Just to let y’all know, I’m now writing over at Abject Terror & Utter Discussed these days. The language is a little more colorful depending on who’s writing, and it’s probably going to be a little more “in your face,” but that’s why this blog won’t be updated anymore. It’s still mostly political stuff, and will continue to be. We’re not sure of the format quite yet — it might mutate into more of a stream-of-consciousness thing eventually. Right now though, it’s just regular blog posts among friends. So if you’re up for a little more confrontation, please check it out!

General | 2 Comments »

This past weekend, Hillary Clinton was asked by Tim Russert about a speech her husband gave on the campaign trail. Supposedly, Bill Clinton labeled the Obama campaign a “fairy tale.” At least, that’s the take from the following sources (list of quotes brazenly stolen from the Huffington Post):

New York Times, Jan. 11th: “[Former President Clinton] described Mr. Obama’s campaign narrative as a fairy tale.”

The Politico, Jan 11th: “…Bill Clinton dismissing Sen. Barack Obama’s image in the media as a ‘fairy tale’”

BreitbartTV, Jan. 8th, which hosted the full clip yet chose to headline it in the most inflammatory (and inaccurate) way possible: “Bill Clinton Fumes About Obama: ‘Biggest Fairy Tale I’ve Ever Seen’”

Same NYT article, quoting someone else incorrectly framing the comment: “[Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-SC)] saw the remark as a slap at the image of a black candidate running on a theme of unity and optimism. “To call that dream a fairy tale, which Bill Clinton seemed to be doing, could very well be insulting to some of us.”

Maureen Dowd, NYT, Jan 9th: “Bill churlishly dismissed the Obama phenom as ‘the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.’”

Donna Brazile on CNN, Jan. 8th: “For him to go after Obama, using a fairy tale, calling him as he did last week. It’s an insult. And I will tell you, as an African-American, I find his tone and his words to be very depressing.”

So there are the stories, and Sunday we had Russert confronting Hillary on the issue (full Meet the Press transcript is here). First he noted,

RUSSERT: So there was the former president chastising the press for the way it was covering the Obama campaign and saying of Mr. Obama’s effort, `The whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”

Then later on he used the following quote from the speech as backup to tie “Obama’s effort” to the words “fairy tale”:

CLINTON: Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.

Sounds pretty damning, doesn’t it? That is, until you read what Clinton actually said, and to what “fairy tale” he was referring. Read it, and you’ll see Russert is just as responsible as the other media hacks of basically fabricating a story by tying the words Obama and fairy tale together, then attributing them to Clinton. It’s totally reprehensible.

Here is the whole answer President Clinton gave to a question asked by an audience member, courtesy of The Swamp:

But since you raised the judgment issue, let’s go over this again. That is the central argument for his campaign. ‘It doesn’t matter that I started running for president less a year after I got to the Senate from the Illinois State Senate. I am a great speaker and a charismatic figure and I’m the only one who had the judgment to oppose this war from the beginning. Always, always, always.’

First it is factually not true that everybody that supported that resolution supported Bush attacking Iraq before the UN inspectors were through. Chuck Hagel was one of the co-authors of that resolution. The only Republican Senator that always opposed the war. Every day from the get-go. He authored the resolution to say that Bush could go to war only if they didn’t co-operate with the inspectors and he was assured personally by Condi Rice as many of the other Senators were. So, first the case is wrong that way.

Second, it is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, numerating the years, and never got asked one time, not once, ‘Well, how could you say, that when you said in 2004 you didn’t know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war and you took that speech you’re now running on off your website in 2004 and there’s no difference in your voting record and Hillary’s ever since?’ Give me a break.

This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen…So you can talk about Mark Penn all you want. What did you think about the Obama thing calling Hillary the Senator from Punjab? Did you like that?

Or what about the Obama hand out that was covered up, the press never reported on, implying that I was a crook? Scouring me, scathing criticism, over my financial reports. Ken Starr spent $70 million and indicted innocent people to find out that I wouldn’t take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon.

So, you can take a shot at Mark Penn if you want. It wasn’t his best day. He was hurt, he felt badly that we didn’t do better in Iowa. But you know, the idea that one of these campaigns is positive and the other is negative when I know the reverse is true and I have seen it and I have been blistered by it for months, is a little tough to take. Just because of the sanitizing coverage that’s in the media, doesn’t mean the facts aren’t out there.

