The Truth About Obamacare

I’ve found a new poster child for the right wing/tea party patriots who claim they want to take back their country.

Let me introduce to you Mr. Cranky, a blast from my Midwestern past, who now lives in the OC and who apparently, from his Facebook posts, has “arrived” and therefore doesn’t give a crap about the rest of us. He is, however, intensely focused on his own gene pool.

To wit:

“ 4 hours at the hospital with granddaughter #1 getting some stitches after her forehead met a brick column when she tried to step over the dog. Glad for private insurance, no government help required. Plastic surgeon? You got it! Great attention? You got it! Red tape! Hell no! Colored bandaides? Yah betcha bootie baby! Obamacare? Stuff it where the sun don't shine!”

He does have a way with words, does he not?

Cranky, I’m delighted that your granddaughter got a colored band-aid, but if whoever provides her with health insurance loses his/her job, all bets are off. Hope it never happens to your family, but if or when it does, you’ll have my sympathy, even though you seem to lack any compassion for those of us who aren’t adequately covered through no fault of our own.

What’s striking in Cranky’s post is his lack of understanding about what he calls “Obamacare” . He thinks it’s Socialism.

Well Cranky, let’s just put that tired old canard to rest once and for all.

The reforms that were enacted are just some much-needed rules of the road that reign in private insurers who have been screwing us ALL. If you have a new grandbaby and she is born with diabetes, the insurance companies won’t be able to deny her coverage.

Any of your kids still under the age of 26 but unable to find work and therefore uninsured? Now they can remain on your obviously gold-plated policy.

Did you ever have a problem with alcohol and check into rehab to dry out? You may have been sober for 35 years, but it matters not to the health insurance industry, as that is their definition of a pre-existing condition. You would have been UNINSURABLE, until the new rules were put into place.

“Frankly,” as the degenerate Newt Gingrich would say, I wish we did have national health insurance like all the rest of the civilized industrial nations of the world.

It STILL wouldn’t be socialism, but at least we would be rid of the pariah of a blood-sucking industry that has no business being in business.

Descending Into Poverty

I friended an acquaintance from my Midwestern hometown past on Facebook some months ago, and his rants ever since have been a real eye-opener for me.

Mind you, from what I remember, this guy, (who has been dubbed as Mr. Cranky by my BFF Diantha), was as middle class as I was, though perhaps a notch above, since I’m pretty sure his dad was a veteran and mine wasn’t. And that made a huge difference in social and economic status the 50s and 60s, unless you were university professors like my in-laws.

My Dad was too young to enlist in WWII. By the time the Korean Conflict (how’s THAT for a war euphemism???) rolled around, a cyst on dad’s back kept him out of that one too.

So my family didn’t benefit from “Big Gov’ment” benefits like Cranky’s family did. No GI Bill for us, no cushy jobs at the Postal Service, no government-provided health care at the VA.

And since my father didn’t want to work the land like his German ancestors, we didn’t get those farm subsidies that continue to enrich the few at the expense of the many. Are you listening, Billy B?

Instead, Dad just went out there and worked in non-union jobs for rich guys that paid him too little, screwed him out of a decent pension in his old age, and convinced him that if he dared join a union, the company would fold and he would never work again.

Dad was duped.

As are too many of us in what used to be the Middle Class, but who are now sinking into the ranks of the working poor. If we can get work. Otherwise, we’re just poor.







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We're Stupid, All Right

A flu bug impaired my body, my brain and my ability to crank out a meaningful post this week. But even on my best day, I could never compose as cogent a piece as one of my favorite writers, David Michael Green, whose commentary on what has brought America to its knees is nothing short of brilliant.

Be advised fellow liberals, Green is no Obama apologist. He lays out all the ways in which this administration has been spineless, and thus, ineffective, in its first two years. On the other hand, he sounds a clear warning on the folly of returning to power the very people responsible for wrecking the country over the last 30 years.

For you Tea Party types, I hope you will read the essay with an open mind. Perhaps then you'll understand who your real enemy is.

Read it here. And leave your comments. Let the discussion begin!

Raindrops On Roses

When I feel despair for the future of my country, and lament that one in seven of my fellow citizens now lives in poverty, and wonder how those Values Voters have managed to turn Jesus into an unrecognizable stranger, I seek refuge in Julie Andrews and one of the best movies ever made.

The Sound of Music is worth watching once a year, as is The Wizard of Oz. And nothing in The Sound of Music inspires me as much as “My Favorite Things.”

Call me a putz, but when I'm feeling sad, I simply remember my favorite things, and then I don't feel so bad.

