Obama's Enforcer: Pretend Like We Never Hated You

If you're like me, you've remained on various White House propaganda lists and campaign email subscriptions just out of curiosity -- to find out what they're trying to sell us today.

Despite the fact that we're still a year and a half away from the presidential election, Obama's campaign manager. Jim Messina, is wasting no time.  I think he may have an inkling that the president's (former) base is feeling the disenchantment, so he has a solution:  Forget the past.  Let's start all over, shall we?  Pretend we never called you whiners and sanctimonious purists for not getting the Public Option.  Make believe Obama is not an incumbent who sold you out. Imagine he is a brand-new, fresh unknown community organizer again.  Let's make it a resurgent campaign.  Surge like it's a war.  Do the metrics.  Grow some more grass roots!  (actually, being a sometime gardener, I was under the impression that you grow plants from roots, and that roots are either there or they're not.)  Here's what he sent out today. Judge for yourself.

http://my.barackobama.com/2012-First-Look-Video

Ari Berman of "The Nation" recently wrote an in-depth piece about the curious choice of Messina as Obama's campaign manager.  After watching the video, I can see why he would rub would-be volunteers the wrong way.  He talks at, rather than to, his audience.

"Messina begins the re-election campaign with a significant amount of baggage", Berman writes. "As a former chief of staff to (Max, D-Montana) Baucus and deputy to (Rahm) Emanuel, Messina has clashed with progressive activists and grassroots Obama supporters both inside and outside Washington over political strategy and on issues like healthcare reform and gay rights, alienating parts of the very constituencies that worked so hard for Obama in 2008 and that the campaign needs to reinspire and activate in 2012. Obama’s fixer has arguably created as many problems as he’s solved.  'He is not of the Obama movement,' says one top Democratic strategist in Washington. 'There is not a bone in his body that speaks to or comprehends the idea of a movement and that grassroots energy. To me, that’s bothersome.' ”

You can read the entire article here: http://www.thenation.com/article/159577/jim-messina-obamas-enforcer

So....ARE YOU IN, OR NOT?  Messina wants to know, he wants to know now, and he wants it to go viral. NOW! (Nothing like the old soft sell).

Here is my proposal.  If President Obama goes on national TV and swears on the Bible of Lincoln that he will unequivocally support the Progressive People's Budget, support universal health care, stop the wars, raise taxes on the rich -- then I will think about it while remaining highly skeptical  But first he has to show he means it.  Maybe by reversing that signing statement and taking back his order holding Gitmo prisoners indefinitely without charges? That would be a start.  Then he could announce a special surcharge on Wall Street.

Sorry, Jim Messina.  As much as I would like to believe Obama is a born-again fresh candidate, I gave up believing in the tooth fairy a long time ago.  All the words in the world  will not enable him to grow those ephemeral roots in a soil that is barren and depleted.

And no, Bambots -  criticizing Obama is not tantamount to supporting the Republicans. Obama is a Republican anyway, so what have we got to lose? 

No Peeps at The People's House




Can You Guess Which is the Soft-Boiled, Rolled Over Easy One?

  Are you bummed that you didn't score a ticket to Monday's annual White House Easter Egg Roll?  Not to worry.  You can always go to next Saturday's annual Peep-Off candy fest in Maryland instead, or just stay home and watch one living old pope beatify another dead one in Rome. Then, if you are really bored and have a strong stomach, or just want to laugh at the expense of the rich and self-involved, tune in to the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner.  The WaPo has invited The Donald, and even Bristol Palin will make an appearance.  It's a gala opportunity to watch the Fourth Estate stenographers fawn all over the people they are supposed to cover. As in, give cover to.  Of course, you will probably still be recovering from your 3 a.m. wakeup call Friday to watch the Will and Kate nuptials on all 145 networks.  It is all too much to handle, especially since most of those polled are termininally depressed about "where the country is headed" and have other things to worry about, like eating and gassing up the car.