Otherwise I do not have any strong feelings about that subject.”

Russert’s treatment of Mrs. Clinton is precisely why I no longer watch Meet The Press. I really got sick of watching Russert’s “fair and balanced” treatment of an issue consist of having as guests an extreme conservative and a moderate conservative, leaving the liberal side unrepresented. How many times has Joe Lieberman been invited on his show to act as the mouthpiece for the supposed “progressive” side of an issue? Too many times.

Russert didn’t even give Mrs. Clinton a chance to correct this blatant attempt to basically call Bill Clinton a racist, and spoke over her as she tried to explain that the quote had been taken horribly out of context and that the “fairy tale” tag was being applied squarely to Obama’s constantly-changing stance on the Iraq resolution to use force, and the subsequent occupation.

Again, so much for the “liberal media.” This is either extreme laziness on the part of reporters who have too much time to fill in a day and who have to help create and inflate a fabricated story, or it’s more of the same disgusting tactics that have been part of the two-decades-old campaign to smear the Clintons (see The Hunting Of The President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill Clinton).

Looks like they’re going to have to make another movie.

General | 1 Comment »

The Mainstream Press ™ is totally up in arms about how they could’ve been so wrong about NH. Dennis Kucinich is calling for a recount. Chris Matthews is consoling himself by talking about Hillary’s weepiness. There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The Guardian UK, in two separate articles, offered two explanations for what might have happened in NH on Tuesday. Just for the record, if you’re reading this far into the future, the polls had Obama at approximately 37% and Clinton at approximately 30% heading into Tuesday’s NH Primaries. Clinton went on to win, with 39% of the vote to Obama’s 37%.

So two explantions are given by the Guardian. The first is that NH voters are just racist, and Obama suffered from the “Bradley effect.” The Bradley effect is named after Tom Bradley, black mayor of Los Angeles, who lost his bid to become California’s Governor in 1982 despite having an overwhelming lead in the polls. The theory behind the loss was that white California residents, not wanting to appear racist, told pollsters that they were planning on voting for Bradley, but then pulled the lever for the white candidate once they were alone in the voting booth. The big conservative paper in NH, the Manchester “Union Leader,” claims the racism accusation is absolutely preposterous. Of course they would claim that. After all, that paper represents the demographic under this cloud of suspicion.

The second explanation is that some independent voters, more or less certain that Obama would win the Democratic primary, decided to vote for McCain since the Republican race between McCain and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was judged to be much tighter. Oops. Remember, NH in 2000 was very kind to Senator McCain. New Hampshire Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike selected him as their Republican candidate for president.

Of course there are plenty more primaries to be held in the next few weeks, and many delegates to be won and lost. However, if it comes to pass that NH is largely responsible for stopping the Obama Express — remember how important momentum is — and helping Hillary Clinton stabilize her footing in the Democratic race for the party’s nomination, we can essentially thank those independent McCain supporters for propping up Hillary. And if she wins the nomination, and even the presidency, how much can we thank those independent NH voters who were either too racist to pull the lever for Obama or who were more interested in helping out an “old friend” than a candidate for change?

The press has been pretty hostile to Hillary over the years, and I’ve gotten my digs in here as well. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post wrote a whole article about how she has been vilified in the press. Even Tom Brokaw, onscreen, chided Chris Matthews the other night about his obvious dislike of Mrs. Clinton.

