This President rocks. It's daunting to think about how many warehouses of socialist mops and vats of extra strength socialist Lysol we'll need to clean up Republican Texas.
Aside from the need for socialist mops, the really good news today is that it looks like we are getting closer to HCR that includes a public option. We have the AHIP (American Health Insurance Plans) to thank for this. According to Paul Krugman of the New York Times AHIP's threat to increase rates b/c it didn't like the Baucus bill backfired.
A Hatchet Job So Bad It's Good
It seems that a bunch of selfish greed mongering fat cats had become so desperate and crazed by the mere thought of losing one penny that the fat cats blew up the very building they were protecting.
Shall we cry 'em a river folks?
I didn't think so.
Meanwhile, there were other pressing developments today in the U.N and in the U.S. Congress:
Big thanks to the 44 Diaries for sharing this with us.
Senator John Cornyn, by the way, ran an ad during a commercial break, extolling the virtues of the status quo.
Here we go again. Yet another Republican sells his/her soul to the devil for the money. It's all about the money. It is always about the money. Cornyn receives $1.6 million from his big ol' sugar daddies in insurance.
Hats off to Bill Moyers for his wise words and refreshing honesty. And hats off to another wise Texan, James Moore, who shows us how Texans can so badly mess up Texas.
More relevant video clips and transcripts can be found here.
Remember all of the color coded alerts issued from Tom Ridge, former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security? The red alerts and the orange alerts that would send chills down the spines of the American people? The ones that would make some hearts stop with fear? The alerts that would send CNN and all news channels into feeding frenzies that would in turn bring fear and anxiety into homes across America? Remember the huge and bold front-page headlines in our daily newspapers? How many children went to bed at night afraid? If parents were fearful, their children were terrified. For those who live in New York City and Washington, D.C. the fear was even more palpable because the residents know all about a terrorist attack.
And now we learn some of the alerts, if not most of them, were fake.
According to an article published in Politico posted on Daily Kos Tom Ridge admits he was pushed by the Bush Administration to announce terror alerts when it was politically advantageous to do so.
Tom Ridge confirms a long-held suspicion among Bush critics, writing in his new autobiography that he "was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over."
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann smacks down the obstructionist Republicans and Blue Dogs who are getting major contributions from the health care industry.
PBS pointed out that the health and insurance industries are spending more than a million, 400 thousand dollars a day, just to destroy the "public option" - the truly non-profit, wieldy, round-up and not round-down, government, from helping you pay your medical bills with about a billionth of the recklessness with which it is still paying Halliburton and its spinoffs to kill your kids.
And much of this money is going to, and through, Republicans.
But that's the real point tonight.
Not all of it is going through Republicans...
Not to mention YES to affordable health care benefits for members of Congress.
So, it was OK to vote to burn billions if not trillions on a ginned up war. It was OK to vote for trillions in bailouts for a bunch of thieving financial crooks and sharks. Now these very same sharks are earning billions and giving themselves fat bonuses again. Hopefully someone bothered to ask them to pay back the bail out bucks.
Our tax dollars are paying for all of the above including BMW level health care insurance for members of Congress. If John McCain had to find his own health care insurance company, like so many other Americans, he would be turned down because of pre-existing conditions. If he would be lucky enough to find a willing provider, McCain would be out of pocket thousands of dollars for or bankrupted by treatments desperately needed but not covered or flat out denied by his plan.
Why are we paying for top notch care for our esteemed lawmakers when many of them are against the same for us? If they say no to us, we should say no to them and demand that the federal government rescind all taxpayer funded health care coverage for members of Congress. Let our revered leaders buy their own freaking insurance like a vast number of Americans have to do. Some may learn they cannot afford to pay for it and college tuition for their kids.
When one goes to alternative sources for news and information on the evil doing Internets, one is likely to discover a whole host of information that will routinely never make it to the local, national evening news or cable TV.
The posts below, for example, are certainly fit to print and air but somehow, because of the powers that be in the corporate owned media, much of it has been fed through the buzz saws and the shredders of the gatekeepers who control particular messages and agendas.
Thanks to the interactive Internets and You Tube, bloggers can disclose news that is largely unnoticed or ignored in the mainstream.
Halliburton/KBR Rewarded for Deaths of U.S. Troops.
According to an article written by Jeremy Scahill for The Nation magazine, Kellogg Brown and Root received bonuses for work that had in fact killed American troops.
First, from the Texas wing of The Party of Torture and Tax Cuts.
Senator John Cornyn, prominent member of the Party of Torture and willing player in the Bush Administration's
Journey to Depravity must think Democrats are quaking in their boots because, according to The Huffington Post he attempted to bully and blackmail them on the torture issue.
Cornyn apparently prefers to sweep the recent revelations of torture under the rug. That or pin the blame on Democrats who served on the Foreign Intelligence Committee at the time, and/or stick it to low level military and CIA officers at the bottom of the torture chain of command.
If Democrats insist on probing the Bush administration's program of detainee torture, they'd better be careful, a senior Senate Republican said Tuesday, because they might find blood on their own hands as well.
