Monday - It's all good

Monday - It's all good man

. . . .Monday, start of a good week, the sun's out. Flowers are looking good, let me tell ya!

. . . .I'm just absolutely sure that's it not age-related, since I don't get older. Let me tell you though, my "roadworthiness" as I get older is just not what it used to be.

. . . .Let me make something crystal-clear. Especially based on last week's rants. I don't have a problem with Christianity and Christians. Some of the coolest people I know in this life are people of faith. My problem? When someone, when people, use it, as a front for their own political ends, or to manipulate people to their own ends and their own agenda. That ain't cool at all, and it turns my stomach. When people use God, Christianity or Jesus as another flimsy excuse for the crap they do. Personally, I think Jesus just absolutely had to be one of the cooler people to ever walk this planet. Jesus was the original outlaw and renegade. That little rabbi, the Son of God was just alriiight! (and did some cool miracles too!)

. . . .It has no place in politics period! I will never forgive Karl Rove for introducing that into the mix and "energizing the base".

. . .. Amendment 1 of the Constitution of the United States of America:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion; or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . . .

. . . Read your Constitution, that's the exact wording. It doesn't say a religion, it doesn't say the religion, it doesn't call out a National Religion, a founding religion or a State religion, in fact, it specifically calls out the opposite; it doesn't call out Christianity, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism or any other, it simply says "religion" and it specifically calls out the the free exercise thereof as it applies to any religion.

. . . . . .One of the points that I'm trying to make with those rants is that they, Faux News, the extreme Right, the neo-conservatives own the narrative right now. They own the news cycle and the story. What we need to do is simple, and I'll lay it out simply. We need to understand how they're owning it and what type of picture they're painting, in order for them to acheive their treasonous ends and bring about the failure of the system in this country.

- It's basic education in the political process.
- It's understanding that they are working for the failure of a sitting American President elected through due Constitutional Process, and that this is a treasonous and seditious act, and understanding the definition of what that is.
- It's understanding and arming yourself with the facts, the real facts and using those to counter the lies and rumors spread by entertainers like Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, Savage, Coulter, Malkin and others of their stripe.
- It's understanding that it's important to do so, it's about this country and it's future.
- It's not being afraid to call them what they are, entertainers, clowns, storytellers who are absolute tools with the IQ of a garden hose. They are the "mainstream media" they always chatter endlessly on about. They are the wealthy elite they spend so much time nattering on against. They are the ones leading the Fox sheeple down the path towards the Fascist state they want.

.. . . . .Understand that I have absolutely no quarrel with true conservatives. My issue is with the extreme Right wing, the neoconservatives, the extremists represented by Limbaugh, Gingrich and Cheney and who have the Becks, Oreilly's, Hannity's and Coulter's as their mouthpieces and dancing girls in their traveling snake oil show. A true conservative is someone whose stomach was turning and a little bit of vomit was coming up in the back of their throat as the Bush Administration ran up the largest deficits in the history of the United States, expanded the Federal Government to it's largest size ever, and used Executive Order for 7 years to suspend 9 of the first 10 articles of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

. . . .For an absolutely eloquent explanation of the above, John Batchelor, a conservative Republican columnist over at the Daily Beast turns this one in on why the Republican Party has become a party of zombies; dead, old and eating your brain:

The Republican Party has become many bad things—intolerant, inert, fly-blown, incoherent, and delusional—but the worst is that the GOP is no longer young. The GOP, according to a Gallup poll, has lost, forgotten, ignored, just generally scared off the younger voters, non-white voters, and female voters in all demographics.

What is a political party that is vastly white, middle-aged, male, Southern, pious, conservative, aggrieved, impotent, nostalgic, rude—and regarded negatively by more than half the respondents? Time magazine’s Republican political consultant Mike Murphy looks at the demographics and warns of a coming “ice age” for the party. That is grossly optimistic. No longer in second place, the voter self-identification polls place the Republicans well behind the leading independents and the second-place Democrats. The GOP is the equivalent of a shrinking third party on its way to becoming a museum piece beside the Whigs, the Greenbacks, and the Prohibitionists. The GOP is like a zombie cartoon reading the daily headlines of the last four years and asking, “Am I dead?”

It is not possible to dismiss Cantor, Gingrich, Cheney, and Limbaugh as only just cult cranks, because the Gallup poll shows that the nation regards them as speaking for the party, and so do the Republicans themselves—Limbaugh at 13 percent, Gingrich at 10 percent, Dick Cheney at 9 percent, far ahead of anyone actually holding or running for office.

Pundits like the nonpartisan analyst Charlie Cook assert that the party is in its “wilderness period” and will emerge after a “time-out” like a recalcitrant child of privilege. Partisans like the defensive former Bush speechwriter David Frum are smeared publicly by Limbaugh and his cult for trying to push back at the demagogues as “bombastic” and “a stereotype of self-indulgence;” yet when Frum gets a chance to fight back in Newsweek, he invites the muggers for an open debate. About what? Polite commentators like Peggy Noonan, while nodding cautiously to the demagogues as though they are pet gargoyles, beseeches the party in her Wall Street Journal column to cure its “base-itis,” to open its arms to something that isn’t an opera of bigotry, to cease the self-branding as “mean, thick, and angry.”

