Health Care

It’s hard to imagine how anything very positive will come out of the President’s health care summit in Washington tomorrow.  An article in Politico describes the atmospherics and the haggles involved in detailed negotiations.

A gaggle of congressional Democrats and Republicans will meet with the President at Blair House for about six hours, apparently all of it televised.  The White House has attempted to portray this as an example of long-promised bipartisanship and transparency.  It’s a mystery how they could think that after a year of partisan conflict in Congress, health care reform can be resolved in six hours, particularly in the presence of TV cameras.  But maybe they don’t think that at all — maybe this is just a cynical scheme to portray the opposition as a hopeless obstacle to justify forcing health care reform through Congress in the most partisan way possible.

The President and the congressional Democratic leadership are not going to suddenly see the value of satisfying Republican concerns about specific issues like tort reform and the possibility of tax dollars paying for abortion and medical care for illegal immigrants.  They also aren’t going to accept the Republican argument that their plan is far too expensive and should be scrapped in order to address more specific measures in a less costly way.  In fact, the Democrats can’t even agree among themselves on many health care issues.

Republicans aren’t going to walk into Blair House, take their seats at the table, slap themselves on their foreheads and say, “You know, those Democrats have actually got a great plan.  Let’s all hold hands and be friends.”  If they’re smart, the Republicans will present at least the outlines of an alternative plan that they can support, in full view of the cameras.  That would defuse some of the charges of obstructionism.  If they’re stupid, they’ll do some pontificating and mainly sit with their arms folded and a petulant pout on their faces.

It’s pretty obvious what the objectives of the two sides really are.  As the Politico article noted,

The Democrats’ unstated goal, of course, is to make congressional Republicans look like a bunch of whiny, cynical, ideologically bankrupt crybabies who don’t have a plan of their own.

For their part, the Republicans are determined not to be lectured to by the President, as evidenced by their insistence on a round (or square) table where everyone sits at the same height, with no raised lectern.  They’re not going to sign on to the Democratic plans (now in three versions), but they want to avoid the charge of being totally negative.  We’ll see how that works out.

The real story coming out of the health care summit may be the confusion and disarray among Democrats.  The Senate has their health care bill, the House has theirs, and neither of the two chambers can muster enough votes to accept the other chamber’s version.  But wait — now the President has published his plan, which is more like the Senate bill but includes things the House wants.  And the kicker is, the President’s plan hasn’t been accepted by either the House or the Senate.

And now they’re all going to gather at Blair House, probably to accomplish little more than making themselves look foolish and ineffectual.  One thing is sure — we won’t hear a bipartisan choir singing “Kumbaya” at Blair House.

Related News:

• Sen Snowe Rejects White House Healthcare Summit Invite
• House passes a piece of health care
• Obama: Health care plan good for businesses
• Will Health Care Summit Jump-start Reform?
• Does My Insurance Leave Me Naked

Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada has insulted many Americans by calling opponents of Obamacare ”evil-mongers,” just as fresh polls show support for the massive 1,000 page bill for government control over the U.S. healthcare system decreasing significantly among Independent voters.

Reid coined the term in a speech to an energy conference in Las Vegas this week, and then had the audacity to repeat it again in an interview with Politics Daily.

Such “evil-mongers” are using “lies, innuendo and rumor,” to drown out rational debate, the top Democrat in the Senate said.“It was an original with me,” Mr. Reid said of the term.

This after days earlier lampooning the GOP as ”being run by a talk show host.”

Mr. Reid, who was actually armed with a patch of AstroTurf, blamed the GOP for sponsoring town hall attacks against Democrats, accused the party of waging a barricade on Democratic efforts to pass Obamacare.

“I just want to show you what AstroTurf really is,” Reid said to laughter. “They’re taking their cues from talk show hosts, Internet rumor mongers, and insurance rackets.“

”I just think, as I’ve said before, it’s not often that you try to blow yourself up, but that’s obviously what they’re trying to do with all this vexatious stuff they’re doing with these meetings, the birthers. It’s a party being run by a talk show host,” Reid, whose own poll numbers have sunk dramatically in the last month or so, said.

Other top Democrats, like Senate Majority Whip Leader Dick Durbin, are insulting Americans who aren’t supporters of the highly intrusive socialistic government program that is estimated to cost anywhere from $1,000,000,000,000 to eight times that amount if what they promised us about Medicare is any barometer.

One of Obama’s propaganda news networks, MSNBC’s Mr. Maddow, Mr. Keith Olbermann and Mr. Ed Shultz, pushed earlier talking points for proponents of Obamacare for days, even claiming the events were being “manufactured,” and that people were being “manipulated.” Shultz even had the audacity to say that the people showing up at the town hall meetings were “dumber than Joe the Plumber.”