And for a landlubber whose roots are in the Midwest, it doesn’t get any better than when the blue whales show up in your neighborhood in Southern California. These magnificent creatures, the largest animal ever to inhabit the earth, reach up to 100 feet long and weigh as much as 100 tons, in the Southern Hemisphere at least. In our neck of the woods, they are a bit smaller at 80 or 85 feet.

To put it in some perspective, a blue whale is as big as 40 elephants.

It's rare to see the blue whales near our beaches, as they are usually found farther north near Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands. But as many as 35 of them showed up less than two miles off the Redondo Beach pier a little over a month ago. Cooler weather here has produced a bloom of krill, the tiny shrimp-like creatures the blue whales engorge at a rate of four tons a day.

Best estimates are that only one percent of the population of the world has ever laid eyes on a blue whale, so I am now a member of an exclusive club.

So forget politics, turn off Fox News, stop arguing with me on Facebook, and indulge in a spiritual experience on the Voyager, if you happen to be in Redondo Beach any time real soon.

But hurry. The blue whales, like some hapless incumbents in Congress, might well be here today, gone tomorrow.

Watch the video from CBS News here.

Rot and Decay

Give me your best baritone voice, and chant along with me: “USA! USA! We’re Number One. We’re Number One.”

Now switch to a tinny falsetto, and let’s speak the truth: “No we aren’t.”

Although we cling to the certitude that we are the cat's meow of civilized societies, we are actually Number 11 in the rankings of the best countries in the world, according to a recent Newsweek report.

Newsweek measured countries on health, economy, education, political environment and quality of life in an attempt to answer the question: "If you were born today, which country would provide you with the very best opportunity to live a healthy, safe, reasonably prosperous and upwardly mobile life?"

Unsurprisingly, the countries faring best were the enlightened democracies, and highly regulated free market economies, of Northern Europe...Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway. You know, the countries the Tea Baggers refer to as the “socialist nations.”

So let’s examine several of Newsweek’s categories and see where we stand here in the good US of A.

Starting with health, we’re all the way down at Number 37, according to the World Health Organization. How is it possible that we rank below Oman, at Number 8? France (Number 1, those despicable Socialists) I could understand, but Oman??? Even Colombia, home of the Drug Kingpins, outranks us at Number 22.

I suspect our miserable ranking is connected to the reality that we spend more on medical care, but with worse outcomes, than any industrialized nation in the world.

Let's see where we stand in education. Ouch! Don’t we have Harvard and Berkeley? Oh, wait...We’ve starved our K-12 program so badly for the last 30 years that the most highly-qualified students for those lofty institutions are foreigners. Looks like our home-grown high school graduates are destined for careers at Taco Bell.

Isn’t anyone upset by this? This is our future we’re talking about here. We’re eating our seed corn, folks.

Political environment? We have become totally dysfunctional, with the Party of No obstructing every positive move our President tries to implement, just because they want to see him fail to further their own nefarious political purposes.

We have become an embarrassment throughout the civilized world. (If you don't believe that, get a passport and go see for yourself.)

But at least we still have Lady GaGa. Whoever the hell she is.

Smart or Stupid?

I like to think of myself as an intelligent person, but when my husband comes home with a problem invented by Google to screen its prospective employees, and has the solution while I’m still scratching my head, I realize just how stupid I really am.

Here’s the problem: You have eight balls which are identical in appearance, but one is heavier than the others. You have a scale, and can use it twice to determine which of the eight balls is the heavy one. How do you proceed?

While you’re chewing on that one, let me ruminate on one of my favorite subjects, multiple intelligences, as outlined by Dr. Howard Gardner.

Gardner’s thesis, now widely supported in the mainstream, proposes that there is no such thing as a universal intelligence, but says that we all possess gifts that constitute what the world would define as being smart. Here are the categories that Gardner defined:

Linguistic intelligence ("word smart")

Logical-mathematical intelligence ("number/reasoning smart")

Spatial intelligence ("picture smart")

Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence ("body smart")

Musical intelligence ("music smart")

Interpersonal intelligence ("people smart")

Intrapersonal intelligence ("self smart")

Naturalist intelligence ("nature smart")

I suppose the more categories we can lay claim to, the smarter we are. Truth be told, I'd claim three of the eight at most. I won’t tell you which three, but I will confess it IS NOT logical-mathematical intelligence, the category that is most rewarded in our society. (Thank goodness my oldest child inherited that gift from her father.)

So although I’ll put my head down on my pillow tonight feeling dumber than dirt because I’d never make the cut for Google, perhaps I’ll awaken in the morning inspired to write another blog piece, or play a Beethoven sonata on the piano, or counsel a friend who is going through a nasty divorce.

Let that be my contribution, for just one day, to a better world through my limited intelligence.

