The real insurance cancellation scandal is over. Obamacare fixed it

Los Angeles Times, 2007: One of the state’s largest health insurers set goals and paid bonuses based in part on how many individual policyholders were dropped and how much money was saved.

Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies, documents disclosed Thursday showed.

The revelation that the health plan had cancellation goals and bonuses comes amid a storm of controversy over the industry-wide but long-hidden practice of rescinding coverage after expensive medical treatments have been authorized.

The practice was known as “rescission.” Companies hired people to go through the insurance forms of people undergoing expensive medical treatment, looking for typos or minor inaccuracies. If you forgot to mention a tooth filling — boom! — no chemotherapy for you. You’d have no insurance coverage at all and a pre-existing condition. You were screwed. This was the unregulated, free-market approach that Republicans tell you is so wonderful and perfect.

Obamacare made the practice illegal and in May of 2010, this particular corporate scam ended industry-wide.

"[Insurance companies] look for anything that they could say ‘you didn’t tell us about,’" Dale Rice, whose 17 year-old daughter’s coverage was pulled in the middle of a health crisis, told the Chicago Tribune. “They hope that people just lay down and die and don’t fight.”

The insurance industry was denying coverage and literally allowing people to die after taking their money for years. That’s a cancellation scandal and going back to that is not an option.

Perspective: fertilizer plant explosion far more deadly than Boston bombings

CNN: Twelve bodies have been recovered in West, Texas, Sgt. Jason Reyes said Friday, two days after a fiery explosion ripped through the heart of the close-knit central Texas town.

Sixty people are unaccounted for, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Friday. He said authorities are checking to see whether any of them are in hospitals.

Reyes said 200 people have been injured and 50 homes have been destroyed.

“This is still being treated as a crime scene,” Reyes said.

At the very least, twelve are dead — I want to impress on you that that number is the best case scenario. If we’re lucky and that number holds, then the explosion at the West Fertilizer Co. was four times as deadly as two bombs deliberately set by suspected terrorists in Boston. And I think we’re all sure that we aren’t going to be that lucky. That number is not going to hold.

It’s becoming clearer every day that West Fertilizer was ridiculously under-inspected and under-regulated, despite the incredibly dangerous chemicals being used there. Last year, it paid a fine of just $5,250 for violating Hazardous Materials Regulations — a paltry sum, knocked down from the already paltry original judgment of $10,100.

So once the smoke clears on these incidents, which event do you think is going to going to get the spotlight in Washington, lax regulation of industries using dangerous chemicals or terrorism?

The answer’s so obvious the question might as well be rhetorical.

[photo by The Bay Area’s News Station]

"I'd like to take the CEO of BP and jam his face in that pile on the beach"

From the St. Petersburg Times:

Kevin Reed, 36, of Pensacola breaks down and weeps upon seeing the oil-defiled shores of Pensacola Beach on June 23, 2010. Reed's father taught him to swim in these waters, and Reed just taught his five year old son to swim here. "This will never be the same," he says. "I'd like to take the CEO of BP and jam his face in that pile on the beach."

Where no comment is necessary, I won't offer any.

GOP to Big Oil: Don't Worry, We'll Let You Keep Your Servant

Good news for oil companies, drillers, and Smokey Joe himself.

Talking Points Memo:

NRCC chairman Pete Sessions, whose job it is to increase GOP ranks in the House, says Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) will likely retain his post as the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee. Asked last night after a House vote if Barton may face further repercussions for apologizing to BP CEO Tony Hayward, Sessions told reporters that Barton's already paid his penance.

"I don't think that's the direction we're headed in," Sessions said. "...I believe that Joe has adequately addressed the issue."

Sessions noted numerous times that he was speaking as a member of the GOP leadership team (he is the fourth ranking Republican under Minority Leader John Boehner, Whip Eric Cantor, and Conference Chair Mike Pence ) and not as a rank and file member of the House. Boehner, Cantor and Pence organized last week's rapid response to the Barton flap, in which anonymous GOP leadership aides left the door open to further recriminations.

Because, really, who better to represent the Republican Party on the Energy and Commerce Committee -- which deals with oil companies -- than an obsequious little slaveboy to Big Oil? Putting the fox in charge of the henhouse is the GOP way, after all.

Surprise! Judge Who Blocked Offshore Drilling Moratorium is Invested in Offshore Drilling

Associated Press has a bit of bad news for people who think that we ought to hold off on offshore drilling until we at least know the rigs aren't as screwed up as Deepwater Horizon.

