Post & Riposte

The letter which follows was published in the August 23 edition of the Columbus Dispatch:

Can health-care view define a person?

I have been a board member of the YMCA, a vice president of the United Way and the president of a parent-teacher organization. I thought I was a pretty solid citizen.

However, I have been informed by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California that I am "un-American." Paul Krugman said I was a racist ("Anger aimed at Obama, not at his proposals," Forum column, Aug. 10), and White House officials believe that I am part of an angry mob because of my opposition to President Barack Obama's health-care plan.

BILL BABBITT
New Albany

To this letter, I wrote and submitted the following reply:

Editor,

On August 23 The Dispatch published a brief letter from Bill Babbitt under the headline "Can health-care view define a person?" I offer the following response to Mr. Babbitt's letter as well as to the editor who wrote the headline:

Dear Bill,

It's not your view, but rather the arguments you use to present that view which tell others who and what you are.

If your reasons for opposing President Barack Obama's health-care plan are the unsupported, emotionally-loaded taunts phrased as questions being shouted at town hall meetings, you are indeed a member of an angry mob of un-American racists, despite any and all claims to the contrary and a record of past community involvement.

If you have reasons for your opposition, which are supported by facts, you need to state them in order to dissociate yourself from those who offer none.

George A. Denino

Debunking the Health Reform Myths

August 22, 2009: Your Weekly Address

President Obama debunks the myths around health reform, and discusses the public option proposal in which many of them are rooted. But he focuses his address on the stark moral and historical turning point at which we find ourselves.

Let's Be Perfectly Frank

Most folks will examine these images and think they're funny. Unfortunately, I know a bunch of people who won't see anything wrong with or funny about them.

How do I know?

I keep getting blindly forwarded, hate-and-fear-mongering email messages from folks just like the ones in the pictures below. Their messages suggest that when they were in school they slept through most of their classes, especially English and Social Studies.

The next thing you know, they'll be calling for a preemptive strike against China.

This woman appears to be a protesting against sex education.

So what is one to do when confronted by folks posing loaded questions which are as dishonest in their intent as asking "Have you stopped beating your wife and kids?"

On August 18, Rep. Barney Frank (D - Mass) showed how to deal with them:

Click here to read Steve Benen's Washington Monthly commentary on this event, which includes a transcript of the encounter.

He Gets It

The following letter to the editor appeared in the August 19, 2009 Columbus Dispatch:

Health insurance has no free market

The Senate Finance Committee plans to support a health-insurance bill that would make us buy health insurance, but which omits the public option.

The federal government already has engineered a massive transfer of wealth from middle-class taxpayers to the Wall Street investment bankers. Now it looks like we'll throw another enormous pile of money at the medical-industrial complex, especially the private health-insurance carriers.

Why on earth would anybody believe that health insurers actually compete for premiums? In my case, I am a few years shy of retirement. I have a $5,200-deductible health-care policy from a private carrier. I have never made a claim. I have never stayed overnight in a hospital.

I exercise regularly. My health is generally good, but I would not qualify for a different policy.

My carrier this year increased my premium by $295.23 per month. That's the increase, not the total. The premium has almost quadrupled in a little over four years. The company knows full well I will continue to pay increasing premiums because I fear the Big One will hit before I qualify for Medicare. Others may call that the free market, but I call it extortion.

There is no such thing as a free market in health insurance, and there never has been.

In my view, a compulsory health-insurance bill without a public option is worse than no bill at all. President Barack Obama should stand his ground and fight.

WILLIAM C. MARTIN
Jackson

Let There Be Light

Here's something you won't be hearing about from John Boehner or any other Ohio congressional member of the Party of No. They're still claiming the stimulus plan has been a total failure.

The conservative rag known as The Columbus Dispatch did its part to advance political ignorance in the Buckeye State, burying the article on the lower right-hand corner of page A8.

What story you might ask, was worthy of front page coverage in "Ohio's Greatest Home Newspaper" on this day? Why an enlightening account of how police in nearby Lancaster, Ohio used a taser on a man who had been huffing keyboard cleaner and set him on fire him in the process, of course.

Perhaps that's the GOP's idea of the light at the end of the tunnel.

***

Work in Ohio tied to federal stimulus funds up big in July

By Erin Dostal THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Economic-stimulus projects in Ohio employed the equivalent of 312 workers in July, up from 13 full-time jobs in June.

Employees on Ohio's stimulus projects worked a combined 54,000 hours and earned more than $1.8 million, said Scott Varner, an Ohio Department of Transportation spokesman.

"As more projects come online and more work is performed, those numbers should rise dramatically over the next several months," Varner said. "It would not shock me that when we get into the reports for August, you'll see a dramatic increase."

Beginning stages of work usually include putting up signs or filling out paperwork, which partly explains why the June numbers were so low, he said. Employment numbers and hours worked should continue to increase throughout August and September.

