of business. There would have been no extension of unemployment benefits. The bailout of the banks probably would have continued, because it was started under the Georgites. But the blame for its outcomes would have been correctly laid to the party whose policies lead to the mess in the first place, not to a Democratic Administration that out of weakness is just following along. Unemployment would be even higher, and so on and so forth. And there would be Sarah Palin, just a couple of heartbeats away from the Presidency.
The bottom line is that the country would be in even worse shape than it is now, due to a continuation of Republican policy. But, instead of being able to lay the blame at the feet of a Democrat who a) seems very reluctant to lay blame where it should be laid and b) is following some of those Republican polices himself, it would have possible to put the GOP right into the political crosshairs where they belong. And so, since the only nomination of Barack Obama made it highly unlikely that McCain would have won, Obama was indeed heaven sent for the GOP.
I notice PM hasn’t posted today.
Submitted by daphne chyprious on Wed, 10/21/2009 – 7:54pm. Maybe he’s reacting to the assertion – and evidence – that Obama’s not necessarily as potent as he believes. A pushover, in fact. Submitted by Yman on Wed, 10/21/2009 – 11:46am. “If Hillary Clinton had somehow been able to pull out the Democratic nomination, whether or not the financial collapse and the revelation of the new Great Recession that had actually started some months earlier came before or after November 5, 2008, McCain might well have won anyway. (Given the way that Clinton ran her primary campaign, relying more and more on racism as it progressed, it is highly likely that huge numbers of African-Americans would have stayed home on election day.)” Based on what, Doc? The same hopium-induced imagination you displayed during the primaries? Obama and Clinton tracked neck-and-neck with each other against McCain throughout the primaries, polling which included all those AA voters you imagine would have stayed home based upon your imagined acts of racism. All of this, of course, was before the economic collapse which ensured McCain’s defeat. Yet you imagine that McCain “might well have won anyway” (irrespective of the economic collapse) if Hillary had been the nominee? Hey, …… is that what attracts you to writing about politics rather than your area of alleged expertise? Because when writing about science, you need to use data and facts, but when writing on a blog about politics you feel comfortable just using your imagination? BTW – Did you ever notice how often so many of the Obots use religious references when referring to Obama? Now that they’ve had the veil lifted (at least to some degree) from their eyes, Doc is claiming he was “heaven sent for the GOP”. Seriously funny stuff. » Submitted by Start Loving on Wed, 10/21/2009 – 11:29am. What is frightening, if you are not able to see how totally unqualified you are to judge Pres. Obama and his strategy and policies, GOD HELP YOUR PATIENTS, AND THE PATIENTS OF YOUR STUDENTS. This writing of yours is the hieght of blind tripe. Garbage. » Submitted by Yman on Wed, 10/21/2009 – 11:48am. He’s the expert ….. on writing “blind tripe”. Submitted by Cole… on Wed, 10/21/2009 – 4:45pm. –Obama is “heaven sent for the GOP”, obviously in a tongue in cheek kind of way. But had Hil won she also would be a “heaven sent” gift, the GOP would have been on her tail from the get-go, meeting with Murdock aside and forget her ‘under fire in Iraq’ claim or her play to the rifle guys with her little girl recall of learning to shoot and kill from her grand-dad, the GOP hated Bill and they hate Demos and they never showed any affection for her as first lady. She was part of Whitewater and Foster and the Monica thing and even though she would probably have done things in the same misguided way that Obama has she would be “heaven sent target of distraction” for the bush mess–which she also would not have investigated. For many of us on the Progressive side, none of the last three left standing were good choices but the idea of ABB still held and McC was ABB jr. The possibility of a ABB jr. and ABB jr miss victory was abhorent. All we had was “Hope and Change”–and a big voter turnout. Obama has, for all his efforts of bowing down to the bipartisan gods, not won any respect or thanks from the criminal right crowd and is loosing much from the Progressive side which keeps looking into its bag of “hope”, finding it empty. » Submitted by Yman on Thu, 10/22/2009 – 12:27pm. Of course the GOP would have gone after her …. they would go after any Democrat who was elected. What’s your point? Are you seriously suggesting that the GOP would have gotten traction by recycling their old, failed attacks (i.e. Whitewater, Vince Foster, Monica Lewinsky, etc.)? Seriously? Not only did they not work the first time, but her approval ratings went up when they tried it. A few of them may have tried it, but it would not only have failed again, it likely would backfire in their faces. I doubt the GOP would have had an issue with her meeting with Murdoch, so I’m not sure why you’re bringing that up. Same for her story of how her father taught her to shoot at the cabin her grandfather built. Her grandfather “taught her to kill”? First of all, she said her father taught her to shoot, and she said she went duck hunting. She never said she either “killed” or was “taught to kill” by her grandfather. It was part of her childhood, and nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, it’s not like she was actively lobbying and pandering to the pro-gun, hunting groups, like Obama was. Similarly, I’m not sure what’s wrong with the fact that she had a meeting with Murdoch … all of those seem to be things that you didn’t like, but they’re hardly something that would upset her GOP critics, or even the vast majority of Democrats. Were you as upset by Obama’s meeting with Murdoch? ABB? Not sure what that is, but presumably you’re suggesting Obama was a better choice than McCain. Uhhhhm, …… no kidding. BTW – She also would not have investigated Bush? I don’t know if she would have or wouldn’t have. Unlike the delusional Clinton-haters, I don’t pretend to have the ability to read minds or predict the future. That being said, …. …. we know Obama’s not going to. After all, …… it’s time to “look forward”. Submitted by neoconned on Wed, 10/21/2009 – 9:33pm. …and it required Obama to take off running with his agenda from Day 1. Had he done so, the first effects of his program would become evident about now. If he had done the right things, unemployment would be going down, foreclosures would be dropping, millions of American mortgagees would be getting a new deal on their debt (while the banks would also be getting helped through fixing their greedy “mistakes”), and the Republicans would be seen as bigger fools by more voters than they currently do. If he did the wrong things, could he be worse off than he currently is? But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Barry had to make nice with the sandbox bullies and blow it! Where’s that Audacious Hope we were promised? You, know, the one the nation voted for? Despite all of the talk (including by Keith Olbermann tonight on Countdown) that the GOP is in dire straits, I don’t see it. Rush and the other flaming Nazi gasbags are hard at work rebuilding their base and keeping it from recovering from their insanity. My very subjective observations indicate that it is working; meanwhile, the polls show that the majority of independents have had enough of “change” that isn’t and are back to leaning Republican. And the bad economic news hasn’t finished coming in yet. Yes, for these reasons and many more, Obama will prove to be the savior of the GOP – and the GOP can just like the fact that a half-black man did what thousands of their wealthy white trash could not – revive their party. I love it – NOT!TSFW
Professor of Preventative Medicine? How wonderfully qualified.
Listen to Start Loving, Doc.
Dr. J. is quite right–
No kidding.
We Had But One Chance…