Archive for the ‘Filibuster’ Category

“This is a big fucking deal”  -Joe Biden.

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”  -MLK

The Devil is thriving in the Catholic church.

The Ides of March have passed.

The health care bill passed with some drama.  As it should.

Outside, the wind blows hard.

My favorite part is that they lied without shame and cheated overtly and they still lost with ceremony all around them on worldwide television.  Republicans sucked the other day like they haven’t in decades and it was all on display.  They barked like dogs and continue to whine like toddlers.  Shameless.

I readily confess I don’t have my brain wrapped entirely around this bill and some specifics of the reconciliation language.  I have been paying attention.  I didn’t for a time and then I did again.  I got kinda sick of it all.  It does suck.  The bill.  As in sucking chest wound suck.  A mandate without fierce oversight, a mechanism to not only compete but provide accountability and barometric pressure is pure dumb.

A license to ill.

It was on it’s head already.  I sort of understand the economic imperative behind the mandate but throw us a bone bitches or don’t even bother touching me there.

 

I just can’t help but get caught up in the symbolism.  I know the bill sucks but it does accomplish some pretty important shit.  I’ll defer to the fantastic Ms. Maddow:

“On September 23rd…

• All kids get covered (no pre-existing conditions)
  
• Can’t get dropped if you get sick (no more insurance companies dropping you)
  
• No more lifetime limits (on benefits)
  
• Children can stay on until 26 (coverage up to that age)
  

On January 1, 2011…

• Premium payment reformed (80-85% for medical care) with rebate if you don’t use coverage
  
• Free Medicare preventative care (no co-pays)
  

By 2014…

• Total ban on all pre-existing condition denials
  
• Health exchanges open
  
• End to annual limits on benefits

Republicans want to repeal this…”  -democraticunderground.com

I’m not sure I want to “do” Rachel but I’m positive I want to get her drunk and cuddle.

So yeah, some good stuff.  It’s just that it barely flirts with incentive for fairness via non profit competition.

That’s the part I liked the most when we started this whole thing.  I see it as key.  Public option, extended Medicare, whatever.  Vital.  We have miles to go before we sleep.

Single payer, Universal, whatever label you choose and whomever you choose to accuse,  the richest spender nation on the planet ought to be covering it’s people.  We buy half of all the weapons.  Half of all of them.  Half of all the weapons made for war, we buy.  I don’t think we’re as big as Canada geographically, but our dick is way bigger.  Can you hear me now?  WAY bigger.  We could take Canada in 72 hours without the military.  They don’t have many guns but we do.

What exactly are health exchanges?  We now know they will be open.  How many?  Where?  I’ll assume that’s good news.  A place to trade bandages and syringes.  Do I have to volunteer?  I’m gonna have to choke a bitch.  I’m gonna have to read this bill and the 157 page reconciliation.  I’m working like twelve hours a week and taking a class.  You can see how I’m underwater.

My feet hurt and it’s humiliating.

It’s a simple problem and the answer is simple.  Shave five or fifteen cents off the defense budget and we can throw in some jobs for infrastructure.  Health care, jobs and mortgage relief.  We spend half the entire global budget on weapons and ten times as much as our nearest competitor.  China.  That there is my idea of Socialism, spending way too much of the people’s money on things they vehemently disagree with.  Wait, that’s Communism.  Isn’t it?  When they can’t afford roof and bread it is.  There is your Goddamn communism.

That there is your buttock.

Wars are your ass.

Your ass mam, has gone missing.

I’m trying to make a point here.  We still are a wealthy nation, despite our recent financial regress.  Much of it was concentrated without equity in the last decade but there is plenty of money right here in River City.  There is no reason, moral or fiscal, we should be denied this right.  It insults my intelligence when anyone complains about paying for it.  They talk about health care being 15 to 18 percent of our GDP.  The defense budget is well over half of every dollar you pay in taxes.  We spend so much fucking money on weapons, it makes the world go round.

Literally.  The world turns because of America’s efforts to be able to kill everyone of us.  Thank God for us.  Don’t piss us off.

Still, I’m impressed and finally proud again of the Democrats.  They pulled it off and scared the crap quite literally out of the obstructionist asstards by supplying them with an example of lockstep so long taken for granted as a fundament in the Republican playbook.  Smoked them at their own game.  Here’s hoping this bodes well and emboldens this heretofore assemblage of invertebrates.  See little Billy, we knew you could do it.  Now get your little ass back out there because the game isn’t even half over.  Be a Democrat for fucks sake.

Now the crazies come out like corpses of Laurel & Hardy with giant red eyed rats speeding off and away from their persons and pockets and folds.  Slack jawed zombies repeating obsolete talking points and swinging scythes.  The Baggers.  The Birthers.  The Hawks, Neocons, Bigots and Bible thumpers.  What an egregious ship of fools.  Obsructionist pricks for infamy.  Avoid their rodent familiars and do not dance with either of any of them.

It’s not safe to drink their liquor.

They really are beginning to parody themselves.