But just in case you did score a magical golden ticket to the White House day-after-Easter event, you WILL be checked at the gate. Since the hoi polloi have no earthly idea about proper attire and accessories, the cryptkeepers are laying it out for us:


 "The following items are prohibited and will not be permitted into general public and public ticketed areas: firearm / ammunition of any type, weapon of any type, hazardous materials, chemical materials, radiological materials, biological materials,knives (of any kind), toy guns / toy weapons, fireworks, pepper spray / mace, scissors, razor blades, needles, leatherman brand tools (or similar), screwdrivers (or similar), glass bottles / containers, thermoses, tripods, backpacks / coolers, air-horns, laser pointers, aerosol containers, sticks / poles, chairs, animals except guide dogs, and duffle bags / suitcases."

So, how much fun could it be?  Besides leaving your crochet hooks and leftover radioactive spinach at home, you'd better forget about your stash of Peeps candy too. It's not on the list, but Peeps are known to be dangerous.  Not only are they about 500 percent sugar, (and this is an official  First Lady "let's move" anti-obesity event)  they are potential weapons of mass destruction.  It is estimated that more than one billion Peeps chicks, ducks and bunnies will have been consumed by the nation's children (and their sneak-thief parents) by the time some of them reach the White House lawn on Monday.  We are talking massive sugar hangovers and residual candy buzz. It is estimated that Americans have spent close to $2 billion on Easter Candy this year, and Peeps are second only to chocolate in popularity.  Plus, we have evidence that Peeps smoke and drink: 



(pics from PeepsResearch.org)



So, besides the Secret Service, the White House Drug Czar should be at the ready, just in case. Unless, of course, he and the narco squad are busily raiding doctors' offices to make sure sick people aren't getting too many pain meds. 

Happy Easter everybody!

Let the Gaming Begin: Record Profits Despite "Reform"

If you own stock in any of the for-profit health insurance companies, you have reason to rejoice. Shares in UnitedHealth Group Inc's  quarterly profit "crushed estimates, fueled by growth across its health plans and continued benefits from Americans' moderate use of healthcare services, and its shares soared as much as 10.5 percent to a three-year high" according to a Reuters report published Thursday. 

The prognostications of the cynics have come to pass. Despite the much- ballyhooed health care reform law, the for-profit health care system is raking in the big bucks.  They claim that we're just not seeking medical attention like we used to. According to them, we are voluntarily choosing to suffer because we are getting with the austerity program. We are becoming careful and responsible health care "consumers." Fools that we are, we  continue to pay these parasites their skyrocketing premiums, even as we go to the doctor less.  We can't afford the deductibles, the co-pays and all the other out of pocket expenses, analysts concede.  But too bad for us, and hooray for them is the talking point they're not even trying to hide.

 "It was a great quarter," according to one Wall Street analyst, who added that the profits -- amounting to more than $1 billion in income for the United Health leeches -- "pretty much confirms, at this point at any rate, the best hopes that you could have had."

Shares of rival private insurers rose after the report, with WellPoint Inc  up 3.6 percent, Aetna  rising 4.6 percent and Coventry Health Care  climbing 5.3 percent, the Reuters article said. 

The report on profits is the first since provisions in the health care reform law, requiring that private insurers invest at least 80 percent of their profits back into patient care, went into effect at the beginning of the year. It proves that the new law, while ensuring that young people can stay on their parents' plans longer, that you can't be dropped if you get sick, and  that you can't be denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions, really benefits large insurers at our expense.  They win, and we lose, albeit just a miniscule amount less than we did before. We continue to pay obscenely high premiums and still can't afford to go to the doctor. "Obamacare" as its Republican critics derisively call it, really is a scam of epic proportions. Progressives and conservatives are in agreement that we should not be forced to buy this "product" that purports to care for our health. The so-called good bits don't go into effect until 2014 anyway. 

And just as we suspected, the private insurers have figured out a way to game the system. They post record profits after they are supposedly reined in.  The irony is delicious.

Meanwhile, more of us are uninsured than ever.  And judging from the massive influx of cash to the venal health care cartel, the coverage we do have is pure  junk.  They still rake in much more than they shell out. 

" The report card is an 'A'," gloats David Heupel, a large-cap growth fund portfolio manager with Thrivent Investment Management, whose fund holds Aetna shares. "It's hard to really find anything here that you can poke at." (Presumably, Heupel doesn't have a worry in the world with his gold-plated health insurance plan and his secure job.)

