I Hope You're Happy

Appendix fails to assassinate Glenn Beck

The nation asks doctors to put it back for another try.

The Golden State isn’t worth it

After analysis, the studies find that the standard of living in the high tax, high social program, big government state of California, life isn’t as good as in the  no taxes, small government state of Texas, and the residents are leaving to lower taxed states in droves.

Having seen this coming, this is why I’m an advocate of small government. Too bad there isn’t a small government-lowtax social liberal party out there for me to get behind.The Democrats every once in a while show some interest in it, especially after Clinton proclaimed the era of big government is over. The rest of the party just hasn’t come around to that concept yet.

Todd Akin gambles on the Pledge of Allegiance, Loses

If you want to use it as a political weapon, you should take care to say all the words. I’m just saying.

Cheney’s FBI interview featured 72 times where he couldn’t recall

I know Reagan got away with it, but really, he had Alzheimer’s. Cheney is just avoiding the question.

And Lo, the two party system did create a void, and out of this void came…third parties

America is seeing the problem with the two parties, and we all know that being an independent is a bad route to go (Joe Lieberman). Most of Europe has several parties (BUT THEY’RE ALL SOCIALISTS), so it’s about time we got in on the action, and allowed some more voices into the debate. It can’t get any worse (right?)

Doug Hoffman, the Conservative of NY-23 claims Glenn Beck is his hero

No wonder that race got so fucked up that the Republican candidate dropped out and endorsed the Democrat. With an election as strange as that, I’m shocked there wasn’t a former porn star or reality TV b-lister also on the ballot.

As a result of Barack Obama’s policies, lobbyists are quitting in droves

If only there were a pied piper to run the rest of them out.

Iran Accepts nuclear deal

Funny that Bush was never able to do this….

Texas and Ohio voters reject red light cameras

I think that if we can’t get this on the ballot everywhere, we should reject them like the mysterious guy in Chicago: with a cherry picker and the cover of darkness.

Carly Fiorina to run for California Senate seat

Let’s see, she nearly ruined HP and Compaq, got chased out but kept her $29 million golden parachute, and then was economic advisor to John McCain.  This is one chick that has failed upwards. The difficulty on this is she has money, connections and media savvy. The easy way to beat her is to point out how few of California’s citizens have a golden parachute in their contracts. Should be easy to paint her as one of those Wall Street types that caused this whole economic disaster, and who can’t relate to the masses like her Democratic opponent.

Michele Bachmann losing aides like Washington is losing Lobbyists

Michelle Marston has left her for being too crazy.

Michael Steele on the mid-term elections: We’re Transcendant

Presumably, the chairman meant that his party is ascendant, meaning on the rise, and not transcendent, meaning beyond the limits of comprehension.

The quote says it best.

So AT&T sued Verizon, and Verizon said, “Um well, ok.”

Seems AT&T was getting killed by the Verizon ads comparing networks, and sued, claiming false advertising. The expectation was Verizom would drop the ads and they’d settle out of court. Verizon, on the other hand, replied very simply by saying, “Prove it.” See, the burden of proof is on AT&T and if Verizon has its facts together, well, AT&T has little legal recourse.

This lamp is consumer retribution

An LED lamp that connects to the phone jack in your wall, stealing power from the phone company.

Dick Grayson

The Caustic personality of Dick Grayson

I have to admit, I like him because of one of his faults. He’s overbearing, and overbearing as a real personality fault, but this also makes him a no bullshit kind of guy, and that’s really what we need in politics.

He’s so brash, nobody wants to run opposing him

That’s one way to win an election.

The Fox News Beat

Jane Hall left Fox because of how skewed they are

She says she left because they stopped debating the issues, and because “Beck is scary”.

White House to Democrats: Stop providing balance to Fox News

I think the idea is to let Fox News continue to become more extreme and more marginalized.

Of course, by the laws of Social Newtonianism, that sort of means they must also become more extreme and marginalized. I wonder if they’ve found some sort of Social Gravitation constant I haven’t worked out quite yet.

There’s enough going on in the the Health Care Debate to make a special version of News Shots, so here it is: The Inaugural “Take Your Pill”.

Big Pharma alone has spent $40 million dollars in the second quarter lobbying Congress

Let’s start by adding it up. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents 32 manufacturers. They paid lobbyists $6 mil over three months. This alone seems like a lot, but many of the manufacturers spent their own money on their own lobbyists. Pfizer spent $5.5 million. Amgen, Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline spent about $3 million each. Add everything up and we get the $40 million dollar figure.