I’ve always thought that being a good loser is important.  I’ve been on the losing end enough to approach being gracious I think.  I’m hopeful that losing has humbled me, it sucks and it shames me but I try to learn and stuff and be polite about it.  The way one loses speaks volumes about one’s character.  If you listened to Boehner on the floor the other night or The Human Shitsmear and Butt Boy Hannity these last few mornings you might think the sky is about to kill you in your bed.

Not good losers, but excellent assholes.

These pricks are the epitome of sore losers along with the entire lock step, teeth full of Orios, lime green plastic tumbler full of cherry Kool Aid and rum mouth breathing members of the 1/4 Paradigm.  That was a pretty cool sentence.  If you don’t know about the 1/4 paradigm, categories are on the right on the main page.  Just scroll down.  I have a fairly general theory about relativity and how it applies without bias but with predictable pattern in a sociopolitical context.  I offer a bold constant.

I don’t really know about other countries but I understand very well that one of every four people in this country are ignorant dipshits.  My “1/4 Paradigm”.  In stores near you.

You’d think an invitation was extended to a banquet just ahead of the apocalypse.  You’d think because we passed a weak ass health care bill we were courting Satan himself.  The bill sucks.  Hello irony.  Fuck us in the neck.

The reaction has been of the meanest of spirit and bafflingly irrational.  Childish and callow.  Pointless.  Some fourteen state attorneys general have or intend to file suit.  Futile.  Not going to happen, if any single case enjoys a day in court it will be ashes, ashes and they will all fall down.  A waste of time money and the attention of even the dumbest citizens.  Give me a break.  Might as well piss up a rope.

Children of the corn.

What has my attention is the ugly and still gathering brutal reaction of the great unwashed.

Bricks through windows and awful terrorizing threats directed at our elected representatives that have finally and with courage, attempted the right thing on behalf of us all.  Stupak came around and they went after him like a common enemy.  Cheers Bart.  Those were your people.  An articulate bunch.  Very brave and very cool.

Kucinich is still the king of composure and principal.  What a class act.  I think Maddow and Kucinich should snuggle.  Just then, Dennis’ hot, six foot tall, copper haired, wife with a scorching accent enters the room in a black skirt, pumps and a line up the back of the stocking.  Nobody gets the Kucinich cool like I do.

Cantor’s claim of a bullet is looking dubious.  I bet that little prick is lying.

What frightens me is the virulence and vehemence, the irrational fury of those that would oppose a leap forward.

What makes me sick is the publicly elected officials who foment such dehumanizing disregard for common decency and difference of, or deference for, an opinion.  This is America.  We aren’t ever going to be herded onto boxcars for mass extermination.  If it ever happens here it will last an afternoon, maybe a day.  I’m not referencing irresponsible roundheads like Limbaugh, Hannity or Beck but rather the Boehners, Bachmanns, Cantors, Kings, Grassleys and Demints.  Allegedly responsible representatives who hobby, trade and wage in fear and dangerous incendiary nonsense.

Dirty, filthy immoral bastards who would blow anyone for $20k.  How do these people get taken seriously?  See above.

They deliberately cultivate and collect the same brand of bigoted, racist and ignorant subhuman that so violently opposed civil rights legislation.  Dumbass mouth breathing fucktards.  A handful of those folks have ended up being assassins.  Murderers.

American tradition and legacy is such that justice and liberty for all eventually prevails.  When there is will there is way.

It can take a while and never without a price.  The vulgar and profane consistently manage to extract more than a pound of flesh.  They are arrogant and bereft of humility.  At this pace, there will be blood.

They will go too far unfortunately and their cause will be consigned to history as ill advised and malattempted.  Political leprosy.  Social pariahs.  Just like McCarthy, Nixon and Dumbya’s entire posse.

These people are as ridiculous as they are dangerous.  There will be blood.

Just do the best you can to think peace.  It’s gonna get ugly.

It just might start rural.

All these earth quakes.  Bound to be a volcano.  See what I’m saying?

Health care is no mere privilege but a right that comes with being born human at least.  I believe that.  I always will.

Drinks for my friends.

So, the Democrats run a lame candidate for Senate in Massachusetts while turning their backs on a nest of Republican snakes.  So, the Republicans simply cater to the lowest common denominator.

Meet Scott Brown.

He posed.  Hairspray on an empty corn cob.  He’s a goddamn lead singer.  How new are you?  Look at my thumb, gee you’re dumb.

Maybe, just maybe if he wasn’t up against cardboard.

I should be angry.  I suppose I am.  Should I be angry at Republicans for being such ignorant, obstructionist asstards, or Democrats for being such paper tiger pantywaste losers?  I feel like being confused, but I’m not.  What I am is disgusted.

“The Republicans are playing chess and the Dems are in the nurses office because, once again, they glued their balls to their thighs.” – Jon Stewart.