UnitedHealth blames crappy winter weather for its premium payers not going to the doctor as much as might be expected, though it does acknowledge lower than normal claims even in areas not impacted by severe winter storms. They suspect people will start going to the doctor again once the weather warms up. Huh?  Last I heard, people get sick more in the winter, during cold season.  I suggest we look into claims denials along with the unconscionable rate hikes as  big, huge, glaring factors in their "wow, like we totally didn't expect this" windfall profits.  I also suggest we continue to clamor for Single Payer, Medicare for All and send the private insurers straight to the penultimate circle of Dante's Hell where they belong.

Feel the Pain

Elected officials across the political spectrum are in unanimous agreement.  We are in austerity mode, and the only cure is that we all share the sacrifice and feel the intense, unrelenting pain.  Otherwise, the spending will cause Armageddon and we will all be dead.  Even Standard & Poors, the credit rating agency that said subprime mortgage securities were AAA-OK, is warning of disaster unless we  raise the damn debt ceiling to avoid cracking open our fool skulls and making our national headache even worse.

 And when they say feel the pain, boy, do they ever mean it. Literally. The Obama Administration wants to clamp down hard on the inordinate amount of narcotics being prescribed to a nation of slobbering junkies. They want doctors to undergo special training in order to weed out the addicts from the bona fide legal sufferers. And guess who would provide this special training to the clueless doctors who have already gone through three years of medical school and another three to five years of internship, residency and postgraduate training?  Why, the drug companies, of course! The very pharmaceutical companies which manufacture the pills will be trusted to tell doctors how to prescribe less and vet their patients with a vengeance. They would also be forced to bear the costs of the pain meds classes.  I can just envision the outcome.  Profits are at stake here, people!  Watch out for a merry-go-round of lobbyists and sudden influxes of political contributions from drugmakers to the lawmakers in charge of this noble effort. Watch out, too, for a chilling effect on doctors trying to alleviate the pain of the suffering.  Big Brother DEA will be watching them more closely than ever and monitoring every controlled substances form in triplicate.  Watch out for people in pain being turned away, in droves.


Pain medication is actually being underprescribed by most American physicians, according to a slew of surveys.  Doctors are already afraid enough of being investigated by the DEA. (The only sure way to score a Vicodin prescription, according to one unnamed doctor I know, is to be a police officer with an on-the-job injury.  Then your health care provider is safe from scrutiny.)


Meanwhile, the Administration is "absolutely committed to legislation that will make prescriber education mandatory,” R. Gil Kerlikowske, the Obama Drug Czar, announced. He said the White House will push hard for the legislation, and that he has already approached members of congress to discuss and craft it. He wants it done by the end of the year.  Among the drugs to be more strictly monitored are  OxyContin (long-acting oxycodone), fentanyl and methadone.


 "They are considered critical to pain treatment. But they also have been associated in recent years with a national epidemic of prescription drug abuse and addiction, as well as thousands of overdose-related deaths," according to The New York Times. "The F.D.A. has long argued that only Congress has the authority to mandate physician training as a condition of prescribing narcotics, because the legal distribution of the drugs is regulated by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and the licensing of doctors to prescribe them is overseen by the D.E.A., not the F.D.A."


Kerlikowske, former Seattle Police Chief, is the same guy who got rid of the "War on Drugs" slogan, but he continues to do battle against marijuana legalization.  He's the same guy who threatened to sue the State of California if it legalized weed.  He loves Nancy Reagan's "Just Say NO" anti-drugs campaign, and thinks it worked.  He also has a pretty poor civil liberties reputation. In March 2007, the NAACP called for his resignation, stemming from his alleged cover-up of a police brutality incident against a drug dealer. The case was referred to the FBI and the Justice Department, which found no evidence of corruption against Kerlikowske or the Seattle P.D, despite video footage of the incident. Kerlikowske is  a graduate of the FBI Academy's executive program.


Kerlikowske, who also has a masters degree in criminal justice, thinks our doctors just didn't get enough training about addiction and pain management in medical school.  So, his solution is to legislate the drug companies -- the altruistic drug companies which have only the best interests of the populace at heart and work hard to keep the prices of its United States drugs the highest in the world, and blackmailed the President into backing off drug price negotiations in health insurance reform in exchange for their cooperation - into teaching doctors who already have more education than their overpaid CEOs could ever hope to attain.


