An Email to Senator Conrad;

First I want to point out that me and my wife are partial owners of the XXX Farm in XXX N.D. We have extended Family throughout North Dakota, My wife and I were married in Bottineau and I was discharged from the USAF at Minot AFB 1968.

Healthcare has always been important to my wife and I. I am a disabled vet with a service connected disability. When my wife was just 30 years old, she had a cerebral hemorrhage that left her with seizures. There were several times during our marriage where I was between jobs or had taken a job. When I was between jobs we couldn't afford the medical insurance nor the medicine that my wife required. I once had to call the rescue squad due to her having a seizure and she was taken to a local hospital.

On one job, she was denied health care benefits for the first year of my employment because of a previously existing condition. Just a little over two years ago she became totally disabled because her seizures led her to putting her hand into a hot skillet burning it severely. She is still a month away from Medicare and has a low cost insurance plan that has terrible drug coverage. Just one of her medications costs $598/ mon even at WalMart.

I looked at the Medicare formulary and over the course of a year her out of pocket costs would be over $5000, you know because of the Drug Cartel that won't allow Medicare to bargain for the best price. When she was employed and had employer based insurance the same drug was $20 for 3 months. We now are forced to purchase her medication from overseas at a price of $175 for 100 days.

I am ashamed at the United States of America for the way our health care is handled. Why are we 37th in health care behind some very small and backwards countries? Why do I have pay the highest cost for prescription medications that are required to sustain life? This is especially true when government gives money to pharmaceutical companies and universities for research into new drugs that are then patented and taken to market with no benefit to the government. The real Drug Cartel is not in Columbia or Mexico but rather in the US Corporations that rake in billions of dollars per year while people are literally dying for lack of their product.

You have the ability to change the condition that our health care is in. But a Co op is not the answer. The Co op my work for farmers in collection of their grain or in the distribution of electricity. It is not the answer for Health Care. I as well as millions of other Americans can not put our trust and welfare in any Corporation be it for profit or not for profit corporation.

My personal choice to resolve the problem is a single payer system with a strong public option. Now I realize that some people claim that this would be socialism. My first response is, so what. There are many socialized programs that Americans don't complain about. Fire and Police Departments, the Military, public schools and Universities, the post office are just a few. These were formed this way because this is the most logical and cost effective way to run these programs. North Dakota has its own State Bank that makes loans to farmers and others. Is that not a Socialized banking system? Is it an uneven playing field for the private banks in North Dakota or just a good way to protect the Citizens of the State should their be a meltdown in the global economic system?

Why, I ask you, can't you support at least a public option in health care? Why should we have to worry about losing our health care if we lose our jobs? We are not asking for any more than the coverage that you and your family enjoy. We are not asking for free health care only a more trustworthy system of delivery.
We want a system that we have some control over. It would be accountable to us the citizens of this country not to some board of directors that may not have our best interests in mind when making decisions.

I asked the question but alas I already know the real answer and it is truly a sad comment on just how corrupt our political system has become. When the voices of corporations become stronger than real live people there is something very wrong. The very fact that person-hood has been granted to corporations and that has led to the practice of lobbying which has corrupted the political process in this country. In most every other country in the industrialized world our politicians would be jailed for accepting bribes from these corporations.

While I no longer live in North Dakota I have family throughout the State and we will be watching your voting record as well as your press releases. When next election comes around our support either monetarily or otherwise will be for either for you or a challenger depending solely on your vote.

Thom,

Everyone should be allowed to hold whatever religious/spiritual beliefs that makes sense to them or makes them feel good. You’ve said that the bottom line is that your spiritual beliefs make you feel good. What you believe doesn’t make sense to me.

Now you’re a person who says that atheism is a religion and if atheists dare to express or explain their beliefs, you call them evangelical atheists, the very works kind. It seems that when it comes to atheists, you think it’s best if they stay in the closet.

You on the other hand, feel free to express your spiritual beliefs whenever you want. On your Tuesday, August 18, program, you expressed your belief that the world benefits from monks sitting around meditating, because you believe that we’re all connected on some cosmic level, and that their meditation improves the world through what would appear (from my perspective) to be magic.

I guess you can claim that there are some female monasteries, though not as prominent as male monasteries and nonexistent in Tibetan Buddhism, a tradition that you seem to hold dear. After all, you refer to the Dalai Lama a His Holiness. I guess that gives you enough wiggle room to talk your way out of charges of being oblivious to the inherent sexism involved.

Fine, believe all the spiritual and pseudoscientific things you want. That’s your right. But you really should reconsider your proposal that MY tax dollars should be used to support YOUR religious/spiritual beliefs. It’s not only disrespectful of the feelings and finances of atheists like me, but since you want to eliminate tax exemptions from all other religious traditions, it’s more arrogant than I thought you’d be. Your superstitions are better than their superstitions! Nice.

