What Ezra Said. Twice at Least

Ezra has been a voice of reason in the HCR process. Many if not most of us want more. But we don't always get what we want. The last few decades it seems like we don't get anything, even that which we need. But this country got an xmas present yesterday, let's just hope that it's the gift that keeps on giving.

HCR

There is no good side to this “bill”. This is a “good” start on the road to an acceptable program. It has been pointed out many places that the 3 big social programs passed in the last 70 years, Social Security, Civil Rights, Medicare all were crappy at their start. ALL of them. But they were a start. They are all better today. ALL of them. Could they be better? Hell yes they could. Hell, Civil Rights should never have even been needed if this were a more, I don’t even know what the words are, maybe better, nation. Could any of them be killed by any congress in the foreseeable future? No. Watered down maybe. See teabaggers saying don’t take away my medicare.
But humans, or at least americans seem to like the big whatever, the big fix it all at once, the all or nothing answer. But nothing works that way. Electricity production – Solar!, No, Wind!, No, Nuclear!, No, Clean Coal!, No, drill,drill, drill!, my car runs on water!. None of it is the answer by itself and some is BS. It takes baby steps and fighting each step of the way. This is the second biggest positive change in 45 years in the way we see this country. The other was when we started to take care of our seniors (medicare) and when we recognized that all animals born with human DNA were actually human (civil rights). Both of these were in the 60’s and took softening up of the legislature over years to get them to pass. I was young in the 60’s but I remember the fights and I didn’t understand why things shouldn’t be the way they ended up. And they didn’t go far enough. Now I understand. Some people are selfish, some are assholes, some are ignorant, some are all of these. Nothing has changed there in 50 or even in the last 5000 years. But this is our time. This is when we get to make change. Will it be enough? Hell no, it never is. Someone the other night accused me of pissing and moaning because I didn’t get the pony. My response was I was not buying a pony. I didn’t expect the pony. And I didn’t get pissed because I didn’t get the fucking pony. I am pissed because that’s what happens when I and millions of my closest friends get unnecessarily and selfishly screwed.

Not Pretty Pictures

Want to see what a recession looks like?
Here's a chart of the unemployment info. Play it through and see what the fuss is about.


Us.

H/T to ari at Edge of the American West

Need To Know Why. This Is Your Answer

Aimai over at Balloon-Juice has a great comment on what's going on in the senate for health care reform.
Finally an explanation.

Fun Today

Over at Balloon-Juice commenter Dreggas posted the following story. It's probably not true but you never know. So for a good laugh and beware it's not monitor-keyboard safe if any thing is being ingested.
Gift Testing

On being poor, and not just a little bit

Poor, the summation

This can only be from someone who is or has been there. If this feels real to you then you've most likely been there. If you can't imagine this reality then you're probably not close to being poor. If this is your nightmare, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that you live in a country that thinks this is OK, that if you work harder everything will be alright. I'm not there. Yet. But I am as close as I've ever been. And I'm seeing myself slide down that rat hole no matter what I do. So I'm sorry.

Not Just Nuance- They are Pro-Coathanger

tristero has it right

Words do matter and our use of them is important.

What most of the so called pro life segment wants is to control half of the populations bodies. How their bodies are used, how their bodies health is decided, how their very existence is controlled. Notice the major theme is control. It isn't right. Using some decided upon bullshit name (pro life) for the people who want to control a woman's body is not right either. So for me from here on I'm using, Pro-Coathanger. 

Ah... screwed again

Had an attorney tell me once that a settlement was only good when both sides felt like they got equally screwed.
If both sides thought it was a good deal they didn't need attorneys.
If one side was ecstatic and the other pissed then it should have gone to court.
So now we have laws being made that way. One side is ecstatic and the other is pissed. And screwed. Problem is, it's not the 2 political sides happy or screwed. It's the owners of the country that are getting screwed.
It's us. We're on the losing side of all the political settlements.

Thanks Lynn Woolsey

The email that I sent to my representative:

Thank you for voting for health care reform. I wish the bill could be better. I wish it could happen a lot faster. I wish it would cover everyone. This is an issue that can not wait. As you well know people are dying directly due to the health care industry in this country. Why is that so hard for a great number of your fellow elected officials to understand? I would say that I can not believe that this many people are so selfish and heartless. But I know better. I know that the people who run the health care insurance industry don't care. I know that the people who run wall street and therefore affect the insurance people, don't care. They are greedy, selfish and heartless bastards and don't give a damn about anyone but themselves.

