“Romneyhood” and the Paul Ryan Medicare Plan…

I wrote this in the comment section of a local newspaper which had a not-so-subtle attack on Social Security and Medicare.

I expect it will be voted down or deleted by the Romulans, so I will paste it here too.

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George W. Bush’s two $2 trillion wars on the Chinese credit card and the annual $600-700 billion appropriated to the Pentagon’s “operating budget” which includes weapons systems they don’t even want is what is causing the deficit problems.

People who draw money from Social Security paid into Social Security.

People who are on Medicare paid FICA taxes.

Bush drew on Social Security’s surplus to fund the tax cuts for the 1% and spent Medicare’s surplus on the Medicare Part D program that was written by drug company lobbyists to make sure that Medicare has to pay full retail price for prescription drugs. (The Veteran’s Administration gets drugs for half the price that Medicare pays for them.)

Now we have the clown in the magic Mormon underwear and his sidekick that wants senior citizens to eat out of the dumpster who are promising to finish it off with their austerity programs.

The most horrific thing about that idiotic Paul Ryan plan to replace Medicare with a coupon so you can be gouged by health insurance profiteers with junk insurance plans that are worse than what a Walmart employee gets, is that the coupon is indexed for inflation, but healthcare costs typically rise at 2-3 times the rate of inflation.

Once you get out 4-5 years, the coupon will have long since lost any buying power it had when the system was implemented.

This is Sarah Palin style novice budgeting. Anyone who has a pen and a piece of paper can sit down and figure out how quickly that Paul Ryan’s Medicare-replacement coupon will be meaningless based purely on average inflation and average rise in cost of medical care.

For everyone else, the Romney/Ryan “Romneyhood” plan takes us back to the old system of “lose your job, lose your health insurance” and being kicked off when you get sick, and having them deny you for pre-existing conditions.

Under President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, there are cost caps in place to help people who are currently victimized by the insurance cartels, as well as rebates if they don’t spend enough on your medical care, punishments for employers who don’t offer any healthcare, no pre-existing conditions, and free preventive care and cancer screening with no co-pays, to name a few.

The prescription drug prices for seniors on Medicare has already gone down thanks to the PPACA, and it will continue to do so as the “donut hole” is plugged at the expense of the drug companies (not the tax payers).

The Wikipedia article has the facts about the PPACA, without the spin of Fox Noise and the scaremongering of the far right.

The truth is that the PPACA is a clone of the Republican health care reform proposal with ideas that originally were proposed by the Richard Nixon administration, and ultimately turned into Romneycare in Massachusetts. (and there are good ideas in there)

The big difference is that Mitt Romney signed the Romneycare plan into law with taxpayer funded abortions even though he could have used his line-item veto to strike them. The PPACA “Obamacare” doesn’t cover abortions in any circumstances. Mitt Romney’s law in Massachusetts is far more liberal than “Obamacare”.

Romney’s campaign manager, Andrea Saul accidentally endorsed “Obamacare” by way of endorsing “Romneycare” a couple of days ago.

The truth about Romney is that he’ll say or do anything to get into office. He has a huge amount of disrespect for the electorate, and he feels like he is “owed” the presidency.

Anyone who understands basic math could sit down and tell you that the Romneyhood healthcare plan that is co-sponsored by Paul Ryan is going to be bad for everyone. If it does save any money, they want to give it to the Pentagon!

Can anyone tell me how we are going to get rid of the problems facing us when the neoconservative Republicans ARE often the root cause of the problem?

http://www.gottavote.org - GET REGISTERED TO VOTE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act – The facts about “Obamacare”.

Tampa moves to silence and intimidate protesters at the 2012 RNC convention

I can’t seem to find a link to a page that describes this neutrally, so I will just talk about it instead.

The Republican Party is so worried that some people (mostly poor people who are harmed by Republican policies) will come wave protest signs too close to the billionaire Republicans for comfort, that the City of Tampa, Florida will be setting up “exclusion zones” and “official protest areas” way out of sight of the convention area.

If this works out like it did in 2008 and 2004, this will mean that Florida taxpayers get billed for many hours of police overtime for thousands of police officers. It also means that the police will again, probably slip plain clothed officers into the crowd, disguised as protesters, to start throwing rocks and bottles at the uniformed police officers, to give them an excuse to move in and be brutal thugs. They’ll use these “agent provocateurs” to give them an excuse to taser, beat, pepper spray, and shoot the crowd.