Teddy Kennedy held this office for forty seven years.  The lion of the Senate.  I admired Ted Kennedy.  Comity no longer exists anywhere in the Senate.  It went from solid to gas.  The way of the Dodo.  What we have here, is piss all over his grave, equal parts Democrat and Republican.  It will freeze and eventually evaporate come spring.  It will still stink for summers to come.  Them with more mild sensibilities and weaker constitutions will wonder if the reek is merely rotting vegetation.  The dying foliage of deciduous urban landscaping.   Only in the fall.

You and I, along with the forest rodents will understand it to be the odor of personal weakness and the strength of filthy lucre.

And the shit of urban rodents.

No equitable, compassionate health care for the richest nation ever.  Health care is a right, not a privilege.  Yet this crap persists to blow in our faces.  Tens of thousands die here every year because of greed and cowardice and/or no health care at all.  Then there’s them that go broke.  Hundreds of thousands dead in Haiti, not because of an earthquake, but because of decades of poverty and neglect.  Wait til you hear how complicit we’ve been.  Hundreds and thousands die every month in the various wars we conduct.  Plenty of funding there, but no conscience.

We are getting sucker punched every morning out of bed.

I need to remind you that by shaving one tenth off our budget for the military industrial complex, we’d all have health care and groceries forever. Higher education would be free.  No potholes.  No collapsing bridges.  We’d all have enough for the fruit of the month club.  We’d be excited about the pears.

Pete Townshend once said something about ending The Who before they became parodies of themselves.  He was anxious for them not to become a joke.  It’s too late for America.

Since when did a party have to have 60 out of 100 votes in the Senate to scratch their own balls?  How is it that after barely a year under a new administration, a twisted referendum is allowed to hold sway in state like Massachusetts?

This is profoundly and spectacularly ridiculous.

I’m not sure I give a mad fuck.  The only option now is to ram the diseased phallus that is the Senate health care bill down the blistered, milky, puss oozing upper gastrointestinal tract of the house.  It’s a shitty bill.  A mandate to buy but no mechanism for controlling cost or avarice.  A non starter for me.

I’m having a hell of a time giving a shit.  Whatever happened to hope and change?  Does anyone remember laughter?

I am disgusted.  I’m romancing apathy.  Sure, there’s been progress, but on such an infinitesimally incremental level that I’m struggling with what appears to be a wish sandwich.

“Have you ever heard of a wish sandwich? A wish sandwich is the kind of a sandwich where you have two slices of bread and you, hee hee hee, wish you had some meat.”  -The Chips 1956

This really is stupid.

You give me twenty, maybe twenty five bucks, I’ll make you the best salad you’ve ever had.  I have skills.

Drinks for my friends.

This is goddamn ridiculous.  No public option, no expansion of Medicare but a bill that still mandates Americans buy insurance from private, avaricious, corrupt, compassionless corporations that avoid caring for the sick as deftly as they obviate promoting health care for the healthy.  This is fucking bullshit.

Zero sum game.  Embarrassing.  All this work and debate.  We will end with nothing or worse than nothing.

Depends on how you look at it and what passes.

All the power in the hands of this jackass Lieberman?  How did that happen?  He says he’s getting closer to being able to vote for health care reform.  Closer?  Who the fuck is this guy?  I’ll tell you who he is.  His state, Connecticut, is ground zero for the insurance industry.  They give him tons of cake and they let him eat it too.  He first championed expansion of Medicare during his bid for the Vice Presidency with Al Gore.  He’s said it since in many ways and so many venues.  Now he says he’ll support a Republican filibuster for any bill containing that, or a public option.

That or a public option.

Benedict Fliptop, what a dick.  The ghost of Ted Kennedy should visit this asshole over the holidays and punch him in the mouth.  Then Teddy should show him the future of his Christmas’ with thousands dying and him losing elections.  I loathe this prick.  I will personally campaign against this douchebag like nobody’s business.  Did you know that Joe Lieberman has sex with prostitutes?

See?

He will never again represent the citizens of his state or anyone else in this country.

Then we have Ben Nelson from Nebraska.  He’s still not happy with the abortion language in the current bill.  This guy is a fuckhead.  This is not about your ridiculous moralizing, it’s about 140 people dying everyday for lack of coverage you asshole.  Ben Nelson and Trader Joe can take a long slow lick on my diseased scrotum.

Here’s the bottom line.  This bill mandates that we buy into this egregious clusterfuck without any mechanism for protecting us from their abhorrent policies.  If we don’t, we will be fined and that money will go directly to their coffers.  How’s that for truth, justice and the American way?  Here’s a shit sandwich, no condiments, no lettuce and no bread.  Just shit.

This is what the cause for health care reform has become.  A cool water sandwich and a Sunday go to meeting bun.  What do you want for nothing?  A rubber bisquit?  Bow bow bow.

See the job of our legislative branch has never been to legislate morality, although it too often has, it’s job is to legislate ethics and fairness, although it too often doesn’t.  This protracted and vulgar instance is a shiny red thumb of that example.

People are so fond of screaming for the reconciliation strategy.  What they don’t understand is that it’s a purely fiscal process.  Preventing big insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or exercising caps on lifetime or annual coverage is not possible in this process.