As for the solution to the Google problem, well, just Google it. Or tune in here tomorrow.

Bring On Big Government

If it means more cops on the beat, more ambulances to respond when I choke on a fish bone, or more firefighters to keep California from burning to the ground in the dry season, then by all means, give me Big Government.

Bring it on, as Shrub would say.

I want more employees in the FDA to keep Big Pharma from peddling me drugs that prove dangerous within five years of their release on the market; more inspectors for the chicken growers whose eggs contain salmonella, and more IRS agents to catch the tax cheats who make me pay more than my fair share for the commons.

I’d like more nurses, whether in our public hospitals or in the private sector, so that if I end up hospitalized with an “e coli” infection that’s resistant to any available antibiotic I have an angel to hook me up to an IV and monitor my vital signs. And hold my hand if I am croaking.

It would be lovely to have enough teachers so that classroom sizes didn’t exceed 20. I’d pay extra for that.

Please give me more investigators to prevent Medicare fraud so that Medicare will be around when I need it in my dotage.

I’m not so keen on expanding government to revamp the interstate highway system, as depleted oil supplies and rising oil prices will soon make our roads obsolete. So I’d prefer that my hard-earned money not go down that rathole. But I’d sure like to see more government subsidies for rail, whether high speed or just restoring our existing tracks.

I’d write a bigger check for more FEMA employees (as long as they aren’t beholden to industry) so the country could respond efficiently to a disaster like Hurricane Katrina. Likewise, the Minerals and Management Service (MMS) could use some higher-caliber employees to prevent accidents that kill our coal miners. If we have to pay more to expand these departments, I’m all for it.

And let’s not short-change our veterans, who go off on questionable missions like Iraq or Afghanistan, and return with missing limbs, brain damage, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, only to find no resources to treat them.

Where Big Government loses its luster for me is its entry into my doctor’s office or my bedroom. I don’t need government dictating to me whether I will have an abortion or use marijuana to ease the symptoms of an untreatable illness.

Most of all, I’m tired of paying for endless wars that don’t make us more secure but only enrich the mercenaries and munitions makers.

That’s the sort of Big Government I think most of us could agree we should dump.

Scary Fanatics

There’s been a whole lot of hoohah in recent weeks over plans to build a community center, which would include a mosque, near the ruins of the World Trade Center.

The hysterical masses are up in arms over the audacity of Muslims to dishonor those sacred grounds by building within eye-shot of where some crazed terrorists, who hailed primarily from our ally Saudi Arabia (and who incidentally were Muslim) blew up almost 3000 of our fellow citizens on 9/11. (Did you know that some of those victims were...Muslims?)

I don’t now what’s sacred about Lower Manhattan or its environs, which is where the proposed Community Center That Includes A Mosque would be built. Wall Street’s a pretty sleazy neighborhood, given the rape and pillage that’s been inflicted upon the common folk of this nation by the big banks, hedge fund managers and super wealthy hucksters over the last 30 years.

I don’t think there’s much left in that neighborhood to sully.

Whether the mosque gets built or not, the disturbing undertone in this flap is an irrational fear and intolerance of Islam. You can see it in the mistaken notion that our President is a Muslim. That’s patently absurd, since just three years ago the anti-Obama crowd was complaining about his Christian preacher Jeremiah Wright. You can’t have it both ways, folks. He’s either with the Rev. Wright, or he’s facing Mecca.

But this is an appropriate moment to ask: What if he WERE a Muslim? Would that preclude him from being the POTUS?

In the latest example of Islamophobia, a Florida fundamentalist preacher plans to hold a Koran-burning ceremony Saturday on the anniversary of 9/11. Hoping to forestall the “reverend” (whom I refuse to name as it just feeds his attention-seeking agenda) from igniting a powder keg, Gen. David Petraeus, Hilary Clinton and other sentient beings are pleading with him to cancel the ceremony.

Petraeus warned that a public Koran burning that’s likely to go viral worldwide on You Tube would endanger U.S. troops in Afghanistan and undermine our efforts to win hearts and minds there. So far that plea has fallen on deaf ears, but the pastor did say he is praying about it and waiting for God to give him instructions.

My prayer is that God will answer swiftly and tell the psychopath to crawl back under his rock.

Fanatics of any faith are frightening, whether Muslim or Christian. But some in this country seem to feel that the Constitution only protects the civil liberties of the Christian fanatics. The First Amendment does NOT read “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof (except for Islam.)”

We should be very, very careful. If we want our religious freedom to be preserved, we had better be willing to extend it to those of other faiths. Or it might come back to bite us in the butt someday.

