My take on HealthCare

I haven't posted much at all on this subject, because frankly, I haven't read the bill and really don't know too much about what it says.

I know that it doesn't talk about "death panels", euthanasia, abortions, etc. But other than that, it is a 1,000 page bill. And my representatives won't even read it.

So far, from what [little] I do know:

• People are angry on both sides.
• The right says the left are being thugs at the town halls
• The left says the right are being thugs at the town halls
• I've seen pictures/videos of both of them doing it
• I doubt there are many "paid" disrupters
• Lies are being thrown about by both sides as to what exactly this bill is or isn't

I have some opinions:

• The Representatives/Senators we've elected need to read the thing, in its entirety, before voting either way
• People need to calm down at the town hall meetings, and stop shouting over each other
• While I feel for the uninsured, I don't think now is the time to fix this
• Thus, I don't like it that Obama is rushing this through

Therefore, before giving healthcare to everyone, I think we need to do something more important: fix the healthcare system for those of us who already have healthcare. If you watch the movie Sicko by Michael Moore, regardless of how you feel about him, this brilliant documentary really shows how the insurance companies screw us over. There are "death" panels on private insurance companies' payroll; there are people who decide if they should pay for healthcare based on monetary/accounting figures. My sister almost died because the insurance company wouldn't approve her MRI to see what was wrong with her. When my parents finally just borrowed the money to do it anyway, they found a life threatening disease that would have killed my sister had they not caught it in time.

And that is wrong. My parents pay for healthcare.

This is what needs to be fixed. Otherwise, we are going to replace these corrupt beaurecrats with government ones, and everyone will deal with these guys. Fix the system we have now, don't just shuffle who pays for it and give it to everyone.

N. Korea needs to be put in its place.

North Korea has threatened to "wipe out" the US and its allies today.

A US Destroyer has been following the Kang Nam, a North Korean ship suspected of transporting illicit weapons to Burma, off China's coast, in accordance with U.N. sanctions passed to punish the nation for the nuclear test last month.

The UN sanction requires that ships suspected of carrying illicit cargo to allow inspection at sea. If they won't comply, they will be escorted to the nearest port for inspection.

North Korea has not taken kindly to the resolution and the US's involvement in its enforcement.

"If the U.S. imperialists start another war, the army and people of Korea will ... wipe out the aggressors on the globe once and for all," the official Korean Central News Agency said.

North Korea has banned ships from the waters off its east coast starting Thursday through July 10 for military exercises, Japan's Coast Guard said.

North Korea is expected to be testing short & medium range missiles during that time, including the one aimed at Hawaii.

Source

I am tired of being threatened by this small country and its smaller man in charge. I'm sure our ally, South Korea, is tired of it as well. We need to do something about this. What exactly, I'm not sure. But something is better than nothing.

Any suggestions?

Torture: A Crime that Requires a Verdict

Borrowed from sojourners: http://blog.sojo.net/2009/04/17/torture-a-crime-that-requires-a-verdict/

Torture: A Crime that Requires a Verdict

by Jimmy McCarty 04-17-2009

Dear President Obama,
Thank you for making the four memos approving of and describing the torture done to children of God in our name public even though many pleaded for you not to. Thank you for letting me know that my tax dollars were used to torture those carrying God’s image. I have known we made helpless people think they were drowning for a while now, but now I know we kept some awake for almost two weeks straight. Now I know we put collars around the necks of defenseless people and slammed their heads into walls. And now I know we put people in boxes so small they couldn’t move and put insects in those boxes the prisoners thought could seriously injure them with no way of escape.

We cannot know what we need to repent of without knowing what sins we have committed. Thank you for letting me know. Now I pray that we as a nation ask for God’s forgiveness for what we, because of our fear and complacency, allowed to happen in our name and work to ensure it never happens again.

