Founding Fathers Were in Favor of Universal Health Insurance

Proof:

Preamble to the Constitution:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Seems to me the general Welfare would include universal health care as a right, not a privilege. And then there was the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Now how can you enjoy "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" without your health? Case closed.

Labor Day Heroes

I can't leave this blog today without directing you to The Public Record and its story on Labor Day and the Heroes of the Union Movement. It is well worth reading.

THE UNION MAID
Woody Guthrie

There once was a union maid, she never was afraid
Of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid.
She went to the union hall when a meeting it was called,
And when the Legion boys come 'round
She always stood her ground.

CHORUS:
Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,
I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union.
Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,
I'm sticking to the union 'til the day I die.


This union maid was wise to the tricks of company spies,
She couldn't be fooled by a company stool, she'd always organize the guys.
She always got her way when she struck for better pay.
She'd show her card to the National Guard
And this is what she'd say:

CHORUS

You gals who want to be free, just take a tip from me;
Get you a man who's a union man and join the ladies' auxiliary.
Married life ain't hard when you got a union card,
A union man has a happy life when he's got a union wife.

CHORUS

And finally, here is a YouTube video featuring Pete Seegar, who is a national treasure:

Soldier Killed in Afghanistan Had Reinlisted for Son's Health Coverage

The story is at Raw Story

CNN news anchor John Roberts asks "How far would you go to get good health insurance?" A report this morning tells the heartbreaking story of a man who lost his job as a computer consultant, and along with the job went the health insurance for his family.

Army SPC Greg Missman had ended his military service 11 years earlier, but signed back on in order to provide his young son Jack with health insurance coverage.

After only one month on the ground in Afghanistan, Missman's father Jim received the news that Greg's convoy had been ambushed, and Greg was killed in the attack.

CNN reports that a "Pentagon spokesman said there is no way to count how many soldiers have joined the armed services to get health care benefits. As for Greg Missman, his son will continue receive military health insurance so this soldier's sacrifice will live on."

The CNN YouTube video is at the Raw Story Web site
And according to Senator Chuck Grassley and the rest of the Gang of Idiots, we don't need health care reform.

White House Green Jobs Czar Van Jones Resigns Under Pressure from Glenn Beck

Van Jones is a brilliant environmental activist, author and graduate of Yale Law School. My first sentence here does not even begin to outline his accomplishments and honors. For more, see Wikipedia. He has reportedly worked behind the scenes to help unseat reactionary FOX "News" mouth breather and knuckle dragger Glenn Beck. The score now is Beck 1, Jones 0, after Beck began pounding on Jones for his "radical Communism," and for signing a petition calling for answers to questions about 9/11. Most news stories center on the petition, because even corporate reporters recognize that the Communism thing is silly. But most news stories fail to identify the petition. We have found it, at 9/11 Truth.org

Here are just a few of the "radical" questions in the petition.

• Why were standard operating procedures for dealing with hijacked airliners not followed that day?
• Why were the extensive missile batteries and air defenses reportedly deployed around the Pentagon not activated during the attack?
• Why hasn't a single person been fired, penalized, or reprimanded for the gross incompetence we witnessed that day?
• How could Flight 77, which reportedly hit the Pentagon, have flown back towards Washington D.C. for 40 minutes without being detected by the FAA's radar or the even superior radar possessed by the US military?

Jones said he quit rather than serve as a distraction while the president is working on crucial projects including health reform. He also said he didn't closely scrutinize the petition before he signed it, but it seems to me all the questions are reasonable, and I would have liked to see the 9/11 Commission attempt to answer them.

Glenn Beck is a coward and a bully. Compared to Van Jones, he is a piece of dog poop on my shoe. But Beck will probably now be encouraged to go after more Obama appointees.

Little Trip up the Coast

We took a little trip up the California Coast this last week. Here's a shot of Ocean Avenue, Cayucos. The yellow building is a relic of the Old West, Hoppe's restaurant
And here's lunch. Some kind of Salmon thing I think, with mashed potatoes and herbs.

Health Care: We Are Truly Screwed

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has written a piece on health care that puts to shame the "reporting" done by the cable news networks and even the big city newspapers. It is a long piece, but worth reading. Here is the link. And here is a summary that comes near the end of the article.

To recap, here's what ended up happening with health care. First, they gave away single-payer before a single gavel had fallen, apparently as a bargaining chip to the very insurers mostly responsible for creating the crisis in the first place. Then they watered down the public option so as to make it almost meaningless, while simultaneously beefing up the individual mandate, which would force millions of people now uninsured to buy a product that is no longer certain to be either cheaper or more likely to prevent them from going bankrupt. The bill won't make drugs cheaper, and it might make paperwork for doctors even more unwieldy and complex than it is now. In fact, the various reform measures suck so badly that PhRMA, the notorious mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical industry which last year spent more than $20 million lobbying against health care reform, is now gratefully spending more than seven times that much on a marketing campaign to help the president get what he wants.

I was so incensed by the piece that I immediately wrote a blistering note to Obama at the White House Web site promising never ever to support him for a second term. Obama has become a huge disappointment. Even bigger because he held out to much hope for so many of us. We knew Bush as a dick to begin with, so no big deal when he turned out to fulfill our expectations. But Obama promised HOPE and CHANGE. Crap. Very little of it is happening. Obama is a phony.

Invitation

To my readers: You're invited to take a look at a brand new Web site I built for a very talented recording artist. Her name is Erin Rametta, and here is the link. You can even sample some of her music on the site.