Darth Cheney Misses the Point on Waterboarding

This CNN article recounts a recent interview on Fox News where former Vice-President Dick Cheney described how enhanced interrogation techniques used on Al-Qaeda operatives gained useful information.

"The enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving
thousands of American lives," he told "Fox News Sunday.

The man is deluded. All the hubbub regarding this issue has occurred because the torturous acts took place, not whether they were successful or not. The vice-president is missing the point that American citizens are angry that their government tortured prisoners and apparently did so with the approval of the White House. Mr. Cheney is a ends-justify-the-means sort of guy whereas I was taught that wrong is wrong.

And why did we torture? I think his reasoning says a lot about how decisions were being made in the time following 9/11:

"Time was deemed to be of essence. There was fear of a pending attack" in the
aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Fear. The attacks were horrific but the Bush White House allowed fear to overwhelm them and make ridiculous decisions. What does it say about those decisions that the vice-president of that administration is still doing talk shows eight years later trying to explain that what they did was correct because we haven't been attacked since 9/11? He's still trying to sell it but no one except Fox and their zombies are listening.

It's not what you accomplished, Mr. Cheney. It's how you did it.

Sen. Ted Kennedy on Health Care Reform

This is a video of Ted Kennedy on health care (with a compliment to Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown). He demonstrates the enormous difference between those who have effective health care coverage and those who don't. People lose their life savings paying for medical care, sell their house or even go bankrupt. It shows just how out of touch some members of congress and the senate are that some of them insist there is no problem and the rest can barely muster enough effort to address it. Senator Kennedy was right, now is the time to fix the problem. Now is the time to reform health care.

Are Bake Sales for Medical Bills the Best We Can Do?

I was out with the family last night and ran across another flier advertising a bake sale and auction for a family with a sick child. This particular young child has medical bills totaling over a million dollars because of a condition he had at birth. The flier mentioned both parents had been laid off recently leaving them with no medical insurance. This is only the latest in a series of such fliers I have seen in the area. Look at the counter of Dairy Queens, Circle K's and Speedways and you will see collection cans for families who can't even afford the deductibles for their child's illness because the care has been so expensive. The skill and professionalism of their doctors and nurses has kept them alive but how can they pay for that treatment?

These are situations people find themselves in. Ordinary people who are doing all the right things but finding themselves in holes so deep that sunlight is a distant memory. Families in these situations often have no choice but to declare bankruptcy which hurts the medical professionals and hospitals we all count on.

How can you read a story like this and think that health care reform is a bad idea?

How can bake sales, spaghetti dinners and pancake breakfasts can solve this problem? It's ridiculous to think a family may lose everything because they want to keep their child alive. When someone has a serious illness the only concern should be how it is treated. People in Europe and Canada don't worry about being homeless as a result of health care so why should we?

Mandatory insurance and a public option to help hold costs down are good ideas.

Anecdotal Evidence for Health Care Reform

Reader Jarret forwarded a link to the Avaaz.org site where folks from countries with national health care share stories about how successful their systems are. Many of these stories refer to single payer systems managed by the government which is different from what congress is proposing. However, I found that each of these stories spoke of an overwhelming sense of relief that the person's maladies were taken care of and the threat of bankruptcy was non-existent. This insightful post caught my eye:

• I am a specialist physician working in a large Australian public hospital. When the American public see advertisements maligning universal health care systems such as that in which I work, the most important question to ask is - who paid for this? The answer every time will demonstrate in whose interest the current system operates. This is never the public. This is the reason that no government in any developed country, no matter how conservative or pro-market, will ever be able to remove universal health care - they would be drummed out of office by the people at the first opportunity.
  by Dr Ben Cowie

It's nice to see stories from people who actually use these systems rather than the spin that has been coming from certain pundits.

Obama Lays Out Health Care Reform in a Radio Interview

The president was interviewed by conservative Philadelphia radio talk show host Michael Smerconish this morning and laid out his "musts" for health care reform. Please note that the Palin Death Panels are no longer a "must":

"No. 1, it's got to be deficit neutral," Obama said. "This has to be paid for. .
. ."

Point No. 2, it has to bend the cost curve," he said. "We've got to
reduce a plan that experts credibly say will reduce healthcare cost inflation. .
. ."

No. 3, we've got to have the insurance reforms I've talked about
for people who already have health insurance," he said, including a ban against
dropping coverage for people who are ill or blocking coverage for people with
pre-existing conditions."

No. 4, I want to make sure that we have a
health exchange . . . where you will have a set of options," he said. "You can
go and look at a bunch of options, and we have to make it affordable. .

. ."Choice, competition, reducing costs, those are the things that I
want to see accomplished," the president said.

I would like to see the public option of coverage included as a must because insurance companies will always find a way to reject claims or not insure some people. I like what I see overall but the president has to step up and really fight for health care reform. Right now I don't see a more important issue so if the republicans don't want to help I say swing wide left and steam roll them. No one has ever been as accomodating to the opposition party as President Obama. It's time for him to start twisting some arms and accomplish what we sent him to Washington to do.