Dr. Howard Dean is a physician, that’s why he has that “DR.” before his name.  He’s also a former candidate for President of The United States and former chair of the Democratic party (DNC) where he was a leading architect in gaining a legislative majority in congress.  He’s smart and has the courage of his convictions.  Despite my impression that he always looks like he’s swallowed a turd or at least snorted one, I like him.  He’s tough and speaks truth to power whether it gets him in trouble or not.  This is a man who doesn’t give a mad fuck and has nothing to lose.  Tonight he announced on public television that the bill, as it exists, should be killed by Democrats.  He said that his recommendation to U.S. Senators is to vote against it.

That’s pretty heavy and it carries more than water where I’m concerned.

He pointed out that although the bill provides for no exclusion based on pre-existing condition, it does allow for charging three times as much based on age alone.  It’s a fecal falafel.

I understand there are important reforms still in this bill but they are rendered moot by the mandate that we purchase the product.  It’s right here that it becomes nothing more than smoking a Tootsie Roll of cat crap in hell.

We’ve reached a point where the greasy oily Republicans aren’t even a legitimate factor in the debate.  The ignorant fucktards have long since marginalized and rendered themselves inconsequential.  Now it’s just the Democrats fighting among themselves over the definition of “Real Reform”.

This really is nothing but a butt based product buffet.  Spoons up.

The good news better be what I think it is.  Reconciliation.  Could be used after some legislation has passed.  Fund stuff through the back door to support the bill, the policies, the ideal.

I’m really not holding my breath but you can’t telegraph that move even if both parties know what’s next.  It would be nothing short of grandiose to find out Harry and The Dems are as clever as Benny and The Jets.

I gotta tell ya, this piece has been easy to write but tough to stomach.

Drinks for my friends.

What bothers me so much about the senate bill is that it mandates we buy in, with penalty if we don’t, but the public option has been so diluted that it will only cover three to four million Americans.

This really chaps my ass.

The entire impetus of a public option all along has been to supply much needed competition for the Goliath, thereby forcing the whole clusterfuck bureaucracy into some modicum of accountability in terms of quality and affordability.   Well, do the math.  They bray at lung top that 98% will be covered, yet that number is egregiously misleading when it’s laid bare that it will be accomplished by forcing the majority to buy into the hopelessly corrupt monolith that has been selling death and discrimination to us for decades.  These numbers come not even close to establishing meaningful competition. Four million of 350 million living breathing Americans.

I beseech you, do the math.

Various Senators and representatives, including Anthony Weiner have come forward to say that it’s not perfect but a giant leap forward.  I like that guy, but the numbers are leaving my dick in the dirt.  Here’s another number:  The most important components of this bill, like the weak ass public option, are not due to manifest efficacy until 2013 or 2014.  Thus, the giant has five fucking years to mitigate, obfuscate, lobby with a million bucks a day to spend, to ensure that all protections and rights afforded us in the original legislation are stillborn.

This shit is fucked up from hell to breakfast.  Even if this legislation is passed intact, the fight will merely be in it’s infancy.  We get nothing for five long years and at the end of that road, we will be forced to buy insurance and our options might just suck more than they do now.  Forced to buy their product.  Forced.

Why is no one talking about that?

The great unwashed rail and stomp about a government usurping of free enterprise and democracy.  Fuck them in the neck.  Fools.  Why behave in public if you’re living on a playground?

The government takeover of health care will most assuredly be complete because the government is a plutocracy.  Not for, of and by the people but for, of and by the corporations.

I understand that the progressives and liberals are optimistic for momentum.  They are gleeful for potential.  They seek, against impossible odds to set the ball rolling toward the the pins of avarice and corruption.  Hoping that inertia befriends them.  Once in motion it stays in motion and they can coax or accelerate it’s velocity despite it’s initial mass.  I fear that that the ball has a balsa center, it’s being released far too slowly and by the time it reaches those pins, they will be obelisks bolted down.

And thus the idea of public funded health care or even *gasp* single payer health care dies an ugly, painful and protracted death.

There are significant merits in this bill, such as the language that prevents cancellation upon actually becoming ill or the rendering obsolete of denying care for a pre-existing conditions.  Yet realistically, they are euphoric sentimentality in the face of a mandate that we all buy in to whatever is available.  I’m calling bullshit on the whole thing.  We are required to carry auto insurance but it’s barely regulated, so those that can afford it get ripped off while a third go without in some states.

I can’t see how the exact same scenario is avoidable in this instance.  It’s a prescription if you will, pun intended, for the status qou.  With the exception being that the insurance companies bathe deeper in filthy lucre as the fines imposed on those who can’t or won’t participate go directly into their coffers.  That’s right, did you know that?  What kind of shit is that?

Now of course, the procedural vote for cloture, so the bill can actually be debated without filibuster, has yet to even take place.  Word is that it’s scheduled for Saturday night at 5 p.m. West Coast time.  At that point, amendments will be proposed, hard ass Republicans will wail and whine and the outcome is anyone’s guess.  The way I understand this procedure, after cloture is achieved, it tooth pulling time.  The proposed legislation, if it survives, will emerge with less teeth than it entered the arena with.