Some projects, such as the Guernsey County I-77 pavement improvement project and the Rt. 22 roadway improvement project in Perry County, began this year and will be completed before 2010, Varner said.

Others, such as the Alum Creek Drive widening project in Pickaway and Frank- lin counties, won't get started until next year.

The largest project started last month was a twolane resurfacing project in Guernsey County contracted by Shelly & Sands Inc. Employees worked more than 6,300 hours in July — the equivalent of about 37 full-time jobs.

Leonard Liptak, controller for Terrace Construction in Cleveland, said his company began work on two projects last month: on a bridge on Rt. 116 and median construction on I-75 in Findlay, both in northwestern Ohio.

The greatest number of jobs is expected to be created in 2010, as bigger projects, such as Pickaway County bridge projects and the Nelsonville bypass, continue into next summer.

ODOT expects to award $390.5 million on contracts for 111 projects in the state by Sept. 1.

That is more than half of the $774 million in stimulus money the organization is responsible for spending on infrastructure projects.
edostal@dispatch.com

The Case of the New Front Yard

Here's a slideshow I made showing how Pat and I have spent a large part of the summer.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Rush to Judgement

Rush Limbaugh's recent and ongoing commentary suggesting that President Obama and those in favor of healthcare reform are somehow like Nazis serves to underscore the latest duplicitous strategy of the rabid right as it attempts to derail reforms and policies which an overwhelming majority of Americans favor.

This tactic is both malicious and deliberate. Limbaugh is not stupid. He knows full well what he is doing. He also knows that Naziism was the right-wing, polar opposite to the left-wing, Communism in Pre-World War II Germany.

That left-right alignment of political ideologies has not changed. Liberals and their attempts to expand access to the fruits of economic success through social programs are on the left of the political spectrum. Conservatives and their opposition to any change in access to those fruits are on the right.

Limbaugh is betting that the average American's ignorance of history will allow him to conflate those opposites precisely as Hitler did in naming his movement National Socialism (Nazionalsocialismus) and his party the National Socialist Party (Nazionalsocialistische Partei - Nazi for short).

The name National Socialism suggests an ideology favorable to a progressive social agenda rooted in patriotism. The Nazi sobriquet, however, more accurately reflected the party's ideological underpinnings of extreme, right-wing nationalism which led to World War II and the Holocaust.

Calls for that same brand of extreme nationalism are the rabid right's stock in trade. They can be found in the host of anonymously written and blindly forwarded email messages we've all received, which promote the "you're either with us, or you're Un-American" mentality while stirring up irrational fears toward any and all progressive initiatives.

Like those who organized Hitler's Brown Shirts, the folks behind the anti-healthcare reform protests at town hall meetings have no interest in debate or compromise. They want an America where their narrow beliefs are mandated and dissenters are labelled as enemies of the state.

Taking their cues from Limbaugh, they cloak themselves in the mantle of unassailable patriotism. They lay claim to moral superiority even as they use intimidation and fear-mongering to tar their opponents with labels befitting their own behavior. They use thuggery as they call others thugs. In the mold of Hitler and Joseph McCarthy, they know the ignorant among us will blindly follow if they give voice to their irrational fears and encourage them to shout the loudest.

Thus, it is Limbaugh and those who parrot his diatribes who are the political heirs of Naziism, not those who lean to the left politically.

Since this blog pays homage to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, an excerpt from that work expressing a possible motive for and dynamic behind Limbaugh's attacks on President Obama seems appropriate.

Those familiar with the novel will recognize the passage as part of Atticus Finch's summation to the jury before they leave the courtroom to determine Tom Robinson's fate. Those unfamiliar with it would do well to pick up a copy and read it.

The witnesses for the state, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption—the evil assumption—that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber.

Limbaugh and his followers spread their lies and write their hate-mongering email messages with the same, cynical confidence Bob and Mayella Ewell had in the jury's inability to get beyond their prejudices. They know this tactic will work so long as Americans are willing to go along with them without questioning the assumptions "one associates with minds of their caliber."

Wag the Elephant

Click the image to enlarge. Click here to view source.

Necessary Reform, Absurd Attacks

Who are you going to believe, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh or President Obama? If you choose the dynamic duo of duplicity, I must ask why?

Beck and Limbaugh have made careers out of pandering to and stoking the fears of the ignorant among us. In contrast, Barack Obama has honestly and openly addressed issues such as race relations from which his political opponents either fled or attempted to use as wedge issues during the recent presidential campaign.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Weekly-Address-The-Necessity-of-Health-Reform-and-Absurdity-of-the-Attacks/

Click here to read a transcript of the address.

GOP Strategy Revealed

Those who complain that the GOP has offered no counter-proposals to legislative initiatives currently working their way through the democratically controlled Congress have missed the point.

The Party of No does indeed have a plan, and it's the cat's meow.

Click image to enlarge. Click here to view source.