Went to my Congressman's District Office, this past Monday, March 15, 2010.
Asked to speak to whoever it was that one could speak to when the Congressman was not there.
Out came a young man, his Deputy District Administrator. I had met this young man about two years previously, but he did not recall me.
"What did you come to talk about?"
"I came to talk to you about the health care reform. I would like to know why the Congressman has changed his position with respect to the public option. He promised that he would not sign any health care reform bill that did not contain a public option. He was a signatory to this letter stating just that. So, why has he changed his position?" [I held in my hand a letter of August 17, 2009, with 60 Members of Congress, who had signed on, as an attachment to the letter, stating their position with respect to the public option, i.e., that they would NOT sign any health care reform bill without a public option. This was a letter to The Hon. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary, U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services, signed off on be Raul Grijalva, Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee, representing the Congressional Progressive Cause and the Congressional Black Caucus.]
"He can change his position if he wants."
"You know about Cong. Grayson's bill H.R. 4789, don't you? The Medicare Option for anyone under 65 who wants to join and pay for it?," I asked. "What are the Congressman's feelings on that?"
"He's against it - there aren't enough votes for it."
"Well, I can tell you that since he introduced it, plenty of Americans have signed up in a matter of a couple of days, they are signing up endlessly - it's phenomenal."
"It doesn't matter," he says, "the votes are not there and the Congressman is going to sign the bill as it is."
This weekly diary takes a look at the past week's important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.
When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?
2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?
3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?
The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist's message.
:: ::
Chris Britt, Comics.com, see reader comments in the State Journal-Register
The historic Conclave at Blair Castle has finally ended, the illustrious personages in attendance have shared their wisdom with us, and I have humbly transcribed their words, so serfs everywhere will be able to sleep well tonight knowing that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well . . .
Crossposted at Daily Kos. If you choose to recommend it there, the Rec Button may have been pushed to the bottom after the last diary comment made.
THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS
This weekly diary takes a look at the past week's important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.
When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?
2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?
3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?
The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist's message.
:: ::
Chris Britt, see reader comments in the State Journal-Register (Springfield, IL)
This weekly diary takes a look at the past week's important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.
When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?
2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?
3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?
The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist's message.
This weekly diary takes a look at the past week's important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.
When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?
2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?
3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?
The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist's message.
This weekly diary takes a look at the past week's important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.
When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?
2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?
3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?
The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist's message.
"I don't think the White House recognizes how much trouble they're in," said one former Democratic official. "I think they're miscalculating what's happening with progressives and the left."
Failing to understand the intensity of progressive anger, dismissing it with condescending arrogance is bad enough, but that's not all they're miscalculating. Obama and Democrats seem to think they're securing the long-term support of the corporate establishment, they think they're consolidating their power, but they're walking right into a trap. They're being set up to fail, they're being set up to take the blame when everything implodes. The corporate masters of America and their GOP enforcers expect that this trap, this setup will result in a Presidency so disastrous and unpopular, in a Congress so despised, in a political system so divisive and dysfunctional that when General Petraeus arrives on his white horse to save America in 2012, he will win every state, Republicans will take Congress back, and the Permanent Republican Majority will be here to stay after a rather unsuccessful first attempt.
If that doesn't happen, it won't be because the designated scapegoats with the (D) after their names in the White House and Congress didn't play their assigned roles. They are. To clueless, halfwit, suicidal perfection. Democrats are jubilant that they've managed to clusterfuck their way to 60 votes in the Senate, but they won't be quite as jubilant when the healthcare crisis keeps intensifying and unemployment keeps getting worse and banks keep failing and the dollar tanks and the war in Afghanistan keeps getting bloodier and the commercial real estate market implodes and takes what's left of the economy down with it.
Obama isn't playing 12 dimensional chess, he's playing Russian Roulette with a bullet in every chamber.
He loaded the Wall Street Bailout bullet, he loaded the not enough stimulus bullet, he loaded the Bernanke back to the Fed bullet, he loaded the deficits are bad bullet, he loaded the Afghanistan escalation bullet, he's loaded every bullet the corporate masters of this country handed him and keeps pulling the trigger.
Good God, I haven't been able to pull myself away from the swift undercurrent of depression long enough to get seriously pissed at anything but "healthcare reform" (what a fucking joke lately), but this article on HuffPo awoke the beast within:
Senator Chuck Schumer forgot to check his dirty mouth for a flight on Sunday.
The New York senator was overheard calling a female flight attendant a "bitch" after she insisted that he shut off his cellphone so the plane could take off.
A Republican aide who witnessed the incident claims Schumer muttered the insult to none other than Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.
According to Politico, who first reported the story, the aide quotes Schumer as saying, "It's Harry Reid calling. I guess health care will have to wait until we land."
Schumer's spokesman later apologized for the incident, say that the senator "made an off-the-cuff comment under his breath that he shouldn't have made, and he regrets it."
In Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges examines the pervasive ways in which Americans are separated from the complexities of reality and become trapped in a mind-killing, reality-destroying, one-dimensional existence. For most of them, there is no way out of this corporate capitalist prison; for most of them, there is no escape; they can't even try to escape because they don't even know they've been locked up. They don't see the guard towers, they don't see the walls, they don't even saw the bars of their own cells.
Chris Hedges . . .
We consume countless lies daily, false promises that if we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected, envied, powerful, loved, and protected. Reality is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity, it is condemned as defeatist. Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality and who grasp the hollowness of this culture, are shunned and condemned for their pessimism.
Human beings have become a commodity. They are objects, like consumer products. They have no intrinsic value. Life is a brutal world of unadulterated competition. Life is about the personal humiliation of those who oppose us. Those who win are the best. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Compassion, competence, intelligence, and solidarity with others are forms of weakness.
In accordance with these lethal illusions, progressives are weak and deserve to be erased. Conservatives are strong and deserve to rule. Capitalism is sacred. Conformity is sanctified. Dissent is condemned. The corporate media pounds this narrative into the public consciousness every hour of every day, in every conceivable way, through every visual, aural, emotional, and psychological form of communication ever devised. The consequences have been devastating.
If there's still enough time, if it's not too late, if you haven't given up, if you can find the words, if you haven't run out of words, if you haven't been silenced, banned, exiled because too many Obamabots profusely supportive admirers of Barack at GOS and other bizarre locations don't want to hear the truth, don't want to deal with it, can't bear to look at it, won't acknowledge it because he is their last refuge, their final sanctuary, the only source of hope they have left in this betrayed wreck of a country.
How many times do they have to see Obama stumble down the side of that Misty Moderate Mountain before these people realize he's not the Moses of the Democratic Party, before they finally understand he's not leading us to the Promised Land, he's just plunging us deeper into the Valley of Centrism Death, where lies and self-delusion reign and the truth is never heard. It shouldn't be so hard for them to figure out how this is all going to end if progressives back down again, if we take one for the team again, if we let K Street's bought and paid for hacks pass this healthcare "reform" atrocity.
You don't have to walk and crawl on six crooked highways for the rest of your life to know where we've been and where we're going next, an IQ of 50 and two functioning eyes are all that's necessary to confirm that those crooked highways are just an endless corporate tollway to nowhere and that it's our job to keep paying for the trip.
She lay in her bed, with a bible clutched in the hand not encased in a cast, speaking openly about her divorce. Despite her deeply religious views, the divorce seems to not bother her at all, other than strategically.
She answers her ancient roommate, "I'll pray for us both to get better, so we can get out of here, but if that doesn't work, we just have to live it, one day at a time." The old lady starts to cry, and she speaks again, "Look at it this way, at least you got 50 more years than I did before you landed here. You've had a pretty good life, dear. We'll get through this."
That stops the old lady's crying.
The two of them talk a lot at night. Neither sleeps well, but when you are bed ridden all day, as she often points out, how tired can you possibly get?
She's 42, and this nursing home is her final stop, and she knows it.
Crossposted at Daily Kos. Look in the Comments Section of Daily Kos for more cartoons on the economy and sports. Somehow, I couldn't fit them in the main text of the diary.
THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS
This weekly diary takes a look at the past week's important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.
When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?
2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?
3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?
The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist's message.
This weekly diary takes a look at the past week's important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.
When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?
2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?
3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?
The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist's message.
This weekly diary takes a look at the past week's important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.
When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?
2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?
3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?
The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist's message.
:: ::
Mahmoud, Hugo, and Muammar... Meet Rush, Glenn, and Sean Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune
Only 12 percent of U.S. homeowners eligible for loan modifications under the Obama administration's housing rescue plan have had their mortgages reworked, and millions more foreclosures are coming, the Treasury Department said last Wednesday.
Federal Reserve and Treasury officials are scrambling to prevent the commercial-real-estate sector from delivering a roundhouse punch to the U.S. economy just as it struggles to get up off the mat. Their efforts could be undermined by a surge in foreclosures of commercial property carrying mortgages that were packaged and sold by Wall Street as bonds. Similar mortgage-backed securities created out of home loans played a big role in undoing that sector and triggering the global economic recession.
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. "In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger," Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. "The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis."
The Taliban are back. The Afghans are tired of American troops in their midst . . . virtually every military expert agrees that Afghanistan is the last place on Earth for a modern army to wage war and that includes every NATO general.
Long ago, the British learned that Afghanistan is a place where empires go to die. The notion that democracy as practiced in the West can be transplanted there is farcical . . . since the 1700's the primary export from Afghanistan has been heroin and it remains so today. Other than growing poppies, there's not much that passes for an economy there. It doesn't matter who's elected because the business of Afghanistan is opium. American troops will not alter that.
