Health Care Reform Protester Fails Miserably on "Hardball"

Katy Abram showed up to a town hall meeting that was held by Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) and passionately said that she doesn't want our country turning into Russia or other socialized countries and asked what he would do to support policies that would bring us back to what the founding fathers intended. It was a scene that we have seen played out over and over again at town hall meetings from across the country.

Lawrence O'Donnell was the fill-in host on Hardball yesterday and had Abram on as a guest to ask her about her opposition to health care reform. As Logan Murphy over at Crooks and Liars states, "This wasn't like shooting fish in a barrel, it was like shooting the broad side of a barn with a bazooka -- at point blank range". Watch this:

Obama's Rendition Program

Scott Horton has a piece up at the Huffington Post about Raymond Azar, the apparent first case of rendition that has been carried out on Obama's watch. Horton's whole piece is worth the read, but here are some clips:

According to court papers, on April 7, 2009, Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by "at least eight" heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company's U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe.

[...]

On a ride to the infamous Bagram air base in Afghanistan -- site of the torture-homicides involving U.S. interrogators exposed in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side -- Azar contends that a federal agent pulled a photograph of Azar's wife and four children from his wallet. Confess that you were bribing the contract officer, the agent allegedly said, or you may "never see them again." Azar told his lawyers he interpreted that as a threat to do physical harm to his family.

[...]

Before boarding the Gulfstream, Azar was shackled, blindfolded and had earphones placed on his head. Occasionally, the earphones and blindfold were removed so that his interrogation by FBI agents could continue. The 16-hour flight was broken by a refueling stop in Tbilisi, Georgia -- which has long served as a pit stop for rendition flights into and out of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. During the flight, according to papers filed by the Justice Department, Azar confessed to the charges against him--essentially that he was aware of corrupt payments made to a U.S. government contract agent to help Sima International secure or extend its contracts with U.S. government agencies.

Azar's attorneys are now seeking to suppress that confession, arguing it was secured by torture and that Azar, a native Arabic speaker, did not understand English well enough to have given it.

Gingrich, Grassley, and Steele Think That Voluntary Counseling = Euthanizing the Elderly

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone does a good job exposing the opportunism of Newt Gingrich:

Here is Gingrich a few months ago:

More than 20 percent of all Medicare spending occurs in the last two months of life. Gundersen Lutheran Health System in La Crosse, Wisconsin has developed a successful end-of-life, best practice that combines: 1) community-wide advance care planning, where 90 percent of patients have advance directives; 2) hospice and palliative care; and 3) coordination of services through an electronic medical record. The Gundersen approach empowers patients and families to control and direct their care. The Dartmouth Health Atlas has documented that Gundersen delivers care at a 30 percent lower rate than the national average ($18,359 versus $25,860). If Gundersen’s approach was used to care for the approximately 4.5 million Medicare beneficiaries who die every year, Medicare could save more than $33 billion a year.

via Health Care Rx: Across the Country, Some Systems Are Getting It Right – Newt Gingrich.

Taibbi's reaction:

That was Newt Gingrich just a few months ago praising the “Advance Directives” practiced by a hospital in Wisconsin. Advance Directives are another word for the end-of-life consultations that the teabggers have been flipping out over of late. Gingrich loved them a few months ago.

[...]

Well, what happens when suddenly the Republican party decides it wants to scare the shit out of a bunch of old people by telling them the new health care bill is going to include a provision in which “death panels” ask them “when they want to die”? Now all of the sudden Gingrich is violently against the same programs he was so windily praising earlier this year.

And make no mistake, this is exactly the same thing. The only thing that’s actually in the health care proposals is a provision that would allow Medicare to pay for exactly the kind of programs Gingrich praised, on a voluntary basis. The programs are not government-administered in any way, there’s just government money now to pay for the private programs. And now Gingrich is suddenly aghast at them.

Ezra Klein labels Gingrich as an intellectual fraud and frankly, it is hard to disagree.

Who else has decided to jump on the "the government wants to kill old people" train? How about the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley:



Grassley, while the latest to embrace this view, is simply another example of how this argument has crept into the mainstream of the Republican Party. RNC Chairman Michael Steele also recently stated that it was "proper" for Sarah Palin to question the so-called "death panels" in the health care reform legislation.

Stop Slandering us You Health Care Reforming Nazis!

If anyone wonders why local groups from around the country, including the Cincinnati Tea Party and Cincinnati 9/12 Project, continue to compare President Obama to Hitler and the current Administration to Nazis, then look no further:



Don't you like how Beck says that he isn't saying that eugenics is going to happen? I guess he changed his mind from back in May:

He's saying you can either let the delivery system do it, in other words, the healthcare system can just say, yeah, you're not going to get that. You're too old. You're a drain on society. I'm sorry, no kidney dialysis for people over 70. What is it in the UK?

60. Some the things they cut off once you outlived your usefulness.

This is Nazi Germany stuff.

This is the kind of stuff that is progressive in its nature. It is eugenics. It is survival of the fittist.

Regardless, the rest of his rant is filled with how similar these times are to the time during the rise of the Nazis. Rep. Tom Pence just wrote a piece that was posted over at Human Events in which he decried the criticism of those who oppose health care reform:

The notion that Americans may not want the federal government making health care decisions on their behalf appears to be truly beyond the comprehension of Democrats in Congress and the White House. So they have responded by slandering honest folks looking to have their voices heard.