Sure, there's a drug problem in this country.  People often self-medicate because they have no health insurance, they're miserable due to joblessness, or they are in psychic pain for any number of reasons.  And the way we have of dealing with it is ass backwards. We don't treat addicts -- we jail them. Only the rich and insured go to rehab. Insurance companies are stingy about covering it. The government's solution is to make both the addicts and the sick suffer needlessly and crack down on doctors instead of cracking down on illegal drug labs and internet sales and the constant barrage of TV commercials actually urging us to pop a pill for any condition, real or imagined. How sick is that?




Take Two Aspirin and Don't Call Me in the Morning



"The Quitta From Wasilla" & Breitbart Booed in Madison

In case you missed this.... here is some unedited raw footage from the Sarah Palin Boo-Fest in Madison on Sunday.  The guy doing the intro is conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart, the heckuva guy who brought down ACORN and got Van Jones and Shirley Sherrod fired. 

 It was one of the few heavily attended "Tax Day" events in capital cities -- and that is only because the crowd was composed largely of pro-union demonstrators and but a handful of Tea Partiers. 

The video was sent to me by my friend "pvolkov", whose two comments today on Paul Krugman's column perfectly summarized the Madison spectacle. "One could not make out what she was trying to say", Ms. Volkov relates," but the screeching of her voice was like chalk on a blackboard. The intensity of the crowd's response was electrifying." 

As she noted, you didn't see this footage on your TV news. And if you did, it was heavily edited to amplify Palin's inhuman octave levels and to muffle, if not drown out entirely, the sights and sounds of the protesters. CNN went so far as to claim Palin really fired up the crowd!  I am convinced the only reason Palin kept speaking was because her contract stipulated "no finish, no paycheck".


The event was sponsored (naturally) by the Koch Brothers' "Americans for Prosperity" teabagger front group. The mainstream media continues to cover the ever more sparsely attended Tea Party "events" as if it were really still a grassroots movement, and continues to ignore the truly massive protests of progressives occurring nationwide. I guess the TV cable and corporate print media types live in the same bubble as the politicians.  But whether they like it or not, they're going to lose control of the narrative sooner rather than later. The true progressive movement is under the control of no party.  The Democrats have given nary a nod to the demonstrations.  It's as conservative David Frum says: while the GOP fears its own dwindling base, the Democrats seem to despise theirs.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d28JrsE8YyI&feature=player_detailpage

Paul Ryan Shrugged

It's a DoubleStuff version of a Cheez Whiz oreo.  Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan, the Brangelina of nihilistic free market capitalism, are both having career surges this weekend -- she with a movie premiere and he with another gala performance of "Killing Medicare" on the Sunday morning talk show circuit.  So what if one of them is physically dead, and the other is an intellectual flat-liner?  Where there's greed, there's life.... and it goes on and on and on, with the avarice and mendacity chromosomes of the gene pool being carried forward in many a self-interested body.



Star-Crossed Love Object(ivists)



Some people I know had a brief fling with the soap opera fiction of Ayn Rand during adolescence, since her novels seem to satisfy the deep-seated (mainly male) teenage urge to be the center of the universe, have lots of overblown sex, or just be left alone to do their own thing.  Most people do shake off adolescent fads and the rigid thinking of youthful cults and well,... just grow out of it.  But some don't, and Ayn Randism is nothing if not a cult.  Perhaps the most egregious example of someone never outgrowing  Rand's juvenile philosophy of selfishness is former Fed Chairman Al Greenspan.  To make matters even worse, he actually knew the woman in the flesh and was a member of her inner circle of acolytes.  Greenspan is a True Believer in the sanctity of an unregulated free market. The financial world crashed because of his misguided faith.  And no, he has never been indicted or even criticized all that much by the mainstream media.  It doesn't hurt that he's also married to an msm star (Andrea Mitchell). 

