Taking to the Streets
Well, the teabaggers “descended” on Washington today, in part courtesy of 40 buses chartered by something called “Americans for Prosperity,” and of course having been heavily promoted on Fox. A “crowd” the police estimated at 3000-3500 came waddling in to generally make asses of themselves, invading the wrong offices, carrying strikingly dumb and offensive signs, and blurting paranoid nonsense, usually in cracker accents. They were naturally treated with the utmost seriousness on TV, and dominated ABC News radio broadcasts throughout the morning. Sheesh. Is any righty stunt too cravenly manufactured and ridiculous to not get on the news? One wonders.
I’m something of a veteran of political protests; perhaps it’s something in our famously pure Bull Run water here in Little Beirut, and as such my only reaction was how utterly, head-slappingly lame the whole thing was. You see, the whole point of a protest is, among other things, for it to be big, and sorry, but I consider big to be anything over 50,000 or so. The teabaggers didn’t cut it, although they do flagrantly lie about their numbers for the very reason I’m discussing them now. If you have to have the fervent support of a whole news channel, a dozen crazy congresspeople, and some billionaire’s buses to get a few thousand bozos to act out in a city like Washington, your “movement” is sorely lacking. Sleepy little Portland had the largest rallies in the country against both Iraq wars, and drew 80,000 to an Obama rally, with a population of a half million and relatively underpopulated hinterlands. No media hype or billionaire buses were involved, and both disastrous wars proceeded nevertheless, and continue. So it goes.
What’s remarkable is that a few deliberately and systematically misinformed souls, bought and paid for and relentlessly propagandized by deeply conflicted congresspeople and the special interests who fund them, think that their pathetic display ought to affect national policy, when our much more significant and spontaneous one clearly didn’t. The reason they think this, of course, is that Fox News and its many imitators have taught them to do so. Protesting in favor of rapacious corporations and ill-conceived wars is, to the media, Serious and Important, while protesting against those things is fringe-y and un-American, no matter the numbers of people, much less those other pesky numbers, in the budget.
A guess it all depends on what you think a trillion is worth. Anyone with a pulse could have predicted that the second Iraq War would cost a trillion, but no one was allowed to discuss such a thing. If you have to look at the price, you can’t afford it, you know. Not so with health care, natch, the lack of which polishes off a September 11′s worth of America every few weeks, but, if your arithmetic is dishonest enough, might also cost a trillion one day. And? If the teabaggers had listened before the war, and not started it, health care would now be free, or at least already charged on the credit card. In both cases, corporate giveaways and the insatiable needs of the rich add considerably to the total bills of both, but Americans are getting used to that, so most of them would certainly rather get something than nothing, even when they know they’ll be overpaying in any case.
But our media just loves wars, which boost ratings and careers, and hate boring old public policy, which is something that happens to other people, anyway. When you rake in millions spouting nonsense to the red light and spend more on cosmetic treatments in a week than ordinary people crankily complain about spending in health insurance in a year, why wouldn’t you think that wars are cheap and life-saving medical care would be nice, but frankly not a priority? These are the people who explain reality to us, and no wonder they explain it so poorly.
Today, minority leader John Boehner darkly intoned to the rapt teabaggers that health care reform was the biggest “threat to freedom” that he’d encountered in his 19 years in Congress, and for him, anyway, I have no doubt it is; he’s working with the new definition of “freedom” I talked about yesterday. Todd Akin, a wingnut congressman from Missouri, messianically led the teabaggers in the Pledge of Allegiance, the mere utterance of which, to his deluded mind, would “drive liberals crazy.” He then promptly screwed it up, leaving out the word “indivisible,” so eager was he to emphasize the McCarthy-era addition, “under God.” Michele Bachmann, who was appropriately called “Captain Crazy” by one of her GOP colleagues, called today’s event the “Super Bowl of Freedom.”
Really? 3500 people at the Super Bowl? Somebody tell Coke and Pepsi; they’re not getting their money’s worth.
For anyone desperate for some righty-supplied entertainment, here is the link to the Twitter thread for the #teabachle.
Thanks for the link, skeptic. My favorite sign was one held up by a typically fleshy and beady-eyed righty that said. “Obama listens to MAO I listen to FOX News.” Yeah. Who’d a thunk?