I'm glad that I served in the military. I didn't want to go. I did not believe in the war in Vietnam. But I volunteered anyway. I don't want kudos or thanks. It was what I was supposed to do. The congress people who voted against health care reform don't deserve the thanks of a great full nation. The deserve scorn and ridicule, because they didn't do what they were supposed to do. They voted for the benefit of a few greedy, selfish, heartless people who paid them to. We need better. We demand better.

Phillip

This man speaks from the heart. He speaks of actual humans and their lives, not some ideological crap from a book.

H/T BarbinMD over at Kos

A Little Fun

From Molly Ivors at Eschaton




If you'd like to see more here's AniMusic's channel on YouTube

GTFU

America needs to realize that it is time. It's time to understand that we as a country are 233 years old. I'm not sure how that relates to a human lifetime. Dog years=7 human years, so maybe 10 nation years=1 human year for an nation age of 23, but it seems like our country is still in but should be out of puberty by now. With the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the president, maybe, just maybe the world has recognized that we have taken the important step of starting to grow the fuck up as a nation and as a people.

A Nobel Prize, Or, How The World Looks Thumbing It's Nose At Stupid

Phil Nugent is so on the money I'm going to re-post his take here and link to it.

I'll freely admit that, when I turned on the computer this morning and saw the news that President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, my first thought was that the Yes Men or some similar bunch of jokers must have hacked into the Yahoo! News page. A lot of talk has already been stirred up about how this is ridiculous because it amounts to awarding a major international humanitarian award to someone on the basis of lofty ambitions, idealistic goals, and inspiring speeches. You think? If you have to give someone an major international humanitarian award every year, then, given the state of the world, you're going to spend a lot of time making symbolic gestures. Read the list of Nobel Peace Prize laureates and the citations attached to their awards, and you will notice many variations on the phrase "for his/her/their efforts". Not successes, mind you, but efforts. Considering that Yasser Arafat got one, in tandem with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, for his "efforts to create peace in the Middle East", which some might argue is kind of like giving Susan Atkins an award as Midwife of the Year. One of the few instances when someone got it for a single concrete act came in 1973 when Henry Kissinger (and Lê Ðức Thọ, who had the grace to turn it down) won the prize for the cease-fire in the Vietnam War, and that has long been recognized as the greatest sick joke in the award's history.

The news does seem a little like a joke about the way that Obama seems (especially to his enemies) to seem to stride through life to the tune of Karen Carpenter singing "Close to You", just as (say) the story about Newt Gingrich having a pouty fit because he didn't get to spend a lot of snuggly alone time with President Clinton during the flight to Israeli for Rabin's funeral seemed like a joke about Gingrich's petty, megalomaniac instability (and the way that he himself derailed the budget shutdown by telling the story seemed like a joke about Clinton's ability to dance on the bodies of his own self-imploding enemies). In the end, though, who cares, really? Why, all those people who, this time last week, were practically dancing in the streets because Chicago wasn't going to get to host the Olympic games, which they saw as a slight to Obama. (Limbaugh and the dittoheads who have openly prayed for Obama to "fail" aren't kidding--they really don't want anything good to happen in this country for the next four years, lest he get some of the credit for it. This is their patriotism, the same kind of patriotism that, when George W. Bush was in office, took the form of condemning anyone who suggested that soldiers in combat zones overseas be given sufficient body armor and other protective resources, if the President and his Defense Secretary didn't want them to have it.) When the Olympic Committee is seen to be dissing Obama, wingnuts are suddenly hugely impressed by the wisdom of international deliberative bodies, but when the body in question is offering Obama a Nobel, it's probably only a matter of time before a meme is generated alleging that he only got the award after Roman Polanski put in a good word for him.