“It’s not surprising to learn this, because the pharmaceutical industry for years has been one of the most effective and powerful lobbying outfits in Washington, and it explains why we have a lot of drug policies in the U.S. that don’t look like drug policies in any other industrialized country,” [said Harvard Medical School Prof Jerry] Avorn.

Avorn wrote a book about drugs and health care called Powerful Medicines. He compares the current fight to the one in 2003, when Congress last made a major health care change by adding prescription drug coverage to Medicare. Avorn says PhRMA’s lobbying efforts were so vast and so intense that the result is now written into the law.

Today the government is empowered to negotiate how much it pays doctors, hospitals, laboratories — almost anyone who does business with Medicare. Anyone except pharmaceutical companies. Avorn points out that negotiating drug prices is illegal in the United States.

If you want to know what PhRMA is getting this time, Avorn says just look at what’s not on the table during the debate:

Drug re-importation from Canada? Off the table.

Government-negotiated drug prices? Off the table.

“A lot of those seem to have been resolved even before the public discussion begins,” says Avorn. “And usually, as with the other interest groups involved, they seem to have been resolved in favor of the interest groups, rather than in favor of the public.”

The price of drugs in this country is several times what it is in other nations due to this policy. This is why importing from Canada looks more and more inviting. Now, I understand the side issue of the safety of drugs from unregulated pharmacies outside the U.S., but you know, if you buy your penis pills from FucknutzFarmacy.com and you die because you got death in pill format, you didn’t do your due diligence with your own health, and Darwin just claimed another success story.

Let me tell you what happened to us. My wife needed medication, we had just married and the insurance paperwork hadn’t gone through, and so we asked how much it would be to pay outright. The answer was delivered simply. $13,845 dollars. Yeah. Great. thanks guys.

The funny thing is, we as taxpayers help fund the development of these drugs, the clinical trials, and than we don’t make royalties for the funding to you know, maybe help pay for a national health care system or something, and then we get fucked by the companies.

I’ll tell you what. I’ll arrange fundraisers for anyone in Congress with the balls to stand up to this.

Snake Oil

I’m not sure who’s peddling the snake oil here, the authors or Obama. True, the tax burden on this will not come just from the wealthy. In fact, I think it should be carried by everyone to some extent, and we shouldn’t rely on the wealthy as the bank of all future spending. I don’t expect to jump on the public plan and just have a free ride at the millionaire’s expense, get back all those premiums I’ve been paying to the system all this time.

At the same time, the authors quote all the untrue Republican mouthpiece arguments about rationed care, long waits in line and all the same stuff that we’ve heard in our insular world about horror stories from nations with national healthcare systems. Well, I know doctors in England, I know what the truth is, and it ain’t the picture the Republicans paint.

Look at the Abortion Monkey

Of course, if you are losing the fight you can scream Abortion and hope everybody runs for the hills.

How to tell a liar on the Health care debate starring Elizabeth Edwards

Let’s look at her list:

• if you hear somebody saying we can’t afford healthcare reform
• if they use any of these words: “socialization,” or “government control of your healthcare decisions,”
• if they mention “England,” “France,” or “Canada,” you can be assured that they are not telling you the truth.

Sounds pretty simple.

I’m not sure of any of the stats quoted on the bottom of this article, but I’ll try to find something similar from what I think is a reputable source.

Case in point: Michele Bachmann says if we insure more people, there’s going to be less medicine

I don’t usually cite the Huffington Post, it is too unreliable and biased, but here you go. Apparently, if more people got health care, it would increase the hassle for her in the form of lines and other…things. Thanks for the insight Michele, it really would be a personal travesty if more Americans were happy and healthy and had affordable health care. Thanks for understanding the problems of the nation.

“Any mother,” Bachmann said, would do whatever it takes to get “the high-quality health care that her child needs… As a mother of five biological children and as a foster mother to 23 children, there is nothing more important to me than to make sure that my children have high-quality health care when they need health care.”

And so, Michele, you want to deny other mothers the ability to get that health care so that your snot-nosed brood can? Wonderful sense of American Equality there. We found the Un-American people in the house. Hm, there’s logic that somehow Elwyn Tinklenberg can’t defeat in an election. I suggest you donate to help him out.

