We had eight years of gross government malfeasance, and now you get mad?

You didn’t get mad when… the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.
You didn’t get mad when… Energy company officials were invited to dictate energy policy.

You didn’t get mad when… a covert CIA operative got exposed out of petty political spite.
You didn’t get mad when… the Patriot Act got passed..

You didn’t get mad when… we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.
You didn’t get mad when… we spent over 600 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn’t get mad when… over 10 billion dollars, much of it cash, just disappeared in Iraq .
You didn’t get mad when… you found out we were torturing people.

You didn’t get mad when… the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.
You didn’t get mad when… we held back and let Bin Laden escape.

You didn’t get mad when… you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
You didn’t get mad when… we let a major US city drown.

You didn’t get mad when… we gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich.
You didn’t get mad when… the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark, and our debt hit the thirteen trillion dollar mark.

You didn’t get mad when… using reconciliation; a trillion dollars of our tax dollars were redirected to insurance companies for Medicare Advantage, which cost over 20 percent more for basically the same services that Medicare provides.

You finally got mad when… the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.

Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all okay with you. But helping other Americans… oh hell no.

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The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government to create positive solutions. We recognize that government is not the enemy of the people, but a vehicle for our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we support leaders who work toward positive solutions that benefit all Americans, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.

This needs wider reading and I highly recommend reading the entire article over at the Denver Post website.

From today’s Denver Post:

As America comes to grips with the reality that changes are desperately needed within its health care infrastructure, it might prove useful to first debunk some myths about the Canadian system.

Myth: Taxes in Canada are extremely high, mostly because of national health care.

In actuality, taxes are nearly equal on both sides of the border. Overall, Canada’s taxes are slightly higher than those in the U.S. However, Canadians are afforded many benefits for their tax dollars, even beyond health care (e.g., tax credits, family allowance, cheaper higher education), so the end result is a wash. At the end of the day, the average after-tax income of Canadian workers is equal to about 82 percent of their gross pay. In the U.S., that average is 81.9 percent.

Myth: Canada’s health care system is a cumbersome bureaucracy.

The U.S. has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. More than 31 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead. Think about it. It is not necessary to spend a huge amount of money to decide who gets care and who doesn’t when everybody is covered.

Myth: The Canadian system is significantly more expensive than that of the U.S.Ten percent of Canada’s GDP is spent on health care for 100 percent of the population. The U.S. spends 17 percent of its GDP but 15 percent of its population has no coverage whatsoever and millions of others have inadequate coverage. In essence, the U.S. system is considerably more expensive than Canada’s. Part of the reason for this is uninsured and underinsured people in the U.S. still get sick and eventually seek care. People who cannot afford care wait until advanced stages of an illness to see a doctor and then do so through emergency rooms, which cost considerably more than primary care services.

What the American taxpayer may not realize is that such care costs about $45 billion per year, and someone has to pay it. This is why insurance premiums increase every year for insured patients while co-pays and deductibles also rise rapidly.

Myth: Canada’s government decides who gets health care and when they get it.While HMOs and other private medical insurers in the U.S. do indeed make such decisions, the only people in Canada to do so are physicians. In Canada, the government has absolutely no say in who gets care or how they get it. Medical decisions are left entirely up to doctors, as they should be.

There are no requirements for pre-authorization whatsoever. If your family doctor says you need an MRI, you get one. In the U.S., if an insurance administrator says you are not getting an MRI, you don’t get one no matter what your doctor thinks — unless, of course, you have the money to cover the cost.

Prairie Writers Circle

The Food and Drug Administration found recently that samples of a feed by-product from dozens of corn-ethanol plants were contaminated with antibiotics. With that news, producing vehicle fuel from grain is looking not only like a wasteful and inefficient process, but also like a danger to human health.

Growing corn is a leading cause of soil erosion as well as water depletion and pollution. Corn ethanol plants further stress our water supplies by consuming four gallons of water for every gallon of fuel produced.

Now to the list of ethanol’s environmental insults we can add pharmaceutical pollution.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with getting help from biological processes to meet industrial needs. But when colossal volumes of product and enormous profits are at stake, as they are in the alternative-fuel industry, biological methods can backfire disastrously.

To survive economically, ethanol plants depend on sales of distillers grains, solid material left over from corn fermentation. Distillers grains are a nutritious, high-protein livestock feed. But they can be laced with multiple antibiotics, the FDA and University of Minnesota scientists have found.

Addition of antibiotics is one of several methods ethanol manufacturers use to control bacterial contamination. Bacteria interfere with the work of yeast cultures that convert sugars to ethanol. Antibiotics can increase ethanol output by 1 to 5 percent, according to Ethanol Producer magazine.

