John McCain and Jon Kyl are using Medicare but do not want all Americans to have access to what they have ...

Anthony Weiner Points Out the Hypocrisy of Members of Congress on Medicare but Against the Public Option

From Think Progress: Rep. Weiner Identifies 55 Republicans On Medicare Who ‘Steadfastly Oppose’ The Public Option

Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) office today released an internal study showing that 151 members of Congress “currently receive government-funded; government-administered single-payer health care — Medicare.” Of those 151 members, 55 are Republicans who also happen to be “steadfastly opposed [to] other Americans getting the public option, like the one they have chosen.” Included on Weiner’s list are anti-public option crusaders Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Orin Hatch (R-UT), Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), and Rep. Peter King (R-NY).

Well, that's a surprise ... denfense contractors control Democratic Senator Dan Inouye ...

Sources: Franken's Anti-Rape Amendment To Be Stripped By Sen. Inouye

Appears Inouye plans to serve government contractors rather than the people.

There is something seriously wrong with the Senate. The Republicans could get anything, except the destruction of SS, through the Senate. But Democrats can accomplish close to nothing. I assume that's become most Democrats, including Obama-baby, are not Democrats but Repugs dressing up as Dems.

Whatever the case the Senate is a waste of time and taxpayer money and should be eliminated. The representation in the House should be increased. This farse is going to get worse and worse and the Dems are going to loose their majority through their own stupidity. Which causes the corporations no harm since they win either way. The people loose, period. Which is the plan ...

Oh, the hypocrisy ...

Tearing Up The Contracts

It's official now: Obama hates us ...

What will Reid do. Will Reid take Obama's hate for Americans as an excuse to betray the voters.

Obama Wants a Trigger, So Keep Calling Reid

Well, Harry Reid is the Senate Majority Leader, arguably the second most powerful man in the country. The Senate is a separate and co-equal branch of the federal government. If he’s giving over his power to the White House to dictate his job to him, he’s weaker than even I thought.

If Reid wants to give up his seat by letting the executive branch take control of the Senate and get the triggers that they have wanted for so long, it’s up to him. If he puts a public option with a trigger in the final bill, fought that battle before. It’ll be time to do it again.

A public option is something that 80% of Nevada Democrats want.

Harry Reid can't lay his actions on Obama. Obama's perfidy belongs to Obama. If Reid chooses to betray American voters that's his own call.

Apparently only a few things make Obama any better than Bush-baby. Obama can construct sentences in the English language. Obama does not behave like a cowardly bully. Obama may stave of the entire world organizing against us for awhile. Other than that, what exactly has Obama done differently. It appears to be more style than substance.

Never, never thought I'd say this, but I almost feel sorry for Harry Reid ...

Reid, left out in the cold by his own party's corporate collaborator of a president. Reid, the target of millions of barb from the voters for his frequent underhanded behavior. Reid, threatened with loss of his Senate seat.

Does he want to do the right thing with health care? Who knows. But what seems very clear is that he will have no support from his usual friends. Obama and his Bush-like cronies want Americans to continue to suffer from lack of adequate health care.

What will Harry Reid do?

Sadly we've seen what Obama does with important issues ... he gives rousing, if duplicitous, speeches in public, then joins the enemy in private. How many years will it take before this behavior catches us with Obama, as it finally has with Reid on health care?

It is Harry Reid’s choice and his alone to include the public option in a final Senate bill. ...

Repeat, repeat, repeat:

As Senate Majority leader, it is Harry Reid’s choice and his alone to include the public option in a final Senate bill. He’s the only one who gets to make that decision. And if he decides to kowtow to powerful DC lobbying interests and hike up health care costs for individuals by $2000 a year by jettisoning the public option, then he’s the one who will have to shoulder the blame.

If he doesn't include the public option in the final bill, Reid will attempt to blame someone or something else, as he usually does. Only this time there are more people watching. Don't expect it will be forgotten as soon as his other deceptions ...
-----------------------
Another subject about Reid, sort of.