And now Paul Ryan is taking up the Rand baton of the free market and the evils of big government.  A mere lad of 12 when his dominatrix died, he nevertheless fell under her spell and has never looked back.  He even makes his staff read her novels as though they were the conservative gospel.

"That Paul Ryan thinks 'Atlas Shrugged' is worth reading (and wasting staff time on) tells you all you need to know about him. He is a non-intellectual lightweight who thinks Ayn Rand's dreadful, fascistic romance novel makes for a good lesson in social engineering and economics," wrote Marie Burns of RealityChex today in response to a Maureen Dowd column that simultaneously shilled and dissed yet another movie premiere.

Atlas Shrugged, so Maureen plugged.  Instead of a grade C remake, I would rather see a movie on Rand herself, something more realistic than that soft porn straight-to-cable biopic starring Helen Mirren more than a decade ago.  If Mirren could play the Queen, she could also play the cold, emotionless Ayn Rand.  She could repeat Rand's testimony before the House UnAmerican Affairs committee on the "red menace" in Hollywood in the 50s.  Another  pivotal scene might be of her famous "Philosophy: Who Needs It?" George Patton-like speech in 1974 to an audience of young West Point cadets. Although it is likely that future General David Petraeus was in the house and met her, that has never been confirmed. But it's only a  movie -- and our current government is Kabuki play-acting, anyway, and the military already calls battlefields and campaigns "theatres."

Parts of the speech, which included her assertion that the Military Industrial Complex is just a myth,  were later included in the philosophy curriculum of USMA.  Here's a choice tidbit she spouted during the Q & A with the cadets: "Any white person who brought the element of civilization had the right to take over this continent." (or for that matter, any other continent, from Asia to Africa and beyond).  So she was a not-so closeted racist too, which also fits the bill to be a card-carrying right wing ideologue. Only now, racism is disguised as birtherism. And not so disguised, as in Donald Trump's recent boast that he gets along just fine with "the blacks."

The end of the film (I hereby nominate the Coen Brothers to be writers/directors) would depict Ayn sneakily applying for Medicare and Social Security toward the end of her life, when her chain-smoking habit finally caught up with her and she got lung cancer.    I can just picture Mirren haughtily rasping, "I took government welfare only because it was in my own self-interest to do so," before the fade to black.  There might also be a scene of young Paul Ryan getting his Social Security survivors' benefits when his father died, also purely out of   individualistic selfishness.  He certainly didn't need to suck on any of the teats of Alan Simpson's government milk cow, because he inherited a multimillion dollar business. But Social Security isn't means-tested -- though grown-up Ryan would certainly love to change that now. 

Of course, Ryan and Greenspan aren't the only Rand Fans.  The real Brangelina are apparently true believers.  So is Vince Vaughn.  Maybe Dowd could write about them next time.  Of course, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are in the fold. And  CNBC star Rick Santelli, whose on-air rant famously birthed the Tea Party Movement as a means of deflecting blame for the mortgage meltdown from Wall Street to Reaganesque welfare queens, is also a self-avowed Randroid. 

Screeched Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange in 2009: "Why don't you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages, or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water!"

He later admitted, "I know this may not sound very humanitarian, but at the end of the day I'm an Ayn Rand-er."   Curiously, despite being an avowed atheist, Ayn Rand is everywhere in  right-wing world. Her novels are enjoying a huge boost in sales.  The Rapture goes secular.

 "For over half a century," writes Jennifer (no relation to Marie) Burns in her new biography,  "Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right."

Oh, and here's a scoop, in case you missed it in my Times comment. The TARP program, which bailed out the banksters, really stands for The Ayn Rand Program for troubled capitalists. They just never got around to telling us. 

Bankers and Other Protected Species

It's official. Gray wolves in Idaho and Montana are now fair game for Sarah Palin and other hunters. Today's congressional budget vote contained the first ever Congressional rider removing an animal from the endangered species list.  Only problem is, the politicians forgot to remove another breed of predator from the protected list: the Wall Street banker.


Several recent reports, in The New York Times and elsewhere, have reminded us that not one of the bankers who caused the meltdown two years ago, destroying the savings and the lives of countless Americans and doing their part to make illegal foreclosures and 20 percent unemployment the new normal, has been indicted or gone to jail. Not a single one.


