Teabagger's Parents and Grandparents

Actually, looking at the age of some of the teabaggers it might be the same generation... the dream lives on.

Just the Beginning

Teabaggers have ridiculed a man with Parkinson's, compared Obama to Hilter, threatened violence with guns, used racial slurs, and said health care is a privilege and not a right. Health care is a privilege? Are the Teabaggers so out of touch that they believe all working people can afford health care? I couldn't afford an extra $180 a month for insurance and that's with a $2500 deductible! Even with a good job I pay almost $100 a month but that includes dental and optical and a much lower deductible.

Here are several reasons why health care should be a right and not a privilege:

Drug resistant infections
out of control emergency rooms
new pandemics on the horizon
lost productivity
spiralling costs for everyone...

How about just the first point? For every infection that goes untreated and festers or for every patience that does not follow their medication regimen we are setting the stage for super bugs. TB now comes in a bright, new, shiny drug resistant strain, childhood illnesses once thought to be eradicated are making a comeback.

When I was in school we had immunization day. We were given Polio vaccines right in school. There have been cries, on the right, of socialized medicine invading our country and we are on a slippery slope to becoming a European style state but many of the people so violently opposed to the public option also received Polio Vaccines in Public schools, as well as other vaccines, TB tests, and fluoride treatments. There was a time when we as Americans all worked together to achieve great things and I was hoping we were about to experience a Renaissance but I was wrong. I was not so naive as to believe that Obama would be able to cure everything but he came with a message of hard work and pulling together and personal responsibility that I liked.

The reason I think this health care reform is a good start (but only a start) is that I hope it will put us on track for a single payer system. Or, if not a single payer system then establish a system of private NON-PROFIT insurers. We always hear about the English, Canadian, or French system but what about the German system?
excerpted from Germany’s Health Care System: It’s Not The American Way
by Uwe E. Reinhardt

First, Germany’s system is almost elegant in its simplicity. That is probably
no historical accident. Germans appear to understand the trade-off
between the operational simplicity of a system and its fairness and efficiency
in each particular instance...
Second, the ethical precepts driving German health policy differ substantially
from those driving American policy. Germans, along with other
Europeans and Canadians, view health care as part of the cement that binds
a people sharing the same geography into a genuine nation. All social
classes in Germany thus are made to share the same health care system.
About 90 percent of the population gains access to that system through one
social insurance scheme that is administered by some 1,000 fiscally independent,
semiprivate sickness funds operating under the constraints of a
federal statute. Only about 10 percent of the German population has
private commercial insurance, but they share the same health care delivery
system and merely enjoy more amenities.
Under Germany’s statutory insurance scheme, premiums are based on
ability to pay. With the financial burden of illness fully socialized in this
way, the system inevitably would be subjected to top-down global budgeting,
including controls on price and volume. Germany’s clear social ethic,
to which all political parties still pledge explicit allegiance, makes the
global budgeting described by these authors politically acceptable.
The United States never has had a one-tier health care system, and, as
the recent debate on health reform in Congress has demonstrated, the
United States never will have a one-tier health care system. A working
majority of the politicians representing Americans in the policy arena
evidently view health care as essentially a private consumption good of
which low-income families might be accorded a basic ration, but whose
availability and quality should be allowed to vary with family income. This
view lends official sanction to the following three-tier system: Tier I for
the low-income uninsured: a system of public hospitals and clinics that
rations health care severely through constraints on capacity. Tier II for
the insured, broad middle class: a system of competitive, integrated private
health plans budgeted on a per capita basis, with limited choice of providers
and with varying degrees of tacit rationing. Tier III for the Medicare
population and the moneyed elite: the traditional, open-ended, free-choice
fee-for-service health care system with little or no rationing of care.

The interesting thing is that this article was written in 1994 and things have not changed. Well what has changed is that we spend a great percentage of our GDP, 14% in '94 and over 16% now, Germany still only spends about 10%.

The Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland do not use a government-run, Medicare-like health insurance plan. They all rely on purely private, nonprofit or for-profit insurers that are goaded by tight regulation to work toward socially desired ends. And they do so at average per-capita health-care costs far below those of the United States — costs in Germany and the Netherlands are less than half of those here.

So really the Teabaggers are willing to risk another 1918 flu pandemic, or the rampant infection from the next superbug because they don't want to give any handouts... I am truly saddened at the level of hate this country has come to. Just wait for the immigration reform. If you thought health care was a fight you ain't seen nothin' yet

WTF

If you can't read the title it says "if Brown can't stop it a Browning can..."