Picture a Roman Coliseum.

I’m no legal eagle, but I’m no dummy either. At the same time, I’m not an expert when it comes to Senatorial procedural logistics, but it’s worth pointing out that a lot of these guys are obstinate dicks.  I can only imagine that the future of this bill and health care will not be scrambling for sunglasses in anticipation of a bright future and there’s a chance there will be a rush for fresh dirt for the coffin.

Somebody talk me down.

Drinks for my friends

The latest figures indicate that the fiercely embattled public option will cover a mere two to three percent of the currently uninsured and the CBO says premiums will most likely be somewhat more than current market price.  Sounds like a wash to me.  Sounds like the sucking of a drain.  This whole thing is so fucking ridiculous.  Smoke and mirrors, dogs and ponies.  You can bet your ass, along with your lunch money, with those kinds of numbers, the whole thing is doomed to failure.

Spruce Goose bitches.

It will flop like Gerald Ford coming down the steps of Air Force One but it won’t ever get up again, at least not in my lifetime.

Good job everybody.

Jackasses.

The only customers it’s poised to attract will be our sickest and least likely to succeed.  No prom kings or queens here.  Bottom of the gene pool, unhealthy, lowlife, walkin’ the dog saps.  So it will be fiscally overburdened by virtue of our lowest common denominator and our last shot as the richest nation on earth to provide health care for our citizens will probably not even enjoy another attempt for at least half a century.  Good job Democrats, you fucking pussies and even better job Republicans you obstructionist, plutocratic, avaricious, disingenuous, lying pieces of self serving shit.

I really hate you guys.

Did I say that or just think it out loud?

Is there a difference?

Well, let me say this:  Fuck, fuck, fuck, snot and mucus and bile and shame and fear and stupid and puke………

You, Joe Lieberman, who’s state is ground zero for health insurance HQ’s and who announced publicly the intention to filibuster the very debate,  and you, John Boehner lay off the embarrassing spray on tan and you, Chuck Grassley you lying prick and you, Mitch McConnel with more chins than a Chinese phonebook and you, Max Baucus who can suck my caucus and you, Kent Conrad and you, Blanche Lincoln, you Democrats in name only………every single one of you has sold out the best and most important life or death interests of the American people in general and your own constituents in particular for what you know will line your pockets, get you you re-elected and is nothing more than a pack of aspersions, distortions and preposterous calumny.

Whomever the asshole was that declared health care reform to be Obama’s Waterloo, forgive me it was Jim DeMint, might just have been exactly right.  I don’t care who you are, that there’s fucked up.

This party might just might be over.

Have you no shame?  No decency?

Y’all negotiated and philandered, lied and decried, wrung your hands and whined like little bitches while thousands died and ended up with the pussy party (D), still being able to save face with a donut hole public option, the asshole party (R), still able to fool some of the people most of the time while still screwing them with an atomic fucking jackhammer that put them there and paid there salaries and benefits all of the goddamn time.

Sick.  Fucking sick.  Pun intended.

Everyone got what they wanted, what they imagined they needed, while the lobbyist pimps, four to one for every legislator, spent a million bucks a day to make sure they and their corporate sugar daddies maintained the status quo and everyone got paid.  You and me excepted, of course.

Because a horse is a horse of course of course and what does that make a dumbass donkey?

Cigars and cognac all around.

Some one hundred and twenty two people die every goddamn day because they lack the insurance to pay for what is killing them and the naysayers would have us debate socialism.  Government takeover.  Bullshit.  Not just a theater but an opera house, with excellent acoustics, of the shrill and reverberating absurd.

I’m needing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  Seriously.

Some tomato soup.

Mission Accomplished.  Major combat operations are at an end.  It’s all over but the shouting.

If I did my job as well as you do yours, I wouldn’t have one.  Either that or I’d be a CEO.

This health care bill, all 1990 pages of it is going to be such a charade, facade and so spectacular a bellyflop of POLITICAL PORNOGRAPHY, so profound and disgusting, that any chance of, or attempt at, meaningful reform in banking, civil rights, justice, execution and prosecution of wars, foreign entanglements, energy, food supply, federal aide, education, accountability by any bureaucracy, institution, agency, corporation or industry will be so stained and suspect and blood spattered from other more egregious crimes, that this administration, all it’s good intentions intact, will experience a serious faceplant and we will all have been complicit in climbing decades backwards.

There’s you and there’s me, rip off the mask and let’s see.

We’ll march I guess, with rotting teeth and stage four cancer and we’ll get coupons for nachos and Hostess products at the 7-11.  They’ll sell those bacon wrapped franks along the quarter mile route.  There will will be tents for the overexerted at the halfway point.

Watch your NASCAR and your World Series while the politicians dither away at your rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  By the way, I was more than happy to see the Phillies hand the the Yankees their ass tonight and did you see the wrecks on Sunday at Talladega?  Nice that both Newman and Martin walked away.  But by the time both contests are actually decided, your life or death fate will most likely be determined well in advance.  If you are uninsured, it is likely you will remain uninsured.  Categorize yourself as therefore fucked.