 In her Times story today, Gretchen Morgenson recounted a meeting in 2008 between Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner  and then-N.Y. Attorney General (now governor) Andrew Cuomo.  They conveniently decided not to prosecute either banks or bankers for fear of ruining the markets and causing financial Armageddon. Now, where have we heard that scary term before?  Oh yeah, from the boss of JP Morgan Chase, whose profits just soared by 67 percent.  CEO Jamie Dimon personally went to the U.S. government last week to warn of yet another Armageddon, in the event Congress does not raise the debt ceiling next month.  That's the same Jamie Dimon who charged his company a whopping half a mil in moving expenses recently because his million dollar salary and $5 million bonus just didn't cut it.  I guess he wants to fly a private space shuttle to Mars to avoid Armageddon when the debt ceiling collapse explodes the whole planet. Either that, or he's going to move the contents of Fort Knox to an underground mansion paid for by Homeland Security.  (You can probably tell I am really into conspiracy theories today as well as feeling crankier than usual).


Morgenson also blamed the lack of FBI expertise and manpower for the failure to investigate Wall Street bankers. She contrasted the current lack of accountability to the hundreds of prosecutions in the Savings & Loan scandals in the 90s, when the modern day Mr. Potters actually went to the slammer.  Not only do few investigators have the knowledge of the arcane credit default swaps and other financial casino tricks invented by Wall Street, the culprits themselves have trouble explaining exactly what they did to screw us all so royally. They committed crimes so novel there were no specific laws against them. The Securities and Exchange Commission in charge of overseeing the financial world was lackadaisical at best and criminally complicit at worst. Whisteblowers who approached Congress were ignored.  The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, enacted during the Great Depression to prevent the rise of banks too big to fail,  just opened the floodgates of unfettered greed even wider.  Gene  Sperling, a top Obama economic advisor, was one of the architects of that repeal during the Clinton Administration. The so-called financial reform legislation last year co-sponsored by Chris Dodd (himself a beneficiary of a crooked Countrywide mortgage deal) and smooth talking Barney Frank, has teeth made of yellow jello.


But the real wolves have been reined in, proving that Congress, despite the conventional wisdom, can really do things when it takes a mind too.  The wolf population has grown and no longer in danger of extinction.  They apparently have been killing livestock and terrorizing Max Baucus's constituents.  And the National Rifle Association has to have more furry warm bodies as targets for their bullets of freedom.


RootsAction, a group of activist economists, is calling for A Robin Hood tax on Wall Street  Let's see if the president puts his money where his mouth is and fights for it.  Cuomo , himself a puppet of Wall Street, just got rid of the state millionaires tax and slashed the budget on the backs of the poor.  The banks threatened to leave Wall Street unless he did. The corporations and banks are so grateful they are running nonstop TV ads thanking him.  They're calling themselves the Committee to Save New York, and their ad actually features a crowd of pedestrians in Brooks Brothers suits. I am not kidding! No wonder the banksters are raking in the record profits. Even their needy trophy wives get sweetheart zero interest deals from The Fed, according to a recent article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. (And for a detailed story on Cuomo's influence peddlers, see "Eyes on the Ties" on my Blog List on the right- hand side of the page).
 
But it's never enough.  Jamie Dimon is now whining that Senator Dick Durbin wants to put the kibosh on his usurious price-fixing debit card fees.  This guy is insatiable.  His greed goes way beyond normal unmitigated avarice. Since he and his ilk are already de facto owners of the government, any attempt to rein him in amounts to a mutiny, in his view.  It is sheer effrontery for Uncle Sam to say no to Mr. Dimon.
  
Meanwhile, I  hope all the gray wolves somehow get word that the bullets are going to be flying  and  do the smart thing by emigrating to Canada.  The laws up there actually protect species, both human and animal.  And they even  have strict banking laws that protect ordinary citizens.  I say let's ship Jamie Dimon up there to the wastes of the Yukon Territory or an abandoned Siberian gulag and let him howl all he wants at the moon, alone and far away, where he and other seriously dangerous creatures can cause no further damage. The taxpayers will gladly foot the bill for his moving expenses.

Let's Give Them a Reason to Howl