“If the teabaggers had listened before the war, and not started it, health care would now be free,”
____________________________
Terrific logic. That old rectal thermometer must be hitting on a feverish 102F for you again, CH, producing these incoherent ravings. In the Marxist dream world doctors and nurses work for free, hospitals rise out of the ground after magic beans are planted, and aspirin grows on lilac bushes. And nobody better complain about the super-efficient feds taking over the health rackets because that just proves they’re stupid.
France, which opposed the war (s), pays half what we do for far superior health care, and also isn’t in the economic fix we’re in now. I don’t see any influx of French doctors, either. The again, their government has not been run by corporations and delusional demi-fascists, so they’re starting from a different place. Obviously, nothing is free, but paying for useless and destabilizing wars is A WASTE, and paying for a healthy nation is not. That’s just one country; I could name many others.
You need to get out more.
It’s a language issue. The NHS in Britain is exposed daily by the British media for the bureaucratic, inept, inefficient agency it is and we get to read about it. So, everyone is down on the NHS. But, since few Americans read the French media and daily English translations of accounts of the Gallic medical screw-ups are hard to find, you socialists can get away with pimping their system. Unless you read French fluently you don’t know any more about the French medical situation than you do about economics, which is to say nothing.
The fact that you’re a righty shows that you know nothing, and not just about economics. That’s what gives you the special confidence to respond the way you do. You’re just a propaganda organ, and it shows.
How you and the teabaggers can defend a system that costs more and produces the 37th best outcomes in the world is beyond me. You must never have had any encounters with the American health system, much less any other, to be so frankly uninformed. Half of the employees, much of the time, and nearly that much of the square footage, is devoted to “insurance” in any American hospital or medical practice, and no matter how good your insurance is, you will be routinely bilked and made to jump through hoops to get basic care. I found this out last year when my mother was dying, and it left not just an impression, but an enormous amount of headaches and bills.
Corporations do not care about people, or much of anything but profit, and as such, are unfit to deal with human needs like health care. Government, and yes, trial lawyers, are our only defense against the ruthlessness and greed that drive them.
Of course, since you consider yourself the world’s death panel, and say so, you obviously don’t give a shit, either. Write back when you get tossed out of a hospital, or have vital care denied, by the lovely corporations you so ardently defend. Or have your heirs do it.
So, you concede that, as things stand now, we have a “health racket” in this country.
That is progress.
Jeff Bleich :
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bleich4-2009nov04,0,1193621.story
Ain’t small government grand? When I was in California last week, we passed the Soledad Prison, a beacon of glaring light in a bleak and shattered economy. Crime, it seems, does pay. Just not the way you’d think.
3500? We had more fans in the stadium when the Cleveland Indians were losing 102 games a season. (And I had my own personal beer vendor, if I recall.) We would buy general admission seats for $7 and walk down to the box seats with impunity. This was the old crappy stadium that held 85,000. When only 3500 people were there, it was like a tomb.
In re: socialized medicine – if there were half as much energy spent on halting fraud in the Medicare system (perpetrated mainly by providers, not patients), which is estimated to be 10% of the cost (ten percent!? do that math, Tom!!), as there is on protesting the fictitious tax increases, we could afford to insure people at age 60 and above.
There’s no defending the warped thinking that makes the US the world’s leading incarcerater, but that’s a government program, too. And like all government programs, a government health care one would grow like zucchini, as well. If you’re dissatisfied with the present health care system, and apparently many are, why not get together and set up your own? There’s a long history of co-ops in the US, insurance, agricultural marketing and processing and so on. Why does the whole population have to be coerced into the one Pinocchia Pelosi and her pals want? They’re the same geniuses that came up with the ethanol fiasco. That program won’t go away and neither will a health care one, no matter how messed up it is.
I would have to point out that such travesties as the “victim’s rights” movement, as well as the war on drugs, are creatures of the right and are now privatized into huge lobbies that drive policy toward incarceration. The government is involved only in that it has shamefully given in to these forces. Kind of like with health care. As soon as “private enterprise” is handed a monopoly over which the consumers have no choice, we get a bunch of corporate freeloaders slopping at the trough, with a lot of lobbying dollars to continue doing so. Pelosi has little to do with this dynamic. Dianne Feinstein, on the other hand, is a different story. Her husband is a MIC freeloader, nearly as bad as Dick Cheney.