You can read more about the interview here in the LA Times.

Or Maybe You Shouldn't Bring Me Every Piece of Trash Health Care Reform Rumor You Happen to Pick Up

Why would you believe any of these ridiculous lies? And why would you believe any of these people are working for your best interests?

• Sarah Palin- “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil,”
• Senator Charles Grassley- “In the House bill, there is counseling for end of life,” Grassley said. “You have every right to fear. You shouldn’t have counseling at the end of life, you should have done that 20 years before. Should not have a government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”
• Investor's Business Daily- "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."
• Senator Jon Kyl: "Imagine needing a new hip that will make it easier to get around, but just because you're over 75, the government denies you that surgery."
• Rep. Lamar Smith-the bill "contains gaping loopholes that will allow illegal immigrants to receive taxpayer-funded benefits."

Not a bit of truth to any of them and yet, this is the noise that passes for debate because we're dumb enough to give these people five minutes of our time. Every single one of these statements has been debunked and shown to be untrue. I don't know how you get from authorizing payment to doctors for end of life counseling to "death panels" but once Governor Palin said it the shouting at town hall meetings got so loud this provision of the bill was removed. All she and the shouters accomplished was to make grandma pay for living will consultations from her own pocket.

We've got to be smarter than this, folks, if we want to move ahead. We're not first among developed countries for life expectancy rates or last among those countries for infant mortality rates so the system we currently have is not the greatest no matter what pundits say. Those two measurements are hard scientific facts that prove our system is not taking care of everyone who needs care. It's time to read the bill, form an opinion and have a real, healthy debate.

Remember, only we can decide if those shouting the loudest are telling the truth.

President Obama was Elected to be Bold

We didn't elect President Obama to maintain the status quo. We elected a man who had big ideas and a broad scope. The fervor that swept him into office was a repudiation of eight years of lies, war and corporate greed. We wanted something different. We wanted an administration that was empowered by the people, one that would look at the problems and say, "I can do something about that". We wanted that kind of leadership because we were ready make a change but needed the political will do so.

And we won.

There are those who say this president is doing too much, too fast. That it would be better to wait "for the right time" to make changes. They say that spending money on health care reform so soon after a giant stimulus bill would be an enormous error.

In my experience the time is never right for change. There will never be a time when we are out of debt or when unemployment is at a good level. Health care reform needs to be dealt with so we can move on to growing the economy, deal with immigration and a hundred other items on the national to do list.

It is spectacularly shameful that so many people want this legislation to fail. There are people who are in real need, who want health insurance but who can't get it because of high premiums, pre-existing conditions or those who have exhausted their lifetime benefits due to catastrophic illness. There are people who started the year with a job and health coverage who no longer have it. They are our freinds, our neighbors and our family members. If this legislation is not passed how can we proclaim that we are our brother's keeper?

Rumor, fear mongering and misinformation have played an enormous role in watering down this powerful legislation. People who have no motivation to help the health care insurance industry are shouting down debate at town hall meetings. Their free floating anxiety over the government's involvement in health care will kill the public option and guarantee that all of us will be forced to buy insurance without a government run program to compete for lower prices.

These people who react from fear need to move aside so that those with bold ideas can forge ahead. It's what we voted for and it is what we expect. Maintaining the status quo just means more of us will go broke paying medical bills we cannot afford. It's time to change some things and not be afraid of that change.

The UFCW is Still Up to Their Old Tricks

Stop me if you've heard this story before.

A local chapter of the United Food and Commercial Worker's union pickets a family owned grocery store. They want the store workers to unionize and set up "informational" pickets outside the store. The store's workers then hold counter protests, essentially picketing the union that wants to represent them.

"Sure," you say. "I know this story. This is the UFCW Local 880 picking on Henry Nemenz. This is exactly how they closed the Hubbard IGA and how they are attempting to close the Poland Sav-a Lot. Old news."

Except it's happening in Phoenix, Arizona.

The UFCW Local 99 is picketing a family owned chain of grocery stores called Basha's in an effort to get their employees to join the union. The Basha's employees are counter picketing, claiming they do not want to be represented by the UFCW.

An observant reader left a comment on an earlier UFCW post when he noticed the similarities between events here in the Mahoning Valley and those in Phoenix. There is a blog post here detailing the events taking place in Arizona. There's also a longer investigative piece here.

Funny, isn't it? Who knew the rust belt and the sun belt had so much in common?

Cash for Clunkers Sells Cobalts and Helps the Mahoning Valley

CNN Money has a list up of the top ten cars purchased through the government's Cash for Clunkers program and the Lordstown built Chevy Cobalt is on the list at number 10. With only 4 out of 10 cars on the list made domestically, the Cobalt's position says good things about the car's price and quality.

