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@Zero G: re: "Holder: Osama bin Laden will never be taken alive
By Agence France-Presse"
I think bin Laden won't be taken alive 'cause he's already dead; on or about 12/12/01. Respected researcher David Ray Griffin said it was April '03. 2 former pakistani prime minisiters, Bhutto and Mosharrif mentioned it offhand during interviews.
@td duff: I think the bottom line is: ITS THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN.
"The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase."
-Yogi Berra
@Mark
Maybe I'm dense but I do not understand how ERISA is a good trade-off for this healthcare bill. ERISA is a fund employers pay into to safeguard employee pensions if the employer falls into dire financial circumstances that prohibit the employer from meeting its pension commitments. This fund was not established to be tax-payer funded.
In recent years, companies have claimed impending financial disaster as cause to dump their pension commitments. ERISA will undoubtedly be drained if it is not properly funded.
@harry
My own belief is that without forensic evidence I don't have a basis for an opinion...
...but trials come with the process of discovery, and we are seeing the pullback from KSM being given a civilian trial.
I see evidence of a cover up, but the smoke gets in our eyes, meanwhile:
Holder: Osama bin Laden will never be taken alive
By Agence France-Presse
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
http://rawstory.com/2010/03/holder-osama-bin-laden-alive/
Sign on the way out of Carlos Marcello's office:
Three can keep a secret if two are dead.
@ TD Powerful- like something someone might put on their tombstone!
Hey all and Thom::
here is the bottom line on all these health care hold out republidumbs and the
conservative dems:
IF THE MACHINERY OF POLITICS REQUIRES YOU TO BE AN AGENT OF INJUSTICE TO OTHERS YOU HAVE FORESAKEN YOURSELF AND THE PEOPLE YOU ARE REQUIRED TO REPRESENT.
I wonder how Norman Goldman is going to begin his show today. He has been holding out on the health care bill and highly critical of the President on this matter.
@Zero G thx for posting Right on, Dennis Kucinich. Heard the breaking news on Stephanie Miller. It was the reason I was able to get up this morning!
We should take a play from Reagan playbook: Declare for-profit health care illegal. We leave out the part about bombing in five minutes.
Loud sex enough for cops to search your home, court rules
By Daniel Tencer
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
http://rawstory.com/2010/03/loud-sex-cops-search-home/
What Fourth Amendment?
Re susceptibility of people to authoritarian leaders in Yale experiments and French talk show where people were willing to shock someone:
Stability of one's living standard makes people more willing to 'stick their neck out' and dispute or challenge or oppose a group. If one won't lose their job (source of income if self employed), housing, access to financial aid with medical bills, food and are comfortable (stable middle class) then people feel more comfortable to challenge authority. E.g. why general strikes work in France, Greece and other European countries but not in USA is because people won't 'lose everything' if they 'take to the streets.'
@Zero G: I hear you er..I read you. Granted there's a lot of smoke with 911 (pun intended). My personal belief is that the govt probably was involved, at least passively, but at the same time I can believe they were that incompetent. whether there were explosives set in the towers..meh...maybe.
Health care reform debate should be more about: is the government going to get stricter on the quality of the American Food Supply, provide funds to schools to improve physical education programs, funding for research for alternative medicines and medical practices, etc... In other words we're debating if we should provide health care, but we haven't even begun debating what we can do to improve health care. To me it's a shame that we're still stuck arguing for the bare necessities because of the gross incompetence, and obstructionism produced by the Health insurance lobbyists and their political collaborators.
From: Why I'm Voting 'Yes'
by Dennis Kucinich
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/17-9
[...]
In the past week it has become clear that the vote on the final health care bill will be very close. I take this vote with the utmost seriousness. I am quite aware of the historic fight that has lasted the better part of the last century to bring America in line with other modern democracies in providing single payer health care. I have seen the political pressure and the financial pressure being asserted to prevent a minimal recognition of this right, even within the context of a system dominated by private insurance companies.
I know I have to make a decision, not on the bill as I would like to see it, but the bill as it is. My criticisms of the legislation have been well reported. I do not retract them. I incorporate them in this statement. They still stand as legitimate and cautionary. I still have doubts about the bill. I do not think it is a first step toward anything I have supported in the past. This is not the bill I wanted to support, even as I continue efforts until the last minute to modify the bill.
However after careful discussions with the President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Elizabeth my wife and close friends, I have decided to cast a vote in favor of the legislation. If my vote is to be counted, let it now count for passage of the bill, hopefully in the direction of comprehensive health care reform. We must include coverage for those excluded from this bill. We must free the states. We must have control over private insurance companies and the cost their very existence imposes on American families. We must strive to provide a significant place for alternative and complementary medicine, religious health science practice, and the personal responsibility aspects of health care which include diet, nutrition, and exercise.
The health care debate has been severely hampered by fear, myths, and by hyper-partisanship. The President clearly does not advocate socialism or a government takeover of health care. The fear that this legislation has engendered has deep roots, not in foreign ideology but in a lack of confidence, a timidity, mistrust and fear which post 911 America has been unable to shake.