The arrogance which the Democrats have displayed by name-calling and discrediting these people reveals their insolence and hypocrisy.

It appears that community organizing and grassroots are terms reserved solely for liberal activism. A number of taxpayer and patients rights groups post the location of town halls on the internet, and Democrats in charge act as though it is an abomination to democracy. Yet when then Senator Obama throws together an operation of a million liberal activists, so organic they created an iPhone app for it, that’s just good old fashioned political organizing. Right!

"Slandering honest folks"...who keep comparing Democrats to Nazis in order to argue against health care. Who is slandering who here?

For me, it is not an issue of opposing the "First Amendment Rights" of Conservatives to organize, voice their opposition, or even be part of grassroots or astroturf organizations to oppose the legislation. What I take issue with is the complete disregard for civil debate and the encouragement to purposefully "shout down" people at town hall meetings that feel differently than they do. What I take issue with, is perpetuating complete falsehoods that have been circulated about health care reform and then, based on these falsehoods, start to label people as "downright evil" and "Nazis" when they question the truth of said claims.

The criticism of opponents of health care reform doesn't have anything to do with suppressing the viewpoints of opponents of this legislation. The criticism of opponents of health care reform has everything to do with trying to maintain a healthy debate that is rooted in fact and refrains from labeling people as the equivalent of Hitler because they may support reforms to the health care system.

The Daily Show on the Health Care Debate

You knew that with all the madness that has been taking place in regard to the debate over health care reform as of late, The Daily Show was bound to provide some insight:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Healther Skelter
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

Rove More Involved in Attorney Firings Than Previously Disclosed

Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee released over 5,400 pages of emails from the Bush White House and the Republican National Committee regarding the controversial firing of U.S. Attorneys.

You can read the White House emails here and you can read the RNC emails here.

and what did the emails reveal? From Bloomberg:

Karl Rove and other aides to former President George W. Bush played a bigger role in the dismissal of federal prosecutors than was previously disclosed, newly released documents show.

and what about former U.S. Attorney from New Mexico, David Iglesias? Again from Bloomberg:

In an interview with the committee, Miers said Rove became “very agitated” in a conversation with her about David Iglesias, then the U.S. attorney in New Mexico. The Judiciary Committee released a transcript of the Miers interview.

“It was clear to me that he felt like he had a serious problem and that he wanted something done about it,” Miers said, according to the transcript. She said she didn’t recall whether Rove said he wanted Iglesias removed.

One Rove aide e-mailed another in 2005 discussing the firing of Iglesias. The e-mail said: “I would really like to move forward with getting rid of NM USATTY.” Miers later wrote in an e-mail that a decision had been made to replace Iglesias.

The Justice Department “gave Iglesias top rankings, so this decision was clearly not just the result of the White House following the department’s lead as Rove and Miers have maintained,” according to Conyers.

A chain of e-mails in 2006 started by then-Representative Heather Wilson, a New Mexico Republican, criticized Iglesias for failing to bring public corruption cases that could help Republicans.

A Rove aide forwarded Wilson’s e-mail to Rove and complained that Iglesias was “shy about doing his job on” Patricia Madrid, Wilson’s Democratic challenger in 2006 who was the state’s attorney general at the time. Weeks later, Iglesias was placed on a final list to be fired.

Is this really any surprise?

Is the Diagnosis of the Health Care Debate that Democracy is Sick?

Ezra Klein thinks that it isn't Health Care Reform that is sick, but rather Democracy:

...the questions reformers have to answer is not "when did you stop beating your wife?" It's "what will prevent you from beating your wife?" Given that there is no such thing as a "death panel," nor any policy provision that would establish such a thing, it is hard to explain the institutional checks that would prevent a "death panel" from coming into being. When you have to explain why your bill won't create death panels, and what will make sure that it doesn't, you've pretty much lost the argument.

[...]

What we're seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It's distrust in the political system. A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the "institutional checks" that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other. In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable. If it was not unthinkable, then no number of institutional checks could repair that relationship. Similarly, the relationship between the protesters and the government is not healthy. The protesters believe the government capable of madness. There is no evidence for that claim, which means that there is no answer for it, either. That claim is not about what is in this bill, or what government has done in Medicare and Medicaid and the VA. It is about what a certain slice of Americans think their government -- and by extension, their fellow citizens -- capable of.

How does a country get to a point when the discourse about, in this case, health care reform has morphed into the actual belief by some members of society that senior citizens will be euthanized if reforms to the system are passed? More importantly, how does this belief (and others) become legitimized when there is no such provision in the actual bills that are being proposed? Klein thinks that it indicates a fundamental distrust of the government, even to the point where opponents of health care reform are willing to believe that the government could euthanize their own citizens. What does this mean really? Perhaps that this movement isn't rooted in a concern about health care reform, but rooted in a blind hatred for the government. Members of this movement don't need to have their rage backed up by factual information; they feel that they can accomplish their goals through anger and opposition.

You see it in video after video, outrageous claims are being made about this legislation and yet I wonder if simply countering these claims with statements like "no where in this legislation does it say what you are claiming", is going to be enough?

Alaska Teabagger Rally in Anchorage 8/10/09 from Dennis Zaki on Vimeo.