Fox News, which is a criminal organization ran by the far-right, will then move in and blame “violent protesters” for causing the police brutality.

If the protesters manage to take a peaceful protest too close to rich business criminal and Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney, they could be arrested, charged, and imprisoned under the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act”. The Occupy Wall Street movement is widely expected to show up to protest Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republicans.

Maybe Ron Paul will get his 15 minute speech at the RNC, and maybe his supporters will get to rewrite some of the official platform, but the Republican Party is so corrupt overall that this will mostly just annoy them as they ignore the new platform and anything that Mr. Paul says.

In other news, as President Obama spent the entire day, Sunday, in Colorado, talking to the victims of the Batman Shooter (which itself was enabled by lax gun laws), Mitt Romney was “leaving on a jet plane” to go to London to consort with other rich business criminals. It might have been political theater on Obama’s part, but Romney won’t even pretend to care about this tragedy. He can openly show his contempt for normal people because normal people already know what Mitt Romney is.

On another note, Election Projection site Electoral-Vote.com is now providing an alternate map that doesn’t consider Rasmussen polling at all. As you may or may not know, Rasmussen is basically owned by Fox News and cooks up poll results to always give the Republican candidates a 4-5 percentage point benefit of the doubt. The new map looks much better for President Obama.

On the subject of polling, it would be great if we could get another poll on the Indiana US Senate race. The Tea Party managed to defeat a very popular Republican Senator (Richard Lugar) which had broad support from Democratic and Republican voters alike, and replace him with Indiana’s former part-time state treasurer, Richard Mourdock.

You may have heard about Mourdock’s work as state treasurer already. He lost track of $600 million of state money during the middle of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, which forced local governments to up their taxation rate. Due largely to Mr. Mourdock’s questionable competence, I am recommending Joe Donnelly to Indiana voters.

Is Mitt Romney really going to be an outsourcer-in-chief? Plus, the Gary Snyder Show starts censoring my comments.

The Gary Snyder Show is a local political radio talk show here in northeast Indiana.

Like a lot of talk radio shows, they tend to have a “conservative” bend. They want to call President Obama anything that will stick, and they don’t want anyone mentioning foul language like “George W. Bush”.

Well, I called in yesterday to talk about Bain Capital and Mitt Romney, and I did get a little side tracked. I reminded people of what happened last time we had a majority Republican government, under George W. Bush. Namely, millions of jobs lost, the stock market crash of 2008, millions of people evicted from their homes and foreclosed on, only to be thrown out by their local sheriff.

I even pointed out that you could go on Google and search the White House Archives from 2002 where Bush was setting up the housing market to fail by declaring that he got Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to dedicate $500 billion in home loans to people who couldn’t even afford a down payment on a home.

Bush and his Republicans not only set us up with the subprime loan crisis, but then they also passed tax credit laws that effectively had the US federal government paying companies to export our jobs to countries like India, Mexico, and China. I mentioned on the radio that Bain Capital and Mitt Romney made a fortune in the outsourcing business, and while the big shitpile (I didn’t call it that on the radio, but I can call it that here) was busy falling apart, Bain Capital got millions of dollars in federal tax credits for the expenses they incurred while they were firing American workers and sending the jobs to other countries.

It was about that point where I got the bum’s rush off the line, and he took in other callers who seemed to either have no idea what is really going on, or have a financial incentive (because they are millionaires) in seeing Mitt Romney win the election so that their taxes get cut under Paul Ryan’s euphemistically-named austerity plan “The Path to Prosperity”, which, if Romney gets in, will likely pass, resulting in a huge new tax increase for the middle class and cuts of hundreds of millions of dollars from Social Security, food stamps, and the Medicare program.

The problem isn’t JUST Romney, Romney just personifies the problem very nicely.

The big problem  that causes blue collar manufacturing jobs to be lost all over the United States are these largely Republican-backed global free exploitation treaties. They are the reason that if we attempt to put “Buy American” provisions in our own laws, like Obama’s 2009 Stimulus Plan, then other countries will go after us for it in the World Trade Organization.

We should repeal and renegotiate a lot of these trade treaties, because that is what is enabling outsourcing.

With NAFTA, CAFTA, and the WTO, it becomes economical for American companies, like Bain Capital, to send jobs to China, where there are no worker protection, minimum wage, or environmental protection laws, then load up all the goods onto a cargo ship and burn diesel fuel to get it all back to the United States.