In this here blog, my main beef with Senator Clinton has been her apparent inability to come up with a direct answer to certain questions, such as “do you regret voting for authorization to use force against Iraq?” However, in the past few days I’ve found myself hoping that she gets the party’s nomination. Am I just a softie who’s been swayed by her recent attempts to really show a personal side of herself? Much was made of Hillary “tearing up” when asked a question in NH at a town hall meeting. In today’s world of five second sound bytes, I heard that full thirty or forty second clip at least six times on the radio at the top and bottom of each hour, and saw it four or five times on television. Some say it was a calculated performance. My take was it was exhaustion, coupled with a real conscious attempt that she was no longer going to put up such a wall between herself and the general public. Most commentators, particularly the right-wing ones, put it squarely in the “calculated” category. Could Hillary’s victory have also been partly due to “Limbaugh backlash?” Remember when Limbaugh lambasted Michael J. Fox over ads he appeared in for candidates who supported stem cell research? He basically said Fox was faking. There was a huge backlash, and some analysts made the case that Democratic candidates won in some areas at least partly in reaction to Limbaugh’s hateful message (just as an aside, I should mention that Fox did not just appear in ads for Democratic candidates). Perhaps people are finally sick of seeing Hillary get smacked down by the press and the talking heads? During the St. Anslem debate, when a local NH political analyst asked Mrs. Clinton about the “likeability factor,” and what she thought of the fact that polls seemed to indicate that Obama was likeable while she was not, Clinton responded, “well, that hurts my feelings.” Her timing in delivering the response was as perfect as any seasoned comedian. The audience howled with laughter and applause, and Mrs. Clinton just sat back in her chair and smiled. It’s a clip I could watch again and again, probably because it’s so completely and unquestioningly genuine, and is not plagued by the possible “calculated or not?” interpretations as the “tearing up” incident. Again, it was another clip that was played over and over again on the news, even here in NY. Did it have an effect of helping the NH voting public get back on board with her?

I personally know people who will never vote for Hillary, no matter how “likeable” she becomes (or *is*). They just “don’t like” Hillary is the response you get when you ask why they would never vote for her.

Why don’t they like her? It’s a good question, and often they don’t know themselves. It’s like the joke Bill Clinton told back in 2004 about the guy who was walking along the Grand Canyon, slipped and fell, and held onto a twig sticking out of the rock that he grabbed on the way down. Suddenly the roots start coming out and the man looks up and asks, “God, why me? I’m a good man, I worked hard, paid taxes all my life, I’m a really good man, why me?” At that moment, a thunderous voice comes out of heaven and says, “Son, there’s just something about you I don’t like…”

Hmmmm. OK. So it’s nothing to do with her record as Senator. They don’t know her record as Senator. There’s just “something about her” they don’t like.

So just as an aside, what about her record?

Looking into Clinton’s and Obama’s actual Senate votes (check them out at Vote Smart), I’m surprised by a couple things. The first is that Obama seems to have a significant number of “No Vote” notations on his record, especially on hotspot issues like National Security, Foreign Policy, Immigration and Defense. The second is how many times Clinton voted against progressive Democrats on issues such as oil leases, pay raises for congress (she voted for them), and a bill which would’ve prohibited the use of cluster bombs in areas near civilian populations. On the other hand, she did vote to implement the 9/11 Commission recommendations, while Obama voted against it.

It’s important for people to do their own investigations when choosing a candidate, and there are tools like Vote Smart, linked above, to help people do their homework. Part of the reason I mention this is because my father forwarded to me an e-mail I’ve seen several times in the last few days. It’s called (in all caps), “WHO IS BARACK OBAMA,” and I’m surprised it hasn’t been changed to “WHO IS BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA?” yet. It basically brings back all the lies that have been told about Obama to date, only in one place — that he is a Muslim (he’s not), that his is an atheist (he isn’t), that he attended a madrassa (he didn’t), that he was sworn in on the Koran (he wasn’t), that he won’t say the Pledge of Allegiance (he will). The e-mail even says that “these facts have been checked by snopes, and you should check them out yourself!” Snopes covers the letter here, and says that the e-mail even has a link to snopes. The one my dad received did not have the link on it, so at some point someone made it even more difficult for people to check out the validity of the information in this e-mail.

These things are sent to place the seed of doubt, much like the “Al Gore is a liar,” stories, or the infamous so-called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” smears against John Kerry. See, we vote on “feeling” in this country. If any national election was actually decided by voters based upon the issues alone, no Republican would be voted into office for the next 30 years based upon the record of this (p)resident and the Republicans in congress. Instead, their minions work to place seeds of doubt about the Democratic candidate’s character. Again, “I just don’t like Hillary.” Or, “I don’t know about Kerry — didn’t he give his medals back or something? Weren’t some of the soldiers with him on the boat complaining that he didn’t really deserve his medals or something?” Or, “didn’t Al Gore say he invented the internet? What a liar.”

These smears have an impact on those who have not investigated the truth behind these candidates. The Obama letter is a perfect example. Thom Hartman was talking on his show yesterday about how he met someone in the bar at the airport who was talking about how he admired Jimmy Carter because he was the only president in recent times that didn’t make millions off his presidency, and that Reagan had some good ideas but he saddled the country with massive deficits. Next thing he knows, this person is telling him how he “just couldn’t vote for Obama though, because he was Muslim and was sworn in on the Koran.” So otherwise well-informed people are hearing these rumors and believing them.