Reid went to the AMA to find out how Republicans were going to vote? And they lied to him? Is this weird or what:

The Doctor’s Fix Debacle: Reid Claims He was “Misled” by AMA on Deal for GOP Votes

Did some of his own Dems lie to him too? You know theoretically he didn't even need the Republicans.

Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens puts it in words ...

"They're opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world ... We're entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq's oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."

...

"We leave there with the Chinese getting the oil," Pickens said.

Just who is this 'we' oil man?

I'm almost speechless. But the thoughts that do come to mind are: another arrogant, contemptible turd and mucus secreting corporate slug.

T. Boone Pickens "takeovers put many independent oil producers out of business. With an estimated current net worth of about $3 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 117th-richest person in America and ranked 369th in the world." [Wikipedia]

And to think he didn't get Iraq and after supporting all the warmongers collected in Bush's Corporate regime that sacrificed so much American blood and money for his benefit.

I realize American corporations just don't care, but what about all the non-Americans that were murdered and killed and raped and tortured and starved and abused. What about all their losses in lives and property and hope for a decent life? 'We," oil man, are all smaller because you and your corporate buddies supported and encouraged a mental deficient 'president' and a criminally insane 'vice president' to perpetrate a war of terror on Iraq. And that 'we' includes you, oil man.

---------------------

One little point I don't quite grasp. If Corporatist T. Boone Pickens concludes that the blood and money expended by Americans should result in his personal increase in wealth and power where does the blood and money of others that is destroyed by Americans enter into that accounting? Is it a plus or minus in T. Boone Pickens mind? Or does it just not exist in his mind?

Big surprise: Harry Reid doesn't want anti-trust legislation for his masters, the insurance companies ....

Bad News: Insurance Industry Anti-Trust To Be Offered As An Amendment To Senate Health Care Bill

Harry Reid couldn't lead himself out of a paper bag. All he does is take orders. He has so many masters he obviously lives in a state of perpetual befuddlement.

So sad, but probably true: Obama is working against us on health care ...

Watch the decisions Harry “makes” in coming days. My bet is they’ll shore up the underlying deals — they’ll make mandated insurance modestly more affordable and fix the mandates a bit, while protecting the insurers from a viable, functioning public option. The industry will still control a system in which consumers will be forced to buy their unreliable products with government subsidies.

And seeing this coming, Nancy Pelosi will push a more reform-minded House to fight back as hard as they can. The House now carries the hopes for even limited reform. Sadly, her opposition is not just the Senate’s 60 vote barrier; it’s in the White House.

Working against us on one of the most important pieces of legislation to Americans' wellbeing. That's the kind of man Obama is. If he wanted decent health care for Americans he would have made that very clear by now. Instead he prevaricates.

Reid is a reeking twisted turd. Obama's actions are just as ripe. But you have to hand it to him. Successfully working against the people and for his corporate masters takes skill. So far Obama has managed to keep from alienating a good number of his supporters. Wonder how he'll turn his betrayal on health care to his advantage?

Is Nancy Pelosi really going to fight for us this time? ...

Nancy Pelosi has disappointed me so many times after espousing progressive positions then absolutely caving to the fake Dems (which includes the Prez). But this time she seems to be working harder (not to mention that there's a swelling of support around her) so maybe she will continue the fight to the end:

By now you’ve probably heard about Nancy Pelosi’s decision to include the more liberal version of the public option in the final House bill, the one that includes Medicare + 5% rates, as the Progressive Caucus has sought, instead of negotiated rates. This may be slightly premature. Whatever bill she releases will be guaranteed to get 218 votes, and right now the process to round up those votes is ongoing – her Majority Whip Jim Clyburn will seek the necessary votes within the next 24 hours. But she’s nearing that count for the “robust” version, leading her to side with House liberals on this question.
[...]
Finally, let me echo Chris Bowers and say that respect must be paid to Nancy Pelosi. Getting a Medicare +5% public option through her chamber of the House would be a major achievement, making it far more likely to get some manner of public option in the final bill – and, because it’s among the most popular elements of reform, ensuring that a decent health care bill passes into law this year. She deserves a lot of credit for getting this far, and so does the Congressional Progressive Caucus, often thought of as a weak player in the Capitol. Take a bow, Raul Grijalva, Lynn Woolsey, and the rest. (Pelosi About To Include Medicare +5 Public Option In House Bill)

Ending news articles with inanities ...

