Who Am I?

Weekend Update 05-21-2011

Posted: May 21st, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Weekend Update | Comments Off on Weekend Update 05-21-2011

Yes, Ryan’s plan for Medicare is unfair, but its real problem is that it’s a fraud. The numbers don’t even add up in any of his budget. He makes it look like it works by pulling numbers out of thin air and just making crap up. But this does illustrate the unfairness of the Medicare part pretty well. And this was a funny look at the doublethink involved.

This blog post on the Celiac Disease Foundation’s conference is good. Toward the bottom is a PSA on celiac disease. Be sure to watch it!

“Nothing serves the nation’s future more than making sure future citizens lack adequate health care and nutrition.” Think of the Children. I’m not even one of the seniors Ryan is trying (and fortunately failing) to woo and I still worry more about my children and grandchildren than I do my wife and myself.

Good for her. And this 10th grader could almost certainly whup up on Bachman in said debate.

Ryan proceeds to remove all doubt that he was never anything but an empty suit. And he seriously miscalculated how much we all love and care for our families. Unlike Ryan, for most of us family trumps ideology.

Got health insurance? Better hope you don’t get purged. Hopefully the insurance exchanges established by the ACA will also eliminate this aspect, though this is one of the weaker aspects of the law. It really needs a government-run option to rein in the private insurance company abuses. That would also give those who might want more of their premiums to go to health care instead of company profits a better option. A government option (judging by other government-run programs) would almost certainly run at 95-98% medical loss.

So, Newt wants to bring the whole country down to Texas’ level? I dearly love my state, but I’m also acutely aware that we compete with Arkansas and Mississippi to be the worst in almost every meaningful category. The other states that do as poorly as we do on so many measures have the excuse of being poor. Texas is not poor. It’s rich in resources of all sorts and supports multiple industries. We simply choose to act as though we were a poor state and getting poorer all the time. We have one of the largest percentages of our population mired in poverty. We have the largest per capita rate of uninsured citizens and uninsured children. We’re horrible at ensuring pregnant women in our state get early and proper prenatal care. And our public education system consistently ranks near the bottom of the barrel. This year our governor has set his sights on dismantling the research capabilities of our top-flight public universities. Hopefully he won’t succeed and he’s actually getting some significant resistance from his own party. The strange thing in Texas is the way that its citizens keep electing people who year after year make the lives of most people in Texas worse and worse while enriching themselves and those who fund them at the expense of the overwhelming majority of our states’ residents. And they’re open about it. It’s not a secret. I know part of it is because they aren’t the least bit hesitant about using racial fears and tensions, especially in rural Texas. But that certainly doesn’t account for all or probably even a majority of the dynamic. It’s just one piece of the puzzle. The net effect, though, is that the worse Republicans make life for Texans, the more Republicans we elect. That’s been a pretty steady trend for the past several decades. Maybe Newt’s right? Maybe if Republicans can push a third of the country into poverty, uninsured (especially those pesky kids), and leave them desperate, the whole country will reward Republicans by electing more of them? I know it sounds backwards, but it seems to have worked here.

Maybe people will understand a picture better than figures? We either need to let the Bush tax cuts expire or Republicans need to be honest and forthright about how they are going to pay for them. They are the single largest threat to our economy.


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