Nutty ranting. We’ve seen it all over. A forum I like to frequent is peppered with it every day. Sometimes, you just want to stop visiting the sites that have the nutty ranting — unless you’re visiting the site specifically to read the nutty ranting.
This health care issue has been rife with nutty ranting. We’ve seen it on the newscasts, FoxNews actually promotes nutty ranting, and I’m not talking about Glenn Beck, although now that he comes to mind, yeah, Glenn Beck, among other nutty ranters.
My initial thought being the “events” staged by FoxNews as news — that entire tea bagging thing. Oh sure, there are insurance and pharmaceutical company lobbyists who pay to put the events on, but FoxNews publicizes them and then shows up to promote the events and even, as caught on camera, pumping up the crowd for the benefit of their cameras.
The poor producer. She was doing as told and unfortunately she was caught on camera encouraging the crowd when the cameras came on … and so FoxNews had to “reprimand” her publicly so as not to appear like they were helping to stage these so-called news events.
Anyway, it’s nutty ranting.
The latest nutty ranting though took place in the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, the one in the news since July, that is trying to construct a health care reform bill without a public option.
This bears repeating: the public option the president and realistic wing of the Democratic Party are trying to put in place is the same health plan available to the senators and representatives who are opposed to the public option. Talk about hypocrisy.
So, in the committee, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, tried to insert an amendment adding a public option to the finance committee plan. It did not pass. In fact, it only got eight votes out of the possible 13 Democratic votes. The committee is made up of 13 Democrats and 10 Republicans.
Senator Chuck Schumer then introduced a different amendment with a slightly watered down version of Rockefeller’s amendment (it has to do with the rate of reimbursements) and the vote changed in favor of the option, but not enough to get it passed.
The chairman of the committee, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, agreed with Rockefeller and Schumer that a public option would save money, over $100 billion over a six year period according to the Congressional Budget Office, and that such an option would help insure the 40 million Americans who currently are not, but he voted against both amendments because, in his words, a bill with a public option would not get 60 votes in the Senate.
Note to Senator Baucus, a bill does not need 60 votes to pass in the Senate. It needs 60 votes to attain cloture in the Senate, thereby avoiding a filibuster, which the Republicans are going to try regardless of what the bill has in it. As a matter of fact, the finance committee bill now has billions in give aways to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. What the companies really like about the bill are not only the give aways, but also the personal mandates that will force individuals to buy health insurance.
The give aways are for the insurance companies to take on these millions of new customers who cannot currently afford to buy insurance. Talk about feeding at the trough of government! Their billions spent on lobbying appear to have paid off handsomely.
But the real nutty ranting didn’t come from Senator Baucus, although believing one thing and then voting against it is pretty nutty, the real nuttiness came from the Republicans who spoke out against the public option. Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said the government-run program would amount to a single-payer system, which it clearly would not.
When Senator Rockefeller asked him how that could be, after pointing out there was no mandate for people to enroll in the program and that it would feature a variety of private health insurance plans to choose from, the lying senator from Iowa said that it would eventually lead to a single-payer system with “ray-tioning” and denial of services, citing two groups as references: the extremely conservative Heritage Foundation and the Lewin Group, owned by Ingenix, which itself is a wholly-owned subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group.*
So, Senator Grassley’s talking points — and those of every other Republican politician opposing real health care reform — are coming directly from the health insurance industry. Chuck Grassley, it should be pointed out, is the same senator who told constituents that he would be voting against health care reform regardless of what was in the bill because he didn’t want to authorize the government to “pull the plug on Grandma.” Nutty.
Well, nutty ranting. What are you gonna do? The birthers are putting out new TV ads demanding the president produce a birth certificate, even though the president already did and the state of Hawaii officially validated it.
Eternally nutty ranter Brent Bozell accused the president of slapping the First Lady in the face when the president decided to fly to Copenhagen, Denmark to make a pitch for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Chicago, IL.
Other Republicans (including the ones who insist they are “conservatives”) said the one-day trip was a distraction for the president who should be focused on the War in Afghanistan and the health care debate, as if the president has forgotten these and other pressing issues. Nutty.
And then there are the kooks who are accusing the president of indoctrinating school children because some children are on YouTube singing a song about the president. These same kooks didn’t seem to mind when school children were singing songs about President Bush (43) and his efforts — such as they were — to help New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Nutty.
Nutty ranting. We seem to have a lot of it these days.
On a lighter note: today marks the 25th Anniversary of my first day as a sober individual. Sometime in the last five days of September 1984, I’m guessing September 28 since that was a Friday, payday, I had my last drink of alcohol and puff of Marijuana. Ooo-rah!
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