The irony of death panels is that it’s a reality here and now.  The irony of health care rationing is that it exists and is practiced without compassion today.  The irony of socialized medicine, which we have now via Medicare and Medicaid, is that no country that enjoys it would ever give it up, us included.

There is no irony about the lies and obfuscation.  They are simply lies and and obfuscation.

The idea of single payer health care is among the most humane, compassionate and progressive notions ever implemented by modern states, governments and societies.  It is growth and progress where the human condition and even evolution are concerned.  After all, it does serve to affect the perpetuation of our species in a constructive way.  To utilize a small portion of the proceeds from our labor and largess to care for the people who are responsible for it, is a profoundly good idea from the perspectives of either the often mutually exclusive concepts of morality and commerce.

It makes fucking sense.

At least pot is legal in LA.

Drinks for my friends.

Did ya guess I’m furious?

Where exactly does the rub lie you ask?

I’m a little at a loss for words here.  Don’t worry, it won’t last.

Heh.

It’s just that this is so important.  In a country as wealthy as ours, health care is not a privilege, it’s a right.  Fuck me, every living being deserves it.  How embarrassing that far poorer nations are getting it?  Until we can make it available to us and for us equitably and fairly, how can we even advocate for it with a straight face for anyone else?  It’s moral and ethical and shouldn’t be political but it is and that’s just ugly.  Fucking disgusting.  The very idea that it’s being debated in our corridors of power just confounds me.  We have the money and the resources and everyone wants it.

We stood up against the Nazis and humiliated Japan.

For this most humane of causes, we battle our own.  We fight those elected by us to advance our very best ideas, interests and needs.  The fight for what we deserve is with our own alleged democracy.  They mock us by allowing it to even be a contest.  What is right is clear.  What we expect is obvious.  Why they represent us is clear.  What we want is clear and still, the outcome is in question.

You inglorious fucking bastards.

Ahem.

We’re talking about the public option amendments proposed by Chuck Schumer and J. Rockefeller today before the Senate Finance Committee in the precipitously spectator friendly fight for health care reform.  Note to elected reps, you’re being watched.

Okay, I understand this is the first authentic punch in this fight.  I’m well aware that it was meant to be ceremonial; a shot across the bow if you will.  Schumer and Rockefeller admitted as much.  Both amendments pretty much went down in flames.  The reckonings were 15 opposed to 8 and 13 opposed to 10.  Chuck was all smiles for the post game, saying that they did better than he’d anticipated and momentum is building.  I’m a little lukewarm on Schumer but I admit to having a soft spot for him.  His assessment is likely more cogent and certainly better informed than mine.

Pisses me off when he defends Baucus though.  Shumer wishes they weren’t running those ads.  Buacus is a pawn and an officious prick.  He deserves it and we’ll be talking about it here in a minute.

Here’s what chaps my ass.  Max, four million bucks in campaign contributions from big pharma and big insurance, Baucus.  After a suspiciously protracted process of negotiation, Baucus puked up a bill so lame, so transparently in favor of not just maintaining the status quo but adding bulkhead after bulkhead to protect and enrich insurance companies at the expense of the common American,  I’m simply in awe anyone in what was once the world’s greatest deliberative body can pretend to take him seriously.

I harbor dark oozing contempt for this man.

Let me give you an example.  His bill mandates that every American, regardless of income level, purchase health insurance.  Any American citizen who does not not purchase health insurance would be subject to a fine.  Either way, whether an individual buys in or not, monies for premiums or penalties for not buying in, go directly to health insurance corporations.  No reach around, just straight up cash.  All it does is give access to the money of the forty or fifty million uninsured to the insurance industry they haven’t otherwise been able to get their hands on.  Needless to say, without a public option to foment reasonable competition for rates and service, his bill is nothing less than a totalitarian dictate to further enrich an industry that has been ripping off the average American for decades.

Max Baucus really sucks.

Max tells us today on national television that his job is to deliver a bill that will garner sixty votes on the floor of the Senate.  Bullshit.  Where is that written?  Where does it say that his job as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee is to do anything but deliver a fair and equitable bill in the best interest of his constituents and as committee chair, a bill that reflects the will of 65% of the American people?  Just what is with this sixty fucking votes thing?  It’s absurd.  It takes fifty one votes to pass a bill.  Sixty votes guarantees cloture and therefore prevents filibuster.  But it only takes fifty one votes to pass a goddamn bill and there are sixty of you spineless bastards.

The Democrats are so terrified of fillibuster they won’t bust a move without being able to prevent it?  So what?  Make the filthy Republicans actually filibuster.  Bring some sandwiches a cot and a laptop loaded with porn.  Have your aides set up a tent if you need to spank it.  Pretend you’re at the DMV.  Outlast them if it’s something you believe in and it’s the right thing for the American people.  You ARE the majority you know.  This is a walk in the park.

