100 Slaves 100 Enemies

Years ago Bill Maher asked something to the effect of, “What does raising the security alert to orange mean — am I supposed to wear a sweater before I leave the house?”

So now we know. Security alerts were meant to make you scared and vote for an incompetent fool who claimed that he would protect you.

Former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge says pressure from fellow cabinet members to raise the nation’s terror alert level just before the 2004 presidential election helped convince him it was time to quit working for former president George W. Bush.

via Was U.S. terror alert used for political reasons? – The Globe and Mail.

Frances Townsend is quoted in the article refuting these claims. And it makes me wonder if the reporters who write these articles have heard of a search engine called Google, where you can look up people and see what sort of record they left behind. They even get to use this thing called Lexis Nexis that I can’t afford to use to find everything ever printed about anyone. Except me, I suppose

This blurb from the Huffington Post doesn’t paint a pretty picture. It would seem there’s no point in taking Townsend seriously, especially since she went around telling everyone that Al Qaida was possibly/maybe/might disrupt the 2008 elections. So, it would seem she has a history of using fear as a way to try to manipulate an election. She’s a believer. She must be considering her praise for George Bush when she resigned (in 2007! all these dedicated yet quitter Republicans…), so why bother asking her opinion. She’s a shill for her master.

She’s now a commentator on CNN — her new master. What better way to boost her ratings than to jump into this fray.

Apparently, it is not Clifford’s alter-ego, but in fact a Democrat who receives almost, but not quite, as much money from special corporate interest groups such as the health insurance and financial industries as Republicans.

From today’s front page of the Washington Post, Blue Dogs Receive More Health Industry Backing Than Other Democrats (found via Beat the Press):

[The Blue Dog Coalition] has set a record pace for fundraising this year through its political action committee, surpassing other congressional leadership PACs in collecting more than $1.1 million through June. More than half the money came from the health-care, insurance and financial services industries, marking a notable surge in donations from those sectors compared with earlier years, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.

A look at career contribution patterns also shows that typical Blue Dogs receive significantly more money — about 25 percent — from the health-care and insurance sectors than other Democrats, putting them closer to Republicans in attracting industry support.

A little later in the article we get this:

“I know there were some that thought we were trying to stop health-care reform,” Ross said in an interview this week for The Washington Post’s “Voices of Power” series. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We simply wanted to slow the process down and ensure that we were working toward the kind of health-care reform that the American people need and want.“

According to these poll results, the American people want universal government-run health care. The Physicians for a National Health Program blog tells us that we could have this with the passage of one of three bills: “The House already has Rep. John Conyers’ H.R.676 and Rep. Jim McDermott’s H.R.1200, and now the Senate has Sen. Bernie Sanders’ S.703“.

OK, so that seems simple enough. So, why won’t Ross do what the majority of people want him to? Oh, right…

Ross has received nearly $1 million in contributions from the health-care sector and insurance industry during his five terms in Congress, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign contributions.

At the end of the article, Charles W. Stenholm, a former congressman from Texas who was part of the original Blue Dog group in the mid-1990s and who is now a agriculture and health care lobbyist answers criticism that money in politics is corrupting the political system by saying that the Blue Dogs “have played a tremendously important role in keeping the process from getting out of control.”

Indeed. Real health care reform would take health care out of the control of the health insurance corporations. And we can’t have that. As Noam Chomsky points out, universal health care “has no political support; only the majority of the public.”

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link: The Center for Responsive Politics’ health care reform section

Cost is supposedly an issue for providing health care reform (not even universal health care), yet Congress is ready to pay $6.9 billion for equipment that the military doesn’t want or need.

The Democratic-controlled House is poised to give the Pentagon dozens of new ships, planes, helicopters and armored vehicles that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates says the military does not need to fund next year, acting in many cases in response to defense industry pressures and campaign contributions under an approach he has decried as “business as usual” and vowed to help end.

The unwanted equipment in a military spending bill expected to come to a vote on the House floor Thursday or Friday has a price tag of at least $6.9 billion.

House Seems To Be Set on Pork-Padded Defense Bill
by R. Jeffery Smith
Washington Post
Thursday, July 30, 2009