I got a bit sidetacked hearing the news that Brett Favre is back; being a long-time Packer fan, I appreciate what he did for the franchise, and my feeling is that no business has a right to keep a man from working if he's capable and somebody is willing to employ him.

Anyways, the discussion with Robert Peters of Morality in Media on Monday reminded me of when I was in the Army, I spent a few weeks at a small military compound on the island of Crete. Directly across the street was a Greek “gift shop” which sold, among other things, “classical” figurines of nude females, and males with jumbo-sized stiffies; the latter depictions can in fact be found on ancient Greek pottery. While local (European) tourists ignored this stuff, some American soldiers from the compound were quite fascinated by it, in a juvenile way; you don’t generally see this kind of thing in an American gift shop.

I wonder what accounts for this difference in reaction. It can’t simply be explained in congenital terms. Americans and Europeans reactions to this stuff should only be explained by an unhealthy and judgmental attitude toward sexuality in this country. Europeans have a decidedly healthier attitude toward sex—it is just part of everyday existence. You can see this in their cinema; in America movies, sex scenes often seem to be just thrown in there for no particular reason but the prurient, but in European movies, it just blends in with the course of a day’s activities—it’s what humans do. In Europe, even young kids are exposed to nude representations of the human body; over time it becomes meaningless.

According to a recent cover story in The Economist, Europeans also seem to believe that American sex offender laws are in many cases “unjust” and “ineffective.” The anecdotal evidence provided to justify this conclusion is typical of the worst case scenario examples used to support a particular view (a 17-year-old girl having oral sex with a boy shy of 16), but it does point out that there is very little done to differentiate degrees of offense in official registers. A report by Human Rights Watch found that sex offender lists included men who visited prostitutes, people who urinated in public, flashers and streakers, and consensual sex between teenagers. Sex offender registrations have exploded, but not because of an increase in sex crimes, but because it now has such a wide net.

Politicians pass harsher laws to satisfy the public fear, but now so many people are registered sex offenders that it is difficult to keep track of who and who isn’t dangerous, according to the article. It is admitted that it a certain percentage of incorrigibles—particularly men who target boys—will reoffend. But for most, the harsh laws are merely self-defeating, since they tend to prevent people from attaining any semblance of a normal life. The article also suggests that money wasted on monitoring the clearly not dangerous could be used to better monitor those who are. The bottom line: make punishment fit the crime.

But that won’t happen. The mainstream media feeds on the ratings potential of anything to do with sex, and TV shows like “Law and Order” refer to sex crimes as among the most “heinous” crimes known to humanity, right up there with mass murder, and more so than scam artists who take people’s live savings and force them live penniless on the streets.

It is tragic to witness the unprecedented rise in men over-compensating for their inadequacies, by strapping a gun to their thighs when attending public events. Now, that the whole world knows of their preexisting condition, we can all take solace in knowing that they will still be able to receive health care. Thanks to BIG PHARMA, Viagra, Cialis, and other remedies are readily available in massive, no wait...make that adequate quantities for these unfortunate little guys. What a country!

Hip hip hooray for Jim Wallace and for Jesus!

Throw the money changers out of the temple!

Join the conference call today at 2pm PST with President Barack Obama and the Reverend

http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=action.display&item=HC09-main

RASTA- you eat too much PASTA man - you want the Rush Limbaugh Show or the Michael Savage show or dumb dumb FOX NEWS- your on the wrong board, man.

@Food Fascist,DDay - Please don't feed the troll - I believe Rasta posts & runs anyway - he doesn't hang around looking for replies to his nutso posts.

BTW, he's no "righty" either - he is, in fact, SO far to the left that it may look, from where most progressives live, his position may APPEAR to be to the right of ours, assuming the spectrum of views to be circular.

B Roll,

I suspect both you and Thom have elements of "truth" in your religious or spiritual philosophy: it's a breath mint AND a candy mint!

That is, God may not be the"old man" cloud being. However, God may be what we could call energy or life force, which IS a reality. If you think you can "connect" with that energy or, by meditating as a group, somehow make that connection together, maybe that is possible. (I have had experiences of "connection" with others in my life that may be somehow related though, to day, haven't been explained.) There is so much at a subatomic level that is really amazing, and so much yet to explore. I wouldn't rule out experiences we can't explain yet.

I think I heard that pastor before. he was viral (on some liberal sites as well as sites where the posters are mostly black) during Obama's campaign for presidency.

If that's who I think it is that guy is a complete nutter and is the head of church called the ATLAH. The guy is form Harlem and is running a program asking the members of his church to buy outside of their neighborhood to make their economy so bad that they would prevent gentrification.

