We're hearing a lot from Senator Joe Lieberman, (R) (D) from Connecticut, lately.  So I thought we could dedicate a post to the best things ever said about him.  Maybe we could chronicle his hypocrisy, a continuum of sorts--on one end, the most hypocritical things he's ever said, on the other end....well, okay, there's only one end.  

Got any favorite Lieberman moments?  Care to dedicate a poem?  A limerick?  

How about lyrics for a Joe Lieberman Blues Collection?  

Born up near Poughkeepsie, came out whistlin dixie...

Take it away, TPMCafe.

What does it look like? 

Is there a receptionist?

Is it one long corridor of cubicles that leads to Dick Day's office? 

Does Bwak leave a trail of feathers behind?

Does Strato fly in on a velvet cloud, drop off her copy, then fly off into the grand blue sky?

What happened that morning Obey walked in and found Lalo sitting in his Eames leaning chair?

How many times has middleclassbill pounded on LisB's wall asking her to turn the music down?

Is Oldengoldendecoy chiseling out cafe recommend rules on the ceiling?

Is Jason Everett Miller cursing at the person who, once again, left off a t while mis-stenciling his middle name on his office door?

What do we all wear on casual Fridays?

Do we have a ping pong table?  If we do, who's the best player?  Johnnienohands?

Is the cleaning lady who comes in at night actually davidfarrar in drag disguise?

Has Josh ever been to the TPM blogger's imaginary office?

Is Ramona's office really big enough for a Democrat wide intervention?  

Are Professor Amike, Flowerchild, Miguel, Synch, Old Grouch, Ripper and Aunt Sam, all sitting in the conference room but not sure who called the meeting?

Does Thera have an honorary corner office?  With a couch?

And who has the trap door beneath his/her cubicle that leads to a secret dungeon, with shackles and leg irons tailor made for Blunderdick and Widdle Dub?

Okay, I'm sorry not to have mentioned everyone else by name. (And everyone else by name knows who they are. I haven't even mentioned me, so don't feel bad.)  But feel free to chime in and help give me an idea of what our office space looks like.  

Maybe someone can volunteer to draw up a colorful blueprint once we solicit enough machinations on what the place looks like.  
 

Some reporter-blogger-journalist-Twitterer overhears someone close to the White House saying one thing or another about health reform, then publishes it and the whole blogosphere starts hyperventilating.  

Seems like there are tinier and tinier bits of information floating around the inter-webs.  Parsed and re-parsed.  Snippets of things beltway ring leaders say or intimate, often anonymously, from which we try and create a narrative.

Whole thoughts are rarely captured. We're down to microscopic. Pieces. Of. Thought. that get distributed and repeated every nanosecond of every minute of every day.

And they are little bits and bytes; a Hannity-style video splice from a speech President Obama once gave as a Senator three years ago, an edited quote attributed to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, five words from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.  

Round and round they go, where they stop nobody knows.

This seems to confirm yesterday's fragment of a sound byte taken from something Marc Ambinder thought he overheard Glenn Greenwald infer from what White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs seems to have implied in answer to a question that wasn't actually asked by MSNBC White House Correspondent Chuck Todd.

Granted, it would be great if what President Obama and his cabinet said was strong unambiguous and consistent. And they definitely need to work on that. 

But maybe we all need to work on taking some things that are reported--no, not some things, lots of things-- with a grain of salt.  

Let's take a collective breath every now and then.  

Let's take into greater consideration the motives of those that would love to misinform, misquote, and mix mash and mire otherwise simple declarative intelligent statements coming from anyone with a (D) affixed to their name for the sole purpose of creating mass hysteria. To demonize, delay and grind to a complete standstill the slightest sign of progress. To attain the merely reflexive goal of snuffing out anything that has the faint pulse of hope.

Maybe we need to do a better job of editing out the madness.  Otherwise, we're really not communicating at all.  

And this is all just an exercise in circulating binary code.

We tend to underestimate our power as Americans.  And in this case, as consumers of health insurance.  

Right now, it seems that our elected representatives are thinking about dropping the public option from health reform legislation.  Senator Kent Conrad, whose fat wallet is made possible by Blue Cross Blue Shield, Amgen, New York Life Insurance and Kindred HealthCare, to name a few, is dead set against a public option.  