It is already being helpfully suggested that Obama should do the right thing and turn the prize down, pointing out that he is not (yet) worthy, and thus heading off "a Nobel backlash" that, writes Mickey Kaus, "seems non-farfetched." Really, you think so? You think that a man who has been routinely denounced for his steady availability (i.e., over-exposure) and bi-partisan reaching out (i.e., spinelessness, wresting defeat from the jaws of victory), and eloquence (i.e., empty fancy talk), all of which he brought to the job, like rain to the desert, after eight years of a rigid ideologue who hid behind his handlers and couldn't manage to be articulate enoug to even be coherent much of the time, could somehow fall under attack for having been given an impressive-sounding prize that he hasn't earned by a bunch of foreigners? Is it really so important to these people who gets the Nobel this year that they think Obama shouldn't have it on his mantle if he has the chance to stick it up there, or is this what it feels like: battered liberals doing what they've begun to accuse the President of doing, and trying to reach out to the very people who've been using them for pinatas by agreeing, hey--our guy ain't that great! I might agree if I thought the award going to Obama was an abomination, like the Medals of Freedom that Bush pinned on all his lackeys and toadies. But at worst it's just silly, albeit silly in a nice way, and anyway, it's not as if I'm the one who's being invited to drag my ass out to Oslo in the winter.

Of course, the people who'll yel loudest about it will be those who can't see a Nobel for the President as a nice thing for the country but as a slap in the face, because they think this democratically elected president who was voted into office in a landslide and is widely liked, if not loved, as a dictator whose existence is an implicit condemnation of their values and their way of life. (The very lowest of the low will see it mainly as more evidence that well-spoken black dudes just have everything handed to them.) And you know what? They're right, kind of, at least about the part regarding what's being implicitly condemned. The Nobel does have one very real purpose, and that is that, by giving it to the right person once in a while--a Dalai Lama, a Lech Wałęsa, a Desmond Tutu, an Al Gore--you can really piss off some people who richly deserve to be pissed off. The Committee has done its best to suggest that Obama was given the award because of the things he wants to do, but I suspect that he was given the award for something he is, or rather isn't: i.e.. he isn't George W. Bush, or Bush's designated successor. Which ought to be recognized as a very low bar, but there's more to it than that.

The Bush years should be--will be--remembered as the country's moral low point since the end of slavery, a time when an inane little man with no qualifications but his family connections lost a democratic election, was appointed to the job of leader of the free world anyway, by his father's old cronies and party colleagues and with the complicity and approval of the press, and then proceeded to spend his full term ignoring the needs of the country and its people while using the time to instead order up legal rationales for an imperial presidency dedicated to the justification of torture and wars of choice, while creating a climate of fear that was meant to provide a reason for all of it. It was a horror show, and for those of us not of boundless faith, there were moments during it when it felt as if it would never end and that the most rotten people in America had succeeded in permanently reshaping the country and its values to make a better climate for their lizard skins. This all must have been dismaying to the many people in Europe who love what this country is supposed to stand for, who have a special place in their hearts for its history and its stated ideals and principles, and who were especially saddened, in 2004, to see a man voted back into office as recompense for having been caught wiping the Constitution and his own beloved Holy Bible with his diarrhetic ass.

You don't hear much about it now, not in this country, not even from most Bush haters (who do have a lot else to focus on), but among Bush's crimes and atrocities, one of the greatest still has to be the way he took the moment after 9/11 when the whole world was offering America its condolences and tender best wishes and threw them down and danced on them with a stupid cackle, just to show his gym buddies how tough and "independent" he was. Just as Walesa, in the days when Poland was in lockdown, and Tutu, when apartheid was still the law of the land, were given the Peace Prize largely to show them the world's gratitude that there were living counter-examples to their own corrupt and degraded societies, Obama has been given the prize for letting the world breathe a sigh of relief at the news that, no, it isn't going to go on forever, that the people whose job it is to decide wanted it to stop. (Even though, Garry Wills recently pointed out, it hasn't yet stopped as thoroughly as it should. But that's another post.) In light of this, the award should rightly have been given, not to Obama, but to the voters of the United States, who made the real heroic choice last November. But to have done that would have come too close to admitting the real reasons for giving the prize to Obama, which would have amounted to saying aloud that America, from the moment that the Supreme Court decided that honor and intellectual decency were things that it would be happier without, to at least the 2006 midterms, seemed about as much of a lost cause as Poland under martial law and South Africa during apartheid. And you don't win a peace prize, or get chosen to distribute them, by saying things like that.

B of A or Brain of Ass

Over at Blog on the Run this little tidbit about Bank of America should let you know a little of how the big boys work fuck us over. Be sure to click on the link which brings up the filing in Ohio. Good luck in keeping your blood pressure down.

