Author Archives: John Wallenfeldt

Robert Reich’s Blog: The House: Tax the Wealthy to Keep Everyone Healthy

Since I plugged Krugman, I had to go sanitize myself by checking out Robert Reich’s blog. I read this yesterday concerning taxing the utmost wealthy to pay for health care. A good read.

Also check out his recent Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan-related entries. Tie this in with Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article and his most recent commentary on the subject. Check out his interview on Here and Now yesterday as well.

WeWantThePublicOption.Com! – Vote for our next target!

I love this! Vote for your least favorite “ConservaDem” Fifth Columnist in the pocket of the insurance industry here and keep the pressure on these jackasses who don’t want to provide health insurance to ALL Americans.

Screw the GOP. Their contrary asses won’t vote for America anyway so let’s at least keep the Democrats in line. And Lieberman too, I guess, since we need the vote.

And give a little to get the ads out if you can too.

And here is a fairly recent list of the scumbags who need convincing.

Apollo 11 Launch: 40 Years Ago Today

Remember when this country had big dreams and didn’t settle for less?

Remember when we didn’t check on focus groups or gave a shit what lobbyists told us?

Remember when big business just sucked it up and did the damn job?

THAT and a dose of hope and optimism got us to the moon. Not GOP whining and fear tactics.

Learn from this, be amazed of what we used to be able to accomplish in this country, and let’s try to regain our glory.

As racist as they wanna be

Honestly, I’ve been ignoring the Sotomayor confirmation hearings because I know two things. One, she’s going to get confirmed barring a catastrophe. Obama picked a moderate knowing damn full well she’d get confirmed.

Two, I just knew the Republicans were going to sink to the lowest form of racism allowed on 21st century television. It is their nature. It is also their only way to gain power.

I was glad to see this point of view confirmed in Tom Gilroy’s HuffPo article this morning. A very large taste focusing on Beauregard Sessions interrogating Sotomayor:

“The point of putting a ‘racially insensitive’ white man up to question a Latina has nothing to do with bad GOP planning and everything to do with intimidation. Republicans know she’s getting confirmed; what they really want to do is intimidate the White House, the media, and me and you from embracing progressive views.

So, if you’re going to embrace affirmative action, feminism, equal rights, economic fairness, civil rights, — Jesus, even empathy — you stand warned you will be attacked. It has nothing to do with defeating Sotomayer and everything to do with discrediting what most Americans believe and intimidating us from expressing it. It’s also a signal to their dwindling base — disenfranchised, uneducated whites — that the GOP is still the party of the cluelessly and inarticulately disgruntled.

Hence economic fairness is ‘a special interest,’ universal healthcare is ‘socialism,’ and believing in a right to privacy is ‘judicial activism;’ all of it bullshit, but all of it useful.

That’s the goal here; keeping ignorance alive so you can cajole it to the ballot box, the streets, in front of David Letterman’s studio, at the local Board of Ed meeting or the commencement at Notre Dame.

Or outside Dr George Tiller’s women’s health clinic or the Holocaust Museum — carrying a gun.”

Don’t believe that? Then how about Pat Buchanan literally screaming that the GOP doesn’t need Hispanics as long as they can con enough white people to vote for them. That way the GOP Senators should try as hard as possible to paint Sotomayor as an anti-white racist to ensure their ideological purity or some shit.

To be honest, he may actually be right about the numbers if not his racism.

Meanwhle, Maureen Dowd is proud of Sotomayor’s defense of her opinions and career, though may be making too much hay of the white racists in the GOP Senatorial contingent. Not that they aren’t, but they are still in power because someone voted for them.

Even in our next Supreme Court Justice can school Beauregard Sessions.

Big increase in troops’ kids seeking mental help | TPM News Pages

Republican “family values” are shown as a false talking point every time they:

* cheat on their spouses
* deny health care for children
* make it even for their pals to pollute our water, sell our jobs overseas, poison our food, kill our forests and farms, etc. ad nauseum.

The latest? The illegal war in Iraq and the hard fight we didn’t have to fight in Afghanistan if we’d have keep our eyes on the ball have resulted in a major rise in the children of deployed troops seeking mental help.

That’s right. Years of backdoor drafts and multiple deployments without proper gear result in tattered warriors and their kids. Gee, thanks GOP!

Businesses should let go of health care

I’ve been avoiding the public health plan debate on the old blog because I don’t even see another plausible side to the argument other than greed. Or maybe just plain evil.

So, on Friday, I really, really enjoyed this commentary on Marketplace of all places. I mean, I enjoy the program but it is usually chock full of conservative financial types. It was wonderful to hear a logical, and accurate, voice telling business that they are idiots for not wanting to get out of the health care business.

Case in point? Both Chrysler and GM exist today in a post-bankruptcy world and solvent precisely because the government found a way for them to get rid of their health care obligations.

It’s a pretty “duh” moment for this country but big business and GOP are too stupid to see it.

And so, we have Senators who already have public health care reading the words of the private health care lobby, who is currently spending $1.4 million A DAY to fight off a public health care option. Why? Well, if the public plan can give care to the 45-47 million who don’t have insurance, and draw in folks like me who hate paying more money for less coverage year after year after year, you could easily have a public plan of at least 100 million Americans fighting for better care at a cheaper price.

And that’s bad for business while being good for American citizens. Since when was the health of a nation supposed to be something measured on a balance sheet rather than a health chart anyway?

If you want another reason to loathe the health industry, listen to this interview I heard this morning. Steve Inskeep is one of NPR’s conservative bullshit artists and even he seemed to be creeped out by Dr. Sam Nussbaum of WellPoint. Seriously, give that one a listen and you’ll see why I previously stated that greed and evil are the only stances against health care reform that seem accurate. And that guy is both.