In 2003, Olbermann praised protests against President Bush’s policies and said that political dissent “created this country and sustained it and improved it.”

I agree. Don’t you? But it was Mrs. Clinton in 2003 that gave us all a pretty good idea of what to do when politicians don’t listen to the American People:

I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.

And then we had Democrat Rep. Mr. John Dingell of Michigan, one of Shultz guests, even went further and compared protesters to the KKK, saying, “the last time I had to confront something like this was when I voted for the civil rights bill and my opponent voted against it. At that time, we had a lot of Ku Klux Klan folks and white supremacists and folks in white sheets and other things running around causing trouble.”

CNN’s Rick Sanchez interviewed Democrat Rep. Mr. Lloyd Doggett of Texas about the town hall citizens voicing their strong concerns at town hall meetings on Obamacare on Aug. 4 who said “their neighbors were denied their right of free expression by their unruly, mob-like conduct.”

All this from the ACORN-in-Chief, who apparently has to PAY for some “AstroTurf” by hiring ACORN members and others to attend town hall meeting to (intimidate?) counter the American People.

And then just one day after denouncing “extreme radicals” and calling for increasing the civil discourse concerning Obamacare, members of the Service Employees International Union didn’t mind utilized those same aggressive tactics to spread their own message, according to critics of the union.

Dennis Rivera, SEIU Healthcare Chairman, has blamed radicals and “corporate front groups” for the recent confrontations at town hall meetings. In Missouri last week an SEIU staffer was among six people arrested for misdemeanor assault and other crimes, after assaulting a black man.

“At the same time that America’s families are seeking relief from fast-rising and unaffordable health care costs, extreme radicals and corporate front groups are trying to derail health insurance reform by disrupting public meetings,” Rivera said in a statement last Thursday.

`My two dogs tied to a tree by a ten foot leash kept howling and whining for an hour till I let them off. Now they are lying quietly on the grass a few feet further from the tree and haven’t moved since I let them off. Freedom may be only an idea but it’s a matter of principle even to a dog.’ – Louis Dudek.

A momentous event has taken place in Iran over the weekend, which may lead to greater change than anyone had predicted (myself included). The unexpected “landslide victory” of incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over reformist opponent Mir-Hossein Mousavi has led to an outpouring of dissent of a magnitude I have not seen since 1989 in Eastern Europe and China and may have ramifications beyond the choice of Iranian president, possibly signalling the beginning of the end (or maybe even the end itself) of the Islamic Revolution. The people of Iran (particularly the young) are demanding true freedom and from now on may no longer be appeased by being allowed to merely let their hair stick  out from under hijabs or get limited access to the internet. They want true control over their own destinies.

The problems for the regime started when Ahmadinejad was declared victor with a massive 62.63% of the vote, when what limited indicators were available pointed to a close contest and possibly a clear victory for Mousavi. In response hundreds of thousands of Mousavi supporters in Tehran and other cities around Iran came out on the streets and have stayed there. Initially it may have been possible to dismiss the opposition as Tehrani elites, who were acting like New York liberals who didn’t know anyone who voted for George W Bush. However, information has dripped out that backed up their claims: there was a record turnout, which normally is an indicator of strong support for reformist candidates; Ahmadinejad won handily in Mousavi’s home town; the result was announced before polls had closed; and possibly most damningly, there have been claims leaking from the Interior Ministry that the polls were, indeed fixed.

And so people went out and protested. The situation is constantly changing and the Government seems to have been caught off guard and doesn’t seem to know how to respond. It has promised a partial recount, called for unity, attacked the protesters as traitors but doesn’t seem capable of stopping them. It shut down internet access, imposed stringent rules on foreign reporters but (quite hilariously) could not stop Twitter-apparently they called Twitter to ask them to block Iranian access, but apparently those thirty geeks in California were busy playing Halo. And now, amazingly, Twitter has become the voice of the Revolution. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the moment in 1989 when the East German government got its messages mixed up about how much freedom of movement to allow its citizens, leading to a Berlin Wall border guard simply opening up his checkpoint.

Tragically, several people have been killed (and I hope, beyond hope that the bloodshed stops soon)  but this has failed to deter masses of people from gathering for what I consider to be one of the most moving of reasons – to demand their freedom. Often protests such as these fail to have a direct impact on the political process and this can lead to cynicism but sometimes a critical mass of support is reached which is irresistible and the spread of democracy makes another big leap forward and I believe that the protests of recent days are at or close to this point. So come on and join us, Iran, we’re waiting for you with open arms…