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked a six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling projects imposed after the massive Gulf oil spill.

The White House promised an immediate appeal. President Barack Obama's administration had halted approval of any new permits for deepwater drilling and suspended drilling of 33 exploratory wells in the Gulf.

[...]

Several companies that ferry people and supplies and provide other services to offshore drilling rigs asked U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans to overturn the moratorium, arguing it was arbitrarily imposed.

Feldman agreed, saying in his ruling the Interior Department assumed that because one rig failed, all companies and rigs doing deepwater drilling pose an imminent danger.

"The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an unprecedented, sad, ugly and inhuman disaster," Feldman wrote in his decision. "What seems clear is that the federal government has been pressed by what happened on the Deepwater Horizon into an otherwise sweeping confirmation that all Gulf deepwater drilling activities put us all in a universal threat of irreparable harm." Despite all evidence that all deepwater drilling is as fucked up as Deepwater Horizon, it would be irresponsible to assume it to be true. The responsible reaction here is "Drill baby, drill!"

So who is Judge Martin Feldman? He's a Reagan appointee and great big fan of investing in the oil industry. "Feldman, 'a true blue outcome-oriented judicial activist who led the law where he wanted it to go' in Katrina litigation, definitely knows where he's going with the decision he will make in this case," reported local Louisiana Mississippi blog Slabbed. "Anyone doubting the outcome need only to look at his Financial Disclosure Report..."

And that financial report is a doozy. It's peppered with investments in energy, pipeline, and drilling companies -- including Transocean and Halliburton. And don't expect this to be an isolated incident:

ProPublica:

Since BP’s ruptured well began spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico, more than 150 lawsuits have been filed in federal courts seeking damages for the harm that the environmental disaster has dealt to the livelihood of coastal fishermen and business owners. But finding judges to hear these spill-related lawsuits against BP, Halliburton and Transocean may be a challenge. More than half of the “64 active or senior judges in key Gulf Coast districts in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida” have ties to industry, according to The Associated Press.

Some judges own stocks or bonds in the companies named in the lawsuits. Some are related to plaintiffs’ attorneys. Others even receive royalties from oil and gas companies. One judge, according to financial disclosure statements, is a member of Houston’s Petroleum Club,  an “exclusive, handsome club of, and for, men of the oil industry,” reported AP.

It appears that Judge Feldman is a member of that "exclusive, handsome club."

Poll: Obama Most Trusted on Healthcare Reform, GOP Least

A new Gallup poll shows that although no one in Washington can claim to speak for the majority of Americans on healthcare reform, President Obama comes closest:

Americans remain more confident in the healthcare reform recommendations of President Obama (49%) than in the recommendations of the Democratic (37%) or Republican (32%) leaders in Congress. But these confidence levels are lower than those measured in June, suggesting that the ongoing healthcare reform debate has taken a toll on the credibility of the politicians involved.

"Gallup says confidence in Obama on health care has slipped nine points in the last year," writes Greg Sargent. "My bet is that this is the price Obama is paying for leaving the legislative details to Congress and not playing a more assertive role throughout by forcefully articulating what specifically he wanted for the legislation. If he’d been as hands on throughout the process as he’s been in recent days, these numbers might look very different right now."

It also points to the fact that Republicans' claims to speak for the majority of Americans on this issue are basically BS. In fact, the poll shows that Republicans in congress are the politicians people trust least on healthcare reform. In fact, at 32% trust, the GOP leads only the hated insurance companies (26%) and big pharma (30%).

There may not be any politicians winning in this poll, but Republicans are most definitely the losers.

President's Weekly Address: Some Good, Some Bad

President Obama's weekly address centers on healthcare reform and a bipartisan summit to deal with it.

[Transcript]


A couple of thoughts enter my mind. First, that the following really shoots down the GOP argument that we ought to throw everything out the window and start over:

The other week, men and women across California opened up their mailboxes to find a letter from Anthem Blue Cross. The news inside was jaw-dropping. Anthem was alerting almost a million of its customers that it would be raising premiums by an average of 25 percent, with about a quarter of folks likely to see their rates go up by anywhere from 35 to 39 percent.

