Kelly Ayotte votes to kill Medicare

Okay, it's official. Kelly Ayotte voted to kill Medicare. The GOP voted in the Senate to make Paul Ryan's bill which would convert Medicare from a system which pays your hospital bills to a system which gives you a coupon for $5000 (or some such amount) each year and then tells you, you are on your own.

The current going rate for a heart bypass surgery in the state of New Hampshire is about $100,000, all of which is covered by Medicare today but if the GOP and Senator Ayotte are  in power, not tomorrow.

If you get sick Medicare will not save you under GOP rules. Go sell your house and everything you own. Move in with your kids. Rather than raise taxes on the rich the GOP would kill Medicare and next, Social Security.

(She looks like such a nice young lady. Who woulda thunk?)

Republicans Stripped Down over Medicare

NEWS QUIZ: CAN YOU TELL WHO IS THE REAL KELLY AYOTTE? IS THERE ANY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THESE TWO LADIES?

(Notice how nice the Stars and Stripes complement their outfits.)

Trying to find what Kelly Ayotte has to say about Paul Ryan's Couponcare plan to kill Medicare has been likely trying to grasp a cloud in your hand--it just keeps slipping out and disappearing. I may not be the most sophisticated search engine user, but I simply cannot pin the lady down. Titles say, "Kelly Ayotte supports Congressman Ryan's plan for Medicare," but no quote follows, then "Kelly Ayotte says Ryan's plan is not a voucher plan," but no quote, and oh what a lovely quote that would have been and "Kelly Ayotte does not support Ryan's plan."

So, as they say in politics, the righteous Ms. Ayotte may have "evolved," which is to say, her principles blew off like the fuzz off a dead dandilion, when she saw the poll results.

The problem for Ms. Ayotte, and for all true believer Republicans, is they have certain "core principles" or ideology which lead them inexorably to hate Medicare, and not less, Social Security.

The first is that taxes are BAD.   That means, of course, anything which requires taxes (except of course, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers, submarines, just-say-no, sexual abstinence programs) must be BAD. 

Medicare and Social Security require lots of tax, and so they are BAD.

The big problem, politically, i.e. getting elected, is that people love Medicare and Social Security, especially older people.

So when Paul Ryan says he wants to give you a coupon for $5000 or even $10,000 to spend on your medical care every year, it doesn't matter if he gives you a plastic card embossed in gold, even the slowest, thickest voter knows a heart surgery costs $80,000, easily, and that $10,000 will pay for maybe the first twenty mintues of that surgery. And after that, it's sell your home and move in with the kids.

So even in New Hampshire, where there are few taxes but people are irate about what taxes there are, the cry is, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!"

This is, of course, on a more basic level, a philosophical question about how much you want to be responsible for your neighbor. If you pay for your neighbor's healthcare, that's a pretty big committment.  The Finns were famous for looking down their noses at the Americans because the Americans do not provide health care for their own, nor day care nor any of the social support systems Finns have done for generations. Americans were like those tribal peoples of the various Stan countries, unwilling to help anyone other than members of their own families, and even not that, on occasion.  But Finland is a country of what? Eight million. When you talk about including Finns in a bigger family, say all of Europe, then they are not so eager to pay for healthcare for undeserving, lazy Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese. 

So, the problem we've been having as Americans, as peole who live in New Hampshire, is we really don't like a lot of our fellow citizens. We don't think they deserve our help.

But Medicare, and Social Security have been the two big successes and these programs have been relentlessly attacked by Republicans. George W tried to kill both. His Republican heirs keep trying. The mistake Paul Ryan made was he was more open about his intentions, more honest.

And when Ryan unzipped his clothes, when he asked other Republicans to do the same, what the public saw was pretty disgusting. Now all the Republicans in Congress are rushing to zip back up.

Righteous Right Takes Credit for Osama Mission

One thing you have to say for Karl Rove, and all those who travel with him (Rush, Glenn,Sarah P., Michele, the Righteous Right) is they do stick to their story.