Thank you also for vowing that we will never do this again. As a Christian I know God declares these actions completely sinful. There is no theological or ethical justification for torturing another human being. In doing so we demonstrated that we place our faith not in God, or some abstract notion of justice or liberty, but in violence and power. These foundations will not sustain us. Those who live by the sword die by it, and I am now afraid that we have lived by torture so long that we will also die by torture. We must never torture again, and we must work to make amends for the sins we have already committed.

I am not in complete agreement with what you have said, however. You have said no one will be held accountable for the acts of torture because they were approved by the justice department. While I understand the premise of your reasoning, I think it is wrong.

Perhaps those interrogators who physically administered the acts of torture were following orders, but those who gave them were not. They made a decision to pervert justice. Those in the know have not apologized for their conduct or admitted it was wrong; in fact they have vehemently defended it. What they did was illegal according to multiple international treaties and laws. We have prosecuted people from other nations for doing the exact same things we did. We cannot sweep this under the rug. While it may be deemed unnecessary, or impractical, to prosecute all involved from the top down, someone must be held responsible. Those officials that perverted our previously agreed upon notions of justice must be held responsible.

There must be an independent commission of inquiry into the actions of the Bush administration. Everyone, from former President Bush and former Vice-president Dick Cheney down to the justice department, who made the decisions to approve of torture must be brought before the American public and be held responsible. It is the only way the rest of the world will believe we have discarded these evil methods and know we are no longer a nation that tortures. Not to do so is to be complicit in the cover-up of the ways we have sinned and the perpetuation of that reputation of us throughout the world.

It is a sad day in American history. May God have mercy on us.

Barack Dubya Obama

Same sh*t, different piles.

Okay, so remember how during Obama's campaign he got people like me to vote for him because he criticized George W. Bush's domestic spying surveillance program and said he'd end it?

Well, I do. That's a huge reason I voted for him. I was tired of Bush's trampling over our Constitution and treating us as terrorism suspects.

Remember when Obama's campaign website said that "The Problem" is described in part as the Bush administration having "invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court"?

I do.

In February, President Obama's Justice Department quietly argued in a San Francisco court that it was maintaining the same position as President Bush's Justice Department on a case involving detainees trying to sue a private company for its role in their (allegedly) extraordinary renditions.

This time the issue was the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, and whether courts would be able to assess its constitutionality in a case called Jewel v. NSA, where the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is challenging the NSA surveillance by suing on behalf of AT&T customers whose records may or may not have been caught up in the NSA "dragnet."
Last Friday, while President Obama traversed throughout Europe, his Justice Department sought to have Jewel v. NSA dismissed because "the Court lacks subject matter jurisdiction with respect to plaintiffs’ statutory claims against the United States because Congress has not waived sovereign immunity" and "because information necessary to litigate plaintiffs’ claims is properly subject to and excluded from use in this case by the state secrets privilege and related statutory privileges."

Argued the Justice Department: Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair "has once again demonstrated that the disclosure of the information implicated by this case, which concerns how the United States seeks to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security."

"President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration's cover-up of the National Security Agency's dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a 'secret' that cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like deja vu all over again."

Exactly. Deja vu. French for WTF Obama? You are alienating those who voted for you. You know, the ones tired of Bush and his policies. But you are continuing them? Wow.

"beyond even the outrageously broad 'state secrets' privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they 'willfully disclose' to the public what they have learned...

"Everything for which Bush critics excoriated the Bush DOJ -- using an absurdly broad rendition of 'state secrets' to block entire lawsuits from proceeding even where they allege radical lawbreaking by the President and inventing new claims of absolute legal immunity -- are now things the Obama DOJ has left no doubt it intends to embrace itself..."

Obama, you are going to lose your base. People like me. The majority of Americans voted for you because we opposed these policies. Do you think we'll vote for you again if you continue them?

Get it together, man.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/04/on-state-secret.html

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/09/tpm/index.html

We are not a "Christian" Nation

Recently there has been quite the discussion and controversy regarding President Obama's recent speech in Turkey, where he said:

"I’ve said before that one of the great strengths of the United States is – although as I mentioned we have a very large Christian population – we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation, or a Jewish nation, or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."