Gail Russell Chaddock ends an article in The Christian Science Monitor entitled "Who will rein in healthcare costs? Don’t look to Congress." with the following quote:

“There aren’t any easy deficit reductions anymore,” says Stanley Collender, a budget analyst at Qorvis Communications here. “If there were easy reductions, they would have been done already.”

Well, a real easy way to reduce US spending would be to end the Afghanistan (and the Iraq) wars. This would pay for healthy health care for every single American. And that's not even counting all the lives, American and not, that would be saved.

Perhaps, though, easy reductions doesn't mean sane reductions, nor logical reductions, nor reductions one would arrive at with a working intellect.

Perhaps, reductions refers to cheating the voters and engorging the corporations. Perhaps reductions refers to how the elected representatives in the Senate can perform the transfer of funds without the populace noticing. If this is the case then I must agree, reductions that are not reductions but monetary transfers from citizens to citizen-killing corporations, who cynically use the word 'health' in their corporate titles, is not always easy to do without vocal disapproval, at least not permanently.

"Why is the Chamber of Commerce refusing to stand up for small business?" ...

Simon Johnson asks the question in title above.

There is a long tradition in the United States of big business trampling on independent entrepreneurs, and of those entrepreneurs fighting back through the ballot box. This time around, big banks captured their regulators, badly damaged small firms, and look set to do it again.

Why is the Chamber of Commerce refusing to stand up for small business?

The question is, I think, not exactly on the up and up. When was the national C of C ever about small business? As far as I can see they've always been about protecting the most selfish interests of very large corporations while claiming, quite disingenuously, that they are about protecting small business. Local C of C vary. They tend to represent medium to large businesses. Their business is to protect themselves. Creating an environment for new entries is NOT their goal.

The truth that can't be heard ... in the US ...

We can't combat Terrorism by sending our military into Muslim countries. Doing that only exacerbates the problem, since it inevitably intensifies the anti-American sentiment that enables and fuels the terrorist threat in the first place. All of that is so basic. It's been empirically proven over and over during the last decade. It's not Noam Chomsky or Al Jazeera pointing out these basic truths, but instead, a 2004 Task Force handpicked by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon to review and assess the Bush administration's anti-terrorism efforts, principally the wars they were waging in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Undoubtedly, there is some small faction of "Islamic radicals" principally motivated by religious fervor which will likely hate the West regardless of what it does, but -- as the 2004 Pentagon-commissioned Report found -- their most potent weapons are American policies that inflame anti-American hatred in the Muslim world, beginning with ongoing wars waged by the U.S. military in Muslim countries. That's so self-evident it shouldn't require a report to document it, but since it seems to, here's a very credible report that does exactly that [pdf].

A Rumsfeld-era reminder about what causes Terrorism by Glenn Greenwald

Olympia Snowe (Repug): Let them eat cake!

Snowe Says Jump, Baucus Says How High

... [Snowe's] solution to the fact that real health insurance would still be unaffordable for millions if the nation adopted the bill she wrote: let everyone buy worthless junk insurance. This is probably one of the worst ways to make insurance “affordable,” and it seems that Baucus now thinks it is great idea.

I agree with this:

The Democrats’ desperate attempts to adopt all of Snowe’s (a member of a powerless minority party) terrible ideas is sickening. She has been slowly ruining reform with her demands. Her unneeded vote is not worth the terrible compromises she has demanded. Senate Democrats need to stop bowing to her whims and put together the best bill they can to help the American people.

It conjures up the image of Democrats as rodents running in circles around a big piece of stinking cheese.

As for this:

Polling shows the Americans just don’t really care that a bill is “bipartisan.” What they want is real reform with a public option, which will make life for regular people in this country better.

But Obama, the insurance companies, the Repugs, and the minority of DEMS THAT COUNT in the Senate don't want Americans to have health care. They want the insurance industry to get richer and richer off the death of Americans so that they can receive more and more blood money from them. That's what Obama's preferred Senators want.