Mind Boodle er Boggle.
What Sarah Palin wore her McCain hat on a holiday in Hawaii and she had crossed out McCain’s name. Gee is that a message or what? She claims it was a case of or what. After all don’t we all wear hats with the name of our former presidential partner crossed out. A Benny shaved is a Benny burned after all. Bent Franklin said something like that.
No pun intended there.
A prayer cast is on the tuber where congress persons and others are praying for Jesus to break into the Senate debate on Health Care and stop it. Senators Jim De Mint and Sam Brownback were at this prayer-in to help get Jesus on line. The Family Research Council and James Dobson from Focus on the Family have weighed in to support this campaign. They are not falling for the old separation of Church and State. They are calling for God to break his own rule about this and get in there with both fists flying. Kicking Democrat butt is what Jesus does best. After all this is about baby killing, marijuana smoking, long hairs, trying to take our country from us and turning it into a communist secular state were Satan rules supreme.
It is a good thing that Rachel Maddow made a point of bringing this to my attention. She called me personally when I was on the throne to come on down and get on my knees with the rest of this Kill Bill crew. Just like they dragged down the attempt by Senator Bernie Sanders to present an amendment to give medicare like health care to all Americans. The Republicans insisted on reading the amendment line for line and after 3 hours it was withdrawn by Sanders. Oh those witty Republicans.
Today Howard Dean called for the Health Care bill to be made stronger and insisted that it be stopped as it was and put a State level insurance commission to make sure the insurance companies are regulated in a manner that has some teeth. This was immediately twisted by John McCain who claimed that Dean agreed with him and wanted to kill health care reform altogether which is not what he was saying at all.
The bill does something. It gives the insurance companies an expanded pool of clients by making it mandatory that everyone get insurance. Thirty Million people who are not insured get insured. But on what terms? It seems that the right wing is winning on every single point. Is this country really that conservative? Did Obama win on a fluke? Or is it true that the only reason why Obama got elected was because people were so pissed off a Bush that they simply wanted a change. In that case what did the American people really want?
Most of us, and I claim to be in the majority on this, most of us want less expensive, comprehensive health care. We don’t want to lose our coverage just because we are between jobs and we don’t want a plan that is so costly and prohibitive that we don’t use it except in a death bed emergency sort of like car insurance policies that we don’t use for minor scratches because we don’t want our rates to go up. My car looks like a scarecrow’s car for that reason. If I used my insurance I would have to pay half the cost of the repairs out of pocket because of the way insurance companies insist on the deductible for each scratch. On that basis it simply is not worth using them unless there is an accident that makes the car undriveable. The same principal works with health care insurance.
Today the media is full of talk about the $26 dollar Russian software called Sky-grabber that enables anyone to grab Drone video feeds. Military surveillance footage is not encrypted and the military has known about this since the Bosnian war. But they decided that it wasn’t worth fixing because, well, they figured no terrorist would be smart enough to know how to use software like Sky-grabber. The government wanted to get drones on the cheap and so they decided to skip the encryption. So maybe some smart Moslem will learn how to turn the Drones around and send them after American troops. Naw, the towel heads aren’t smart enough. Heck they don’t believe in Jesus and thus don’t have a magic computer terminal access like Americans. After all they are still holding camel beauty contests in the United Arab Emirates. Anyone who would have sex with a camel can’t be that smart. Right?
What other absurdities did I hear about today? Well there was the one about Secretary Clinton who offered to buy out the Poor countries of the world at Copenhagen with $100,000 Billion dollars a year, in 2020. Uh, that is like telling me I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a Hamburger today. The interviewees on Democracy Now this morning were all claiming this was too little, too late. When I switched over to the PBS station there was another expert telling me what a wonderful offer Secretary Clinton was making and how ungrateful these poor countries are for complaining. My own take is that she is bidding low to see if there are any takers. Some really bad poker players might take that as a high bid, but anyone with half a hand knows, you have to up the ante and in this case with the global temperature rising a minimum of 3.6 degrees as things stand and more likely they are going up 5 degrees or more. The only way to keep it down to less than 3 degrees is to insist that the Developed nations cut emissions by 30% and not just 20%.
Apparently China offered a little more transparency on its commercial development rates and that is what the Americans really want, trade secrets in a commercial battle for control of markets. This going green stuff is just a cover for an economic battle being fought on the highest level. What will we give the world for a little cool breeze and a a future for our children? Hard to say, not much but the deal has not gone down yet. The final trump card, Obama is coming into Copenhagen tomorrow. Will the Americans raise the kitty to $200,000 billion by 2020? Will the Chinese go for total transparency? Will Europe offer 30% emission reduction or will the poor and small countries give in and fold? Tomorrow we will see.
Nauru has recognised Abkhazia. This is the smallest country in the world. Well perhaps the Vatican is smaller but that is only the home of the pope. Nauru is broke and is getting $50 Million dollars for recognition. They also threw in South Ossetia for free. This is the country that built its wealth on bird shit until it ran out of phosphates to sell. Now it is selling its statehood. I wonder if it is a tax haven? With that smell gone perhaps it is going to be the in place to be for scofflaws, the pirate nation, oops we have one of those in Somalia. Well they can dream.
Al Franken did the right thing and told Lieberman to shut up today on the floor of the Senate. It was a pretty brave thing for a junior Senator to do to one of the stars of the corporate lobbyists.