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We have unabashed and unapologetic corporate whores, who really should be in prison for taking bribes,like Lamar Alexander-- who's have taken legalized bribes from the Insurance Industry, around $501,650 and from his sponsors in the Medical-Industrial Complex for another $2,070,958-- warning about revolution and the destruction of the Democratic Party (an idea he has in common with one of the more corrupt of the Blue Dogs, Minnesota's Colin Peterson) if health care reform is passed.

Imagine that!

Republicans and the insurance industry front groups just spent the entire summer trying to scare the public with nonsensical lies about death panels and government takeovers and illegal aliens and now you have a shill like Alexander telling the press there should be no health care reform because people are scared.

This is just a replay of what happened when progressives passed Social Security, the Minimum Wage and Medicare! The Republicans obstructed, spread lies and fear and smear and predicted the end of civilization.

Yesterday's L.A. Times pointed out that the states most likely to gain the most under healthcare overhaul are home to its biggest detractors. I have been arguing on activist boards almost daily, looking at the more callous opposers like Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Wally Herger (R-CA), Paul Ryan (R-WI), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), David Dreier (R-CA), Charlie Melancon (Blue Dog-LA), and Parker Griffith (Blue Dog-AL), and their mid boggling determination to screw over their own constituents to preserve the status quo for their generous campaign donors.
They represent themselves and their corporate masters, not the people that elected them.

Yesterday, though, I found a whole new level of insanity as one of the cable news channels highlighted preparations three states are making for this winter's expected swine flu epidemic.
New York and California are going all out to set up programs to immunize school children and contain the expected severity of the problem. Texas has a two pronged attack: relying on the private sector and encouraging people to pray. Because private industry has alwys gone out of it's way to help the community and because prayer has been shown to be such an excellent antigen in the past?!?!?!

I wonder if Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, another opponent of government action, plans to exorcize the H1N1 virus.

Just to give you an inkling why this obviously simple and long overdue legislation is meeting such heavy opposition, Joe Barton, the ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee has personally led the fight to de-rail the bill.

He's part of the GOP anti-health care leadership team charged with fucking up and opposing any legislation on behalf of Insurance companies; who have paid him well, he is a major recipient of Insurance Industry bribes $266,149 plus another gob stopping $2,142,421 from the Medical-Industrial Complex!.

He and politicians like him have had their votes bought and paid for. Corporations OWN their own legislators, and tell them how to vote and on what.

They no longer represent their constituents interests at all.......

Socialism, Marxism, Leninism, fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism -- few, if any, "-isms" have been left off as the right turns up the volume and the vitriol in its daily verbal assault on the Obama's agenda.

According to a search from TVEyes.com, since Obama's inauguration in January, these terms and others like them have been thrown around on cable news at least 3,000 times. Add conservative talk radio and the nation's newspaper op-ed pages to the mix and watch that figure grow exponentially!

Take the third most-listened-to radio voice in America, San Francisco's Michael "I think Autistic kids are faking it" Savage, who recently called Obama "a neo-Marxist fascist dictator in the making." That's one of the nicer things this classless tool has said of the president during his daily three-hour hatefest. He's also claimed that the "radical left," including Obama, "dreams" of "Maoist revolution" with "death camps" and that Obama appointees "actually have almost the same exact policies as the Nazi Party did." Facts are obviously not even a part of his show, he offers nothing to back his imbecilic claims.

Then there's Fox News' "Make it up on the spot" king, Sean Hannity, who has dubbed the United States under Obama the "United States of France" (bonus points for the clever tie in with the despised French) and the president himself "Commissar-in-Chief." Hannity, who would never pass up an opportunity to regurgitate GOP talking points, has even lauded House Republicans for finally using the "S-word." He's also said the Obama administration "is on a mission to hijack Capitalism in favor of Collectivism. ... The Bolsheviks have already arrived." He opened one recent show by declaring, "Day number 52 of the Socialism that you've been waiting for." At least he can count. Spelling, on the other hand, doesn't appear to be Hannity's strong suit. His Commie hating blood runs so -- well, red, I guess, that his program recently misspelled "comrades" in their on-air graphics!

