January 23, 2008 – Capitol Hill Blue

Step One towards fixing health care

January 23, 2008

Step One towards fixing health care: Access to health insurance for the 40-50 million currently without it.

Blue Cross proposes fix for uninsured Americans
https://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080123/hl_nm/usa_bluecross_dc;

Speaking as one of the uninsured, this is actually one of the best, workable proposals I have seen towards fixing our health care programs. It may not be perfect but it is a good starting point that many can live with.

When did it become OK?

January 23, 2008

Last week I posed a question whether anyone out there believed anything that the Federal gov’t says?

From the lack of responses, I am going to proceed, that the majority of people conclude that most of what comes from our gov’t is BS!

So, what I want to know is when did it become OK for our gov’t to lie to us?

Would we have accepted GW’s lies about Iraq before 911?

Now I know I am showing my age when I make this comparison, but our country is starting to remind me of the USSR during the cold war.

An Open Letter to President Bush

January 23, 2008

Mr. President, the American people have never liked being lied to. And since you have become our President, you have been telling some whoppers.

Right after 9/11 you told us that our forces would be hunting for Bin Laden until he and his ilk were “brought to justice”. However, soon thereafter, you removed most of the troops that were looking for him. You have since allowed his trail to go “stone cold”.

Did the dog eat Bush’s homework?

January 23, 2008

Could anyone be so gullible to believe that the White House had not one archivist, just one GS-15 level geek with access to the higher powers, to tell them that emails had to be saved and how to do it? Either Barney ate the email, or the Bush administration broke the law. The congressional Republicans nailed President Clinton for the very thing President Bush seems to have done. Yet they scrapped the email archiving system Clinton put in place to retain emails in favor of what by recent accounts appears to be no system at all. Now they must be held accountable.

Why is Bush still President?

January 23, 2008

A new study documents “hundreds of false statements” by President George W. Bush and his administration in the days leading up to the Iraq war. Each carefully-crafted lie was designed to bolster Bush’s case for invasion of Iraq.

The news is not that Bush lied. Everybody with a functioning brain knows the President of the United States is a serial liar. The news is not that someone managed to document the hundreds of falsehoods used to justify an illegal and immoral war. Lies, when examined closely, fail the smell test.

Bush told hundreds of lies

January 23, 2008

A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.

The missing emails

January 23, 2008

When the Bush administration took office, it was promised that the White House would operate like a lean, efficient corporation, unlike the messy ways of the Clintons. After all, the president was a Harvard MBA and the vice president the former CEO of a huge multinational corporation.

It didn’t work out that way. At times, like with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, White House officials seemed to be clomping around in clown shoes. Now comes the curious case of the missing e-mails.

Rise of the jackal pack

January 23, 2008

While channel surfing for the latest in the series of blah-blah Democratic presidential debates the other night, I came upon what was obviously an old rerun on Animal Planet and could not tear myself away from the bizarre sight: I witnessed two jackals going after each other, clawing and snapping, while an almost unseen Carolina grouse harmlessly flapped its wings.

Media’s love affair with McCain

January 23, 2008

One of the curiosities of American politics is the media’s ongoing infatuation with John McCain. A bit of this is based on things such as McCain’s opposition to torture (unfortunately, we can no longer treat opposing torture like opposing child molestation, i.e., something one assumes is standard equipment in a presidential candidate rather than a luxury upgrade). Yet most of the journalistic love affair with the Republican senator from Arizona is based on other factors.

A lonely but honorable fight

January 23, 2008

In a speech on politicians and the press, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., told a group of journalists that intensive scrutiny was all very well, but from time to time “try to catch us doing something good.”

McCaskill is one of a brave — some would say foolhardy — band of lawmakers who have voluntarily renounced earmarks, or, to use the less polite term, personal pork projects, a popular system for using federal tax dollars to please the people back home.