Hag, you do this all the time. Questions that you’re intellectually incapable of answering, you respond to with unrelated tirades. Nobody can blame you for ignoring things that you can’t comprehend, it’s a common reaction, but why not try just a little harder? Come on, surely you can come up with some kind of a Marx/Engels denial of the possibility of a non-governmental health care scheme, can’t you?
Tea Party protests health care reform outside Cleveland Clinic
Pat Moss joined about 20 Tea Party members protesting health care reform outside the Cleveland Clinic today.
The Highland Heights resident said she was protesting after getting an education from and being inspired to take action by a talk-show radio star.
“Rush Limbaugh set me straight,” she said.
She and other protesters tried to give a similar education to commuters on Euclid Avenue at the East 93rd stop light and clinic workers, patients and visitors walking along the sidewalk in front of the clinic.
Some of the motorists responded by honking their horns or shouting out support. At least one car responded with insults that the group ignored.
Several members of the group said they had been active in other Tea Party rallies including a nationwide event in March and a gathering in Washington, D.C.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
What a mob.
20 Teabaggers.
heh.
My favorite part is, “Rush Limbaugh set me straight.” Yeah, a drug-addled fat ass with a $400 million contract is practically like Moses. I’m surprised it was even 20, but the dumbest have a special pride of which we’re often unaware, as liberal elitists, natch.
Thank goodness, I’m beginning to see the light, at least as beamed from CH. Big government is good, except for the stuff Hag don’t like. Big government is bad, except for the stuff Hag digs. Private business, especially CORPORATIONS, are just bad, bad, bad. Apparently, there are tests given at some point in a person’s life where if they pass,they take the door into government service, but if they fail, they go to work for Wal-mart, unless you’re Dick Cheney, who must have cheated on the test, since he’s been in government most of his life. And some of those bank guys, that end up working for the Fed.
By the way, when Pinocchia and Harry take over the US health care system, and bypass those detestable corportations, which require evil PROFITS, as opposed to the government, that doesn’t need profits because it can TAKE our money, will their takeover include a government that manufactures MRI machines? Will there be government factories that develop and manufacture pharmaceuticals? Will the government make wheelchairs and crutches? Or will they do like they did with ADA and just tell everyone else what to do? Or else. Because when the government tells private business what to do and how to operate and how much money they can make, that’s called fascism.
Dick Cheney went into government for the same reason bank robbers go into banks. That’s where the money is. And just like his purported boss, he has no talents to contribute to the real economy. This isn’t particularly complicated, except for you.
I agree that it’s a sad thing to have banksters, even in an ostensibly liberal administration, setting banking policy, but your way seems unlikely to end this.
If you haven’t figured this out yet, I do have biases… I think that war is antiquated, wasteful, and dumb, and I think government’s only reasonable claims on taxpayer dollars are for things that will benefit said taxpayers, and for those ventures, profits mustn’t be involved, because that’s a ripoff. Like Halliburton.
Halliburton isn’t the only corporation getting periodic checks from the government. And evidently they are providing some kind of a service that maybe the “bad” part of the government wants. The other day word got out that something like 36 million Americans are getting food stamps, or the electronic equivalent. Is this good for starving but obese poor people or bad because supermarkets and grocery wholesalers (corporations) are getting the money? And since some of that money could have conceivably come from the disappearing part of my paycheck, couldn’t I ask one of those recipients to maybe mow my lawn or wash the Buick? Would that be too much?
The government buys lots of stuff, pencils, paperclips, jet airplanes, ships. Should they get all that stuff at cost, no profit to the manufacturer? How would that work? And the government employees, why should they get paid so much? And retirement benefits. How are they different than the corporations?
Two things, Tom. One, you seem to think you deserve entirely too much space on my blog. Please give others a chance. Second, if we didn’t have such a whacked out economic system, wherein 36 million Americans can’t afford to eat, your precious tax dollars wouldn’t have to buy twinkies for those ungrateful fatties you disdain so.