If beltway ring leaders can threaten to drop the public option, why can't we all threaten to drop the private option, as a counterpoint?   

Consider this:  We are the only consumers the health insurance industry can offer its products to. (It's not like there's a global demand for private insurance--virtually ever other country has some version of universal health care, or single payer.) 

We have more power than we realize.  It's unfortunate that we can't seem to win debates as citizens.  As average Americans.    

But as consumers, we are anything but average.  We are powerful.  

If we can boycott Whole Foods, or pressure advertisers to drop Glenn Beck, why can't we arrange a "Drop The Private Option" Day?

I recognize this is difficult.  How can people go without health insurance? 

Well, people are losing their health insurance every day.  They are either being dropped as a result of practices like rescission.  Or they are electing to drop their insurance because they can't afford the premiums and they are going bankrupt.  

Let's just make arrangements to do it all together on the same day.  

This is already an unsustainable system.  

So it's almost like a game of chicken.  

Who will balk first?

It's been referred to as health reform legislation but it should really be called anti-health crimes legislation.  Because what we have in America is a medical industrial complex that operates like a crime syndicate.  

Big Pharma has a nasty habit of manufacturing its research, not just its drugs.  It changes one molecule in an anti-depressant to save it from the threat of generics, calls it a breakthrough and continues to charge you a fortune for it. 

Not exactly the kind of ingenuity that America is known for, is it? Actually, it's precisely the ingenuity that America has become known for.  Look at the auto industry and the energy industry, not just the health care industry--public and private policy has one mantra--make money, not progress.  It's a mentality that is counter to creating anything cutting edge, counter to sustaining anything that is world leading.  

It generates cash, not vision.  

Corporations and government have colluded in this big money, small idea system and it is rapidly destroying our economy.  Our elected representatives are essentially corporate sales representatives.  

But getting back to the mob that owns the health care industry:

Health insurance companies practice rescission.  And we all know how the scam works;  get consumers to pay skyrocketing  premiums for years and when they really need coverage for a serious illness, deny it and drop them completely. Then deny them coverage for the rest of their lives.  

To maintain its stranglehold on Americans, they behave like one giant industry, not like small private companies that compete fairly and offer innovative products for consumers.  

There is no need for a free enterprise when you have a really well-oiled criminal enterprise. 

That brings us to the virtue of a public option.   (Well, virtue if you're one of 300 million American citizens.  If you're a corporate citizen, it's a major problem because it would really destroy the criminal enterprise.)  

The primary purpose of a public option is to provide Americans, all Americans, fair affordable access to health insurance.  And it has to be large enough and influential enough to compete effectively with private insurance.  

But therein lies the problem.  

It means that the private insurance industry would have to compete.  And competing has become un-American.     

That's precisely why, for the White House, the public option has become optional.  
Following in the footsteps of anti-visionaries Kent Conrad and Chuck Grassley, President Obama is now pushing consumer owned non-profit cooperatives, and many believe these cooperatives will lack the negotiating power of size to effectively lower prices.  

Exactly.  

That's the idea.   It reflects America's new rallying cry:  

Never never inspire competition.   

That deal that the White House apparently cut with the Pharma industry is starting to make sense--get the industry to agree to a meager $82 billion in cost cutting over 10 years and promise not to give a not for profit entity the power to negotiate.

The result?  No real competition.  No real innovation. 

What we have now, it seems, is a Democratic majority that represents the corporate minority. 

And when it comes to our health and well-being, that is a crime.  

A crime against humanity.  

This isn't a matter of splitting hairs, as others would have you believe.  

In the next eight weeks, there are only two kinds of legislation that our reps and Senators will be busy crafting:

Pro health crime.  

Or anti-health crime.   

I support anti-health crime legislation.   


 

Okay.  

That's it.  

Emergency.  Sound the five alarm idiot bell.

The Republican party is off the reservation.  They are now the official pace car of the lunatic fringe.   

They are not the right wing.  They are the something is seriously wrong wing. 

And I'm not just talking about Senator Chuck Grassley.  