That sounds small, but that extra efficiency could boost profits by many millions of dollars as national production is scaled up from its current 9 billion gallons per year.

The discovery of antibiotics in distillers grains has raised concern that ethanol plants could breed and disperse drug-resistant bacteria, and that those bugs could share their genes with bacterial species that cause human diseases. Sampling by university and industry researchers has turned up antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the processing streams of ethanol plants.

This case of pharmaceutical contamination comes on top of a half-century of over-prescribing antibiotics for medical and veterinary use, along with routine feeding of the drugs to healthy livestock to promote growth. Nature’s predictable response: bacterial populations that can no longer be killed by drugs that were once used to treat them. Now, of 90,000 Americans who die of bacterial infections each year, more than 60,000 are killed by such drug-resistant types, according to the Centers for Disease Control (pdf).

The ethanol industry says that one widely used drug, virginiamycin, doesn’t show up in meat produced with distillers grains, so we need not worry about the food supply (pdf). But such assurances take the narrowest possible view of the threat.

Johns Hopkins University researchers argued in 2008 that public health officials have also taken a narrow approach to antibiotic resistance, thinking clinically “rather than ecologically in terms of reservoirs of resistance genes that may flow across the microbial ecosystem.” Use of the drugs in agriculture is more widespread than in medicine, and, they contend, creates excellent conditions for the spread of resistant organisms.

In fact, it’s already happening, with germs borne via manure, air, groundwater, soil, flies and irrigation water.

The Johns Hopkins review concluded that overuse of antibiotics in agriculture “has compromised the efficacy of most antimicrobials used in the United States and throughout the world.”

Distillers grains are set to move beyond the feedlot, having been tested as fertilizer on farms, lawns and gardens, and as feed in fish and shrimp farming. The pet food industry also is starting to use distillers grains, and we don’t know what evolutionary mischief might start going on in the feces of dogs, which harbor an especially rich range of bacterial species.

Meanwhile, methods being developed to manufacture new biofuels also depend on biological processes. If and when fuels from algae or cellulose are taken to the billions-of-gallons scale, vast new quantities of antibiotics could be deployed.

Ethanol can be manufactured without using antibiotics — just ask the liquor distillers — so all such drugs should be banned from biofuel production.

In fact, ethanol’s drug problem is just the latest of many reasons to impose a moratorium on production of fuels from grains. If industry cannot supply sufficient quantities of alternative fuels without risking an even deeper medical crisis, it might just be another sign that our thirst for vehicle fuel has outgrown all ecological limits.

Stan Cox is lead scientist for the Land Institute in Salina, Kan., and author of “Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine.” He wrote this comment for the institute’s Prairie Writers Circle. Write to him at t.stan@cox.net.

The Republican party is in shambles and has a choice to either grow up or be forever marginalized.

Right.

And the Republicans, including their aged candidate, blow their collective gaskets hammering at us over and over again with the idea that eloquence and good speechifying aren’t enough to qualify someone for a position in the Executive Branch or for President (and make no mistake, a VP better be qualified for that job or not get selected).

I’m just sayin’.

What ought to really boggle the mind on this economic horror is that it is just one slice of the pie. There is no doubt that there are other economic puddles out there that are also drying up.

It’s going to get worse folks, much worse.

John McCain served his time as a POW with great courage, loyalty and tenacity. More that 600 of us did the same. After our repatriation a census showed that 95% of us had been tortured at least once. The Vietnamese were quite democratic about it. There were many heroes in North Vietnam. I saw heroism every day there. And we motivated each other to endure and succeed far beyond what any of us thought we had in ourselves. Succeeding as a POW is a group sport, not an individual one. We all supported and encouraged each other to survive and succeed. John knows that. He was not an individual POW hero. He was a POW who surmounted the odds with the help of many comrades, as all of us did.

I furthermore believe that having been a POW is no special qualification for being President of the United States. The two jobs are not the same, and POW experience is not, in my opinion, something I would look for in a presidential candidate.

Sadly, McCain’s POW status is not unique, nor his experiences any different from anyone else’s there nor his heroic acts any different from the heroic acts of the other POWs. Yet McCain can’t let a moment go by or answer a single question without mentioning his time as a POW, as if that gives him a pass on everything else. Hell, he even invoked his POW status when asked what his favorite music was, which is patently ridiculous. (ABBA, if you want to know)

John McCain is profoundly unqualified to be a US Senator, let alone President of the US and most assuredly not President in these difficult times at the end of 8 years of an Administration that has done more to destroy this country than any external enemy we’ve ever had.