Now, after their announcement stirred public outcry, Anthem agreed to delay their rate hike until May 1st while the situation is reviewed by the state of California. But it’s not just Californians who are being hit by rate hikes. In Kansas, one insurance company raised premiums by 10 to 20 percent only after asking to raise them by 20 to 30 percent. Last year, Michigan Blue Cross Blue Shield raised rates by 22 percent after asking to raise them by up to 56 percent. And in Maine, Anthem is asking to raise rates for some folks by about 23 percent.

The bottom line is that the status quo is good for the insurance industry and bad for America. Over the past year, as families and small business owners have struggled to pay soaring health care costs, and as millions of Americans lost their coverage, the five largest insurers made record profits of over $12 billion.

And as bad as things are today, they’ll only get worse if we fail to act...

These aren't things that might happen or that will happen if we don't do anything, these are things that have happened. The Republican line can be expressed as "What's the big rush?" -- which seems more than a little out of touch. The ship is sinking and they're arguing that we ought to build new buckets to bail with, because they don't like the ones we have now.

The second thing that struck me was this:

It’s in [the spirit of bipartisanship] that I have sought out and supported Republican ideas on reform from the very beginning. Some Republicans want to allow Americans to purchase insurance from a company in another state to give people more choices and bring down costs. Some Republicans have also suggested giving small businesses the power to pool together and offer health care at lower prices, just as big companies and labor unions do. I think both of these are good ideas – so long as we pursue them in a way that protects benefits, protects patients, and protects the American people. I hope Democrats and Republicans can come together next week around these and other ideas.

The second one may be a good idea, but the first one is definitely not. Insurance companies operate under different laws in different states, meaning that allowing insurers to compete across state lines is a de facto deregulation of an industry that's in need of more regulation, not less. Companies will relocate in the least regulated states, meaning layoffs in other states. Other states will change their laws. Competition won't be among insurers, it'll be among states. The president adds the caveat that he'd be open to this "so long as we pursue them in a way that protects benefits, protects patients, and protects the American people," but that would require some sort of national board and new federal regulations -- something Republicans would never go for. Without some sort of national standard, the least regulated state becomes the national standard and we begin a race to the bottom.

Still, I suppose this highlights the president's party's attempts at bipartisanship and the other party's refusal of it. But you'd think that would be obvious by now. Here's hoping this bad idea dies.

Griper Blade: Bush's Strip Club Economics

As I write, Barack Obama will deliver a "major economic address." In it, he'll basically pitch his stimulus package -- which is reported to come in at $775 billion over two years. The problem is that we don't have it. In fact, just Tuesday, Obama warned that we're going to be dealing with deficits for some time.

Politico:

President-elect Barack Obama said Tuesday that $1 trillion deficits could last for “years to come” as he sought to make the case for budget reforms amid an economy in peril.

Obama’s warning came as he met for the second consecutive day in Washington with his top economic officials, this time in a session devoted to fixing the budget process.

“Peter Orszag now forecasts that, at the current course and speed, a trillion-dollar deficit will be here before we even start the next budget,” Obama said, alluding to his nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget.

The president-elect suggested that such 13-figure deficits could last “for years to come, even with the economic recovery that we are working on at this point.”

The problem, of course, is that George W. Bush has spent money like a drunk in a strip club for the past eight years. And, like that drunk stuffing bills into a stripper's G-string, he really doesn't have anything to show for it. Defenders of Bush's bender will point to natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, to the "Global War on Terror," and to events like 9/11. This spending, they'd argue, was forced upon poor George.

But that's not extremely true. With the exception of Katrina, all of these expenses were avoidable. Iraq is a war of choice, not necessity, and there's a very good argument to be made that 9/11 was Bush's fault. Attorney General John Ashcroft once threatened to fire the next person who wasted his time with terrorism, for example. Fighting porn was the Justice Department's big project. 9/11 happened because no one in the Bush administration took terrorism seriously... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Firing Blackwater USA

A few days ago, Blackwater USA CEO Erik Prince wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. The gist of it is that the mercenary corporation is absolutely wonderful and we should just go ahead and ignore the fact that five guards were charged in an atrocity that left 17 unarmed Iraqis dead and involved a rocket-propelled grenade fired into a girls' school. These guys face a possible 47 years in prison for crimes ranging from weapons charges to voluntary manslaughter.