I'm talking about the whole lot.  De Mint. Inhofe. Shelby.  Bachmann. Cantor. McConnell. Boehner.  Cornyn.  Bond.  Coburn. Graham.  Gingrich.  Kristol. Krauthammer.  Jindal. Palin. Beck.  Limbaugh.  

Collectively, they couldn't mount a brain wave if they tried.  

The entire party is an intelligence-free zone and we are lucky--lucky I tell you--that they're no longer leading this nation.  But they're still very capable of doing damage. 

Get out of the way of their crazy bus--they've thrown it into reverse, floored it and are about to side-swipe the age of enlightenment on a maddening turbo-powered race back to the dark ages.  

Have fun, guys.

Don't let the door of the 21st century hit you on the way out.   

Inspired by a post by Ripper, I thought this summed up the choice your elected officials have regarding health reform pretty succinctly.  The only other option to healthcare is the status quo. It's what we have right now.  

And no matter how you look at it, the status quo is highway robbery.  

It is an unsustainable system that is not only bankrupting Americans.  It is killing them. Rescission is as close as insurance companies can get to a license to kill.  Dropping someone's coverage right at the moment they most need it is criminal.  

Imagine waking up tomorrow, wondering which will spread faster, health reform or your cancerous tumor?

We need reform now.  And regardless of what the medical industrial complex or lobbyists or pundits say, this is not a complicated issue.  

Your rep or Senator is either fighting for healthcare. 

Or fighting for highwayrobberycare.  

Imagine a meeting of two different civilizations.  One is ours, the other far more advanced than ours--like the beautiful water aliens in The Abyss--so full of understanding and empathy and warmth.  So brilliant and magnanimous.  We have waited for this transcendent moment for so long.  We proudly show them our bag of progress.  They look through it, then look up and their eldest most senior being says:

Really?  That's it??  Bombs and cash?  No?  Not cash?  Credit default swaps?  I see.  Okay.  Credit default swaps.  A currency of some sort.  No? Just paper? Okay.  So. This is how you plan on traversing the universe some day?  This.  This is the master plan?  

Bombs and credit default swaps.  

And you say you're the leaders?  Nothing personal, but you don't look like artists and musicians and poets and philosophers.  There's probably not one sculptor or painter or philanthropist among you.  To be honest, you look more like... government and military personnel.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  But since when are the leaders of an entire civilization comprised of government and military personnel?   Seriously, right?  No?  Not funny, okay.  What about the children?   Where are the children?  You're all adults.  How far do you expect to get without the creative intuition and naturally inclusive open-minded social consciousness of children?  I mean, who are your teachers?  

Bombs and credit default swaps.  

Seriously.  What have you been doing for--how long have you been here now, millions of years?  What's that?  Just 5000 years???  But we scanned some of your cave paintings and, well frankly, you'd have to be an idiot to think...come to think of it,  why didn't you keep up with those cave paintings?  So beautiful.  So inspiring.  So full of promise.   When did you drop that?  That's where everything comes from.  The knowledge, the shared wonder, the infinite humility.  And where are those caves, anyway? What about the mountains?  The oceans?  The lush forests?  Under an invisibility cloak?  What's an invisibility cloak??  Never mind.  

Bombs and credit default swaps.
Who..who are you people?  

And just where do you think you're going with all this???

Endless echos of human madness 

crisscrossing time. 


Centuries of rage, 

back to back, and 

not one moment 

of silence 

in between. 

Not one collective repose. 

Not one humanity-wide 

synchronous embrace. 

Not one solitary pause. 


How many millions of years 

has it been 

since any of us heard, 

all at once, 

anyone other than ourselves? 


And yet we don't 

really even hear ourselves, 

do we? 


And if we don't 

even hear ourselves, 

how could we ever hope 

to hear peace 

when peace decides 

to break its silence? 


If we ever gave 

peace the microphone, 

would we even 

recognize its voice?

Take it easy, no sudden moves.  

It's a beautiful night sir 

lift your fingertips 

from those keyboard grooves.


You've said your piece 

so too have they

it's over for now

no reason to stay.


Rise up from the madness

let your mind roam. 

it's a beautiful night 

and the angels and devils 

are rushing home. 


