I am writing to encourage you to join Senator Udall by signing on to Sen. Michael Bennet's Letter in support of passing Public Option HCR via the reconciliation process.
Keep reading if you care to know why this ordinary New Mexican supports this needed measure:
]]> I have been insured via my employers for most of the 25 years I've been working. Two years ago, though, I was laid off, and because my employer was so small, I was not eligible for COBRA coverage. I then found out that due to a non-life-threatening , inexpensive-to-treat condition I can't buy health insurance at any price. Yup, in spite of never having had a single suicidal thought, I can't buy individual health insurance because I have been treated for depression. Now COBRA coverage is a good thing, but it was news to me that even if you have employer health coverage, there may be no COBRA....In addition, it is expensive, (VERY expensive when you're unemployed) and only available for a few months. . I'm back working now, and insured again. No telling how long that will continue in this economy. And, you know, the health coverage I lost was really a stretch for that small employer...Do you suppose maybe If I and the other workers there had my own government option coverage they could have maybe afforded to keep me on? The current system really stacks the deck against the small employers that are the lifeblood of our economy.
C______ , my next door neighbor lady, is dying from Alzheimer's. Thanks to Medicare, she is covered, and her frail husband gets some help taking care of her from in-home care givers a few hours a week. As near as I can tell, this "evil, government run insurance program" is working better for them than my mom's private insurance (HMO) did when she was suffering the same ailment a decade ago. At that time the HMO companies were playing a game of moving their geographic coverage areas (by zip code) in order to drop less profitable customers. As a result, my sister and I had to line up new coverage three times in a five year period. That took hours and days of forms and phone calls...time we could have been spending with mom while she still knew who we were. In only one of those cases was there more than a single choice available....hardly a free market.
At a previous job (A_____ T_____/C______, where you stopped by and chatted with the owners a couple of times) I had to live abroad in Vienna, Austria for several months. Due to a slip and a sprained wrist, and a physical (required by our customer) I got to see "socialized medicine" first hand. No waiting, no payment forms, the Doctors were not rushed, and spent more time with me than any American doctor ever has. It works, and works well. If that is socialism, than count me as a socialist. If you need to raise my taxes to pay for it, that's fine. If some poor people get needed healthcare from my tax dollars, even better...even if they are "foreigners".
I also got to do a lot of other travel while at A_____. I met some very bright and talented people from Australia, New Zealand, Austria, France, and Germany. They all mentioned that they had, at one time or another, an interest in immigrating to the US, but had decided not to due to lack of a government health program. Further, most of the Americans I met in Vienna were torn between keeping their excellent Austrian health coverage, and returning to their friends and families in the US. I learned that the world's best and brightest engineers, scientists, and doctors only consider working in the US if they are from one of the few countries where healthcare is in a worse state than in the US. We have so many Indian, Pakistani, and Chinese professionals that there are jokes about them, but from countries with good public health care systems, we only get them if they came here to be with a spouse.
As for those noisy folks at the town halls...I work with a couple of them. My office mate, J_____: Conservative with a capital C, tea party type, bragged about disrupting congressman Heinrich's town hall. Says he doesn't want the government screwing up his health coverage. See, he has better coverage than I do, because his wife works at _________________, and gets to use her health insurance....paid for by the United States Department of Energy. And there is K____, the "Conservative Christian" young woman who refers to our president as "the antichrist", and wants no part of "socialized" health care? She was quite pleased that, once married, she'd be able to use her USAF officer fiancé's Tri-Care, which was apparently much better than the pretty good insurance our employer provides. And then there is my boss. He's sure Obama is going to ruin the country. Makes most of his money from two small businesses he and his wife run, and only keeps this job for the health insurance. Honestly, I couldn't make this stuff up!
I know you don't spend all your time in DC, but when I have seen you dining at The Range in Bernalillo, the people sharing your table look distinctly unlike my friends, family, neighbors and colleagues. (We can't afford to dress that well.) When you have visited the companies I have worked for, you didn't spend any time listening to the worker bee's concerns. Hey, I know you try, but there was a lot of shouting at the town halls this summer, and I don't know that you really hear from people like me, who are polite, don't interrupt, and don't assume that their view is the only correct one.
Thank you Senator, for your service to the people of the United States, and New Mexico, and for you valuable time,
Your constituent,
Kevbo
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But my second thought is that for all the issues I have with Mr. Obama's leadership (or lack of it) things would REALLY be dismal if he had not been elected and we instead had these two chuckleheads at the helm.
So thanks John, thanks Sarah, for your constant reminder that, while far from perfect, Obama is doing far better than the alternative would be.
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Then he'd take the footage of them reading the phone book, and overlay that footage with a counter showing the number of Americans that died from lack of healthcare while they blather on.
Then he'd make sure every American saw that image 3 times a day.
How about this for a new set of rules on filibusters:
1) Debate is not limited, but each Senator gets only one turn, and if they leave the podium for any reason, that turn is over. They can talk until thier adult diaper is packed full and running down thier pant leg, or they until they drop from exhaustion if they so choose, but when that happens they get no second chance.
2) Once a Senator has taken a turn, they no longer may vote for or against cloture. At any time, 60% of the Senators still awaiting thier turn to speak may vote to limit additional debate.
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Congressional republicans have a stated (through Rush Limbaugh) goal of causing our president to fail.
Obama's publicly voiced support of a public option for health care has been lukewarm at best.
If he were instead to loudly insist on a public option, wouldn't that serve to harden opposition? Could it be that his tepid support is to avoid painting a bullseye on the measure?
Now since he has only gotten minimal republican support as it is, I'm looking for him to stiffen his support of a public option. This will put the blue dogs in the position of failing to support thier president.