I don’t have a problem with international trade, except when it is being used as a smoke screen so they can simply go poison the water and the air somewhere else, and exploit workers somewhere else. This is what our trade agreements with most of the world are designed to do.

Our trade imbalance with China is mostly because it has become the great American pastime to go buy frivolous impulse crap we don’t need.

When you say that rich business criminals like Romney are partly responsible for the problem, that’s true.

It is also true that the people buying stuff they don’t need that was made under slave labor conditions in China are an even bigger part of the problem,

And remember, the entire world shares its water and air. Americans don’t “live in a bubble” where we are magically shielded from all the bad environmental policies that just happen to be implemented on our behalf.

When something goes into the air or water in China, it will end up here sooner or later. Right now, there are “garbage patches” swirling the oceans caused by all this garbage from China, PCB (Polychlorinated biphenyl, a carcinogenic) being released into the global water supply from China, TONS of carbon dioxide, and a smog cloud from China’s dirty coal that ends up causing smog in California.

Outsourcing is just a really clever way for rich business criminals to promote slavery and massive environmental destruction by moving the “jobs” around to whatever country lets them get away with it.

If you want to know what American companies are doing overseas, just remember what companies like Westinghouse did when they were making things here. Hint: A good portion of Indiana has a PCB pollution problem with no remedial action plan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl#United_States

Look under “Indiana”…

It’s clear that corporations can never be trusted to do the ethical thing, because they are only concerned with maximizing profits no matter what the human cost is.

The responsibility falls on us to make sure our government is keeping them from wallowing in their own excesses, but that’s hard to do when they finance all of our elections to keep honest people who would do something about these problems out.

You can say that Barack Obama is hardly better than Mitt Romney, but he *is* better than Mitt Romney. With Romney in charge, we can look forward to a repeal of our environmental protection laws, devastating Republican austerity plans, and the loss of our remaining US-based manufacturing sector. Whether having our middle class quality of life slowly deteriorating under Obama or just going ahead and putting the gun to our head and pulling the trigger with Mitt Romney is a better choice. I’ll leave that to you, it is your vote after all…

Holy Conflict of Interest, Batman!

Well, that settles it. I’m not going to see the new batman movie.

Click here to tell serial MAFIAA whore, Senator Patrick Leahy, to quit being a dick.

You might remember Senator Leahy, he’s still trying to resurrect SOPA. He’s calling it IPAA now as a sort of policy laundering.

The IP Attache Act would use your tax dollars to try to change the copyright, trademark, and patent laws of other sovereign nations to favor the MPAA/RIAA scumbags here at home, and then eventually these laws would make it back to the US in the form of a treaty or “Congressional-Executive Agreement” later on.

The US government won’t stop trying to take over the internet. They don’t want you listening to people like me, they want you to go listen to fake news that they control. Cable TV news channels don’t mention things like SOPA, CISPA, and IPAA, and they lose credibility when they refuse to cover real news stories.

People are finding out just how badly Fox News, NBC, and CNN are lying to them and tuning out. This puts pressure on the US government to shut down sites like Wikipedia and WordPress, and to censor Google.

Back to the MAFIAA (MPAA/RIAA), you shouldn’t give these labels and movie studios any of your money. The more money you give them, the more money they can use to hurt other people and buy laws with.

I’m going to vote for President Obama this year, but I really wish he’d get rid of Joe Biden. It’s obvious why he chose Biden as his VP., because Biden is buddy/buddy with the big Hollywood criminals that want to ram internet censorship laws down our throats.

Obama already had more than enough support in Delaware, and they only have four electoral votes anyway. He could have picked a VP that would have shored up his support in states that were competitive. Evan Bayh from Indiana was on the list.

Obama only won Indiana by about 1% of the vote in 2008 (including mine), but he would have gotten more support here, and maybe even won the state again this year (which is now unlikely and could help cost him his re-election) with Evan Bayh as his VP.

He chose Biden because Biden can go pump campaign donations out of the MAFIAA. Unfortunately, that means they control the Obama administration. Things would not get better in this area under Romney, so I just have to deal with the “yuck” factor when voting for Obama/Biden.

Worth mentioning: That raid on MegaUpload’s file locker site? Joe Biden told them to do it.

Mental health problems and substance abuse are skyrocketing across the United States.