As the owner of a Cobalt I can't say enough good things about it. It's reliable, comfortable, easy on gas and has amenities like XM satellite radio, On-Star and a built in cell phone. This is a stimulus program that is working exactly as intended. Old gas hogs are being removed from the street and destroyed while new, fuel efficient cars built by local GM workers are being sold. It's too bad every government program can't work this well.

When did America become Hard of Thinking? Thoughts on Health Care Reform and the Birthers

I am absolutely amazed at the sheer stupidity some people in this country display. I don't mean the usual idiocy like jaywalking across Market St. at a leisurely pace or sending money to Nigeria. I'm talking about buying into the junk being spewed by people who think health care reform means killing grandma or these idiots who think the president wasn't born in Hawaii.

To me, such people are the 21st century equivalent of the nutbags who used to roam the 1980's speaking in hushed whispers about how car manufacturers were secretly hiding carburetors capable of getting hundreds of miles to a gallon of gas. It's like the ability to reason through a situation was bred out of them genetically. If they overhear something in a bar or read it on the internet then, by golly, it may as well have been carved in stone and brought down from the mountain by Moses himself.

Can we please get over the whole Obama birth certificate thing? If you don't like the guy, fine. Don't vote for him again in 2012. But it's insulting to us as a country that after 200 years of old white guys a young black man with a funny name reaches the presidency and suddenly we need a video of his birth to prove he's the real deal. The arguments these folks put forth are stunningly ridiculous in their pretense. "There is no long form birth certificate," they say. Well I don't know what that means but the certified birth certificate that has been posted on the internet along with the birth announcements from two newspapers is all the proof I need that he was born in the USA. If you need more than that it's time to start cooking your chicken pot pies with the microwave door closed.

This same group of people seems to make up the heart of those opposed to health care reform. Not that there's anything wrong with that. If you think the country is too far in debt and cannot afford such an obligation or if you think such an initiative is beyond the power and scope of the federal government then you have a perfectly reasonable position and legitimate arguments. If you watched a 30 second commercial and then called WKBN and stated as fact the government was going to ration your dialysis and decide whether you were too old to live then you have lost the ability to reason.

Does that sound like something any politician in America would vote for? Do you honestly think the Democratic party is going to allow anyone to hurt one silver hair on granny's head? The AARP crowd is a huge voting bloc that is getting bigger every day as baby boomers age. Democrats will coddle them with warm blankets and prescription meds until they and their 96 cats are as content as newborns.

We need to start thinking again, folks. Disagreeing is fine. In fact, we should disagree because discourse leads to good ideas. Neither party has all the answers. However, if we stop thinking and reasoning we'll all end up under the thumb of people who worship the dollar and hold us in contempt for being sick, for being poor and for wanting what we've earned. Read the legislation yourself, ask questions and then form an opinion. Don't let others do your thinking for you.

The next time you see one of those ads opposing health care reform, ask yourself who benefits from keeping people with pre-existing conditions uninsured. Ask yourself who benefits from higher prescription drug costs. The people pushing those ads already have the power so ask yourself what they are afraid of losing.

Show the Birthers they're Wrong. Wear Obama's Birth Certificate on Your Chest

There's a brand new design up at Rust Belt Pop proving President Obama was born in the USA. You see, it's a picture of his birth certificate. Because that's all you need to prove you were born, unless you're a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist who believes the president was born in Kenya 40 odd years ago as part of a plot to ruin America from within.

So buy a T-shirt or mug and annoy the black helicopter crowd (which now inexplicably includes Lou Dobbs). T-shirts are available in white, black and different colors.

Driving in Hubbard is a Dream with New Traffic Signals

The City of Hubbard recently installed new traffic signals on Liberty and Main streets to help control the flow of traffic and allow emergency vehicles access to green lights as needed. They did this with the help of federal funds managed by the Ohio Department of Transportation.

Anyone familiar with traveling the two largest streets in Hubbard can tell you stories about sitting through pointless red lights when there is no cross traffic. The new signals have a sensor mounted above them that recognizes when there is no traffic and changes lights to green in about 5 seconds. The sensors also recognize the strobe light of emergency vehicles and turn green to give them a clear path in an emergency.

Driving in Hubbard has been great for the last month or so. My early morning drive up Main St. used to be a headache because I would catch a red light at every cross street. Now it is normal to drive all the way out of town and not catch a red light until I get near I-80. Going up Liberty is also easy. A light at the busy intersection of Liberty and Youngstown-Hubbard Rd. could take several cycles and many minutes to pass in the afternoon when traffic was heavy but that time is cut in half.

This was money well spent. With about 15,000 vehicles passing through Hubbard daily less time will be spent waiting at red lights which saves gas and time. The light standards were also replaced and the new black poles have a sleek modern look. These are the kind of capital improvements that can make a city attractive to industry.

New Tees in Black

A bunch of new black tees are up at Rust Belt Pop. Check it out here.