This is just reiteration of what he said while running for President:

"Whatever we once were, we're no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers. We should acknowledge this and realize that when we're formulating policies from the state house to the Senate floor to the White House, we've got to work to translate our reasoning into values that are accessible to every one of our citizens, not just members of our own faith community."

Now, many Christians are in an uproar about this, saying "but we are the majority!"

This is like saying "We are a caucasian nation because caucasians are the majority."

Wouldn't make it true. We are a nation that contains caucasians, and african americans, and native americans, and hispanics... Just because a majority is present doesn't make it the definition of the country.

Further, an article at Sojourners own Jim Wallis' blog puts this into perspective. I'll repost an abridged version of the article:

Monday, in his address to the Turkish Parlaiment, President Obama made a statement guaranteed to spark controversy. “America is not a Christian nation.” Like clockwork, conservatives voiced their complaint. Though it is clear that people have vastly different interpretations of what the founding fathers intended for the religiosity of America, from a theological standpoint, we cannot assert that America is a Christian nation.

How much more offended should we have been if President Obama did declare America to be a Christian nation? Would we really want our faith and our savior associated with a country that gave birth to a trashy restaurant that objectifies women {Hooters}, or worse, a country that legalized slavery for 200 years and now has a wide gap between the rich and the poor? No. But at the same time we cannot deny that our country has done many great things under the influence of Christianity, such as the abolition of slavery, the passage of civil rights legislation, and the creation of PEPFAR.
America is not a Christian nation, but there are followers of Christ within the country pushing the government and the nation to do the will of God. The only state, nation, principality, or country that can call itself a Christian “nation” is the kingdom of God fully ushered in by the second coming of Christ.

America is not a Christian nation because no nation is a Christian nation.

Further, from a political standpoint, we aren't a Christian nation either.

Here's what I mean:

Saudi Arabia is a Muslim State. From wikipedia:

The central institution of the Saudi Arabian government is the Saudi monarchy. The Basic Law of Government adopted in 1992 declared that Saudi Arabia is a monarchy ruled by the sons and grandsons of the first king, Abd Al Aziz Al Saud. It also claims that the Qur'an is the constitution of the country, which is governed on the basis of the Sharia (Islamic Law).

In the US, the Constitution is not based on the Bible. If it were, we would have some major problems if we were to go with the prevailing interpretations of the New Testament. Women not able to lead (or speak in church), having to wear head coverings, be required by law to submit to their husbands. Being illegal to swear. I could go on. The point is, we are not a Christian State.

But our Constitution is based on freedom to choose. In fact, from the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

We are not a "Christian" nation. We are a nation that contains Christians, but we also contain Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists, and Deists.

The Republican party is CLUELESS...

...and why I'm an angry (almost)ex-republican.

The Republicans are critizing Obama's plans for....well everything. They have nothing good to say about him or his policies, any of them. But when the President asks for any alternatives, they just complain futher about socialism or more tax cuts for the rich. WTF? Why?! Oh yeah, the rich that "create" jobs. That may have been true in Reagan's time...but now the rich only create jobs in India and other countries (can you say outsourcing?)

Oh wait, the republicans do have an idea! Impeach Obama and the Dems in Congress because their plans haven't worked yet! Its Obama's fault! Riiiiiiiight. Put the Republicans back in power. Because the last 8 years haven't been damaging enough. You know, two wars and a doubled deficit, and then a stock market crash. Right. Its all Obama's fault.