This is the type of violence that the Republicans and their anti-American supporters have been striving for ever since the Obama Administration took office with the pledge to clean up the GOP's mess.

In attendance and apparently proud to be part of a group of anti-American traitors engaged in seditious behavior were Republican Reps. Steve King (IA), Michele Bachmann (MN), and Mike Pence (IN), and the insanity was in part organized by Dick Armey's Freedomworks and Art Pope's Americans for Prosperity. Americans for Prosperity "advocates pro-tobacco industry positions on issues like cigarette taxes and clean indoor air laws" [SourceWatch].
Story from epluribus media

Welcome Back Real Time

Bill Maher roared back from hiatus and I couldn't be happier. He started the show by talking to Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP. Warren said the financial system is so broken that it's literally banking lobbyists against American Families.
His panel Elliot Spitzer, former Governor of New York; Norah O'Donnell, MSNBC correspondent; and Seth McFarlane, creator of Family Guy; were hilarious. Finally Wanda Sykes came out and talked about being black and being gay. It was a great show and you can watch and join the discussions here Real Time.
If you don't have time to watch here are the main points:
1. Bank Lobbyists are destroying any chance of real financial reform
2. Everything that caused the Financial Melt-Down is still happening
3. Eight of the ten new rules to protect consumers from predatory creditors have been subverted
4. Sarah Palin knows how to fain righteous anger and Bill O'Reilly is a douche. Seth McFarlane hired an actress with Down's Syndrome and O'Reilly labeled him as a hater...

The episode features the character Chris falling for a girl with Down syndrome. On a date, he asks what her parents do. She replies: "My dad's an accountant, and my mom is the former governor of Alaska."

Last night, Palin appeared on The O'Reilly Factor and said, "This world is full of cruel, cold-hearted people" and asked, "When are we going to say this stuff isn't really funny?"

O'Reilly then asked her why she called for the resignation of Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel but didn't come down on Rush Limbaugh even though both men used the "r word?"

Of Course we know that it is OK for Limbaugh to use the r word because HE is a satirist...
5. Obama and the Democrats are PUSSIES. They are on the right side of every issue and still let the Republicans frame the debate.
6. Teabaggers are idiots Only 12 percent of the public say that the Obama administration has lowered their taxes since coming to office, despite the fact that the White House's stimulus package cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, a new opinion survey found.
7. DADT needs to be repealed.
There's more but you'll have to watch clips to get the real deal.

Hah!

This in hilarious. Fox News has a poll asking "What do you think Tea Party Movement is about?"
... and the people have spoken




And here's an example (unedited by me) of what the Tea Partiers are looking for:

We simply want someone who is average. It doesn't need to be a Rhodes Scholar. It doesn't need to be a college professor. It doesn't need to be a lawyer who passed the bar. It doesn't need to be a Peanut farmer, or an expert on global warming. Just an average guy with some CEO experience. Or even a hot chick with the same qualifications would be fine. Or even an average chick with the same qualifications. "Average" means "one of us". That brings a lot of baggage with it, such as imperfect, and blemishes, and mistakes, and even some inexperience. But it also brings the ability to lead, and to be accountable for choices made. It would also be nice to have someone as a leader who does not invalidate us and dismiss us, calling us names such as "teabaggers" and "birthers" and "right-wing nuts" and "Limbaugh lovers" and "gun nuts" but instead, call us "taxpayers" and "citizens" and "voters" and "constituents" and "Americans".

I would love to see the Tea Party rise to power. I think it would be the best thing to happen to the republican party

Stupid People

This image from the BBC article Why Do People Often Vote Against Their Own Interests

Here's a few key paragraphs from the article:

But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform - the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state - are often the ones it seems designed to help.

In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%.

It is a befuddling phenomenon to me. The basic thesis is that the politician with the best story wins. Check out this anecdote:

He uses the following exchange from the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 to illustrate the perils of trying to explain to voters what will make them better off:

Gore: "Under the governor's plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you have now under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he's modeled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries."

Bush: "Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers."I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It's fuzzy math. It's trying to scare people in the voting booth."

Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense - but Mr Bush won the debate. With statistics, the voters just hear a patronising policy wonk, and switch off.

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: "One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.

No matter how you slice it; facts come up short and stories, no matter how flawed, are king.