Why, why, why do the Democrats insist on being such pussies?  I’ll tell you why.  Because so many of them just as shamelessly beholding to the same forces as Baucus.

Procedurally, if Democrats stand together, they have enough votes to prevent filibuster on specific amendments.  What is the goddamn problem?  This is doable.  We have a majority in congress because the people have spoken.  65% of Americans favor a public option.  Between the congressional majority and the overwhelming majority on the part of the electorate, we have what I like to think of as a motherfucking mandate.

Fer fuck’s sake, do the math you retards.

It’s no secret that during the last decade profits have rocketed towards what Baucus and friends intend to be an apogee, while service, care and the number meaningfully insured has cratered below sea level.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely and dickheads like Baucus don’t give a mad fuck about being re-elected because his next gig will be with the very cabal of ruthless, greedy swine he’s now representing instead of the interests of the people who elected him.  The same can be and is said by me for Kent Conrad, Blanche Lincoln, Bill Nelson and Tom Carper.  Spineless, greedy sycophants all of them.

Cowardly inchoate vaginas that are looking forward the next cush gig.  Man, I hate these guys.

There is nothing wrong with prostitution as far I’m concerned.  It’s a contract, a transaction between two consenting parties.  You want to fuck for money?  Have at it.  Baucus however, is a filthy, disease ridden whore.  His entire reason is to let someone else screw you without your consent and get paid by them and you simultaneously.  He wouldn’t do it if it hadn’t worked so far.  How’s that make you feel?

Sucker.

He thinks you’re stupid.  He underestimates you.

Maybe.

Sucker.

Like I said in my last blog, shave a few points off defense spending, end the reprehensible, ineffective and exorbitant War On Drugs  and we’ll be swimming in cash.  Health care will be an “oh yeah, let’s do that” kinda type a deal.  Free cable and comic books for everyone.  The return of $4.99 buffets and all you can eat breakfasts.  We’ve got plenty of money, we’re just really stupid.

Sucker.

And for the record, fuck Roman Polanski.  He gave drugs and alcohol to a thirteen year old girl and raped her.  If I believed in hell, I’d advocate for him to roast on a spit there.  Guess I’ll have to settle for throwing the prick bastard in prison, introducing him to Big Jim Slade and tossing the key.

If more Americans believe in UFOs than oppose a public option, where does that leave me?

Drinks for my friends.

Why is Obama allowing him self to be so humiliatingly chumped by empty suits like Chuck Grassley?  I’m hoping it’s political rope a dope and Grassley will soon wake on the canvas, the taste of his blood in his mouth.

Fingers crossed, boys and chicks.

I’m betting on it.  Think a knuckle dragging moron like Chuck Grassley is any match for our President?  Don’t forget the guy you elected is whip smart.  Made the Clintons look Fisher Price and McCain was Play Doh.  Five or six moves ahead.  The entire GOP will be crying in front of their friends by the time the leaves begin to fall.

Wanna know how I know?  Unwitting pawns showing up to town hall meetings wearing AR15’s.  A shrieking right wing media.  The paranoia is palpable.  The Secret Service could easily expand the perimeter to a mile or more at the behest of the White House and that would be that.  Ask yourself why that hasn’t occurred and a correct answer affords you a glimpse into what is really happening here.  When the day is done, if meaningful health care reform is not passed and signed, the entire GOP will  be left to suffer the slings and arrows of their own outrageous demise.

They will be forced to filibuster, actually filibuster.  Bring on the cots and porta-potties.  Coverage will be live and through the night while ass squeaking octogenarian obstructionists are forced to ramble ad nauseum for the purpose of keeping the poor and middle class from accessing what should be their right in a country so rich, a society so advanced.  This, after every opportunity to entertain compromise has been offered and then scorned.

What we see unfolding here is analogous to the sixties civil rights movement.  The guns.  The shrill psychopathy  I pray not the violence.  It is the old guard Republicans resisting change and what is right with lies, deceit and power whatsoever they are able to bring to bear.  Same as it ever was.  Same as it ever was.

I may be wrong, but when the talking heads gasp and wonder at what the White house is up to, when they all scratch their collective crowns at the the strategy or lack thereof, I’m hoping hard it is this.  I’m hoping this administration and it’s super intellectual brain trust is allowing this pot to boil over on the stove because they understand that the only way real change comes is through this brand of passive violence.  Political judo.

I pray it is so.

Today, former Homeland Security honcho Tom Ridge, from a book to be released September 1st, finally cops to the fact that terror threat levels were subject to political manipulation by the White House and the DOJ.  Um, no shit.  Thanks for your candor, you spineless coward.  Somebody get this man a Presidential Medal of Freedom.  I mean, Tenet, Franks and Bremer got one.  It’s only fair, clearly commensurate…….

In other news, John Ensign deems himself morally superior to Bill Clinton because he broke no laws.  Remains to be seen.  Hold your breath.  Former House Majority Leader, felony indicted and architect of K street, Tom DeLay, announced his new gig on dancing With The Stars and called for Obama to produce a birth certificate.  We also learned that Cheney’s secret CIA assassination program was to be outsourced to the notorious Blackwater.  Keystone fucking Cops.