I'm not a Democrat, either. I don't like some of Obama's policies. But at least he's trying something new. Unlike the tired old "Reaganomics" that the Republicans keep proposing that only worked during Reagan's presidency. In fact, the Republicans let a short term solution that got the US out of a specific recession and turned it into a macro-solution for every problem. I used to like the Republican party. But now they have to blame a new President who has tried to reach across the aisle, who is trying some new things, and blame the economy on him, instead of looking inward and seeing that in the last 29 years, we've had a Republican in the White House for 22 years of them. And oh yea, didn't the deficit spending decrease under Clinton's budget proposals and the public debt increase only slightly (due to interest) while falling as a percentage of GDP? I'm no Clinton fan. I feel that he wasted a ton of his presidency fooling around with Monica and then lying about it. But at least, for a time, he did something and we prospered. But under the last Republican Presidency of eight years and Republican Congress of six, we have gone nowhere. (Except, of course, in doubled deficit-land, Afghanistan, Iraq, and a flooded Katrina superdome)...

What happened, Republican party? You used to stand for something. Under Reagan, you had some new ideas that got us out of a recession. You used to have leaders. Now what do you have? Rush Limbaugh, Jindal, and Palin?

I'm not a Democrat. But I'm sure as hell not a Republican anymore.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/03/25/gop-leaders-introduce-housing-plan/

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover

AIG

Obama: Nationalize AIG or let it fail.

I read a great editorial today by Jack Cafferty, in which he says regarding the bank bailouts that I believe is applicable to the current controversy over AIG:

"Either nationalize the big ones in trouble or let them fail. It doesn't seem that just continuing to hand them money is working."

So let's talk about this. Tao discusses how AIG is circulating a "Doomsday Memo" about how our economy would collapse if we let them fail. I'm not so sure, because we just keep pouring in money and nothing seems to be getting better. We already own 80% of it! If we own 80% of it, let's just buy it and fix the thing ourselves!

Tao continues:

"It was the government's job -- as the primary lenders and financiers of these essentially bankrupt companies -- to dictate the rules of the game. Of course, they could have put strings on that money. They could have capped bonuses, or salaries overall. They could have capped it for everybody, instead of just the top five or twenty-five executives. They could have taken these companies into bankruptcy, where the executives would not be legally entitled to their salaries or bonuses.Yet, they did none of these things. Instead, AIG executives will walk away with $450 million in bonuses -- at a company that was such a colossal failure that it lost $99.3 billion last year and required a $170 billion taxpayer bailout. Worse yet, the executives in the division that caused this epic meltdown will get $165 million in bonuses."

...if these corporations are too big to fail, then they are too big to exist: a proposition also agreed to by the populists and progressives of the late 1800s/early 1900s, by Abe Lincoln, by Teddy Roosevelt, by FDR, by Harry Truman....understood that corporations that grow too enormous threaten our economy and our democracy, and should be broken up into smaller entities that can't do so much damage when they are mismanaged. The era of bank consolidation has to come to an end, and these monsters need to be broken into smaller companies just like Standard Oil was in the early 1900s. Ironically, some of our tax dollars were actually used by these bank conglomerates to buy other banks, instead of, say, giving out loans to consumers and businesses trying to buy things or make investments that would create jobs...we can start by doing what our progressive forbearers did: breaking up the big financial trusts, regulating them with vigor, holding them accountable. When a class of people has screwed up as terribly as big bankers have, we should take away their power and watch them like hawks for the rest of their time on this earth."

We broke up Microsoft for getting too big. Remember that? Time to do it again, this time with big banks and Wall Street.

Thomas Jefferson said "If the America people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currencies, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their prosperity until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

Here's the case for the Government letting AIG fail instead of bailing it out.

According to this article from TIME, we don't need to bail it out. We don't need AIG. Our economy will recover and in fact be more prosperous if we let it fail. Here's an excerpt that I think illustrates beautifully what would happen if AIG were to fail:

"Think of the insured house. Many institutions hold insurance on the house; on the other side are insurance companies and the like making an opposite bet. If the house is destroyed, one group of institutions wins and the other group loses. Considering all institutions together, no money was truly lost..."

I've said it before. It AIG fails, something (or many somethings) will take its place and we will be okay.