And the business of America is corporate greed, corporate profit, corporate expansion. Obama won't alter that. It doesn't matter who's elected, because other than speeches and smoke and mirrors policies, there's not much that passes for reform here.
I don't see any real change,
I don't feel much hope,
I feel a dirty wind blowing,
I see Devils and Dust.
David Axelrod made the case for insisting on the public option if there is an individual mandate to buy from health insurance exchanges, on the Rachel Maddow show last night (segment page). Of course, he thought he was making a different case:
And there is an incentive for the insurance industry to go along and not try to fight these, and that is that there is going to be a larger insurance market, and they have to make that calculation, but we are prepared to do it easy or do it hard, we want to make it work for consumers.
One reading of Axelrod is:
"M'lords, the peasants are getting restive, and if you want to avoid a revolt or other crisis - say, a majority of the House of Representatives elected without being beholden to your largesses - you have to make concessions. However, make the calculation - in some versions of this reform, because of the greater number of peasants you will be taxing in your domains, you will be better off."
Update: Also see: crossposts at ProgressiveBlue and MyLeftWing, and a response to Nicholas Beaudrot drinking the Axelrod cool-aid that the Public Option will "the Public Option will only affect a small number of people", in a comment at Donkelylicious.
OK say, just hypothetically, that you are an administration looking to get one of your two signature policies passed. And the Senate, deeply entrenched in the pockets of the affected industry, looked like it will gut your legislation so badly that getting the result passed will stink of failure almost as much as the stench of failure if it is defeated.
Suppose its so bad that the Senate action is the most likely way for your party to lose the Majority in the House is for the disappointed Democratic supporters of so-called "Blue Dogs" to stay home in the midterms while fire up Republican opponents turn out in large numbers.
That would be the time to bring out the "nuclear option" ... the threat to radically change the Senate Filibuster rule so it can no longer be used as a roadblock to reform.
The lunatics are on the grass,
The lunatics are on the grass,
Limbaugh and Beck keep stoking their demented wrath,
Got to keep the loonies on the path.
The lunatics are in the hall,
The lunatics are in the hall,
The Batshit Insane Brigade howls hatred from the floor,
And every day, Hannity sends more.
Rightwing talk radio thugs, RePugs in Washington, and their lunatic base think they're back on the path to power, but the path they're taking is a path to nowhere, it's the path to electoral suicide, it's the path to political oblivion.
The raving lunatics who comprise the Repug base are bound and determined to make obnoxious asses of themselves the entire month of August.
Insurance industry flacks, raving RePugs, craven Blue Dogs and K Street hacks have been beating the hell out of health care reform for weeks. Senator Jim DeMint (Orc) South Carolina is blasting it as National Socialism. The Mighty Wurlitzer up there in the organ loft of the Bipartisan Church of Beltway Believers has been cranked up to full volume, the choir is piously singing Onward Centrist Soldiers, the congregation is rolling in the aisles, speaking in tongues, the holy saints of Blue Cross and CIGNA must be defended, the trumpets have sounded, the heathens are at the gates, the Capitalists of Christ are no longer going to tolerate the unjust slandering of his Good Samaritan health insurance providers. Verily, the Prince of Profits has said unto them: those evil unhinged godless Leftists bent upon destroying the best health care system in the world must be slain and cast into the Lake of Fire.
As Armageddon approaches, the immaculately centrist Gang of Six is offering some friendly advice to Obama. They're saying what reciters of the Catechism of Centrism always say when a Democratic President needs to be reminded that elections only have consequences when RePugs win them . . .
Bipartisanship is a temple,
It's a higher law,
Bipartisanship is a temple,
It's the higher law.
We've all heard their sermons, we've all heard them singing the praises of bipartisanship, we've all seen them telling Obama to sing along, telling him to join them in moderate fellowship, telling him to enter that Cathedral of Centrism and worship beside them.
Yeah. We've all seen it.
They ask Obama to enter,
But then they make him crawl.
So American soldiers are still dying, the NSA is still spying, CIA drones are still flying, Big Pharma, the Lords of Drugs, Blue Cross hacks and CIGNA thugs are still lying. We're told we have to be patient while our wise and caring leaders decide what's best for us, we're told there must be compromise, we're told we have to hold onto the healthcare we've got until a few drops of reform finally trickle down from on high later this year or maybe next year or the year after that.
Well we can't be holding on,
To what we've got,
When all we've got is hurt . . .
Reform Immigration -
March on Washington
David Axelrod made the case for insisting on the public option if there is an individual mandate to buy from health insurance exchanges, on the 
OK say, just hypothetically, that you are an administration looking to get one of your two signature policies passed. And the Senate, deeply entrenched in the pockets of the affected industry, looked like it will gut your legislation so badly that getting the result passed will stink of failure almost as much as the stench of failure if it is defeated.
