Bush's Tin Ear, Tin Horn Health Care Plan

If I had time I would dissect the Courant's Sunday article on Bush's health care plan. I would say it does four things:

• Taxes the sick and old
• Rewards companies to drop plans
• Encourages individuals to pay or insure individually
• Will leave less people insured, more paying the full sticker (sucker) price for procedures.

Krugman did a pretty good, if incomplete job of it. Here is my comment posted with Krugman's article:

"Gold Plated" is in the eye of the Decider:

I am 60, recently retired. My former employer offers health insurance to retirees at cost - retirees pay the whole thing, about $17,000 a year for two people - not knocking my former employer, they charge based on the age of retirees covered, they must. According to George this is "Gold Plated", although it is the same coverage available for average age employees at several thousand less.

Other stories I read about people with individual policies that later fell into long term conditions pay in the area of $3000 a month.

These are the "Gold Plated" that Bush would tax for having health insurance. Yet the coverage is nothing special at all.

This is simply a scheme to kill health insurance completely. Hopefully it will go the way of his Social Security plan last year.

Perhaps after the State-Of-The-Union I will have more to say.

MIRACLE - I'm getting the Reader's Digest for Free!!!

Do you believe in all the Miracle articles they publish? And those that show the value of Prayer? Its conservative, right wing focus?

I stopped paying for my subscription 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 years ago, yet it keeps coming every month. Of course, when I stopped paying they called and sent many months of letters, offering me just one more last chance. Then about six months ago I got another raft of last chance letters, but here it is today, like every month still coming.

So if you subscribe already, you might as well try this. You will still be paying too much if this causes you or any of your unsuspecting kin to waste time reading it. And perhaps if you are really, really lucky or pray hard enough they will actually cut you off.

For a really needy person, I would offer to change the address on my free subscription, yet I could not bare the guilt -- not for ripping off the magazine -- but the responsibility for someone reading this trash.

Media Reform Conference

My diary at MyLeftNutmeg

http://www.myleftnutmeg.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5327

Also a new proposed State law for Popular Election of the President was timed perfectly for the session on voting integrity in Memphis. It looks like I will have to do a bit more work in tracking this bill and perhaps testifying against it at the Capitol.

http://www.myleftnutmeg.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5331

Why do they spend so much tracking activists?

Why do the CIA, FBI, and Connecicut State Police spend so much time tracking activists?

The Ken Krayeske arrest last week has caused quite a bit of good blogging, and finally, so far, some good inquiry by the Governor facing the threat and likely reality of legislative investigations. (For posterity I will remind you that Ken is a well known local political activist, peace activist, and campaign worker. He was arrested on what look like completely trumped up charges, by cuff happy local police, motivated with Kafkaesque fears by the State Police that Ken blogged that he might create a legal protest outside the Governor's inaugural ball)

Often, people seem to ask: "With all the foreign terrorists and suspected domestic terrorists and criminals, why do they spend all those $ and infiltrating and spying on peaceful activists and protesters?"

My answer maybe different than most. I recognize that paranoids and fearful people such as Nixon and Bush may be a huge factor, yet perhaps they are more enablers than causes.

Here is my partial answer:

You are a career spy or investigator. Over time it becomes less glamorous; just a job; a wife; children.

Would you like to learn Arabic? Find a way to look middle eastern? Put on a birka? Go to Iraq/Iran and live like the natives for a few years in infiltrate the country and try to find and link up with some possibly blood thirsty terrorists/revolutionaries?

Or would you rather disguise your self as an average American in the town where you family lives and infiltrate groups there, while you and your family live a normal American life?

Given that, would you like to infiltrate the underworld and start a career with Mafia, proving yourself along the way as you get closer to the blood thirsty leaders?

Or would go rather go down to your local peace group and join their meeting. Occasionally take one of those peace train's to NYC, and overnight bus rides to Washington D. C. etc.

I know which I would choose, and that's why I suspect there are lots of Homeland Security types who gravitate to this work.

War Stories

That picture of me is from a tour in Korea courtesy of the draft. For now I will summarize my military career, as I often do, as “A lot like the movie MASH, without the blood”. The movie came out while I was there. Originally censored by the Army, yet such a stink arose, they said it was just put up to a higher review board, which then approved it because “it was not like the Army and everyone would recognize it as a farce”.

It seems that if you are a veteran you have so much more credibility -- a genuine Patriot, America’s Finest, not eligible to be a Chicken Hawk. Like the cities that used to fight by having just their leader fight and that would determine the victor, one would guess that any argument could be decided by trading war stories and the person most closely resembling a hero would win all the points -- unless, the louder, more militant speaker loses that comparison. -- sort of how Bush and Cheney seem to trump Kerry, McCain, and Gore.

I probably should not have much credibility on either count. Reluctantly drafted and not a volunteer; by luck of the draw went to Korea not Vietnam; served as a company clerk and mail clerk. Yet, perhaps I can trump more than those who had “other priorities” or were lucky enough to be born when there was no war (before my time), won in the draft lottery (just after my time), or were classified 4-F. And even though a company clerk, I did have jungle infantry training – so I could trump those that trained as clerks, or had just simple infantry training, not to speak of those sent to Germany rather than a rustic Korea.

As Bush Sr said “I was a hero because someone shot my plane down” (not exact quote), McCain is only a hero because he managed to survive as a prisoner, made possible because he and his plane did not make it back. I rate John Kerry more of a hero for starting Vietnam Veterans Against the War than anything he has done before or since.

Still, there is a lot I learned in the Army, a lot of fun stories I could share, some knowledge that applies to our defense/foreign policy. Even in Korea, I met some people in the Army I highly respect, perhaps even heroes. As reluctant as I was, I did step forward when called. And let me include those of my generation who left for Canada or elsewhere in those whom I respect, along with those who maintained a semblance of integrity in their own conduct in the war while either for or against it.