The same clueless tards who've compared progressive policy to Communism have gone on to accuse the president and other Democrats of "McCarthyism! WTF?!? The mind bogglingly stupidity of this comparison is obviously lost on those screaming it the loudest!
It would be a bit like calling forth demons and cavorting with Satan days before kicking off a witch hunt!

No issue bunches the panties of conservatives quite like health-care reform! For more than 75 years, conservatives have smeared attempts to reform our faltering health-care system by labeling it the scary sounding "socialized medicine."

Anyone who argues that Obama's health-care reform initiatives amount to "socialized medicine" is being disingenuous at best. At worst, they lack the basic knowledge of what "socialized medicine" actually is.

Simply put, health-care initiatives that leave the for-profit health insurance industry alone, reform that leaves doctors free to offer their services outside of a government system, reform that gives people a choice between a private health-care plan over a government plan simply can't be described with any honesty as "socialized medicine."

As the Urban Institute put it last year, "socialized medicine involves government financing and direct provision of health care services," and therefore, current progressive health-care reform proposals do not "fit this description."

Of course facts in evidence have never stopped conservatives from claiming otherwise for decades. Since the 1930s, these twits have assailed at least 16 different progressive health-care reform initiatives as "socialized medicine" or as a step that would inevitably lead in that direction.

Franklin Roosevelt's consideration of government health insurance when drafting the 1935 bill that created Social Security, or Lyndon Johnson's 1965 amendment to the Social Security Act establishing Medicare?
Conservatives were quick to run with the "socialized medicine" smear.

Ronald Reagan, patron saint of greedy fucktards everywhere actually released an album full of inflammatory language in 1964, when he was on the stump for Barry Goldwater, in his Presidential bid said of Medicare, "Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients." Of course likening it to the dreaded Socialism......

It is their one trick pony, in order to keep Big Pharma, and Insurance political donations, contributions and bribes pouring in, they will happily sell your life, and your health for some lobbyist cash, or a fat campaign contribution, or in Billy Tauzin's case, a multi million dollar position as CEO of a corporation Tauzin sponsored a bill for!

In the world we actually live in, pro-corporate, inequality-increasing Republicans argue that you should vote for them because they’re regular guys you’d like to have a beer with, while Democrats who want to raise taxes on top earners, expand health care and raise the minimum wage are snooty elitists out of touch snobs.
http://www.americablog.com/2008/05/when-you-fish-in-your-private.html

And in that world, stripping away the regular-guy facade-- pointing out that everything Rush Limbaugh said about John Kerry applies equally to McCain, that McCain lives in a material world few Americans can imagine-- is only fair. Yes, Obama vacations in Hawaii-- but Cindy McCain says that “In Arizona, the only way to get around the state is by small private plane.”

The squealing from the usual pundits shows how much the Obama campaign has the G.O.P. worried. Back in 2004 Fox News described John Kerry as “one of the haves” with a “billionaire wife”; now it asks whether raising the issue of Mr. McCain’s houses is “bashing the American dream.” WTF?!?

And the McCain campaign, after initially mumbling something about how Mr. Obama eats arugula, quickly resorted to its all-purpose answer: you can’t criticize the candidate because he’s a former P.O.W. Didn't the pundits cry foul when Wesley Clark made the entirely reasonable point that having been a P.O.W., while it makes you a hero, doesn’t necessarily qualify you to become president?

When McCain first ran for the House, he won for two reasons: his father-in-law's great wealth and connections and his ability to exploit his POW status. McCain's father-in-law and his friends many of whom were criminals, and not just the white collar kind, like Charles Keating who has bragged about bribing McCain. (McCain got far more from Keating than any of the other Keating 5. "Between 1982 and 1987, McCain had received $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates. In addition, McCain's wife Cindy McCain and her father Jim Hensley had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. McCain, his family, and their baby-sitter had made nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard Keating's jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.")
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2000-02-17/news/haunted-by-spirits