I watched the coverage of the Osama Bin Laden mission, watching President Obama leaning forward in that Situation Room, with Hilary with her hand over her mouth, plain on every face the intensity of the situation, and I watched clips from the President at the Press Club festivities, where he carried off his remarks, cool as the underside of a pillow, and I read the comments from the military brass who call Obama, "Cool Hand Luke," and I had to conclude--this guy has cards he isn't showing, and they are all aces.

What a contrast to the Blow Hard Right. Donald Trump, all self important, loud and idiotic.  Rush Limbaugh, who has never in his life had to make a decision where lives hang in the balance.  Karl Rove, who has never been in the field of any conflict personally.

And now Rove is saying that all Obama did was to take advantage of all the information Rendition and torture dropped in his lap. And, of course, rendition and torture had nothing to do with locating Osama. Someone in the Pakistani intelligence got a license plate number, and that connected to a courier and the rest is history, far as I can tell.

But then again, I don't really know, because I don't have all the details, not even close to the whole story.

But not knowing anything real does not stop Rove or any of his blow hard friends. They always know, because what they know is only what they already believed in the first place, unemcumbered with the truthiness of facts on the ground.

God save us from the Righteous Right.

Osama and the Hampton Mother

"I think the tools that President Bush put into place--GITMO, rendition, enhanced interrogation, the vast effort to collect and collate this information--obviously served his successor quite well."

                       Karl Rove, Fox and Friends May 2, 2011.


Just in case you missed it: The competence evidenced by the Democratic Obama administration, which succeeded where his Republican predecessor had failed, is actually a mistaken perception.

What Mr. Rove and the Republicans want to point out is that the success of this mission depended on torture, and Abu Gharib, and GITMO and all those things you thought you didn't like about the great Republican rendition machine. 

Republicans must be forgiven for being unable to see government's successes, because whenever they are in charge, there are no successes to be seen.

But when a clear government success occurs they will either try to destroy it (as in Medicare) or they will claim it as their own, as in killing Osama Bin Laden. 

Actually, Karl Rove is not the only frothing  right winger  trying to spin Obama's victory into a Republican success.  Overheard in a North Hampton parking lot, this conversation:

"Oh, Osama's been dead for years."
"Really?"
"Yes, they're just releasing it now because Obama's so low in the polls."
"You don't say?"
"Yes, my daughter's in the Navy. She says they've been saying that for years. Everyone knows it."
"Well, I didn't know that."


I wanted so badly to ask that lady, the mother of the Navy daughter, if the space aliens from Roswell had captured Osama Bin Laden and handed him over to their fellow space alien, President Obama. 


I wonder if "They" didn't believe in Navy SEALS, or in the valor and discipline of the people who actually flew in on those helicopters. 


I wonder if George W. Bush flew along with them, with a Mission Accomplished banner to hang in that compound, to claim credit where credit was due? Maybe Karl Rove was with him. And the lady's Navy daughter. 


Or maybe, it was just those space aliens at it again.

The Donald Signifying

Donald Trump has at least accomplished one remarkable thing: He has finally got Charles M. Blow, who writes a statistics heavy, rather staid column for the New York Times, to, well blow a gasket. After Trump's most recent inanities, Blow finally could not cleave to  his Walter Cronkite esque reserve and impartiality any longer. Blow finally had to observe the accusations Obama is not American born (which 45% of Republicans believe) , is not a Christian (which 46% of Republicans believe) simply will never be proved or disproved because it is a matter of faith, i.e., religion among Republicans. It is something they want to believe, really have to believe because "Faith in 400 years of cemented assumptions about the character and capacity of the American Negro," depend on not believing an American Black, born in this country, could not possibly be as erudite and smart as Obama.

In point of fact, I noticed the same thing working in the inner city in Washington, DC, where American Blacks, who often had blue eyes, not uncommonly had very close to blond hair and certainly looked very little like the Nigerians and Liberians and  Rwandans I met there. 