The sun is falling 

no, not the sky 

It's a beautiful night sir

stop wrestling with 

why 

why 

why


so your body writhes

and your mind reels

and your life feels

like crushed crayons

and broken pinwheels


so you think you see

all you're meant to be

you think your soul 

won't 

ever 

ever

ever 

shake free


but it's not like that

not at all in fact


not on the other side of the fog

It's a beautiful night sir

Step away from the blog.

that darkness rolls deep

but it's a beautiful night sir

don't hide in your sleep

I know I know 

that sadness weighs a ton

But hand to god I promise

there's poetry in the universe-- 

enough 

for everyone

 

The NO!! For Hire crowds we're seeing at town halls nationwide are brutal, intensely disruptive, and about as backwards as a modern civil society has ever seen.

The mobs arrive bloodthirsty and truth-starved, armed with fear and bile and unfound rumors, thanks to the corrupt conservative slime lords who drive them into a salivating frenzy of hate, leaving them frothing at the mouths once they get handed the microphone.   

How many lies can you feed these human beings before they crack?  It's only a matter of time.  

What's worse, look who's doing the feeding:

Rick Scott, founder of "Conservatives for Patients Rights",former CEO of a hospital group that had to pay out $1.7 billion in fines to settle allegations of overcharging Medicare and Medicaid.  

Dick Armey, chairman of conservative DC lobbying firm "Freedom Works"--which represents pharmaceutical powerhouses like Bristol-Myers Squibb--this is Dick Armey, former Republican majority leader, the man who claimed that in his world view, because God created the heavens and the Earth, it would be "quite pretentious" for people to believe God would permit global warming to even occur.    

David Koch, chairman of Koch Industries, the largest privately held oil company in the U.S.,  Kock is the primary financier of Americans for Prosperity--whose subsidiary is the fiercely counterintuitively named "Patients First".

Patients First?

Really?!

Isn't this more like Lobbyists First? 

Let's establish a universal truth about the names of these advocacy groups;  the more human-rights oriented the front sounds--the stronger the name cries out justice for the little guy, the greater the chances are that there is large twisted maniacal laughter lurking behind it. 

You cannot debate rationally with these people.  They do not want a debate.  

They want a fist fight.  

No.  Even that's not enough.

They want an ECW title match.  

They are hoping to snatch idiocy from the jaws of enlightenment.  

They'd rather a fight break out than the truth because the truth would ruin them.  

The truth always ruins them.  

The truth about who they really are is ruining them as we speak.  

How many moderates or independents will want to be associated with this vast corrupt underbelly of politics?

Granted, there are plenty of Americans who will proudly confess their loyalty to the likes of radiovangelists like Rush Limbaugh.  

And plenty who will take their marching orders from Glenn Beck as if it's their patriotic duty. 

But I think the more Americans see just how underhanded and uninformed and unhinged this astro-turf roots movement is;  the more they see just which robber barons are funding it, stoking rage for the sole purpose of protecting corporate proifts;  the more they see just which of the usual suspects are the real driving force behind it, the faster it will all fail.   

And it will be an epic fail.   

We are in the heat of it now.  And it looks familiar and awful and evil and hopeless and it's easy to lose faith.  

But you cannot build effectively long term when all you become known for is unabashed malevolence and perpetual destruction.   

When you are found out.  

When you are caught on camera, red-handed.  

When you are exposed as outright criminals. 

That is the difference here, this time.  

There is national exposure of average Americans being used as fronts for corporate benefactors.   It's like corporate-motive laundering. 

The more sunlight on this sinister practice the better.  

Let this descent into chaos receive more and more PR.     

Reason will ascend more strongly as a result.   



 

What's going on with the health care reform bill?  

Is it a hail mary?  

Fumble?  

Razzle dazzle*
(restrictions may apply with regard to success of actual resulting dazzle. In some states, dazzle is void where prohibited.)  

Is it quickly becoming a bunt, when what we really need is a home run?

Is it a 280 yard drive to the hole that will get us to within putting range of an extraordinary legislative achievement?

Or is it a drive to the basket that will roll around the rim six times, just barely drop in and draw enough flagrant fouls to potentially win on free throws?

Is it a classic give and go?  Give the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry everything they want, then go on August recess?

Is it a fake left, go right to reconciliation?

Is it a prison football game?  Where most of the participants are actually hardened criminals including the warden and the guards?  And the new guy is just looking to cut deals for personal protection?