We're told Blackwater employees are "putting their lives at risk each day to protect U.S. Department of State officials and other civilians working in the country. Yet somehow that role and the part they play in this war have been grossly misunderstood." Unfortunately, Prince doesn't really explain why Blackwater is protecting that diplomatic corps. And no one else can either. Before the Bush administration, State Department employees were guarded by US Marines and the Bureau of Diplomatic Security -- an agency similar to the Secret Service. After Bush, Marines and federal cops were somehow not good enough anymore -- we had to hire rent-a-cops with machine guns. But it's the Bush administration, it doesn't have to make any sense. It just is. The fact that Prince and his family were significant donors to the Republican party and Bush's campaigns probably had nothing at all to do with it. Replacing US Marines with Blackwater employees was absolutely necessary because... Well, just because. Remember, if there's any possible way to privatize something, then Bushies go ahead and privatize it. The idea that government is hopelessly incompetent and wasteful extends even to the US Marine Corps. Way to support the troops, George.

But it turns out that Prince realized he had a bit of a public relations problem on his hand. Blackwater employees -- who have been regularly described as "thugs" -- didn't have the shiniest public reputation and that rep needed a little buffing. "What he says is less important that the fact that he's saying it at all," wrote Daniel Schuman for Mother Jones. Erik Prince, normally willing to shut up and let the Bush administration to all the Blackwater apologism, was forced to make his own case. Bush administration officials weren't rushing to the company's defense... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: KBR, a Typical Privatization Story

Today, our service men and women continue to inspire and strengthen our Nation, going above and beyond the call of duty as part of the greatest military the world has ever known. Americans are grateful to all those who have put on our Nation's uniform and to their families, and we will always remember their service and sacrifice for our freedoms.
- George W. Bush, Prayer for Peace, Memorial Day, 2008

There's "above and beyond" and then there's "above and way beyond." Bush, in his "prayer for peace," neglects to tell us just what America's fighting forces are expected to face. We know about the nuts with guns and RPG rounds. We know about the roadside bombs and sectarian violence. We even know about the heat. What we don't get a lot of coverage of is how they're expected to live. Turns out, that's a really big story. And, despite having broken yesterday, it's still not getting a lot of press.

Military Times:

A Georgia man has filed a lawsuit against contractor KBR and its former parent company, Halliburton, saying the companies exposed everyone at Joint Base Balad in Iraq to unsafe water, food and hazardous fumes from the burn pit there.

Joshua Eller, who worked as a civilian computer-aided drafting technician with the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, said military personnel, contractors and third-country nationals may have been sickened by contamination at the largest U.S. installation in Iraq, home to more than 30,000 service members, Defense Department civilians and contractors.

“Defendants promised the United States government that they would supply safe water for hygienic and recreational uses, safe food supplies and properly operate base incinerators to dispose of medical waste safely,” according to the lawsuit, filed Nov. 26 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. “Defendants utterly failed to perform their promised duties.”

The details are horrific.We're told about suffering from "skin lesions that subsequently spread, filled with fluid and burst," about "vomiting, cramping and diarrhea," about "severe abdominal pain." Worse, the lawsuit tells the story of "a wild dog running around base with a human arm in its mouth. The human arm had been dumped on the open air burn pit by KBR."

KBR also reused ice from mortuary trucks. Troops were served ice that "still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them..." That's above and beyond the call of duty. That's way beyond anything that should be expected of anyone...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: The Other Side of the Story

Let's take a look at the economic situation. Never mind the naysayers, the gloom-and-doomers, the glass-half-empty types, some of us are doing just fine. If you look hard enough and long enough, you can find good, simple, hard-working Americans who are managing to get along. Good people, with good, honest values, who know the value of a dollar because they've got a boatload of them:

Associated Press:

Riding record oil prices in the third quarter, Exxon Mobil Corp. on Thursday posted the biggest quarterly profit ever for a U.S. company: $14.83 billion, or about $112,000 a minute.

The results, amounting to $2.86 a share, beat the Irving, Texas, company's previous record and shattered analysts' average expectation of $2.38 a share, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

Consumer groups and politicians saw reason for anger in those numbers.

"Our economy is suffering from many factors, but one of them is the price of oil and our nation's dependence on it," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Markey said that "investments in renewable energy continue to lag with the world's most profitable company, and as an industry as a whole."

"Consumers got credit card debt and empty wallets, while Exxon got double-digit billions," says Judy Dugan of Consumer Watchdog. "Citizens deserve to be mad. They should demand that government get back in the business of protecting them from corporate greed."

