Right Wing bloggers wrong again. Anyone surprised?

Right Wing bloggers wrong again. Anyone surprised?

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future city

dogwood

John Boehner's Crying Game

House Minority Leader John Boehner wept Thursday night, as he delivered the final Republican appeal on behalf of funding President Bush's perpetual war in Iraq.

This is obviously a serious matter for the tear-inclined Ohio congressman, who last lost his composure during a February soliloquy on the need for "solemn debate" in the House.

Unfortunately for Boehner, he is seriously misinformed about the issue that is bringing him to tears.

Perhaps we can help Boehner compose himself.

The minority leader made clear that he believes it will be necessary to sacrifice more U.S. lives in Iraq as a response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Speaking of the 19 religious zealots from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Lebanon who have been identified as the perpetrators of those attacks, the ranking Republican in the House was shaking with anger at Democrats who had delayed the dispatch of the latest billions to fund the president's Iraq adventure.

"After 3,000 of our fellow citizens died at the hands of these terrorists, when are we going to stand up and take them on? When are we going to defeat 'em?" demanded Boehner. "Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you, if we don't do it now, and if we don't have the courage to defeat this enemy, we will long, long regret it. So thank you for the commitment to get the job done today."

It appears that Boehner is suffering from some confusion about the reason why President Bush dispatched U.S. troops to Iraq.

In a moment of such confusion, perhaps it is best to turn to the commander in chief for clarification.

In August, 2006, when President Bush was explaining how the 9/11 attacks inspired his "freedom agenda," Cox News reporter Ken Herman of Cox News, interrupted to ask what Iraq had to do with 9/11. And the president set things straight once and for all.

"The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East," said Bush.

"What did Iraq have to do with it?" asked Herman.

"What did Iraq have to do with what?" responded a confused Bush.

"The attack on the World Trade Center," explained Herman.

"Nothing," admitted Bush, who went on to say that "nobody has suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack."

amusement land

Loyal to the White House, Not the Rule of Law

Goodling opened her testimony with a declaration that she had "no desire" to speak negatively about those she worked with in the Bush administration. She then proceeded to point fingers of blame at members of what she described as her DOJ "family," including those who had revealed details of her role in the scandal over the hiring and firing of US Attorneys for political reasons.

Goodling went on to:

• confirm that former DOJ Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson had compiled a list of US Attorneys who would be fired -- apparently for being insufficiently partisan in their inquiries and prosecutions -- and that Gonzales had been aware of the list and involved in meetings about it,

• place White House political czar Karl Rove in a room where the firings were discussed,

• acknowledge that, as early as 2OO5, there was talk about forcing US Attorneys out to make way for White House favorites and

"I do acknowledge that I may have gone too far in asking political questions of applicants for career positions, and may have taken inappropriate political considerations into account on some occasions," Goodling told the committee early in her testimony. She said she made "snap judgments" to block qualified applicants because they were Democrats or "liberal." Only under intense questioning from committee members Linda Sanchez, D-California, and Jerry Nadler, D-New York, did she offer the details and perspective that made it clear her so-called "mistakes" were part of a deliberate and ongoing pattern of politicization of the hiring process at the nation's chief law-enforcement agency.

tattooed singularity

Health Policy Malpractice

By: Paul Krugman

Let me tell you about two government-financed health care programs. One, the Veterans Health Administration, is a stunning success — but the administration and Republicans in Congress refuse to build on that success, because it doesn't fit their conservative agenda. The other, Medicare Advantage, is a clear failure, but it's expanding rapidly thanks to large subsidies the administration rammed through Congress in 2003.

I've written about the V.A. before; it was the subject of a recent informative article in Time. Some still think of the V.A. as a decrepit institution, which it was in the Reagan and Bush I years. But thanks to reforms begun under Bill Clinton, it's now providing remarkably high-quality health care at remarkably low cost.

The key to the V.A.'s success is its long-term relationship with its clients: veterans, once in the V.A. system, normally stay in it for life.