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On one he had a segment on
This is an easy, FREE way to opt out of unwanted mail-order catalogs that clutter your mailbox, house, and landfills. Not as good as a do-not-mail list, but still a step in the right direction. Just one statistic: A 1.2 - 1.5% order rate is considered good for companys "prospectng" with these catalogs.... >98% end up in recycle bins, or worse landfills.
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I realize Josh has little control over what ads are posted on TPM. When I noticed one for a well known scam( "Google pays me $173/hr") I thought I'd warn my fellow TPMers.
This ad is NOT associated with Google, It claims that you can make money "posting links on google", whatever that is supposed to mean. Here is a link to a discussion of this scam on a google forum:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdSense/thread?tid=310b60ceedc1cd07&hl=en
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We should not dismiss these warnings. For we have already become much like the USSR. We are fighting two wars based not on dire necessity, but on promoting our ideology. Our current military spending currently exceeds that of the rest of the world combined. The current economic crisis shows that we are on the verge of spending ourselves out of existence, and THAT is the way in which we are coming to mirror our cold war nemesis.
]]> The danger is not that we will have socialized medicine in the US, but rather that we won't. The threat is not that we will fail to promote democracy in the rest of the world, but rather that we will bankrupt ourselves in that pursuit.
The average American seems to equate socialism with USSR and/or Cuban style communism. That is far from the only example. Sweden, France, Austria, and many other well-to-do nations are effectively socialist societies. Far from standing in long lines for bread and other staples, they have standards of living that rival and even exceed the US.
So yes, republicans, we DO need to worry about the US becoming another USSR....not the communist one of old that you GOPers worry about, but the current bankrupt and broken state that we see today. For that is what happens when idiology replaces reason.
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Despite treating most of the constitution as nothing more than annoyance, the one amendment the Bush administration did manage to respect was the second. Allowing the "Assault Weapons" ban to expire was one of the few cracks of light in eight years of gloom.
Now we hear Mr. Holder speaking (presumably for the administration) about reinstating this stinker of a law.
Ill-conceived: Banning weapons based primarily on purely cosmetic considerations may appeal emotionally to some, yet doesn't have much impact on crime. Example: In spite of the fact that bayoneting is unheard of as a means of murder or assualt; existence of a bayonet lug on a rifle was part of the formula used to ban them.
Ineffective: The U.S. Department of Justice conducted two studies of the consequences of the 1994 assault weapons ban. In 1999, Bill Clinton's Justice Department looked exhaustively at the ban's effects. It concluded that "the public safety benefits of the 1994 ban have not yet been demonstrated." In 2001, a second Justice Department review similarly found no evidence that the ban had a statistically significant effect on violent crime. A congressionally mandated study by the Urban Institute reached comparable conclusions.
Ultimately unpopular: The Clinton administration, and Democratic congress's support of the "Assault Weapon" ban was a deciding factor in the Republican's gains in congress in 1994, and had it not been for this legislation Al Gore would have been president for the last 8 years. Imagine what a different world we would be living in if that were the case. How many soldiers have died in the hell-hole that is Iraq so that Democrats could claim to have "done something" (that actually did nothing) about evil guns?
I'm not a rich man. In fact I lost my job in March, and was unemployed until nearly election day....still I managed to donate nearly a thousand dollars to Mr. Obama's campaign efforts over the spring and summer. Public information is available that can be verified by those who doubt this claim, but you'll just have to take my word about the week I gave up meat so that I could donate $25.
I had thought that Democrats had learned their lesson in the 90's, and that this money wouldn't be wasted. Please don't waste the opportunity to do REAL good by creating feel-good-do-nothing laws aimed at influencing the behavior of lawbreakers. If you re-enact the Clinton era gun legislation, you will probably be as sucessful enacting the universal health care we so desperatly need. This past year, we had plenty of opportunity to choose Clinton Mk-II policies. Great numbers of us rejected that choice.
Mr. Obama has found experts to advise him on financial matters. Experts on diplomacy to advise him on foreign policy. Experts on unions and industry to advise him on labor matters. Please Mr. Obama, find someone that knows the difference between a semi-automatic, and a machine gun, someone who knows that there is no such thing as a "cop killer bullet", That making a gun's stock out of black plastic instead of figured walnut does nothing to make it more dangerous.....find several such people, and please listen to thier advice on this matter on which you (or at least Mr. Holder speaking for you) don't seem to be very well informed.
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John McCain from last night's debate:
"Yes. Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago. I'm going to give a new direction to this economy in this country."
Dear Senator McCain,
You have made a lot of noise about how you are not President Bush, and how it is time to change the way things are done in Washington. Senator McCain YOU are not running against President Bush, OR the way things are done in Washington. You are running against Senator Obama, who has seldom if ever agreed with President Bush, and does not represent the beltway establishment.
Eight years ago YOU ran against president Bush. Four years ago, you were in a position to run against him again. Considering the mess he'd made of Iraq, even a better position than in 2000. You chose instead to take the stage beside him, endorse his bid for reelection, and endorse his foriegn policy, his domestic policy, and his economic policy. You became his houseboy in the Senate chamber, voting overwhelmingly to support the Bush agenda, and working to convince other senators to do likewise.
Of course it is understandable that you failed to challenge a siting president of your own party in time of war. It simply isn't done. The good of the country be damned, only a maverick would have challenged George Bush for the 2004 Republican nomination.
A maverick would have spared us the last four years of the Bush administration. Would have spared the lives of hundreds if not thousands of our brave soldiers. Would have spared the human rights of the prisoners we still hold without hope of trial, and those we have tortured. Pity that the Republican party contained no mavericks in 2004.
Regards, and good luck during the remaining years of your Senate term.
Kevbo
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