Those simple country folk with their good ol' fashioned common sense and small town values continue to make more money than any company in history, quarter after quarter, year after year. Yay for them!...

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Cheney-Connected Contractor Sued for Slavery

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com A Washington law firm filed a lawsuit yesterday against KBR, one of the largest U.S. contractors in Iraq, alleging that the company and its Jordanian subcontractor engaged in the human trafficking of Nepali workers. Agnieszka Fryszman, a partner at Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, said 13 Nepali men, between the ages of 18 and 27, were recruited in Nepal to work as kitchen staff in hotels and restaurants in Amman, Jordan. But once the men arrived in Jordan, their passports were seized and they were told they were being sent to a military facility in Iraq, Fryszman said. As the men were driven in cars to Iraq, they were stopped by insurgents. Twelve were kidnapped and later executed, Fryszman said. The thirteenth man survived and worked in a warehouse in Iraq for 15 months before returning to Nepal.

KBR is one of the no-bid contractors in Iraq and is a former subsidiary of Cheney's old company Halliburton.

Can we just go ahead and say that neocons are literally evil now?

Obama Ad on McCain's Economic Cluelessness

clipped from www.youtube.com

The nation's in the middle of a housing crisis and McCain doesn't even know how many houses he has? Slap on that "out of touch" sticker.

John McCain, Friend of Monopolies

clipped from www.mcclatchydc.com John McCain broadcasts his affection for Theodore Roosevelt, but his opposition to regulating the local telephone industry suggests that he may not share the former president's passion for busting huge corporate trusts. Unlike Roosevelt, who railed against "malefactors of great wealth," McCain's positions frequently have echoed those of the giant regional Bell phone companies, now consolidated as AT&T, Verizon and Qwest, the big survivors of the telecommunications wars of the last quarter-century. McCain's opposition to the 1996 Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act, intended to spur competition by pressuring the Bells to lease their lines and switches to competitors cheaply, offers a window into how he might view regulation of other markets as president.

I think there are two reasons McCain invokes Teddy Roosevelt. 1. Roosevelt wasn't a Republican in the modern sense, but a Republican in the original sense -- i.e., a progressive. McCain hopes to signal some that his "maverick" label actually means something.

2. Teddy Roosevelt is the one face on Mt. Rushmore that Americans know the least about.

In the end, I'd say it's more 2 than 1.

Griper Blade: The [Your Name Here] Candidate

The big foreign policy expert in the 2008 presidential race is John McCain... Right? Of course, the problem with putting yourself across as an expert means that people are going to expect you to know what you're talking about. So, when the going gets tough, the tough get going -- to Wikipedia.

Taegan Goddard reports that Mr. Big Fancy Foreign Policy Expert seems to have turned to the open source encyclopedia to get the skinny on Georgia in the Russo-Georgian crisis. "A Wikipedia editor emailed Political Wire to point out some similarities between Sen. John McCain's speech today [August 11] on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia," Goddard writes at his Congressional Quarterly blog. "Given the closeness of the words and sentence structure, most would consider parts of McCain's speech to be derived directly from Wikipedia."

Of course, Team McCain denies any Wiki-plagiarism. They claimed it was entirely coincidental. "Nonetheless, at least two political science professors have weighed in saying the similarities are more than coincidental and wouldn't be tolerated from their own students," writes Goddard.

It may be Matthew Yglesias who had the best reaction to the McCain copy-and-paste job; "Given that McCain, by his own admission, can't use the internet it's a bit of an ironic situation though perhaps it counts as progress of some sort."

Isn't that nice? McCain's learning to use the google...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Team McCain Members Earned $1 Bil. as Lobbyists

clipped from www.huffingtonpost.com According to an analysis performed by the group, McCain's top fundraisers and aides have collected nearly $1 billion in fees from U.S. companies in the past decade -- specifically, $930,949,819. Using numbers provided by the Center for Responsive Politics, the group also found that officials of those very same companies have given nearly $12 million to McCain's presidential campaign, so far. "The McCain campaign relies on big money lobbyists, and they'll rely on him," said David Donnelly, director of Campaign Money Watch. "In the 'you-scratch-my-back, I'll-scratch-yours' world of Washington, $931 million gets the special interests the best government money can buy. But just think of the payday these lobbyists might expect in a McCain Administration." Donnelly's group previously launched a website called McCainsLobbyists.com, in which users can track the special interests represented by 40 of John McCain's top fundraisers and advisers.