None of these mewling half-measures speak to the fact that a once idealistic, decent political party of all the states and all demographics for 150 years has now become a cruel cadre that defines itself like a jihad by what it is against. Now and again, I want to shout at them that the city on a hill that is America was not built by four centuries of honest strife to be a gated-community of vain whiners. But then I relax and let them do the talking. “Fail” is a word that ties together Limbaugh, Gingrich, Cheney ,and Cantor, and they use the word like a curse routinely. “Fail, Obama.” “Fail, Powell.” “Fail, Pelosi.” “Fail, liberals.” “Fail, Moslems.” “Fail, health care.” “Fail, moderates.” “Fail, city on a hill.” The zombies hurl the word at whoever does not look like them or listen to them or need them. They are speaking into the looking glass. “Who’s the fairest of them all?”

. . . .You can read the entire piece at the jump here.
. . . . One of the best examples of this bald-faced rhetorical schtick that I can think of came courtesy of Rush himself as he very seriously suggested bulldozing the city of Flint, Michigan and "a few other cities".

. . . .Some real simple tools I use to keep track of all this, and they're simple for you to use and bookmark:
- Open Secrets, this ones dedicated to tracking the heroin (money) that makes your Representative and Senator tick. Who's giving them money, which lobbying firm, which company, which individual, and can give you a big clue beforehand as to how they're going to vote.
- Open Congress, which tracks every bill in the Senate and House, from it's first inception in committee to what amendments or riders are either tacked on or stripped out of it, who voted for it, who didn't vote for it, the whole shebang.
- Fact Check, non-partisan, and not funded by any influence or lobbying group. Devoted to the facts, simply the facts and merciless on politicians of either stripe, goes right after anything to stop the spin right away.
- Media Matters, non-partisan, devoted to tracking the media and calling it like it is when a member of the media, any media of any persuasion, Limbaugh to Olbermann starts their schtick and starts spitting out lies and distortions.

. . . . .As of this morning in Tehran, Ayatollah Kahmeini blinked, Ahmadenijad showed his stripes as a coward and a bully and has left the country.

. . . What's happening in Tehran affects everyone. You might not think so, but the Mideast is a powderkeg right now. (Please let me belabor the point that had we left Saddam Hussein alone, and gone after Bin Laden, the true architect and leader of the Jihadists where he lives, on the Afghanistan/Pakiston border, right now Hussein, a sworn enemy of the Ayatollah Kahmeini and Ahmadinejad, would have been invaluable in helping get Mousavi installed as President). Iran is about 1 year away from being a nuclear country, and since it is a country that lives under the Taliban and Shariiya law, it's always been Al-Queada's modus operandi to come into anywhere the Taliban are where there is political unrest and spread like a virus. Here's why it's important, and it's not really about Ahmadinejad or Mousavi at the end of the day:
- 65% of the populace is under 30 years old. The reason for this is simple, this is the fall-out of the Iran-Iraq war in which most of the males under 30 at the time were killed, millons of them, there is a huge age gap in the country.
- 70% of Iran is now an urban population, not rural anymore
- This urban younger generation wonders why the old men, the Clerics, and the Ayatollah are running the country through their puppet, Ahmadenijad. They feel no connection to these men, no sense of national pride in them.
- Though the Ayatollah managed to shut down Facebook and kick CNN out, he didn't manage to shut down Twitter, which is actually, truth be told, a lot like a virus itself, decentralized, same small data packaged gets replicated and sent out over the Web. Twitter is how the world has managed to keep track of what's going on over there with all other communication shut down.
- The significance of Mousavi is that he's a moderate, he's as pro-Western as anyone over there gets. The further significance, especially in a Mideastern society is that his wife was the more outspoken of the two of them. This has lead many in the crowd of challengers to be women, again, almost unheard of in a Mideastern country.
- As of Monday night, the big lie was perpetrated when the Ayatollah allowed the vote challengers to have a peaceful demonstration with Mousavi present, and promising a vote recount and an investigation, a demonstration with no riot police. Instead, the Iranian paramilitary showed, Ahmadenijad's personal folks and opened fire on the crowd, killing one and wounding several others.

. . . . .A couple of weeks ago, this column wrote on the significance of social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. This plays that out. Twittering is what is keeping these people's hopes alive.