Perhaps America is not really ready for a black president, or a woman president, if they can believe all these things about someone without bothering to check out the facts? Who knows what smear campaigns are coming down the pike? It’s all about racism, division, religion… Anything that’s “different” is so scary, right? I’ve heard more from the talking heads in the past few days about “NH racism” causing the Obama upset than any other subject. The press really hates to get things wrong. Perhaps they didn’t pay attention that a full 40% of voters were undecided going into the election and perhaps these voters didn’t all vote for Obama. Or perhaps they didn’t remember that this is a McCain-friendly state, and when people saw Obama was projected to run away with the Democratic contest, they decided to vote for McCain, supporting him in his attempt to secure the Republican nomination.

As for McCain, it’s been fun watching the right-wing talking heads trying to out-insult the guy in their attempts at getting Romney the nomination. Guess the Limbaughs and Hannitys and Savages and Levins just don’t realize how out of step they are with America. They don’t like McCain. They don’t like Huckabee. They’ll rip into both of them with reckless abandon. Yipes. God help you if you’re not the favorite of the right-wing talking heads. Rush was all flustered that New Hampshire independents and Democrats could vote toward nominating the Republican candidate if they wanted to.

It’s been that way for a long time, Rush. Look it up.

Mark Levin has been brutally savage on Huckabee, and went into a virtual tirade with guest Robert Bork. I really have to start taping these things because the hypocrisy is just stunning. My favorite part of Levin’s show came just before the interview, when he lambasted some liberal commentator who made some ad hominem attack on Romney.. I forget what it was, but someone had come up with some clever nickname for him. “Real yuckster… Real funny…” he said. Then, in the very next segment, he starts in with the Hillary bashing. Funny that he has this pet name for her — “her thighness.”

What a yuckster. Gotta love the smell of ultimate hypocrisy.

General | No Comments »

Who knows how long they’ll offer this, but you can now get a one-year paid subscription to Salon.com, perhaps the most informative progressive online ‘zine. Just click here and try out one of the partner offers (you can always cancel before you owe anything). I tried Rhapsody, which is free for 14 days. Within a couple days you’ll get a notice to go to Salon and create a username and password for your account. Your one-year membership also entitles you to a free one-year subscription to Wired, and other bonus deals. Very cool.

I had written to Salon telling them I wasn’t going to renew unless they got rid of the god-awful columnist Camille Paglia, so I’ve been using the “daily pass” for a while now. I’m all for having an alternative voice, but all she does most of the time is just regurgitate the right-wing talking points. And she claims she’s a Democrat! Um, right… If they ditch her in favor of a more insightful conservative columnist, I’ll pay for my subscription. Until then, I’ll thank TrialPay for renewing for me!

General | No Comments »

Just was looking at some stats for 2007 and wanted to thank you all so much for stopping by. This year, this here blog received just over 5000 unique visitors, served just over 100,000 hits over approximately 25,000 visits overall. Visitors have come from places all over the globe, including the Seychelles, Tuvalu, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Norway, Hong Kong, South Korea and Austria. Most non-US visitors come from undetermined EU countries, followed by Brazil, Canada, Germany and China, respectively. Six percent of you spent more than 30 minutes here per visit, and two percent of you spent more than an hour here per visit. Most of you are using Windows, but seven percent of you are using Linux, while four percent are using a Mac OS. A healthy 50% of you are using something OTHER than Internet Explorer (40% are using Firefox or a Netscape-branched browser).

Rest assured, I am not tracking any one of you, just overall stats like every website does. Just thought you might like to see what your fellow readers are like.

So again, my humble thanks for reading. I’m going to try to post here a little more often. Have a great holiday season!

General | No Comments »

I have a question for anyone who says that global warming is a hoax because the earth “may be warming, but is just in a warming cycle and we have nothing to do with it.” You know, the people who say that it’s totally presumptuous and egotistical for humans to think that they could do anything that could affect the global climate.

Would these people also attempt to reason that the hole in the ozone layer was NOT caused by deodorants and air conditioning? If not, why spend all that time and money switching to environmentally-safe refrigerants and aerosols?