Is it only an exhibition game this time around?  (Real season not starting for another 57 years.)

Is it one quarterback vs 7000 lineman ready to pounce on him including Democrats facing the wrong way?

Okay, I got this started.  

Anyone want to take the ball and run with it?

Bottom line, aren't the reps and Senators that take campaign money from the medical industrial complex the real villains here?

Not that the people who are offering them bribes aren't criminals. They are.  

But what about these "statesmen" that accept those bribes? They're stuffing their pockets with $1.4 million a day.  

They're the real villains, aren't they?   They're the ones who sell their votes to corporate citizens while selling out average citizens--they then go on TV and pretend this isn't a flagrant criminal enterprise operating in full view of the public.  

Those who accept the most money from the insurance industry are the ones getting in the way of reform.  This is no coincidence.  

To be fair, insurance companies are certainly not angels in all this.  

But they're not even pretending to represent the best interests of American citizens.  One look at the testimonies of the smug presidents of these companies and you know they're not even bothering to feign "care". For example, when asked if they would stop their company's rescission practices, they all said no.  

They're not the worst of the worst actors involved in this charade called health care reform, though. 

No. Make no mistake.  The ones committing the real crime against humanity here are those elected to promote the general welfare of American citizens but sell their souls to the highest bidder.

You think the health care system in this country is unsustainable?  That's nothing.  

It's the way things are done in Washington that is unsustainable.  It's the people who perpetuate this crime syndicate from the inside that threaten the health and well-being of every man woman and child in America.  

It's not the anonymous health insurance bureaucrat that pulls your coverage out from under you just when you need it most.    

No.  The evil here has a name.  

And that name very likely starts with Representative or Senator.  

Now it's true that they are not all villains. Some of them are far from it.  

But all it takes is a dirty stinking rotten no good few dripping with insatiable greed to step in the way of honest effective reform.   

We don't have to create an enemy here.  We don't have to find a bad guy.  We don't have to demonize health insurance companies, or pharmaceutical companies.  They are not pretending to be anything but demons.  

It's those pretending to do the right thing, those feigning innocence, deflecting criticism, raging at those who would dare accuse them of pay for play that must be brought out into the sunlight, that most universal of all disinfectants, so that all can see the error of their ways.  

So that they themselves can see the error of their ways.  

Not that they ever will. 

After all, there are probably a breed of villains so vile they have to ride in the back of the devil's bus.

This is a short post.  It is an homage to the way things used to be written.  

This country's founding documents were short, concise and profound.  And I think we should consider having all modern legislation crafted with fountain pen, or the dip pen.  You tend to think more carefully when your words are written with a sense of permanence.  With a  real sense of purpose.  

Seems to me that the word processor has led to confusion, endless revision and infinite legal disclaimers.  The health care legislation is what, over 1500 pages? Health reform should be a lot easier to digest than tort reform.  

Legislators shouldn't write or act or attempt to govern like attorneys, piling stipulations on top of stipulations.  Adding exemptions and qualifiers and signing statements and waivers and see 300 page rider riders and restrictions and other utter nonsense. 

Things should be simpler to understand.  Maybe we have to take a lesson from the founding fathers.  Things should be written with the same sense of importance and landmark significance as they were when the Declaration of Independence was crafted.  Or the Bill of Rights.  

When, exactly, did we embrace such complexity, anyway?  Think about the last 30,000 years.   Seems that somewhere between cave paintings and congressional legislation, man lost the ability to communicate.  

Well, we need to get that back if humanity is to survive.  

The President will sign legislation with a fountain pen. 

Imagine if what he was signing was written that way.  

If you've watched MSNBC lately, particularly Morning Joe, you will have seen Chuck Todd and others opining about how much of a distraction it would be if Eric Holder were to choose a special prosecutor to investigate torture.  
Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com rightfully took issue with the discussion and wrote a critique--was Chuck Todd being an objective reporter?  Was he simply amplifying the Obama administration's position?  
Here's a link to the initial Greenwald critique and here's a link to a subsequent discussion he and Chuck Todd had about the issue.
It seems hard enough to enforce the rule of law in this country.  
Harder still to enforce real journalism.