. . . .One last point on this that strikes to cognitive dissonance and logic. On Friday, the neo-Conservatives and extreme Right wing were once again all over the airwaves stating that the President's Mideast policy and his speech in Cairo were all wrong, since it appeared Mousavi would win, and if that happened somehow we would be "blinded" to what was really going on in Iran. By today, the narrative from the same people changed and somehow the violence and election fraud by Ahmadenijad and the Ayatollah were Obama's fault, since his actions somehow "emboldened" them, according to Frank Gaffney. Cognitive dissonance, folks, can't have it both ways. . . . .as well, again, according to the neocons and the Right, Obama should "do something". Not really clear what. OK, supposing you're someone who supports that position, which everyone is entitled to do. By that same logic then, someone who believes that the Administration should "do something" would have been perfectly OK with Soviet President Putin or Chinese Premier Zhou stepping in during the 2000 Florida recount in our own political process. Same logic, same situation. I'm just saying. . . . .

. . . .We're not part of this equation, period. What we can do is watch as a political process develops in a part of the world that no one thought it would. Geez, it's got to grind people that we weren't the causus belli of this, instead, Muslims came up with it on their own based on their ability to see the world through the Internet and want the same thing for themselves.

. . . .And this has all been about their economy. It's not about us, it's not about Israel, it's not about anything except their economy. This is a global depression, not just an American one.

. . . .But wait, another genius is heard from! According to Jim Cramer of CNBC's Mad Money, the upheaval from the Iranian election is all the fault of the Employee Free Choice Act back here in the U.S.

. . . .Just how many times exactly did Christopher Lambert get jolted by all that lightning and stuff in the Hiahlander movies? I mean how many can there be of "There can be only one"? And add Adrian Paul to the mix. . . .wow.

. . . .The adminstration is going to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency as part of it's regulatory overhaul. It's going to look out for consumer's on issues like credit cards and loans, and act as a watchdog to prevent some of the abuses that have been incurred on the average American.

. . . The next biggie? Health Care.
. . . .Why do we need Health Care Reform? The numbers are simple.
- 46 million Americans are living without health care insurance, 9 million kids among them
- Every 24 minutes someone dies from a lack of medical care they couldn't afford.
- Those uninsured? The ones you think aren't your problem? They are your problem, period. You're already paying a "hidden tax" as a result of them not being covered.
- If you have health care insurance, your premiums are on average $1,000 a year higher due to costs incurred by the uninsured.
- Add another average $370 a year to that due to cost-shifting, what happens when someone is treated at an emergency room or urgent care and can't pay.
- Here's how the cost-shifting works. In 2008, uninsured people received $116 billion dollars worth of health care from doctors, hospitals, and other providers. The uninsured paid 37% of that out of their pockets, and another 26% was covered by charitable organizations and foundations. That left a total of $43 billion unpaid. Except it didn't go unpaid, it folded back into a increase in health insurance premiums.
-You can fact check those numbers here, if you'd like, in a report compiled by Families USA.

. . . .Here's how it works, if you're uninsured, like I am, as a self-employed person. The HMO's negotiate a lower price for services due to leverage. The doctor's groups also know that there will be a certain percentage of people they see who simply cannot pay. So. . . the self-employed, like me and like many people I know, pay an inflated price for services, since they can pay out of pocket, and the doctor's offices still make their money.

. . . As well, here's how the snowball works. Anyone, myself included, that doesn't have insurance waits far too long to go see the doctor. So. . .by the time you get there, the need for care is more urgent, more supplies are needed and the illness is worse. It takes up the doctor's time in a more intense, urgent situation and the patient winds up being out of work longer than he or she could have been if they went in the initial stages.

. . . .But there's no worry, according to that everyman, Rush, the "health care crisis is manufactured."

. . .Why now? Especially given the current fiscal situation? Well. . . .a little investigation of the Congressional Budget Office Report done back in January of 2009, just before the inauguration, about the long term deficits that were incurred and left behind by the Bush Adminstration is staggering. That outgoing administration took a budget surplus left for them by Clinton of $5.6 trillion dollars projected over 10 years (about 1/2 a trillion dollars a year) and managed to turn that into a $1.186 trillion deficit facing the incoming Obama administration in 2009 alone, with a projected deficit of $4 trillion by 2011, that was simply what was left for this administration. How this relates to health care is simple, the Medicare Part D prescription drug disaster that winds up costing over 3 times it's projected cost, and has no savings in it whatsoever, amid a host of other Bush era programs, all of which are projected to cost money or lose money.
. . . .In other words, as bad as things are, it could be a lot worse, sucks to have to say that. So, if there is a wait on health care reform, it will only cost more.
. . . .It's very obvious from hearing the debate starting up, that both sides are in agreement that health care reform is needed, and needed badly and right now, the debate is on how to get there.

. . . .Seriously though, I want you to Google or Bing "asparagus and cancer" and check out some of the results. I'm not going to say any more than that, check it out and get back to me.

. . . .Alright, that's enough to get the week started. It's gonna be a good one.

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do, this rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive and we don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This is not a dress rehearsal, it's about right here, right now and it's about what you do today. Go change it. Change yourself, change the world.

The Desolation Angel