Finally, I used to work for a company that sold a lot of stuff to the government, and the reporting rules were so stringent that I often didn’t even fill out the paperwork, since we wouldn’t make any money anyway. Plenty of other companies did, but the governments involved clearly got the lowest price, as it should be.
Most, if not all, of your opinions are based on fantasy, not fact, and I and many others find that tiresome.
Pathetic. Hard to tell if you ever really had it, but you ain’t got it now.
Wow. I’m really worried that with a whole 3500 people showing up, these teabaggers are a tsunami that will take over the country like they did in rural New York. Well, almost did. Well, intend to on the next round.
It occurred to me this afternoon that Wall Street is missing out on a huge futures market: teh crazy. Yes, Bachmann’s value there is way up today, but Palin’s book tour starts in two weeks. The sky’s the limit on this one. When I mentioned this on a thread at FDL, someone said something about “sanity default swaps”.
Where do I sign up? You can’t go wrong there, betting on teh crazy.
Nail in the Head, I think I’ve found just the woman for you!
As you can see, she’s a looker; and even better, I think I can set something up.
But, you might have to consider making the ultimate sacrifice.
Let me know …
http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/
As you can see, she’s a looker; and even better, I think I can set something up.
But can the Nailhead get something up, that’s the question. If disdain were sex, he’d be a regular Marquis de Sade, but as it is, he has a very visible limp. All prattle, and no bat, as it were.
He’s very picky.
Leaving aside whether and under what circumstances he could be excited enough to get it up, he might even spurn a demigod such as Ayn.
This concerns me, as I’m trying to do my best for him.
I think it would be a good fit.
An effing Mother Theresa, you are. I’d just as soon let his dysfunctions consume him, especially if the Hag could arrange to switch to the bureau in Rome while the deed is in progress. A post-mortem would be fine. Dulce et decorum est, and all that.
I’m just one of God’s shepherds here on earth.
It’s funny you should mention Italy. I was just thinking we could offer Nail in the Head a job as a stringer with Harlan and the crack CHNN team.
He might learn to deal with irrefutable facts under Harlan’s patient tutelage, while picking up some tips from the local carbones, which could only help at the time of his heavenly assignation with Ayn.
I know she’ll appreciate his interest and newly won expertise in the ways of women.
I must object here, Dirigo. Just consider what you are asking/expecting of some poor woman.
Women are different than men. In fact, women respond not just to visuals, as men so often do, but to the words that emanate from a speaker’s mouth. This is a hopeless case, as far as I’m concerned.
Never say die.
And Ayn is, or was, not just any poor woman. Not (ahem!) by a long shot.
She had a one-track mind, just like Nail in the Head.
Really!!! It’s a perfect match; made in heaven!
Honestly, I don’t know what he’s waiting for. I expected to hear from him by now, panting all the way.
Frankly, I am often one of the last to give up on what might seem a hopeless cause, but here… here… you are promoting necrophilia as a just cause.
Sorry. I just can’t get behind that.
You two are incorrigible, but nonetheless hilarious. Thanks.
Three. WT’s trying to make me out to be another old crone with a curtain wrapped around the head.
Who wants to go out with me?
Skeptic’s given up on our dear Nail in the Head. I haven’t. I believe in him and his redemption, through Ayn’s spirit. She’ll have him, if no one else will. I can, well … I can just feel it.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with a portier or two on the head, if one hasn’t had time to get the curlers out.. But please, don’t add Ayn’s, uh, “beauty” to my existing image of Nailer, lest I have to waste all my medical marijuana trying to eat again.
Would that be Mormon Nailer? (tee-hee)
Was Ayn a Mormon, too, in addition to her other charms?
Not at all. She was very much against religion in any form. Period.
Well, what is one to do with a Naihead, whose every rumination is Galt, pure Galt? There’s no room for a runway in the lounge, and no market for Minnie Pearl fashions in Portland in any event. Dirigo sees assisting him in his own personal rapture as a Christian duty. I suppose that when the alternative is to remove his vocal chords, have him stuffed and set him up outside the entrance with a couple of puros in his paw, like in the Good Old Days when Men were Men, caro Dirigo may have a point. Cruelty to dumb animals is, after all, a sin.