This is the guy who's going to reform big government? His campaign is big government.

Griper Blade: Occupation, Inc.

The number being reported is "at least $85 billion," but when talking about money and Iraq, the truth is always murky. In a war practically run by war profiteers, the number is likely to be higher. The upper estimate of the amount of public dollars we've paid private contractors in Iraq is more than $100 billion. Normally, erring on the side of caution would require you to assume the lower figure -- which is why that number is being used in the media. But when we consider the history of waste, corruption, and corporate malfeasance involved in the occupation of Iraq, the higher number seems the safer estimate.

The higher figure comes from Voice of America. In their story, the cite Peter Orszag of the Congressional Budget Office [CBO], who said, "The federal government has awarded $85 billion in contracts for work in [the] Iraq theater through 2007. If you included this year, the total would exceed $100 billion: roughly one of every $5 for the cost of the war in Iraq." The piece goes on:

Orszag says the use of private contractors in U.S. military engagements is not new. What is new, however, is the extent of the reliance on private firms. The Iraq war marks the first time in which the number of private personnel has equaled or exceeded the number of military personnel. By contrast, the CBO report notes that, during World War II, military personnel outnumbered private contractors by a ratio of seven-to-one.

Given what they're being paid and how much we're relying on them, you'd think that private contractors are doing just an astonishingly great job of whatever the hell it is we're hiring them to do.

Of course, you'd be wrong...

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GAO to Report Most US Corporations Pay No Taxes

clipped from www.newsnet5.com The Government Accountability Office is set to release a report that says most U.S. corporations pay no federal income taxes. And most foreign companies that do business in the United States aren't paying corporate taxes. The study says about two-thirds of American corporations paid zero income taxes to Uncle Sam between 1998 and 2005. An even higher percentage of foreign corporations avoided federal corporate taxes. At the same time, said the GAO, the firms had trillions of dollars in sales. The study was requested by Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. "It's shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country," Dorgan said.

Meanwhile, John McCain argues we should cut the corporate tax rate by 10%. Since the current corporate tax is pretty much theoretical, that'd be a decrease for most from 0% to what, John?

Griper Blade: A Potemkin Olympic Village

China is evil. Freakin' evil. Of that, there should be no doubt. We all remember Tiananmen Square and the brutal way a student protest was put down there in 1989. Prior to the Olympics, China also put down unrest in Tibet. As the Olympics are happening, China fights Uighur separatists in the western province of Xinjiang -- although there's very little coverage of that.

How should we respond to the oppression in China? President Bush, who never misses an opportunity to kiss the religious right's butt, cast China's entire human rights record as merely religious oppression -- as if China were guilty only of shutting churches.

Of course, part of the problem is that Bush -- who's used his term as president to spend money like a drunken sailor in a strip club -- has basically sold the US to nations like China. It's one thing to embarrass them slightly, it's another to call a criminal regime a criminal regime. Being part of a criminal regime all his own doesn't help Bush's position any, either...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: McSellout

Take a presidential candidate, add a pinch of pandering, a dash of corruption, a whole lot of money, and you've got McCain

I've been writing about John McCain a lot lately, but let's face it, John McCain's not talking about John McCain and someone has to. Lately, when the media talks about John McCain, it's to repeat some attack McCain's made on Barack Obama. Lately, with the help of a media more concerned with sensationalism than substance, McCain has been able to be a serious candidate for president who doesn't seem to stand for a whole lot.

One of the worst aspects of this whole thing is that no one's looking at the fact that McCain doesn't stand for a whole lot. Mr. Leadership generally leads by following. His opinions go where the votes are or the money is. McCain is a candidate openly for sale.

An example; in June, John McCain opposed a Constitutional amendment to make same sex marriage illegal. He didn't support marriage equality, but he took what would've once been the default Republican opinion on issues like this and said it was up to the states to decide.

But, as I said, that was once the default. That was before Bush's 2004 campaign that highlighted the Homosexual Menaces' Threat to America. McCain was behind the times; the new default was to panic over same sex marriage, foretell the destruction of the family and, with it, the end of America. Under Bush, the GOP has become the party of fear and if your reaction to an issue isn't to try to get everyone to wet their pants over it, then you aren't a real Republican.

So John McCain made a trip to see the Apostles of Republican Jesus, that they might impart their wisdom upon him and anoint him a True Republican. And, lo, so it was done...

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