The other thing about the African Blacks, just off the boat, so to speak is they had no doubts about their own intelligence, and they spoke with me, a white man, very differently from African Americans who had been born in Georgia or South Carolina--the African Africans had no difficulty making eye contact, used multi syllabic words, sentences with difference cadences and clauses. In short, if I closed my eyes, I wouldn't know I was talking to a Black person, although I would be charmed by some of the accents. 


To put it bluntly, my impression was these Black people from Africa, who had been taught in colonial schools or Nigerian post colonial schools, had never been taught they were stupid or suspect.  They did not act as if they were being interrogated by a cop who was trying to catch them in a lie.

From the point of view of a white guy, they were a pleasure to deal with. Very engaging, funny, extremely bright.

Very different from the Blacks from Georgia, the Carolinas and Mississippi, who met my eye only occasionally, who shrugged off every question and answered in monosyllables and who acted as if the less they said the better. No good could come of saying anything to me. After all, I was just some white doctor. What good would I do them?


These American born Southern Blacks had grown up with the comments like those of the chairman of the local Republican party in Virginia, David Bartholomew, who apparently sent a message to the Virginia welfare office saying his dog deserved a welfare check because he had all the usual qualifications: "He's black, unemployed, lazy, can't speak English and has no clue who his Daddy is."


That's the Republican line, really, in essence. Those who need welfare, who are wrecking our state budgets with their demands on state treasuries are unworthy and undeserving.



This line goes way back. Even in the 1890's the conservative line was any man in America who wanted to be rich, could be. All that is required is hard work and a willingness to risk and to sacrifice. Of course, taking the risk works better if your daddy is a real estate magnate, so if you fail, you do not starve and your family is not thrown out on the street.


So, as Donald Trump and today's conservatives see it, it is just as conservatives saw it before the dawn of the 20th century: Those who are poor are lazy and ill bred and deserve to be poor. Those who are rich are hard working and deserve to be rich. America is a country were you get what you deserve.


And Obama does not deserve to be President, and he certainly did not deserve to be admitted to an Ivy League school because he got in on Affirmative action, not like Donald Trump, who got in because his daddy was rich and was expected to make Penn very happy. with a large contribution in cold hard cash.  And President Obama, Donald Trump says, did not deserve to get into Harvard Law, because, Donald says, "I heard" Obama did not get very good grades at Columbia. 


That's what the Donald learned in his two years in the Ivy League. You substantiate a point by saying, "I heard that was true." Obviously, an expensive Ivy League education was not lost on Donald. 


I do wonder about that magna cum laude thing Obama managed to achieve at Harvard. What does Donald hear about that? Does Harvard give out magna cum laude awards by Affirmative Action? 

Did Donald's father not buy the Donald a magna cum laude?


What I'd like to hear about is how they pump Donald up like a Michelin tire man?


And who told him he could do such a fine Mussolini impression? 


All Donald needs is the funny hat with the tassel.

Mr. Trump Instructs

Isn't it peculiar how often people criticize others for failings they, on some level,  perceive in themselves?

Donald Trump somehow knows he is a fat rich kid who had everything in the world handed to him which could be handed to him--wealth, expensive schools, celebrity, but in many ways he never earned the respect a rigorous mind, a lean body, a subversive sense of humor could accrue.

Having been a pugnacious behavior problem in school, his rich Daddy shipped him off to the New York Military academy to straighten him out. That's the story. Donald was bright enough, just too assertive and high spirited.

Or read another way, Donald was so slow witted even his Daddy could not buy him a place at Andover or Exeter or Groton, so Donald wound up at the school for wayward boys where you didn't have to be all that bright. From there to a respectable school, Fordham, but not the Ivy League. That's a bit of a flag, because Ivy League admissions in the 1960's while highly competitive were still very much available to the sons of real estate magnates who just might donate a building or more to the campus. One way to read this story is Donald had to demonstrate to the University of Pennsylvania he could behave himself well enough to be allowed on campus, and then Penn could be happy enough to accept Donald's father's largess.