Mark,

Great post filled with so many ironies and absurdities. The young parents trying to figure what sort of freedoms to give their kids are constantly bombarded with exactly waht you speak of which adds to childhood obesity rates. Law and Order may be partly responsible for childhood obesity just as much as McD's.

"Golden Age?" I think Ravi Batra may be dreaming in a parallel universe.

I think we, as Progressive,s should abandon terminology such as "our current health care system". The status quo has little to do with making Americans HEALTHY, and those who benefit most from the system sure as hell don't CARE about the nation's health.

No, my friends, the system currently in place is obviously NOT a health care system - it's a SYMPTOM MANAGEMENT system, and that's how we should refer to it. The system actually perpetuates illness, such that we all remain good consumers of procedures and pharmaceuticals.

We don't want to CHANGE the health care system, we want to CREATE a REAL health care system, and abandon the symptom management system that is currently in place.

GUNS, GUNS, GUNS...

1) The Right is an incestuous, vile group. Open carry gun permits may allow for a more "efficient" way of doing away with the Right's apponents. Look at Grover Norquist's list of affiliations on his website:

http://www.atr.org/grover-norquist-a3016

2) At least Robert Novak isn't adding filth and lies to the dialogue anymore. The line of replacements doesn't seem to get any shorter, though.

Well...always look on the bright side of life- its as though someone turned on the light in a dark room crawling with bugs. And now- we get to haul all these thugs into prisons and off the streets and from under the park benches- perhaps allowing the good marijuana smokers out due to over crowding - a double hit!

And actually, a triple hit, because the thug racists will get health care, experience love for the first time in their lives and perhaps find Jesus.

oh- I meant patsy

B Roll, I joined late, and I agree with you as an atheist myself. Thom calls us evangelical for explaining to others the absolute folly of all religious beleif. I am quite sure that Thom refuses to accept the finality of death, so he' s holding on to some beleif in a beleif. We all would like to live longer or forever, but alas, it makes no sense that we will. Where do these god's live? They only live in our minds. Thom needs the crutch of faith in something. I prefer to live in a real world. I am a product of evolution, created by natural selection. Thom was raised as a believer because of his parents. So was I. Few escape!

It is interesting to note that Davud Frum objects to the tone, not the message of right-wing "entertainers" like Hannnity, Savage and Beck. Frum has no actual moral or ethical standards, as shown by his casual dismissal of the "white power" speech Thom aired as irrelevant. He is, of course, more concerned with the troublesome possibility that a violent act at the president's person will have consequences for Republicans. It would force them either to denounce their core supporters (many of whom are racists), or confirm that they are the party of hate and regression.

Larry Pratt with his inept answers to Tom's question.
Carrying a gun, concealed or not in a densely populated city is NOT a good idea. I do understand that in rural areas of the US that it is. It is our Constitutional right to bear arms, but as Thom mentioned, what about the trigger happy, easily frightened,unreasonably angry people showing up to Town Hall meeting with guns? Not a good idea.
Having a gun is a huge responsibility it would be a shame that a few trigger happy crazies would threaten our Constitutional right to bear arms.

Hey Food Fascist, I'm an atheist that believes in many of the lessons attributed to Jesus. You should read some them. Try and be a little nicer. You're acting like a republican.

What a difference 5 years makes! In 2004, a couple from West Virginia was arrested on the State Capital grounds for wearing home-made "T" shirts with Vote Kerry magic-marker-ed on them at a 4th of July visit from Ol George W. Less than two months later in Minnesota, I was able to infiltrate an "unscheduled" lunch stop by "W" in my home town, with the help of Democratic operatives. I was "armed" with a Kerry shirt under my Republican-like costume. When I flashed Rove with the aforementioned illegal underwear, I was immediately surrounded and quarantined by the Secret Service. I asked one agent if he enjoyed protecting the Prez from Democrats. He whispered that he hated it. We have a concealed carry law here. Maybe I should have packed a little heat and they might have left me alone.? Ya think? Homey don't think so.

@AZAFVET - Why would you want to be allowed to buy in to Canada's system, as opposed to being allowed to buy in to Medicare?

moonbat666,

Moral teachings and ethics were part of ancient cultures long before Christ espoused them. Unfortunately, people who ask, "how can you live an ethical life if you're not a Christian?" aren't aware of that.

(Your comment didn't go in this direction, but I mention it because it is such a knowledge gap with so many in our culture.)

B Roll,

My posts have been sour today, as well, contributing to a generally negative atmosphere, I'm afraid. It comes from being so pissed off at what's going on in our country. Yes, I know I'm not alone in that. (Maybe I feel more comfortable with pessimism, which allows for elation when things DO go right. I actively, consciously work to climb the mountain of optimism, just like everyone else, I guess.)

DDay,

Thanks --- I needed that!

Thanks Quark,
BURRRRRRRRRP....AHHHHHHHHHH

excuse me.