The cost control conundrum

According to this, if we go with the House plan, we’ll add $202 billion to the deficit by 2019. So in 20 years. we’ll add that much? Shit, is this what we’re quibbling over? Let’s see, there’s 300 millionish people in the nation. Which means we’d have to pay in $1,000 dollars over the next ten years, or $100 extra per year per person? Fuck sign me up. How the hell difficult is that math?

Health care

Now that the Democrats have control of everything, and they actually are able to execute on plans, National Health Care is a major topic looming on the horizon. We’re the only developed country that doesn’t have some national health care system, and we suffer greatly because of it. What I’m going to say in this article, by the end of things, is that we need to jump on our lawmakers and get them to approve the most far-reaching plan we can before the lobbying arms of the insurance case and big pharma can stop it.

First, here’s how our medical system shapes up against others in the world. We have the most expensive medical system in the world. Medicines and medical procedures here have a far higher price tag than in other nations, sometimes by a factor of ten. On the other hand, we don’t have the best medical system in the world. Really. The last time the World Health Organization ranked health care systems, the U.S. was ranked 37th.

How expensive is our system? The average per capital expenditure on health care is $4,138 a year. The median of the survey is $1,783 and second place was Switzerland at $2,794. Who is saddled with much of this cost? Our businesses. We spent how many billions buying out GM, and where did the bulk of it go? Health care for workers and retirees. Having health care sponsored by employers while the cost of our health care is staggeringly high is one of the biggest untold factors that is hurting our economy. It gives overseas competitors a big advantage. Let’s see what has happened in this little economic slowdown. Hummer is now owned by a Chinese company, Chrysler is now owned by an Italian company. Health care is eating us from the inside.

As a matter of fact, I think that I Michigan wanted to bring jobs back to the state, I’d suggest they offer health care for employees rather than tax breaks to manufacturers. That would probably be far more enticing to a company.

And what does the opposition say about it all? I won’t stand for no gubment in mah health cayuh system.

Well, let’s look at what the plan says: Hm, the government is going to set up a way to enroll in a plan with a private insurer that will allow anyone a large group plan which will spur actual competition (I don’t see a lot of that in the system right now) and drive down costs.
Thing is, the plan has insurers spooked because they know what’s coming: the public is going to find out what kind of expenses they’ve been driving up artificially for profits.
I know a little about other health care systems, and you know, we don’t get the whole truth here. In England, yes there’s a backlog and things are slow for some people, but for others, their employer offers enhanced health plans to lure attractive job candidates. In Japan, doctors and government meet annually to find realistic prices for medicines and procedures. Result is one of the most efficient and effective systems of health care in the world.

I know, under Republicans, government has been neither efficient nor effective. Back to health care.

I say all of this because I am reading more and more articles about how the lobbies are going to fight the push to national health care.

Let me give you some idea of the cost all of this has on us. I’ve had the worst four years of my life in the last four. Had some unexpected health costs, and even though I have coverage, and it’s a decent plan at that, my wife and I have $80,000 in health care debt. We’re locked in a bullshit workman’s comp case that has prevented us from making money or making any payments on this money for four years, and so it’s just building up. We’re going to declare bankruptcy and just fucking forget about it. And that’s going to run up everybody else’s costs, and we’re just going to be one more victim of the economy that didn’t need to happen. You want to know why it didn’t need to happen? I’ve never been out of work. I’m not going to be laid off. I haven’t lived beyond my means, I’ve paid off my car, I have no credit cards, much less credit card debt. We had some bad times and bad luck, and now we’re all going to lose out. Of course, if we had Nationalized Health care during this time, I’d be in fine shape. And how many millions more of me are there out in the nation? As a matter of fact, if we didn’t have this issue, I’d have started my company, and there’d be a bunch more jobs out there.

By the way, if you’d like to pass a few bucks my way to help me pay this off, the donate button’s to the right.

But back to this. The lobbysists are lining up their allies in congress and their strategies against this legislation. I’ll post some links here describing what things look like. You know how to get hold of your reps. Get active, and let’s do this.

How Pharma and Insurance Intend to Kill the Public Option, And What Obama and the Rest of Us Must Do

US health lobby: reform could make us as bad as the NHS

One Nation Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance (pdf)

STOP the Insurance LOBBY from Robbing you of NATIONAL OPTION