Day: January 19, 2011

The Republican House Of Representatives Repeal Of The Obama Health Care Law: What It Means!

The Republican controlled House of Representatives has just voted to repeal the Obama Health Care legislation.

In so doing, the GOP has made clear it has no desire to protect the health of the American people, but rather cares more about the insurance companies, the corporations, and keeping their own excellent health care.

They demonstrate that they do not care about 129 million people with pre-existing conditions, many of them unaware because they have not been able to afford health care!

They show that they do not care about the cost of prescription drugs to senior citizens, and the slow closing of the “donut hole”.

They make it clear they do not care about children being able to be under their family’s medical plan, if the family has one, to age 26, at a time when many young people cannot find work and cannot be protected, therefore, for health care.

They indicate they do not care about people bring thrown off their health care plan once they get sick.

They leave no doubt that they do not care whether someone has a lifetime limit on health care coverage, including children who have serious health issues.

They demonstrate all of this and more, that they are a party which only cares about the rich and the corporations, that they have no humanity or empathy for the sick, that they do not concern themselves with the sustaining of life, and would rather demagogue the issue of health care than come up with a real alternative that allows the most advanced nation in the world to protect people’s health, as every other democracy in the world has.

They have shown how far right the Republican party has gone, considering that Theodore Roosevelt first proposed national health care in the 1912 Presidential campaign; that President Dwight D. Eisenhower first promoted and supported a cabinet agency of Health, Education and Welfare in 1953; that President Richard Nixon proposed a national health care plan in the early 1970s; that Senator and later Presidential candidate Bob Dole offered an alternative health care plan to that of Bill Clinton in the early 1990s; and that President George W. Bush and his party instituted a prescription plan in the early 2000’s.

Now the GOP has nothing to offer except negativism, and mean spiritedness, and most of its membership is monstrous and nasty and leaves the image of “to hell with the American people”!

One can be assured that their negativism will go no further in success, and that the American people will surely reject them once they understand what Barack Obama and the Democrats have been trying to do—promote health care for all as any civilized nation should have done long ago!

The Danger Of City And State Budget Cuts: Future Lawsuits!

The city of Camden, New Jersey has just cut its police and firefighter contingents by 45 percent, in a city infamous for the second highest crime rate and a large number of suspicious fires.

At the same time, in New York City, a 75 year old woman had cardiac arrest, and with the failure to clean up the snowstorm that hit the city, it took three hours for help to reach her, and she passed away, and now her daughter is suing the city because of the lack of response.

It is easy to say–cut, cut, cut–rather than to tax to keep services. But these developments mentioned above are happening all over the nation, and it means crime rates will skyrocket, fires will destroy much property and kill large numbers of people, education will become truly a mockery, health care in hospitals will deteriorate, sanitation will not be able to keep up with vermin that will overrun where garbage gathers uncollected, libraries will shut down that offer people a chance for an escape and to do job seeking on their computers, etc, etc, etc.

There are no winners in this situation, including hundreds of thousands or even millions of dedicated public servants who will be unemployed as a result.

Instead of everyone facing up to the reality that we do not get necessary services by praying to God, but must pay the appropriate level of taxes to keep our service, even in a difficult time, the nation will deteriorate to a level that will destroy the body fabric long term.

It also is reality that more lawsuits will ensue, which will use up city and state budgets for attorney fees, and the likelihood of payouts in the millions of dollars for reckless endangerment of all citizens because of the budget cuts!

It is due time for all citizens to face reality: we are all in this together, and must stop seeing taxes as the great evil, as lack of services is a far greater sin! 🙁

The Kennedy Presidency Is Finally, Truly, History!

With the death of Sargent Shriver yesterday, Ted Sorensen in October, and Ted Kennedy a year earlier, the Kennedy Presidency is finally, truly, history!

Shriver died just two days before the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961.

There are no leading figures left from the Kennedy years, and even people who were associated with Kennedy in other ways are just about all part of the past.

As we commemorate the Kennedy years tomorrow, we can all be pleased that the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Massachusetts has made all of the Kennedy materials in its library available in digital form online, the first Presidential library to do so.

It was an undertaking of a long period of time, and should become the model for all of the other 12 Presidential libraries, along with the less official Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois and the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library in Staunton, Virginia.

For those of us who lived through and remember vividly the Kennedy years, therefore, there is good news in the midst of the final emergence of Kennedy as part of History, not current events!