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The National Health Care Soap Opera Hits a Curtain–Intermission or Climax?

Teabagging's true colors--and I don't mean red, white and blue

But let us be generous and think of it as a first step in what is likely to be an arduous journey. Real Reform for the rest of us lies further ahead. Let us be thankful for the people who won’t be forced to die for lack of medical care.

You would think the votes wouldn’t be so close. But all you have to do is look at the demonstrations over the weekend to see the bitterness that poisoned the hope of better legislation. Teabaggers running through the House offices, banging on doors and shouting. Hurling racial and other insults at Representatives as they prepared to vote. Spitting on them. One person in a wheelchair was mocked and told his “free ride” was over.

It wasn’t because of the sweeping nature of the plan. It kept to guidelines established by Republicans decades ago. This bitterness arose because some people in the US could not abide the thought of a black President and wanted to do anything in their power to destroy his tenure in office. They were whipped into a fury by Fox News and demagogues like Rush Limbaugh. Responsible Republican leadership has been out to lunch. They excuse this behavior instead of telling the teabaggers to stop acting like children. And they did this because the teabaggers were pulling the stunts they themselves knew they couldn’t get away with. Finally, after the vote, Boehner told everyone to start acting like adults.

But the genie’s out of the bottle. This is not the end of the teabaggers, I betcha. I hate to see what will happen next.

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Beckstianity 101–Social Justice is un-American

Hey, Glenn Beck also listened to Born In The USA's lyrics for the first time too.

Of course, last Thursday’s cartoon wasn’t really a mock on der Beckstein (although the text was 🙂 ). Getting Eric Massa on his show SEEMED like a good idea at the time. How was Beck supposed to know that a Democrat might not be disloyal to President Obama? Or that he would think that male-on-male tickling orgies might be misconstrued as sexual in nature? Or that he would take little Glennie to task for the alacrity with which right-wing commentators and Teabaggers call everyone they don’t agree with Nazis or socialists?

OK so his counterparts on Fox News all told him so. Can’t blame a guy for trying, right?

But he also managed not only to reveal that he never actually listened to the lyrics to “Born in the USA”. I guess for the last 25-and-a-half he’s been looking at the FRONT of the album cover with The Boss’s tight-jeaned butt smiling at the camera in front of a flag, head-banging along and singing BORN IN THE USA every time it came around. Yeah, Baby, Born in the USA! And for 25.5 years he never actually “listened” to the lyrics to find out what Bruce Springsteen had to say. Well, I can understand that, sometimes even us boys from Jersey find it hard to understand New Jersey. But to ADMIT IT, as if he just found out something everyone in America already KNEW! that just boggles the mind.

Only to be topped by his warning to the faithful. Now if you thought 25+ years of cluelessness was bad, check out the evidence of a LIFETIME cluelessness. He told his audience that if they heard the words “social justice” in their churches, they should run away as fast as possible to find some other church that did NOT believe in “social justice”, because “social justice” was nothing less than a codeword used by Nazis and Socialists! Now I’ve commented before on the peculiar form of Christianity some people espouse, the Calvinist belief that the poor are miserable, not just because they deserve to be, but because they WANT to be. Because if they didn’t “want” to be poor, why they’d just pull themselves up by the bootstraps and make a Horatio Alger success of themselves. So any talk of “social justice” actually allows them to go along, living off unemployment and welfare. This he says, in the middle of a recession where 1 out of 6 people of working age is either unemployed or underemployed. Way to go Glenn!

But the corker is that hitherto, lots of church leaders thought Glenn was the bee’s knees. Now, they’re up in arms–because if there’s one thing that Christian churches have in common, it’s preaching charity, helping your fellow man, fighting for social justice, because their founder, that #$%^&* liberal Jesus Christ, said it was important. More important than praying as a matter of fact. Even the Mormons, who most people figure on being iffy Christians–and Glenn Beck, having been raised Catholic, converted to Mormonism in his adulthood. Looks like SOMEBODY hasn’t been paying attention in church for a long long time. I mean, we all try to not listen to sermons, but usually some of what was said sinks in after a few decades of repetition. But it’s just like Born in the USA. Glenn Beck just doesn’t pay attention. He’s off in his own little world, dreaming dreams no man ever dreamed before, because they’re too #$^&*( crazy to begin with.