"To sit quietly and to let this happen and then to come back later and say people ought to be prosecuted criminally, not just here in the United States but perhaps internationally, to me is inconsistent, to say the least," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
It seems that certain members of the Republican Party, specifically former Texas U.S. Senator Phil Gramm, created mechanisms by which very wealthy Americans could cheat Uncle Sam by hiding their incomes in off shore tax havens. Unfortunately for Joe and Jane the Taxpayers (that would be you, clueless Republican tea baggers, and me), we are the go to folks who have to pony up the mind numbing shortfall.
Apparently there is no end in sight to the Bush Administration and its Republican Party's pillage and looting of every existing piggy bank whether it is that of the federal government, Republican dominated states and local governments, the private sector including formerly revered and respected banks and investment firms, corporations and small businesses. The insatiable and pervasive tentacles of reckless irresponsibility, greed and corruption spread like a lethal and uncontrollable cancer.
Diarist Muzikal203 over at Daily Kos uploaded a video clip of Keith Olbermann's rant on tax evaders last night. Olbermann has every right to howl about this. We all should be doing the same.
(I suck. I really, really do. Libby has graciously agreed to join us regularly on the TK front page. I'm very excited by this addition to our staff of writers, and thank her for her patience with my sluggish updating of her profiles.
It seems that some of these naughty, nasty boys charged their palling-around-with-call-girl activities on their corporate credit cards.
Uh oh. Are these guys still in charge of their businesses? Are they the ones who received the bailout money?
The scandal may have happened pre-TARP, but this kind of behavior should make us wonder about what kinds of scumbags and whackos we have bailed out.
According to Raw Story and ABC News today these boys used a $2,000 per hour call girl service where the "firm's" Madam disguised the charges as business related, e.g. "computer consulting, "roofing construction," etc.
Kristin Davis, the madam in question, went public to ABC News this week; ABC will be broadcasting her interview Friday at 10 pm. Davis says she has a list of 9,800 clients, many of whom she says New York prosecutors deliberately avoided when taking her case, even though she offered them her annotated client list.
In what's sure to create a media firestorm parallel to that of when a Washington, DC madam announced that she was publishing her client list (which included at least one senator), Davis' comments come at a time where incredible ire is already focused on Wall Street and banking executives. The pressure for her to release the list will certainly be immense.
As we all know, this week is the last of the G.W. Bush Administration. Given a national Democratic landslide election and George W. Bush's recent approval rating, there is little doubt that there is more than a tad of dancing taking place in a plethora of streets throughout the U.S. and the world.
For much of their eight year term in office, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have remained tightly entrenched behind iron gates. They avoided the press and media as much as possible. They steered clear of the public and chose to helicopter in and out of their homes and offices whenever feasible. And yet for the past two weeks both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been parading around on the Sunday morning talk and political news circuits. In their final days in office both men desperately tried their darnedest to re-write history. I imagine at this time, after Bush's farewell address, both men are securely ensconced back in their delusional bubbles in undisclosed locations.
With regard to Presidential exit interviews, former Press Secretary Scott McClellan is one of many who offered commentary on Bush's farewell address.
"It's hard to talk about moral clarity when you have tarnished our government's moral standing in the world," McClellan said. "If you look at the speech it was really a feel-good farewell speech. It was designed one final chance to burnish his legacy by highlighting his humanity, showing his humanity, his compassion, his inner decency and good intentions."
But "there are really two problems they don't seem to get," Bush's ex-press secretary remarked. "First of all, the public trust. The president long ago sadly lost the public trust. They are no longer listening to what he has to say or buying what he is selling. Unless he is willing to come out and talk candidly about his own mistakes, his own policy mistakes, and address those issues openly with the American people they are not tuning in."
Keith Olberman speaks out against the tone and tenor of the Clinton campaign. No matter who you support in the Democratic Presidential race, Keith Olbermann calls it like it is. The divisiveness being pushed by Hillary's advisers hurts us all.
KO, who's ratings have gone up 85%, has made a career of calling out the Bush Administration and its allies - namely, Faux News' Bill O'Reilly - on their misinformation, their regressive and poorly managed political policies, and their disasterous consequences.
That screaming you're hearing is O'Reilly, who's ratings are tanking, and the Faux Network realizing they've got another four years of being called on their lies.
I'm a fan of lots of good blogs, like Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars, and Americablog, for example.
One item in Crooks and Liars today really caught my attention. True, it does deal IN PART with the words Rush Limbaugh used to defame Michael J. Fox, but what makes the words even more obscene is HOW Limbaugh delivered his commentary.
The item deals with a Keith Olbermann segment on the Limbaugh attacks that showed also that Fox has been non-partisan in his support of those who advocate stem cell research.
Here's the link: http://www.crooksand... .
More below.
Remember when you were growing up & you marveled at our nation and believed our civilization would last forever? Our ideals & our belief system would transcend time & carry forth into the Universe and make order?
This optimistic, hopeful attitude showed up in our culture, our books, our movies, our television. We created campy, cheerful shows that just felt like shots of sugar in our system. It was an idealistic culture that created utopian universes like the one ruled by the orderly and egalitarian Starfleet.
Today the culture that once created the utopian & always hopeful Starfleet has now created Borgs which threaten it.
What happened? When did we start producing nightmares?