This means that the V.A. can easily keep track of a patient's medical history, allowing it to make much better use of information technology than other health care providers. Unlike all but a few doctors in the private sector, V.A. doctors have instant access to patients' medical records via a systemwide network, which reduces both costs and medical errors.

The long-term relationship with patients also lets the V.A. save money by investing heavily in preventive medicine, an area in which the private sector — which makes money by treating the sick, not by keeping people healthy — has shown little interest.

The result is a system that achieves higher customer satisfaction than the private sector, higher quality of care by a number of measures and lower mortality rates — at much lower cost per patient. Not surprisingly, hundreds of thousands of veterans have switched from private physicians to the V.A. The commander of the American Legion has proposed letting elderly vets spend their Medicare benefits at V.A. facilities, which would lead to better medical care and large government savings.

Instead, the Bush administration has restricted access to the V.A. system, limiting it to poor vets or those with service-related injuries. And as for allowing elderly vets to get better, cheaper health care: "Conservatives," writes Time, "fear such an arrangement would be a Trojan horse, setting up an even larger national health-care program and taking more business from the private sector."

Think about that: they won't let vets on Medicare buy into the V.A. system, not because they believe this policy initiative would fail, but because they're afraid it would succeed.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration is pursuing a failed idea from the 1990's: channeling Medicare recipients into private H.M.O.'s. The theory was that H.M.O.'s, by bringing private-sector efficiency and the magic of the marketplace to health care, would be able to do what the V.A. has achieved in practice: provide better care at lower cost.

But the theory was wrong. Years of experience show that H.M.O.'s actually have substantially higher costs per patient than conventional Medicare, because they add an expensive extra layer of bureaucracy and also spend heavily on marketing. H.M.O.'s for Medicare recipients prospered for a while by selectively covering relatively healthy older Americans, but when the government began paying less for those likely to have low medical costs, many H.M.O.'s dropped out of the Medicare market.

In 2003, however, the Bush administration pushed through the Medicare Advantage program, which offers heavy subsidies to H.M.O.'s. According to the independent Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, Medicare Advantage plans cost the government 11 percent more per person than traditional Medicare. Oh, and mortality rates in these plans are 40 percent higher than those of elderly veterans covered by the V.A. But thanks to the subsidy, membership in Medicare Advantage plans is surging.

On one side, then, the administration and its allies in Congress oppose expanding the best health care system in America, even though that expansion would save taxpayer dollars, because they're afraid that allowing a successful government program to expand would undermine their antigovernment crusade and displease powerful business lobbies.

On the other side, ideology and fealty to interest groups make them willing to waste billions subsidizing private H.M.O.'s.

Remember that contrast the next time you hear some conservative going on about excessive spending on entitlements, and declaring that we need to cut back on Medicare and Medicaid benefits.

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Former president cites international relations, environment, faith-based initiatives

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history. The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me," Carter said in a copyright story in Saturday's edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

"We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered. But that's been a radical departure from all previous administration policies."

Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, criticized Bush for having "zero peace talks" in Israel. Carter also said the administration "abandoned or directly refuted" every negotiated nuclear arms agreement, as well as environmental efforts by other presidents.

Carter offered his harshest assessment for the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which helped religious charities receive $2.15 billion in federal grants in fiscal year 2005 alone.

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The CO2 monster hiding in your wardrobe.

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Outsourcing the War

little buddy

Humanity: The Difference Between a Progressive and Republican

dilemma

Labor and the New Congress: A Strategy for Winning

orange peeled

Why Are American Executives Paid So Much?

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barley field united kingdom

Mothers are paying the price of parenthood

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ayers rock

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carefuly chosen direction

This isn't the first time Harvey has callously wished for more viciousness in American war fighting. In 2005, he said the United States should use nuclear weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq. After recalling the use of atomic bombs during World War II, Harvey lamented that "we sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq and kept our best weapons in their silos."

He then warned of the dangers of "civiliz[ing]" ourselves too much that we won't use weapons of mass destruction:

We didn't come this far because we're made of sugar candy. Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and across this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. That was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever.

And we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves. So it goes with most great nation-states, which — feeling guilty about their savage pasts — eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy.

paris at night part II

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