Surely WE didn’t cause the problem. How could a few cans and air conditioners cause a GLOBAL problem?

I guess the government’s own information here is wrong, because all these supposed scientists (paid off by the neo-cons?) believe that humans couldn’t possibly cause any GLOBAL changes, right?

And of course, this CHART shows no correlation between when we switched to environmentally-safe formulas and a stabilization of the ozone levels (more info here)…

According to this report from a member of the British Antarctic Survey:

An international treaty, the Montreal Protocol, has been drawn up to control the release of ozone depleting chemicals into the atmosphere. This treaty is clearly working, and the amount of these chemicals in air near the surface is beginning to decline. The chemicals are however so stable that it will take a long time before they drop to the levels that existed 50 years ago and it is likely that we will see an annual ozone hole over Antarctica for many decades to come.

So given all the reports, and looking at that chart linked to above, it’s easy to see that humans can’t have *any* effect on something like how much UV can get through the atmosphere.

To think something like that would be presumptuous…

General | 1 Comment »

I’m always fascinated when the neoconservative talking heads in the mass media (I’m talking about Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage, Ingraham…) are confronted by their own words. It’s like watching a train wreck about to happen. How will they shake their way out of this one? What will they do?

I’ve posted a couple examples on this here blog over the years. There was the time that Tony Snow challenged the executive power grabbing of the Clinton administration (yet went right along with it when it suited Bush). There was the time when someone called up Rush on the air and asked him how he managed to dodge the draft because of an ingrown hair on his backside. And then there was this post about Republican Texas Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchinson talking about how she didn’t think it would really be a good idea to indict someone (e.g., Scooter Libby) on something as minor as a perjury charge, when only several years earlier she was calling for Bill Clinton’s head and claiming “[S]omething needs to be said that is a clear message that our rule of law is intact and the standards for perjury and obstruction of justice are not gray.”

My fondest Xmas wish was always to have Hannity confronted with his own hypocrisy by a caller. You know, like back on April 5, 1999 when Sean Hannity on FOX News said about the war in Kosovo, “No goal, no objective, not until we have those things and a compelling case is made, then I say, back out of it, because innocent people are going to die for nothing. That’s why I’m against it.”

Yet he supports military action against Iran, and he is a big supporter of the Iraq occupation.

So why do I love to see Hannity put in his place? It’s because I think he’s the most dangerous commentator on the radio today. It is easy for most people to dismiss Rush as a druggie or as a “fringe” neo-con. I mean, he’s almost a caricature of himself at this point. His hypocrisy is well known, well documented. He is a cartoon.

Hannity, on the other hand, presents like a well buttoned-down Irish Catholic conservative. The only way you’d know he’s out of his mind is if you actually do any research on your own and don’t take his hateful rhetoric and outright lies as honorable truth.

Hannity is not big on facts. Listen to his show any day and what you’ll hear is just pure fear… “You know what Hillary wants to do with this country? You know what she’ll do if she and the Moveon.org people have their way…” It’s all opinion. He is paid very well to entertain and to spin. He goes to great lengths to convince his audience that “liberals” are out to get them, that they want to do X and Y and they’re going to ruin the country, that they have wanted us to lose in Iraq since the very beginning (not true), and that they will settle for nothing but the complete dismantling of our way of life. Ugh.

He cloaks this message in the flag, and you’ll hear almost every caller ring in and tell him what a “great American” he is, even though he is doing his very best to keep us all divided. He’s dangerous because he cultivates this “normal conservative” appearance, when he is actually nothing like a true conservative. He claims he’s a Reagan conservative, but he’s not. He’s a fearmongering, Kristol-type neo-con. You can hear it every day on the radio, and it’s there for all to hear. Trouble is, he has a lot of people drinking the kool-aid.

So on Friday, November 30th, I’m driving a rental car because my car was in the shop. I don’t have my MP3 player, and I can’t get Air America all the way out on the Island at night (the NY station lowers its wattage at sundown). So I tune into 770AM (the big NY “conservative talk” station) Some crazy guy has gone into Hillary Clinton’s headquarters in Rochester, NH and has taken a bunch of people hostage. He has strapped what ended up being road flares onto his chest with duct tape and said he had a bomb. The situation was still going on when a caller got through to Sean’s show. I’ve been trying to find a transcript to get the exact wording of the conversation that ensued, but I can’t seem to find one. Perhaps I’ll pay to download it off Hannity’s site, but I suspect it will be edited out because it really seemed to rattle Hannity and it took him a while to recover.