Clueless, Costly Spooks

I’m reflecting these days on the early 80s, when the Cold War was in full swing, and Ronald Reagan declared the Soviet Union the Great Satan and chief enemy of United States of America.

It was difficult for me to think of the USSR as a threat to my existence once I met Muscovite Mikhail Ozerov at a newspaper editors’ gathering in Washington D.C. Mikhail, or Misha as he preferred to be called, showed up at a cocktail party hosted by Bob White, a newspaper publisher from, of all places, Mexico, MO (my home state). My husband John and I instantly bonded with Misha.

We had so much in common. We were journalists. We had daughters roughly the same age. We were interested in world events, public policy, and the nuances of the Cold War. We just liked each other, despite the all-out efforts of our respective nations to insist that we shouldn’t.

Misha was clearly nervous even as the night wore on, fearful of the watchful eyes of his countrymen who might report back to the authorities. John and I respected his cautiousness, so we left the party promising each other to exchange gifts for our daughters before he returned to Moscow.

We met again the next night in the downstairs cloakroom of the Soviet Embassy before a diplomatic reception. Misha brought a xylophone and Russian childrens' books for us; we gave him Barbie dolls. We were all thrilled to have pulled off such a clandestine rendezvous without Misha being caught and sent off to the Gulag.

John and I saw Misha and his wife Marita several times over the next few years in Moscow. We were struck by their ability to survive as well as they did in a planned economy and closed society.

Food was in short supply, the best hotel in Moscow had bedbugs, and customers stood in long lines at GUM, the “department store,” for hours just to find out what they might be able to buy. A gilt-edged 15-page restaurant menu at the National Hotel was a cruel joke, as there were really only two options: Beefsteak, or Chicken Kiev. And don’t even think of trying to get fed there after 9 p.m.

Moscow was clearly in disarray, and one can only assume things were no better anywhere across the continent.

After witnessing these fundamental failings, I couldn’t help but wonder: If it was crystal clear to me that the Soviet Union was a paper tiger, where in the hell was the CIA for the last 30 years and why couldn’t they figure out the Evil Empire was collapsing?

That’s why I don’t trust our spies, their covert operations in the Middle East or anywhere else, their assassinations, their renditions, and the taxpayer dollars they waste. Just send me and my husband on a mission. We’ll hook up with Misha and Marita and tell you anything you need to know. And we’ll work on the cheap.

When Others Say It Best, I Rest

This insightful nugget from David Michael Green, political science professor at Hofstra University In New York, is from an article he wrote for Common Dreams.

“It is now transparent, for anyone who cares to look, that the ugly tea party movement in America is an invention of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey and their sick ilk, once again mobilizing a boatload of fools who are angry, but too stupid to know quite why. This explains their endless rhetoric about the evils of the federal government, and their simultaneous desire to keep their Social Security and Medicare benies. It also explains their unmatched idiocy in serving as tools for their own destruction. If they succeed, they fail. If they get their champions elected, they lose their government-provided (Shhhh!) goodies. Brilliant."

It's well worth reading the entire piece. Take a look. Click here.

Guess I Shoulda Listened to Mom

Don’t you just hate it when your mother is always right?

The first time I remember Mom’s sage counsel was when I was four years old. All my little friends were taking dance lessons, tapping their way to future stardom and looking darling in the process. They had the cutest costumes! I SO wanted to buy into that.

At the same time, I was intrigued by the piano in my aunt’s house. Those ivories just screamed “tickle me!”

I told Mom I wanted to take dance lessons and piano lessons. Nope, she said. We can only afford one. You’ll have to choose. Making decisions was something I was pitiful at then (and not much better at now) so this threw me into a tailspin.

Wise Mom refused to make the choice for me, but she did give me these words of advice: “Carol, you’ll look pretty silly in a tutu when you’re 80.”

That mental picture did the trick. I chose piano lessons, and that decision has given me a lifetime of rewards.

Mom’s had a pretty good track record over the years. Most recently, she was highly skeptical of Obama’s promise of Hope and Change in the 2008 election. This despite the fact that my husband John was an Obama volunteer who burned two weeks of his vacation time canvassing in the Republican stronghold of Southwest Missouri while bunking at my mother’s house.

Mom and my brother Gerald have been disgusted with politics and politicians for many years. Those two Show-Me-Staters had become so jaded they weren’t even planning to vote until John and I begged them to “get out there and make a difference.”

“You want us to choose between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum?” they asked.

They didn’t trust that Obama would deliver on any of his lofty promises, but we assured them it would be different this time. Obama’s the Real Deal, we said. They rolled their eyes, but at least they cast their ballots.

Alas, almost two years later we’re all still waiting for the change we had hoped for. Please President Obama, don’t let my Mom be right this time.