Why Anti-Trust is a Key

Anti-trust is supposed to keep competition strong by not allowing domination of an industry by one or a few entities. The last 30-40 years have seen the basic end to this, not only in our country but in others as well. The following is a great summery of this, both how and why.
TAP - How Detroit Went Bankrupt by Barry C. Lynn
h/t TPM

The Speech We All Were Waiting For

The presidents speech on Wed was a good speech, given the politics in this country. I particularly noticed these two paragraphs:

I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last. It has now been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for health care reform. And ever since, nearly every President and Congress, whether Democrat or Republican, has attempted to meet this challenge in some way. A bill for comprehensive health reform was first introduced by John Dingell Sr. in 1943. Sixty-five years later, his son continues to introduce that same bill at the beginning of each session.

Our collective failure to meet this challenge – year after year, decade after decade – has led us to a breaking point. Everyone understands the extraordinary hardships that are placed on the uninsured, who live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy.

One of the major problems is not even the bankruptcy problem, it is that without health care coverage we have to wait till problems become emergency room problems. That is they only get solved in emergency terms. You are sick but don't know why, so you go to the emergency room. They will save your life if possible to do in a day or a week. But long term chemo or radiation, probably not. Your kidneys have shut down, might you get dialysis, sure one time. Then what. You break an arm. It's probably set and cast. You come back to have the cast removed. Would there be any checking during the weeks of wearing the cast? To make sure the bone was set and healing properly. Probably not.
That's bad health care.
Is it the doctors fault? The hospitals fault? The patients fault? The insurance companies fault?
Actually as the president stated, it is our fault. We elected the people who vote against our interests, year after year, after year.....
Why? Well insurance and health care wasn't nearly as expensive when I was a youngster. We grew up being told we were the best, we could do no wrong. We took that to mean all things American were the best that things could be. We didn't follow politics and world events to see what other countries were doing, unless they seemed like they might threaten us. And mostly not even then. So we fell complacent, fat, dumb but somehow not all that happy. And now as so many of us are scrapping by, or even less than that we are in deep.
Little steps over 5 or 10 years will not be enough. We have seen what works. Maybe not every system will work here. But we know what does not work. The system we have now. Does. Not. Work. Even people who have good insurance don't always use it, because they know or believe their rates will increase or they will be denied or canceled.
We just spent enough to fund full single payer for everyone for a decade on a stimulus package that we should not have needed. We have spent enough in Iraq to also fund the same thing for an additional decade. Or we had a tax cut that would fund single payer for all for over a decade. So that's 3 decades of single payer that we spent already on crap that has not only not helped the vast majority, it has killed hundreds of thousands of people. And let's not forget that we pay a lot now for this crappy insurance, if we can get it.
The president is only partially correct. We are not at the breaking point, we have sailed past it, whistling in the dark that all is well.

Proper Blogging

If you don't already - read Hulabaloo every day. Digby just gets it. And writes about all of it well.

Great health care reality ad

Health care/health insurance is/should be one of our primary issues and we need all the help we can provide. The following group is one of those trying to help. Please watch the video and support it if you can.
Here is the link for the supporting group.
Health care reality

Great Writting on the Kennedys

One of the best written pieces on the Kennedys, Anne Laurie nails it. Please read it if you haven't already.

The "Luck" of the Kennedys

Ted Kennedy 2/22/32 - 8/25/09 RIP

I have not been a huge fan of the Kennedy clan over the years. But I have to say that he was a good guy. He went not just the extra mile, he went several extra. Two brothers shot down in the prime of life, in political life, just because they wanted to bring equality to all Americans. He was wealthy and did not need to spend his entire life trying to make people's lives better. He could have spent his life getting richer, thinking only about himself. He did not. If we had a few more politicians like him this country, this world would be a better place. It was a better place for him being here, even with all his human failings. He joined and served as an enlisted man in the Army, something I did not know till today. But even without military service he should always be remembered as a patriot, a person who loved his country. He may have been born into a family of privilege, and even enjoyed that privilege, but he did not act like a privileged person.
I am old enough to remember JFK being elected and assassinated. I watched and listened to Bobby Kennedy and was amazed at the depth and direction of the man. Ted lived up to that, his brothers would have been proud.


His great quote at his brother Robert's funeral:

"My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: 'Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not'."



The words stand today and ring true about Ted, just like they did for Bobby.