More on Health Care

TPM notes that Health-Care Market Characterized By Consolidation, Not Competition. The short summary is that in many places one or two large health-care companies control the market in effective monopolies.

These companies would be damaged severely from getting their huge profits if there was a public option to compete against. As a result, such companies are pouring tons of bribes campaign dollars into Congress to convince them to not allow a public option.

Whoa!

So let me see if I get this straight: the United States national soccer team actually beat Spain, the top ranked team in the world? And are now in the finals of the Confederations Cup?

Isn't that as unlikely as Tampa Bay beating both Boston and the Yankees and playing in the World Series?

Oh, right...

Health Care

So, you can have:

a) A footsoldier of a greedy corporation that benefits if it can deny you coverage for your health care.

Or

b) An apathetic government bureaucrat who isn't actively trying to kill you but has little motivation to get you well.

Or

c) A choice between the two.

I choose b or c, because that way I'm less likely to end up with someone who gets bonuses if I don't get the coverage I need. I'm 100% for a single-payer system, aka "The Public Option". Frankly, at this point I'd even rather have "socialized medicine" (which is NOT what single-payer is) than the current for-profit insurance companies that are vying harder and harder to kill their customers for the short-term profit. The current system only works if you are already healthy. If you are sick or will get sick in the future, the system is broken and the companies benefit from your suffering, not your cure.

Iran

I don't have an opinion on who should win the election. I don't think one hard-liner is much better than another. I do, however, feel for the people who think the election was stolen from them. As an American, I felt the same in 2000 and 2004. Unfortunately, my concerns about those elections were never addressed (although more proof that fraud happened surfaces every day). It appears the same will happen in Iran. The only question now is how the people of Iran will react to the election fraud.

I wish them well, but this is entirely an internal Iranian problem. Anything the US government can say will only make the situation worse. Obama's choice to leave the whole thing alone is certainly the best choice at the moment. He can criticize the violent reaction to the protests, but he cannot take sides.

The Republicans who are criticizing the President's decision to leave it alone are idiots. But then, most of the current Republicans in office are idiots.

Tasers

So... tasers can be fatal. In fact, they have resulted in enough deaths that many police have been told not to use them unless they would be willing to use their regular gun in the same situation.

So how exactly is this situation one in which the use of a taser is justified? The officer was bigger and stronger than the 72-year-old. Did he need to pull his gun to control the situation? She deserved to be arrested, maybe. To be tasered? NO WAY.

This officer deserves demotion, retraining, and a few years of the worst jobs possible until he proves his judgement has improved. At the very least. Had the woman died, he should have been charged with murder, so maybe some jail time for assault and loss of his job would be appropriate.

The wanton abuse of tasers needs to be stopped. Tasers are NOT "stun guns". They often kill. Cops should have as much paperwork for pulling a taser as for pulling a gun, and every single use of a taser should require detailed justification and an explanation from the officer of when he lost control of the situation so badly to require the use of potentially deadly force.

Torture Time

Tiller's murderer claims to know of more plans of violence. So, if you are one of those scumbags who believes torture actually works, this is clearly a case of a "ticking time bomb scenario" and therefore we should be torturing this guy to find out what he knows, right?

Right?

I mean, he's a domestic terrorist, who knows of more terrorist attacks that have been planned, therefore he should go through "enhanced interrogation" to determine what he knows. That's exactly the situation you morons who supported Bush's torture program always argued that torture was for, right? Why aren't you all yelling at the top of your lungs for this guy to be tortured?

I'm waiting. Silence only confirms your hypocrisy.

Anti-Abortion, Pro-Choice, Completely Disgusted

I do not approve of what Doctor George Tiller did for a living. But I do not believe he deserved to be murdered for it. The way to stop abortion is through education, not legislation, intimidation, and terror.

This is an act of terrorism, and I hope the killer is convicted under the most dire of those laws. The coward deserves to rot in Gitmo for his action. If the murderer had the courage of his convictions he would have worked to end abortion through legal means.

Update and Note: Tiller performed late-term abortions on fetuses that were either not viable or barely viable. His services helped women like the one in this story, who desperately wanted children but had a complication that forced them to choose between having a child who might die soon after birth anyway, or if the child lived, might be mentally and physically disabled so severely that "life" would be miserable and short. While I still do not condone abortion, the acts of this doctor are in that grey area of my moral compass, where I only pray I never have to deal with myself. I take back the first sentence of this post.

Prop 8

The court upholds the ban. And, as much as I disagree with Prop 8, I think the court made the best possible ruling at this time. They upheld the thing while allowing marriages that had already taken place to stand. If the courts had overturned it, then idiot Republicans would have whined about "legislating from the bench!" and made a fuss over their efforts to force their own morality on everyone being taken out by the privileged few.

Now the folks in California need to get busy overturning Prop 8 legally. Since Prop 8 was promoted via falsehoods and fear, they need to educate the public on how the Prop 8 supporters scammed them with outright lies. The obscene insult to freedom that is Prop 8 needs to be overturned by the people of California. And this time, they should not let a well-funded campaign of lies fool them into legislating morality.

Interrogation Without Torture

Torture is not an effective method to get reliable information. What does work?

The Bush Administration's crimes of torture have damaged this nation more than any terrorist attack, and have led to the deaths of more Americans than were murdered on 9/11.

Torture

Favoring the use of torture is not a political position, it's a mental illness.

Christians: In Charge and yet Persecuted?

The Burkha-Logic of NOM.

Torture: Immoral, Illegal, Ineffective, and A Reason to Kill Americans

Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11.

"The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology," says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.

War Crimes

Anyone who was involved in torture should be prosecuted. Period. Torture is a war crime.

To prosecute war criminals is justice, not political pandering.

To NOT prosecute war criminals is political pandering. Obama is political pandering, protecting Republican war criminals in the hopes of uniting the country. Obama is wrong.

War crimes should be prosecuted and punished. Not ignored as politically inconvenient.

Rich versus Poor

Reading this article angered me a lot. The people described in the article are well and truly rich. They aren't super-rich, but they are rich. They have no notion of what being poor is. If you can afford a second home, you are rich. And frankly, every single person profiled in that first article can afford another $500 a month year in taxes (although they could afford it monthly as well), just give up one luxury item and they've got it. That they think they can't is pathetic. Via FilkerTom.

Huh?

Teabaggers prep for fight. Apparently these jokers actually think that people want to show up at their rallies and watch them teabag each other. Eeeuwwww.