Well, Glenn’s finally “clarified” his statements–I think now he says he meant Big Government instead of Nazis–and apologized in the standard approved format and his faithful congregation have returned to the fold, knowing that Glenn didn’t really mean what he said, even though he did when he said it. But myself, I’ve got to wonder–does this man even HAVE an attention span?

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This is just political theatre–is C-Span getting my angle right?

Friends, Romans, Republicans, lend me your ears, I come to bury health care, not to phrase it...

Of course, the damn thing IS just political theatre, but not for the reasons the Republicans are saying–so much of what could be called REAL Health Care Reform has already been bartered away. As Miles Mogulescu noticed in the Huffington Post:

“On August 13, The Times reported that while President Obama had presented himself as ‘aloof from the legislative fray,’ particularly in connection with the public option, ‘Behind the scenes, however, Mr. Obama and advisors have been…negotiating deals with a degree of cold-eyed political realism potentially at odds with the president’s rhetoric.’ One of the deals reported in The Times article was the Pharma deal. The other was a deal with the for-profit hospital lobby to limit its cost reductions to $155 billion over 10 years in exchange for a White House promise that there would be no meaningful public option.”

Wonder WHY Obama has been so pessimistic on the public option he promised during the campaign but almost immediately reneged on and why everyone keeps saying we don’t have 60 votes when it should take only 51? It’s because they don’t want a public option at all. What do the Republicans have to scuttle? The Democrats have already stove a hole in the hull.

Have your day in the spotlight, Mitch, at least the public will get the chance to see you baling water in instead of baling it out. But the ship’s already sinking without you.

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Health Care Reform, Season II: Defecate or Decamp

I hear the third season will be a riot...

BULL! The Republicans had ample chance to influence what was in the bill, had they not been sitting on their hands and saying that they were going to make health care Obama’s Waterloo. They didn’t give a snap of the fingers what was or what wasn’t in the bill until it actually passed and there appeared some glimmer of hope that the most expensive health care system in the world might actually become the fifteenth best instead of down in the dismal 30s somewhere. Now that the train has left the station, like the villains in an antique horse opera, it’s time to ride hellbent for leather over to Perilous Chasm with dynamite to wreck the train. Obama’s not going to give them the dynamite tho’, no sir, he just runs the livery stable to give the boys a good start trying to get to the chasm before the train does.

I’m not sold on the present form of health care reform: in fact, I think it kinda sux. It isn’t single payer, the only SENSIBLE alternative to what we have; it has no public option, its limpwristed cousin, even if there’s still a pulse in that supine body; and it includes a mandate forcing everyone in the United States to make the health insurance vampires richer. But would somebody please explain to me Obama’s sick fetish with bipartisanship? As Arianna Huffington pointed out the other day, slavery wasn’t repealed with a bipartisan compromise, it took a @#$%^&* war. And Americans are being forced into an economic servitude where they do not have health insurance, they are OWNED by the insurance companies and dare not move from the one they are subject to lest they lose coverage over a pre-existing condition. Sounds to me like an unfree condition.

Not only that, but health care is driving our economy into the crapper. As costs for medicine, health care insurance rise and rise, it’s become one of the major facets of the American economy. That’s just crazy! Communism didn’t bury us, but we need to get a handle on health care before we’re buried by our own Capitalism. The health care bill isn’t going to reverse this, but at least it will slow it down. So I have one thing to say to Obama. Tell the Republicans to defecate or decamp. Don’t compromise this thing any further if you don’t want PASSING health care reform to become your Water “loo”.

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