So now Donald, who claims he was an excellent student, is attacking Obama for having had everything handed to him because he was black. (And Donald would know a thing or two about having everything handed to him.) That stokes the fury of the blue collar Republican Resentfuls, who think the only reason they are not living in McMansions and driving Mercedes Benz automobiles is all the good jobs were given to the undeserving Affirmative Action blacks who got the best schools and from that the best jobs.

The attack on Obama serves both purposes: It says Donald is deserving and Obama is not. And it fits right into the Resentful Republican narrative.

There is a wonderful scene from the movie "Do The Right Thing," where two old black men are sitting in an alley with their liquor in brown paper bags, looking at the Korean owner of a grocery store just across the street, and one says to the other, "Lookit that. Them Koreans only been here in this country, what? A few years. And they got that business up and going and everyone in the neighborhood buys their groceries there. And we been here since they brought us over in the ships three hundred years ago. What's wrong with that?"

And the other says, "You mean, what's wrong with us?"

This is not an exact quote, but that's the way I remember the scene.

And it's a very poignant scene which really bites. But the honesty of the man who can look at where he is in life and take responsibility for his own failings is enobling.

When Donald Trump looks across the street at a black man who had nothing but disadvantage and is now President of the United States, he cannot stand what that says about himself.


Of course, if Donald Trump were actually bright enough, he'd realize it doesn't matter whether Obama is magna cum laude or whether Trump's college grade point average was worse or better than Obama's.  What matters is where  they are now, intellectuallly.

You have only to read the two Obama books and then take one look at Trump, who looks as if he's been inflated like a Macy's Thanksgiving balloon, with that dead animal on his head he calls hair and know the difference.

When Democrats Whimp Out

We had sometime ressembling a Town Hall meeting recently, at the Methodist Church on Lafayette Road and four reasonably hardy Republican delegates to the NH House of Delegates attended, along with a lady whose name I did not get, who identified herself as a Democratic delegate and a man, a delegate from Portsmouth, also a Democrat.

The agenda was the New Hampshire budget and the Republicans said, as they always do, the only way to approach any government problem is to cut "Spending."  They were, as they tend to be, a little vague (a lot vague, actually) about exactly what spending, but you got the idea they are against government spending, which is always BAD and they are against taxes, which are always BAD.

And someone from the audience said he didn't think taxes on the rich who can afford to pay more are so BAD.

That's when the really most depressing moment of the night occured: The Democrat lady started mewling about how if we raise taxes on the rich, the rich might just get up and move out of state. It was one of those, "Wah, wah, wah," moments, where she got all trembly lipped about how Daddy might just get mad and move away if we did anything as offensive as asking him to pay more taxes.

And I wanted to leap up and shout, "And where is he going to move to? One of those many states that don't have taxes?"

And I thought, this lady calls herself a Democrat and yet she's bought into the whole Republican rant about not taxing the rich because they are our Daddy, who dribble down all the goodies to us poor folk, as long as we behave ourselves.

And this morning I saw Eric Cantor on TV saying the same thing--we have big trouble in this country and it's all about high taxes and we've cut to solve all our problems by cutting taxes for the rich.

Yesterday, I saw Rand Paul say Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional because the Founding Fathers did not specifically mention these programs by name in the constitution and apart from a clause about raising taxes and providing for the general welfare, the constitution doesn't give specific permission for those programs, so ipso facto they have got to be unconsittuional and illegal.

And I keep thinking:  If the Republicans are this bizarre and the Democrats are beginning to sound just like them, where are we?

At least Paul Krugman seems to remain sane.  But he says he doesn't want to run for office because then he would be on the line to actually do something.

So there you have it: Patriots come sing the national anthem and praise Ronald Reagan and the trickle down religion and where is our great nation headed?