This fear has so infected our politics, our economics and our international relations that as a nation we are losing sight of the expanded vision, the electrifying potential we caught a glimpse of with the election of Barack Obama. The transformational potential of his presidency, and of ourselves, can still be courageously summoned in ways that will reconnect America to our hopes for expanded opportunities for jobs, housing, education, peace, and yes, health care.
I want to thank those who have supported me personally and politically as I have struggled with this decision. I ask for your continued support in our ongoing efforts to bring about meaningful change. As this bill passes I will renew my efforts to help those state organizations which are aimed at stirring a single payer movement which eliminates the predatory role of private insurers who make money not providing health care. I have taken a detour through supporting this bill, but I know the destination I will continue to lead, for as long as it takes, whatever it takes to an America where health care will be firmly established as a civil right.
I hope that the designers of the health care bill took into consideration how the ERISA law might play out in the courts, since that law doesn't require businesses to offer health care benefits, and the bill seems to at least "encourage" businesses who don't to offer health care benefits. The law doesn't apply to individually-purchased insurance, so the currently uninsured who are supposed to benefit from the insurance exchange or tax credits shouldn't be effected by it.
Messaging: rather than say 'government' could we use this phrase instead? WE THE PEOPLE
On today's show Thom said he could see both sides to Dennis Kucinich's decision, that's a viewpoint you'd never hear from a right-wing radio host.
@Boris31 - I particularly liked Bill Maher's take on Rove's book ...
"Courage & Consequence" - y'know, kinda like "Pride and Prejudice", only with a lot more prejudice. :)
It is more than timely to initiate conversation with your local school district to counteract the misplaced efforts of Texas textbook tyrants. Many districts are seriously considering the high costs of textbooks, and need parents and others to call and encourage them to use more innovative, and creative methods of teaching and learning. I.E, the world is a classroom, experiential learning though place-based or project-based education and use of relevant books, including Thom's.
@harry,
I'm not ignorant of the pipelines, though that misses the point, and these long years later the pipelines are no closer to fruition. The point I'm trying to propose is that until we realize that we are up against a national security state, we are not living in a functioning democracy. We cannot pretend that simply trying to bend the political parties will ever effect change.
The intelligence agencies recruit, and have always recruited, from the Wall St. elite. The media is in their service.
I'm not trying to be cynical. I'm trying to define a problem, because if you cannot define it, you cannot confront it.
I knew that Thom was refering to the Miller-Urey experiment yesterday, because I tried to repeat it as a senior in high school. It won me an honorable mention in the Queens Co. NY science fair. Yet, I get called brain-dead by mainstream media for questioning the official 9/11 story.
Have you heard that over 1000 architects and building engineers are calling for a real examination of the 9/11 evidence. Jesse Ventura's article about 9/11 got censured by the Huffington Post, and when Thom had him on, the subject didn't come up.
@Mark- maybe this is why Kucinich was so strong on ERISA - we will have to ask Bernie Friday what the status of ERISA is.
@Lois - I first heard of Noam Chomsky on Canadian TV. He was side lined by the same Republican/Right Wing propaganda that declared Howard Zinn anti-American.
ERISA laws - holding insurance companies accountable to policies/contracts - does not cover interest, court costs, or additional harm from refusal to treat.
I.E. If you die because the insurance company refused to pay for treatment, and you did not get it, there is no cost to the insurance company. Some state give protections to specific companies to prohibit lawsuits. Therefore, by using this privilege a company can deny the ability to go to court. That is why 'crossing' state lines is so important to the corporatists.
Back in December, Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute said that if the health care bill passes, “Anyone who thinks they’ll be able to repeal ObamaCare is kidding themselves. If they want to stop it, they need to stop it now.” That is because unless the Republicans and their blue dog allies win a veto-proof majority in 2011, they will not be able to repeal health care reform until at least 2013. They have to defeat the bill now, or the public might get around of supporting it in the meantime. Once the bill is passed, expect the right to try to destroy it through the courts.
So Karl Rove last week started his book of lies tour for "Courage & Consequence" and the major networks allowed him to go pretty much unchallenged. The interviews could hardly be seen as "a get" because A. (Rove is a regular on air FOX commentator), and B. (of course would obfuscate to the point of being dishonest).
On the various appearances he repeated a few themes, the most egregious were comparing Bush's desire of privatization of Social Security to Obama's HC bill. If Bush's plan had gone through then American society would have been wiped out in Sept. 2008 and every senior would have been in a bread line. The other was that major Democrats agreed with Bush on the issue of WMD's, which on the face is absurd because the President would always have more current & detailed information.
Please "bully Dave" and let him buy into Medicare. United Health Care refused to pay for Dave' s colonoscopy after saying they would, $3,000.00 we paid, UHC said they would pay for cortizone shot, they paid doctor $500.00 and hospital $15.00 we paid $496.00, UPH pays $7,500 for hip replacement that usually costs around $100,000 including PT, meds etc, we went to Belgium and paid 20% and UHC paid nothing, Dave had an x-ray to make sure he was still a candidate for hip resurfacing UHC paid $62.00 of a $500.00 bill. If we had the money we paid in premiums, it would have paid for all. We just threw that money away. In anger we canceled his insurance and am praying Dave doesn't need medical care until June 22 when he turns 65. Again I say PLEASE BULLY DAVE.