I saw a couple articles about this. Talk about telling you what you already know…

Health.com has compiled a list of the top 10 most depressing US states to live in. Indiana is pretty high up on that list, and so is Kentucky. There’s a real gem of a quote from Kentucky’s Governor about the problems in his state.

“When people don’t have good jobs to support families, I think that leads to depression and anxiety, which in turn leads to substance abuse,” Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear told the AP in 2008.

As usual, the state solution to the drug problem is throwing people with a drug addiction problem in prison. Really, since the “Ronald Raygun” administration, the United States has been entangled in a “drug war” whose costs get larger and larger every year, which hasn’t produced any decent results to speak of at all in reducing the number of illegal drug users (politicians tend to call them “offenders”, which I believe is going too far unless they commit an actual crime against person or property while under the influence).

Our nation is being bankrupted by a prohibition on things like Hemp (also known as Marijuana), which are basically harmless outside of the legal consequences of getting caught with some. In the 1930s, these anti-hemp laws came along because it was generally associated behavior of poor people and minorities. In modern times, these radically socially-destructive laws and the anti-hemp propaganda persist mostly because the drug companies don’t want a cheap and effective anti-depressant and painkiller to compete with. They want people who are effectively abusing their expensive prescription drugs with a wink and a nod from a drug dealer in a white coat. The US mental health system and the APA have been totally lobotomized and replaced by the drug industry. Psychiatrists are supposed to provide other therapies than drugs, but many of them (especially the ones that give services to the poor) simply don’t. If you’re poor, you get like five minutes with a psychiatrist that barely speaks any English and it’s literally like “here’s your drugs, now get out”.

And those five minutes will cost you something like $100, plus the cost of whatever drugs this person prescribed…. Even the people who are lucky enough to get on Medicare or Medicaid end up below the poverty line once you factor in the thousands of dollars a year in co-pays, spend downs, and other rip offs. It’s no wonder so many people turn to alcohol and illegal drugs, they’re cheaper.

Access to quality mental health services in Indiana is basically impossible in most areas. You end up with scumbags like the “Bowen Center”, and that’s about it. The psychiatrists in these places aren’t interested in helping people, they’d rather just add to the problem by insulting you, and basically making you feel like a big blubbering baby for asking them for help.

The United States doesn’t lead the world in anything desirable these days. Or as Jeff Daniels put it in the new HBO series “Newsroom”, “We’re seventh in literacy, second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, one hundred and seventy-eighth in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita,  number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.”

Truth be told, we could bring those numbers up a lot of we expelled the non-competitive states from the union and replaced the government of the rest with some real liberals. I don’t foresee that happening.

I recommend RT America’s video that recently exposed the psychiatry industry in the US for what it really is. In this video, they expose the truth about what happens when you take antidepressant medication. You might lose your sex drive, get fat, and develop a dependency on the pills, but they don’t actually solve the depression. I myself have been dealing with bipolar disorder for many years now, and I can personally vouch for everything this video says. In a way, talking about the criminals who run this country and are trying to rip us all off and turn us into prescription drug addicts helps me deal with my mental disorder better than taking their stupid pills did.

I don’t recommend doing drugs, illegal or prescribed.

The consequences of drugs are always negative even if it’s only because of the laws that we have (the big pharmaceutical industry and the American Psychiatric Association do more *actual* harm than hemp ever has), but whether you do use them or not, you should familiarize yourself with police misconduct and a surveillance state that is shaking everyone down and treating everyone, law abiding citizens alike, as if they are criminals and guilty until proven innocent.

The ACLU has a TON of information on this subject, there are a series of videos on Youtube called “Flex your rights”, and former Texas police officer turned good guy Barry Cooper has a multi-DVD set titled “Never get busted again” and “Never get raided again” that I think everyone should watch. It should be the law.

Cooper goes over how to keep the police out of your home and other valuable information that everyone should know. You might not think you’re doing anything illegal, and you’re probably a good person. There are over 10,000 crimes defined by federal law alone! This is before we even begin to talk about state and local laws. You can get effectively get busted and thrown in jail in this country for farting wrong. This is not a joke. This goes double for states with private prisons, where it is not uncommon for judges to be paid cash bribes to convict as many people as possible for anything possible and throw the book at them in the sentencing phase, and for politicians to take bribe money in exchange for things like mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

I don’t have a criminal record, not even a parking ticket, but at least one in every three Americans by my age has been arrested for something at some point. The legal system is getting corrupted and totally out of control, and it would do everyone a lot of good to be smart about police encounters, before it is too late.