I’ve always like Dock Ellis.

So I began listening to other candidates and found Edwards the most interesting from a policy perspective and he became my candidate of choice, with Hillary second, primarily because of health care for both but his stands on other issues made him first on the list. Obama was still interesting but, like Krugman, I felt his health care approach was inadequate. Then Edwards dropped out and I began to look more closely at Obama and realized that I not only liked what I saw and heard there were significant differences in how he approached issues that I preferred to Hillary’s approach. But I would still have happily voted for Clinton and remember saying so quite specifically after one of their one-on-one debates. I was impressed by both.

Then it became clear that he was the better campaigner, that he had scanned the landscape and mapped out a much clearer path to the nomination that included the widest range of America, and I really liked that, while she more and more began to resemble an old-line DLC candidate, and I definitely didn’t like that.

But I would still have happily voted for her had she prevailed.

Then came the early Spring and Obama showed amazing strength in the primaries and she showed amazing weakness, both in style and in tactics and he impressed me even more and her shortsightedness began to concern me.

I was still quite willing to vote for her however, had she prevailed but I was now taking a very close look at Obama.

Then the accusations of gender bias started coming out of the Clinton camp and not without justification in a certain sense because the more out-there Obama supporters sometimes exhibited such behavior and it was easy to cherry-pick that to focus on, but Obama didn’t nor did his close campaign people. But that’s politics and to be expected, just as the subtle playing of the race card by Clinton surrogates was to be expected (the First Surrogate was a huge disappointment in that regard) but she didn’t do that and I wrote it off as typical politics.

Then she began the “he’s not a Muslim, as far as I know” crap, that’s not a surrogate speaking, that’s her saying that. But Obama was nothing but gracious in his response (while surrogates played the game surrogates played, I generally don’t blame the candidate that much for over-the-top supporters, some but not that much, on either side). And then she made the absurd Bosnia statements, not once but many times and then claimed “fatigue” at the very time she was also putting out an ad stating that she’d be the best one to respond correctly to the 3 a.m phone call, rather a bit of cognitive dissonance there, and then she made the “white Americans” statement which was truly bizarre and her campaign began to work that theme rather strongly while ignoring the reality that Obama has done quite well indeed in very white states, then they started pushing hard at the elitist argument (which I’ve always hated) and it became not just occasional surrogates talking but an actual campaign tactic which she herself echoed and it became much harder to think kindly of her as a candidate.

But I still would have voted for her if it came to that.

Then she mentioned assassination (and it matters not what she “actually meant”, she said it and it was bad judgment to do so and no, I don’t think she was hoping for assassination) and then responded badly to being called on it and she lost me completely, especially as she continued to fail to thrive politically and began rewriting history and playing “if” games with numbers and whining about “counting every vote” because to disenfranchise voters is unDemocratic while she and her campaign continually sought to demean voters like me who live in caucus states by implying that we aren’t really representative of our states (and believe me anyone who actually attended an overcrowded caucus here knew better) and the dissonance of her campaign began to really bother me.

And she lost my vote and because I live in a state that is so blue it blends in with the surrounding ocean I actually may not vote at all in the unlikely chance that she becomes the candidate.

But she won’t, because she’s lost and she seems determined to bring down the Democratic Party along with her candidacy because if she can’t have it than no one can and I’ve had quite enough of that attitude for the last 8 years.

And it doesn’t have a goddamned thing to do with sexism, nor does most of the opposition to her that I’ve seen from thoughtful liberals and progressives (the majority).

There are still things that concern me about Obama’s policies, on health care for sure, but from what I’ve seen his campaign has been the one behaving the most honorably and with the most concern for the nation while hers has appeared deeply ego driven (notwithstanding that it takes a big ego to run for that office at all).

I rather like a quote I saw recently “when I go into the voting booth and pull the lever for Obama I still cry out Edwards’ name” and that is still the case with me but I will be extremely happy to be able to vote for Obama because he’s lightyears better than anyone else out there now, sadly including Hillary.

I have also asked, as have others, time and again for some reasons why those in here who support her do so and haven’t gotten much in the way of an answer.

My wife, who is around Hillary’s age, is furious with her, even more so than I am. She is disappointed precisely because she saw Hillary as a great candidate to be the first woman President and feels truly let down by what is happening. All the complaints listed about the Obama campaign in this article in Britain’s New Statesman are the very things that the Clintons say are necessary in terms of tactics to “season” Obama as a candidate (for the future) when it comes from their side. Either the behavior is acceptable or it isn’t and my wife and I come down on the “it isn’t acceptable” from either camp but the level of such behavior from the Clinton side is just becoming too much to bear.