Day: March 2, 2009

2009 Anal-Ocity

Just when I thought it was safe to watch the news….BAM!…..another idiot speaks!

Colorado State Sen. Dave Schultheis (R) caused outrage by announcing that he would vote against a bill requiring HIV tests for pregnant women because the disease “stems from sexual promiscuity” and he doesn’t think the government should reward “unacceptable behavior.” Schultheis explained his motives before casting the lone vote against the bill:

“We do things continually to remove the negative consequences that take place from poor behavior and unacceptable behavior, quite frankly, and I don’t think that’s the role of this body.

There is one born every minute….an idiot….that is.

The Great Asparagus Patch War

U.N. peacekeepers have upset traditional wild asparagus harvesters on the ethnically divided island of Cyprus by preventing them from entering a buffer zone to gather the tasty shoots.

U.N. soldiers, restricting access to the buffer zone which splits the island from east to west after Cyprus was divided in a Turkish invasion in 1974 triggered by a Greek-inspired coup, say they are only doing their job, but residents are livid.

“This is unacceptable behaviour and I have demanded that action is taken,” said Nicos Kotziambashis, leader of the Greek Cypriot village of Mammari which has been particularly hit by the U.N. ban. “The situation is explosive.”

“It is not something we particularly like to do but unfortunately if the asparagus is found in the buffer zone the peacekeepers have to do their job, which is to regulate access to that part of the territory,” a U.N. spokesman told Reuters.

Plentiful rains ensured a bumper crop of “aggrelia” this year exacerbating the standoff between soldiers and the army of locals who flock to pick asparagus, which tied in green and red burgundy bunches, sells for up to four euros at local markets.

Asparagus harvesting has never been for the faint-hearted with pickers crawling into dense thorn bushes to pick the delicate shoots from the undergrowth.

Why Pick On “Entitlements”?

Right-wing advocates of “fiscal responsibility” typically target “entitlement programs” like Social Security and Medicare as the main cause of the country’s financial problems. They prefer “market solutions” to questions of retirement security and health care coverage. To accomplish this privatization agenda, they promote the mistaken notion that both Social Security and Medicare are in crisis and are unsustainable.

In doing so, however, they ignore or distort some basic facts, progressive economists say. Advocacy groups and think tanks like the Campaign for America’s Future, the Economic Policy Institute, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, the Center for Economic Policy Research and the Center for American Progress tend to agree that Social Security is not in any imminent financial danger and that Medicare’s problems are not inherent but are related directly to the general crisis of health care in the country.

Take Social Security, for example. Social Security will have a $5.5 trillion surplus by 2027 and will be able to pay all benefits promised under current law, through 2041. In addition, Congressional Budget Office estimates show that if no changes are ever made to the Social Security program, in 75 years, the program will be able to afford to pay retirees better benefits than they receive now.

By comparison, if no changes are ever made to the health care system, in 75 years the cost to the country will equal about 99 percent of current Gross Domestic Product.

Nancy Altman, an economist and former advisor to Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, concurred. Of all federal programs, Social Security is the most “fiscally sound,” she noted. If predictions are correct and the program does experience budget shortfalls in 75 years, they will be “manageable.” By comparison, she noted, predicted deficits in the program 75 years from now will be less than the cost of the Bush tax cuts for the richest one percent of Americans.

Altman added that according to federal law, saving money in the Social Security program does not automatically translate into savings in the federal budget or in anyway help balance the budget.

At a time when Americans have lost $2 trillion in housing value and $6 trillion in retirement savings as a result of the market crashes, this is no time to privatize or gut the social safety, these progressives argued.

“We don’t have an entitlements crisis,” economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research, added, “we have a health care crisis.” The word “crisis” should not be used to described Social Security’s financial situation either. Social Security is not “in anything that any reasonable person can call crisis.”

Medicare’s long-term sustainability is tied directly to the need for reforms in the health care system as a whole. “The root of the deficit problem is health care costs. Our leaders must get serious about improving our health care system. A concentrated effort by policy makers to control health care expenditures will help American business compete internationally and free resources for other pressing needs,” read a joint statement this week by Hickey, Baker and Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute.

Tax cuts and entitlements attacks….same song …same old tired party.

Obama’s Fiscal Responsibility

In his speech to a joint session of Congress, Tuesday, Feb. 24, President Obama offered some additional assurances that his approach to budget policy will focus on saving taxpayer dollars without undermining the social safety net and harming working families.

Obama targeted health care reform. “[T]he cost of our health care has weighed down our economy and the conscience of our nation long enough. So let there be no doubt: health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait and it will not wait another year,” he told Congress.

Obama’s agenda for fiscal responsibility looks to other places for savings. He said, “In this budget, we will end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them. We’ll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use. We will root out the waste, fraud and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.”
In a statement following the speech, Barbara Kennelly, director of the national Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, said, “The President is right, comprehensive healthcare reform is the best way to strengthen Medicare for the future and that healthcare reform should come sooner rather than later.”

Comprehensive health care reform that controls costs, provides universal access and offers public options in addition to private options to consumers will reduce overall costs of health care and ease the burden on taxpayers over the long haul.

Experts in the health care field believe that Obama’s reference to waste in Medicare targets the issue of overpayments to insurance carriers implemented under the Bush Medicare privatization law in 2005. They suggest that a reform in this area alone could save billions annually. The White House Web site specifically calls for “eliminating subsidies to the private insurance Medicare Advantage program,” which could produce a savings of about $15 billion.

The Rush Speaks

But personally I think he is deluded or maybe just plain dumb.

This is a piece of his recent speech of CPAC:

…..”We don’t want to tell anybody how to live. That’s up to you. If you want to make the best of yourself, feel free. If you want to ruin your life, we’ll try to stop it, but it’s a waste. We look over the country as it is today, we see so much waste, human potential that’s been destroyed by 50 years of a welfare state. By a failed war on poverty. [Applause] We love the people of this country. And we want this to be the greatest country it can be, but we do understand, as people created and endowed by our creator, we’re all individuals. We resist the effort to group us. We resist the effort to make us feel that we’re all the same, that we’re no different than anybody else. We’re all different. There are no two things or people in this world who are created in a way that they end up with equal outcomes. That’s up to them. They are created equal, given the chance – -[Applause] We don’t hate anybody. We don’t — I mean, the racism in this country, if you ask me, I know many people in this audience — let me deal with this head on. You know what the cliche is, a conservative: racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe. Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen of America, if you were paying attention, I know you were, the racism in our culture was exclusively and fully on display in the Democrat primary last year.”

Just that small part of his endless speech just goes to show how wrong the GOP is on so many levels.  To make his brand of BS a keynote speech, just shows how close the GOP is to wearing a death mask.