I’ve ended up telling cops that they could search my car before, because I didn’t have anything illegal in it. I got profiled because that’s what the police do. About ten years ago, the police in Brownsburg, Indiana had absolutely nothing better to do with their day than pull over a car with three teenagers in it. That was my car. One of the occupants of the car was a friend of mine and the other was a friend of his that wanted a ride to Marion and said he’d pay me to drive him up there. I thought that would be a great way to make some extra money, but on the way out of this guy’s house I noticed that he had packed his bong and a large bag of hemp(!), luckily I was smart and told him to get that shit out of his suitcase and I checked to make sure he didn’t have anything else before he got in my car.

On my way out of town, three cop cars lit up and turned their sirens on, pulling me over for going 32 miles per hour in a 30 mile per hour zone. They made us all get out of the car, patted all of us down (it’s called a terry frisk, and yes it’s legal, and all they have to do to start yanking things out of your pockets is claim they thought they felt a weapon while they were doing this), asked to search my car… I told them OK, since I was sure nobody had anything illegal.

They ended up giving me a warning for speeding (bogus, just an excuse to pull us over) and letting us all go. It turned out, they had been watching this guy, and they saw him in my car. If they found his hemp in my car, Indiana law would have said that hemp belonged to me, and there was easily enough on him before we left the house that I would have been charged with a felony and sentenced to a minimum of five years in state prison. That’s a little steep for offering someone a ride for $50, isn’t it? I think it is.

Consider my story a warning. The police aren’t interested in arresting criminals, they’re interested in arresting anyone they think that they can make charges stick to, whether the person committed any wrongdoing or not. And sometimes, the people you associate with can get you into trouble because of the choices they made for their life.

Of course none of this is fair. You don’t have the luxury of assuming that life will be fair. Criminals own this country, they bought and paid for it a long time ago.

That’s just how the system is, folks. Being angry about it doesn’t directly help you. We know that the politicians are corrupt and that the police tend to be violent, racist, homophobic, and brutal. You need to expect that. You hear about it all the time, and it’s true.

If you’re ready for them, they can’t ambush you. Now, anger at bad governance can be useful… It leads to protest, civil disobedience, and in the long term, things might change. Until then, you have to play with the deck you’ve been dealt.

New rule: People of Walmart and Anderson Cooper 360… and never the two shall meet.

People ask me what the worst part about living in America is.

I’d have to say it’s because there are entirely too many people like this woman walking around.

If Christians are all about love, then why do so many of them want to put people who have done them no harm “behind an electric fence”?

They don’t mention the part where this would inevitably involve some sort of mass murder. Cooper does mention the Holocaust in passing, but not that the Nazis rounded up and killed over 50,000 people for being gay.

The interesting part, in the case of the Nazis, was that there were many gay members of the S.A. Hitler sort of looked the other way as they put him in power, and then he had them all killed too when they were no longer useful to him. If there is anything like this in American politics today, it would be the collaborators  calling themselves “Log Cabin Republicans”. Rich gay people who are so worried about their tax bill going up 2% that they’re willing to form a coalition with people who would like nothing more than to have them all killed. It’s sad that Republicans get any of the LGBT vote at all. Anyone who does this is a traitor.

If you think I’m being too harsh, then compare a “Log Cabin Republican” to a black person who voted for Jim Crow laws. Same thing. We should really have an obligation of conscience to close ranks and defend against politicians who will suppress us and deny us our civil rights.

OK, you can invoke Godwin’s Law now. I talked about the Nazis. It’s very unlikely that even a Republican majority government would march us all off to the gas chambers. We survived years of Bush and Republican majorities in Congress without that happening, I know we will survive “Mittens” too if it comes to that. They certainly have constituents that would like to murder us all, but even the Republican Party over all is not that extreme. The Republican Party does, however, advocate suppression, repression, and is regressive in their stance on human rights. It is frightening that so much of Mittens’ policies are being driven by tea fascists….

Richard Stallman is supporting Jill Stein of the Green Party. I like Jill Stein and I think she’d make a good president, but she can’t win, so you shouldn’t vote for her. We’re going to get Mitt Romney if you do. Keep that in mind…

Young voters: Please get up off your ass. Turn off the XBOX, and spend five minutes in the voting booth.

Occupy protesters: Please get out of your tents and go occupy a voting booth for five minutes.

If we get our asses kicked by the Teabaggers, you have only yourselves to blame.