The caller said he had been waiting forever, and Sean apologized. He said Sean really needed to tone down the rhetoric on his show. Sean argued (of course), saying that he is very careful about what he says. The caller said what would happen if, hypothetically, the hostage taker in NH turned out to be a rabid member of the “Stop Hillary Express?”

The “Stop Hillary Express” is Sean’s cute little name for the campaign to prompt people to show up at her rallyes and heckle her, dog her, make her uncomfortable, do anything they can to shake her up.

Sean said he had NEVER said anything that would prompt ANYONE to threaten Hillary or any of her campaigners, and that the caller should name ONE instance where Sean did so.

The caller said that every day Sean does this, and that he shouldn’t be surprised if one of his listeners did something like this. Sean again argued and said again to name ONE time, “and you need to be specific,” where he said anything that was inflammatory.

The caller was ready for this.

He began… “On March [I can’t remember the date he said, but it was a specific date] 2006, you and Ann Coulter were sharing the stage and you said…”

And suddenly the call was dropped.

Sean was obviously rattled.

He went on for the next five minutes about how he didn’t need to entertain these types of calls, that liberals were ruining the country, etc. etc. etc.

I was livid. Sean ALWAYS asks for a “specific example.” It’s the neo-con talking head standard response… “Name one time…” And they don’t expect people to have an answer. But this time, someone did. And what did Sean do? He DROPPED THE CALL right before the caller got a chance to repeat Sean’s own words to him. What was he going to say? What words of Sean’s could’ve been so inflammatory that he couldn’t stand to hear them back?

Truth is, he says stuff every day that he doesn’t want repeated. This is why Media Matters has been such a thorn in the side of the neo-con talking heads. No longer do their words escape out into the ether. Now they’re preserved for all time, so that everyone can see that their words change depending on the situation. Democrat in the White House? War is bad. Republican in the White House? War is good… It’s sickening, and I was looking forward to hearing what the guy had to say. But Sean would have none of it.

And when he got back from break, guess what the VERY NEXT CALL was? “Hello Sean, I’m a liberal democrat and I have to commend you for not giving that guy a platform to spout…” and the call continued. Amazing. A liberal democrat just happened to call in to tell Sean, “good job on that last caller.”

Yeah. That wasn’t a fake call, right?

Sean is a coward who is terrified to face his own words. You want a specific date to back up that statement? You got it. November 30, 2007. Cowardice on display.

General | No Comments »

Nice one, Mr. Bush… Sure, deny health care to children. How can he even look at himself in the mirror? Today, our beloved (p)resident vetoed a bill that would provide healthcare coverage for 4 million children. Why? Because he felt it would push people off private insurance and onto government-sponsored healthcare. Smacks of socialism too much for Mr. Freedom.

Part of the program was to be paid for by yet another tax on cigarettes, which didn’t sit well with White House press secretary Dana Perino. She got all upset and basically said how dare we punish the poor even further by putting more taxes on cigarettes. Haven’t they been taxed enough?

You just have to admire Perino’s ability to spin, don’t you? I mean, first republicans are complaining that welfare folks only spend their money on smokes and booze, then they turn around when it suits them and whine and moan about how these poor people aren’t going to be able to AFFORD their smokes anymore. I mean, what would Big Tobacco do if people couldn’t afford smokes anymore? Probably have less money to give to republican candidates.

But the real smear job here is Bush complaining about poor people moving off private health insurance and onto government subsidy. Are there still poor people on private health insurance? I thought a good percentage of those oft-quoted 45 million without health insurance in this country were those who couldn’t afford it in the first place? As I see it, even with four million kids suddenly getting healthcare benefits, we still have a good 41 million gap to close. I wouldn’t worry too much about people coming off private insurance to go on the “fantastic government plans” yet. I don’t recall too many seniors getting that jazzed over their “fancy prescription drug programs.”

Don’t flatter yourself, Mr. Bush. Any plan that the republicans are likely to go along with (the only way this veto will be overridden) certainly won’t be the healthcare gravy train that they’re making it out to be.

General | 3 Comments »