Oh, and today Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed called for an apology from The New York Times and The Washington Post saying, “Judging from the evidence released, [the committee] uncovered facts that show that my role in the U.S. attorneys issue was minimal and entirely proper.”  My advice to the periodicals in question?  Invite Mr. Rove to piss up a goddamn rope.  And maybe request a sample of whatever he’s smoking.  Rove is as filthy as a half melted plastic doll discovered in a native American fire pit.  His hubris blocks out the sun.  His mother sucks cocks in hell.

Man I hate these guys.  Even after they’re gone, a pungent, greasy slick glistens on the surface of our water.

Then, my beloved Jon Stewart has Betsy McCaughey, propagator of the “death panel” schadenfreude and big medical industry shill, as a guest and subsequently shellacs her like a bar stool missing a leg.  A premature halt is called so we may watch the entire charade unedited online.  Brilliant.  We loves us some Daily Show.  What the hell was she thinking?  Oh, the shameless cuntiness.

You just can’t make this shit up.

And it goes on and on and on.

Drinks for my friends.

My problem is with the shape of Norm Coleman’s head.  That and his giant teeth.  A thin lipped rictus framing nightmare white tombstones.  I’m so hoping that despite what Franken said yesterday, he’ll wade in and stir shit up.  Please.  He is painfully bright, a math jock at Harvard and very funny.  The long standing rivalries between him, Bill O’Reilly and the Human Shitsmear Limbaugh, are enough for me to sponsor him for Crew Chief of all he would survey.  His colon is clean.  He is not full of shit.

Word to Obama and the all the pantywaste Democrats.  You are out of excuses.  You now have a filibuster  proof majority.  If we don’t get health care, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the lobbies of AIPAC, insurance, the military industrial complex, energy and financial put in their respective places………..well then we’ll know for sure that the only difference between Democrats and Republicans is balls and spine.

Get something done.  Get anything done.  Or you suck and don’t deserve the opportunity we the the people afforded you.

The elephant = evil + balls and some vertebrae.  The donkey = a few good intentions – any vertebrae and any sack whatsoever.

The math is that simple.  The swirl of rhetoric around Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is disgusting.  Man up.  Show us a little something.  Make it so number one.  This is litmus 101.  If you can’t do this, given solid public support, we will doubt you.  Break hard to the left and run the damn ball, I for one am tired of waiting.  Show me goddamn it.

Time to come to Jesus, you so far worthless candy asses.  I am not impressed.

Is it complacency on the the part of liberals because there is no longer a a Cheney or Bush in the room with knife in hand?  I doubt it.  It’s mitigating but there is a preposterous malaise on Democrats that can can only be described as vaginaness.  Fucking pussies.  I really hate this about Democrats.  They’re all about it until it’s time to accomplish.  There is always a thousand reasons not to do something and then there is the single right reason to do it.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin claws at relevance like a woman scorned.  Just lately she sorta challenged Obama to a foot race.  I’m sure by now you’re aware of the conflagration between her and Letterman.  Methinks she did protest too much and in so doing,  audaciously yanked her daughters into the harsh light of scrutiny she so immodestly decried.

A degree of charisma, otherwise stupid and bereft of common sense as well as humility.  Can’t completely blame her, she was a snowball’s chance in a foundry by the notion she might warm the leather in that elliptical of all offices one day.  Yeah right.  Like installing Dumbya’s retarded sister.  See how I loathe?  She’s paper thin.  She disappears at ninety degrees off axis.  The epitome of grandiose insincerity.  What bothers me is how dumb she is.  Forgive me but she is a stupid cunt.

Big bag full of mashed up jack ass right there.  -Keith O.

“I remember as it were a meal ago”

“Said Tommy the Cat as he reeled back to clear whatever foreign
matter may have nestled its way into His mighty throat.
Many a fat alley rat had met its demise while staring point
blank down the cavernous barrel of this awesome prowling machine.
Truly a wonder of nature this urban predator.
Tommy the cat had many a story to tell,
but it was a rare occasion such as this that he did.

“She came slidin’ down the alleyway like butter drippin’ off a hot biscuit.
The aroma, the mean scent, was enough to arouse suspicion in
even the oldest of Tigers that hung around the hot spot in those days.
The sight was beyond belief. Many a head snapped for double
even triple, takes as this vivacious feline made her her way into the
delta of the alleyway where the most virile of the young tabbys were
known to hang out. They hung in droves. Such a multitude of
masculinity could only be found in One place… and that was
O’malley’s Alley. The air was thick with cat calls (no pun intended)
but not even a muscle in her neck did twitch as she sauntered up into
the heart of the alley. She knew what she wanted. She was lookin’
for that stud bull, the he cat. And that was me.
Tommy the Cat is my name and I say unto thee…

Say baby do you wanna lay down by me”  -Primus

Drinks for my friends.