Oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear.

I suppose this cartoon is not very nice at all but I think it's really funny! AND a good antidote to all the idol worship going on right now....

Tragedy of modern war

I so agree with this:

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other -- instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

-- Edward Abbey

Of course, many die-hard conservatives would consider it treasonous. So sad.
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The truth about war

This is painful:

When the smoke was over, the dead buried, and the cost of the war came back to the people...it suddenly dawned on us that the cause of the Spanish-American war was the price of sugar...that the lives, blood, and money of the American people were used to protect the interest of the American capitalists.

--Mark Twain

Fun slogan I just found

Take a look:

Politics is like driving. To go backward, put it in R. To go forward, put it in D.

If, of course, the Democrats don't sell those of us who supported them down the river.

Just sayin'.
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The best hate mail of all time

This is just too funny. You're going to have to go over to Daily Kos and read it because I'm not about to sully my blog with such foul language.

Some folks aren't sure whether it's real or a parody. I rather think it's real because of the appalling spelling. I'm also not even sure a true liberal trying to parody this kind of hate mail could even think of some of this stuff. Just go look. Right here.

Oh, and be sure and take the poll. My favorite part was about Guatemala being in the middle east! (I'm cracking up all over again even as I write this.)
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Oh, that double standard

I found this comment over on Dependable Renegade:

But when Bill Clinton gets a blow job, that's a huge blot on the Democratic party and our "secular" culture. Got it.

Now, why was Sanford, a millionaire, hitting up the state for funds to visit his mistress while trying to deny unemployment benefits to unemployed Carolinians?

Very nicely put.
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Un-freakin'-believable!

What can I say?

Just watch it:

The license

This is rich. My friend Paul posted it over on his blog and I just nicked it!

What a surprise! (Not.)

Even though I already knew this, it disgusts me:

Health insurers have forced consumers to pay billions of dollars in medical bills that the insurers themselves should have paid, according to a report released [Wednesday] by the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee.
...
At a committee hearing yesterday, three health-care specialists testified that insurers go to great lengths to avoid responsibility for sick people, use deliberately incomprehensible documents to mislead consumers about their benefits, and sell "junk" policies that do not cover needed care. Rockefeller said he was exploring "why consumers get such a raw deal from their insurance companies."

The star witness at the hearing was a former public relations executive for major health insurers whose testimony boiled down to this: Don't trust the insurers.

"The industry and its backers are using fear tactics, as they did in 1994, to tar a transparent and accountable -- publicly accountable -- health-care option," said Wendell Potter, who until early last year was vice president for corporate communications at the big insurer Cigna.

Yes, I've had claims denied that most definitely were supposed to be covered under the plan I was on. I'll bet that's happened to a lot of you who are reading this.
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Our ridiculous culture

Yep. This pretty much captures the reporting of the last 24 hours or so:

Energy, landfills and that sort of thing

As I write, I just got home for lunch. On the way, I stopped and picked up three aluminum can and two plastic bottles that had been thrown on the side of the streets. Then I put them in my recyling bin in my garage upon arriving at my house. Did you know that:

-- Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours -- or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.

-- An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now!

-- Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.

-- Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60-watt light bulb for up to six hours.

I also carry along a canvas bag and pick cans and bottles when I'm out walking my dog. It's easy and I'm paying for curbside recycling pick-up anyway.

I have trained myself that when I spot an aluminum can on the street, what I really "see" is three hours of TV and when I spot that plastic bottle, what I really "see" is six hours of light. That really helps motivates me to go to the trouble to pick them up.

Please consider adopting this really simple practice that will help save the earth as well as cut down on the unsightly litter that is thrown around by the careless and thoughtless citizens among us!

Oh, that party of family values

Yeah, I know Democrats cheat on their wives too. But Democrats, as a party, don't set themselves up as self-righteous arbiters of everybody else's morals. This is from CNN:

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, just back from a secret trip to Argentina unknown to his staff or his wife, admitted Wednesday he has carried on an extramarital affair with a woman in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
...
The South Carolina governor had not been seen in public since June 18. When questioned, Sanford's staff told media outlets Sanford was hiking on the Appalachian Trail. But Sanford was spotted Wednesday in Atlanta, Georgia's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
...
[T]he Republican leader in the South Carolina Senate questioned Sanford's abdication of responsibility for leaving without notice last week.

"I'm deeply disturbed that no one knew where Gov. Sanford was over the last five days," state Sen. Harvey Peeler said in a statement, adding: "We cannot let the governor's personal life overshadow his public responsibility, or in this case, his negligence of gubernatorial authority."

It's not the sex; it's the hypocrisy.

(Just sayin'.)
~~~

The problem with that "public option" option

Here's part of a reader's comment I found over on OpEdNews underneath an article entitled "The Simple Answer to America's Health Care Crisis: Medicare for All":

A public option that would "compete" with private insurance would be doomed to fail unless private insurance companies were compelled to accept all applicants regardless of pre-existing conditions. Good luck getting that to happen. Because private insurers would continue to cherry pick only the healthy to insure, the public option would be the only entity insuring those with pre-existing conditions and would require massive subsidies.

The primary reason single payer could take on the 50 million or so people who have no insurance in this country without raising the overall cost of health care in the U.S. is because single payer, like Medicare, has only a 3% overhead compared to 25-35% in private insurance. That extra 22-32% goes to marketing, lobbying, investor return, CEO pay, etc, all items that have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH PROVIDING HEALTH CARE.

That's why even if private insurance companies were compelled to accept all applicants regardless of pre-existing conditions, the whole system would continue to have these huge cost inefficiencies, because the insured are not a single group, but instead are split into thousands of small groups with no financial leverage.

Why isn't the "cherry-picking" inevitability not being talked about among the mainstream pundits? Why isn't the outrageous level of CEO salary being talked about? Would we even enjoy a sporting event if there were a different set of rules for each side? Of course not! Competition is not the real thing if there's not a reasonably level playing field.
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This is urgent, folks!

Check out the Health Care '09 website.
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That election

Just in case you've forgotten or weren't really paying attention in 2000, read this.
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Too many people are forgetting this

Or maybe some of them never knew it. The article I'm calling to your attention is entitled "Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away" by Chris Hedges and I give you just the first paragraph:

Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught. It was Washington that orchestrated the 1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the Middle East, and install the compliant shah in power. It was Washington that forced Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a man who cared as much for his country as he did for the rule of law and democracy, to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran. Iranians know they once had a democracy until we took it away.

When will we learn? When will we ever learn?
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Quotes of the day

From Sojourners:

"Years ago, there's no way we could do this. It brings to mind Big Brother, George Orwell, and '1984.'"

-- Keith Sadler, police chief

"No one has the right to know who goes in and out my front door. That's my business. That's not what America is about."

-- David Mowrer, a local laborer

Both commenting on the 165 closed-circuit TV cameras that “will provide live, round-the-clock scrutiny of nearly every street, park and other public space” in Lancaster, PA.
***
This is very, very, very disturbing.
~