Obama FAIL on Healthcare (Petition)

Jane Hamsher has posted the following at FDL, which a copy of an email being sent out in the wake of breaking news of the full sellout on healthcare reform by the Democrats, brokered by the Obama administration. I fully endorse Jane's message, and encourage readers to sign the petition.

Obama FAIL

The Senate is cutting a deal to kill the public option by giving the President the “trigger” that his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, has been fighting for since he took office.

Shoveling taxpayer dollars into “too big to fail” insurance companies is not the change I voted for. The failure to establish a public option to control medical costs and increase competition is President Obama’s failure alone.

Sign our petition to President Obama: the triggered public option is your failure, and it’s up to you to fix it. Click here to sign:

http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/obamafail

When Barack Obama announced his health care plan in 2007, he said insurance premiums for a family of 4 would be cut by $2500. This plan will see premiums increase $1000 each year.

Obama said “coverage without cost containment will only shift our burdens, not relieve them.” This plan does nothing to meaningfully contain spiraling health care costs.

Obama said “it’s time to let the drug and insurance industries know that while they’ll get a seat at the table, they don’t get to buy every chair.” This plan includes a deal between the White House and PhRMA that guarantees there will be no negotiation for Medicare prescription drug prices.

Obama said he’d go after the drug companies who “sell the same exact drugs here in America for double the price of what they charge in Europe and Canada.” But the White House deal not only doesn’t do that, it bans the reimportation of cheaper drugs from Canada.

What does this deal do? It forces Americans to buy the products of large corporations, then the IRS penalizes them if they refuse.
The Senate’s triggered public option is a failure of Barack Obama. Let him know. Click here to sign our petition:
http://action.firedoglake.com/obamafail

Obama is the only one who can save the public option and make these statements more than mere campaign promises. The fight isn’t over, and we need to let Obama know that a failed public option will be his fault. Thanks for all you do.

Best,
Jane Hamsher
Firedoglake

Click here to sign the petition.

Obama Introduces Guantanamo II

Both Andy Worthington and Spencer Ackerman are following the Obama's administration pursuit of indefinite detentions and renditions policy at the prison at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base.

Worthington writes:

Following briefings by Obama administration officials (who declined to be identified), both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported yesterday that the government is planning to introduce a new review system for the 600 or so prisoners held at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, which will, for the first time, allow them to call witnesses in their defense.

On paper, this appears to be an improvement on existing conditions at the prison, but a close inspection of the officials’ statement reveals that the proposed plans actually do very little to tackle the Bush administration’s wayward innovations regarding the detention of prisoners in wartime, and, moreover, the officials also provided the shocking news that prisoners are currently being rendered to Bagram from other countries.

And Ackerman notes:

“They’re setting up what amounts to a CSRT,” said David Remes, the legal director of the non-profit Appeal for Justice law firm who represents 19 Guantanamo detainees. A CSRT is the acronym for a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, the old mechanism at Guantanamo to adjudicate not a detainee’s guilt or innocence, but whether he constituted a threat to U.S. national security. Detainees were at the mercy of hearsay evidence and had the burden of proving that they weren’t a threat and the government’s case against them was erroneous. The Bush administration contended that CSRTs provided all the process rights to which Guantanamo detainees were entitled. But in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Boumediene case that detainees were entitled to habeas corpus protections.

And so, Remes said, several years and several thousand miles later, here we are again.

Finally, as Andy Worthington makes clear, from the statements of U.S. officials on the "new" policy, at "no point... was any mention made of the government’s obligations to hold prisoners seized in wartime as prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Conventions."

And that is the point, isn't it? The U.S. government, seemingly no matter what executive is nominally at its head, operates a military policy that is scornful of the needs or opinions of its populace. (This was clear with the Iraq War.) The obliviousness to which the supposedly liberal blogosphere in general treats these issues makes one think of what liberals of another generation used to say about feckless GOP President Gerald Ford, that he couldn't chew gum and walk at the same time.

With the the most popular sites in the liberal blogosphere transfixed by the fight for full healthcare (a noble cause), and various trivial scandals (e.g., the latest Kayne statement, or the Joe Wilson "no"), articles on the war, or on torture and attacks on civil liberties are left to a committed but small handful of bloggers.

In the 1960s, an old peacenik slogan went: "what if they gave a war and nobody came?" Today, in the 00s, one could rewrite that: "what if they gave a war and tortured prisoners, and kidnapped people and locked them up forever, shredding age-old rights protections, like habeas corpus, and nobody gave a damn?" No wonder Obama isn't afraid to escalate the war in Afghanistan, even when his head general says that the terrorist Al Qaeda isn't even a real presence there anymore.

You'd think I'd have to make up ironies like this last point, but no need to anymore, not in an America that is unconscious of itself, like a big, lumbering, destructive lunatic on a binge, afraid of itself and of the world in general, but unable to exercise self-reflection, or correct course before it is too late.

AlterNet: "Inside Story on Town Hall Riots"

Adele M. Stan has put together an organizational analysis of the right-wing campaigners who are whipping up reactionary, ostensible "grassroots" disruptions at Democratic Party town-meeings on the healthcare reform issue. AlterNet, who published the story, is touting the article as must-reading, and I agree.

See Inside Story on Town Hall Riots: Right-Wing Shock Troops Do Corporate America's Dirty Work (a portion of which is excerpted here):

All of the narratives today embraced by the ResistNet, FreedomWorks and the Glenn Beck crowd find their legs in the one-man clearinghouse that is Howard Phillips.

Through his Conservative Caucus, Phillips disseminated the "birther" theory that Obama is not an American citizen, gave right-wing operative Cliff Kincaid an award for researching Obama's alleged socialist roots, and for years has railed against "socialized medicine" -- even arguing that Medicare is unconstitutional and warning darkly of a time when the government might determine who shall live and who shall die.

"[W]hen the supply of medical care is controlled by politicians and bureaucrats," Phillips told a 1997 gathering of his Conservative Caucus Foundation, "and the demand for that care exceeds the supply, then individual human beings created in God's image become price factors in the eyes of medical gatekeepers -- they're not even medical, they're bureaucratic gatekeepers -- who determine medical decisions not on the basis of medical needs, but on the basis of bureaucratic priorities."

Phillips' disdain for feminists is palpable, and his language about LGBT people, routinely labeled on his Web site as "perverts," "homos" and "sodomites" is contemptible. He refers to Planned Parenthood as "Murder Incorporated."

I called Phillips for comment on this article, but he was en route to Mexico where he has convened a press conference to protest the nonexistent North American Union, another right-wing conspiracy theory. (Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, is an invited speaker.)

Phillips advanced the career of Randall Terry, founder of the militant anti-aborton group Operation Rescue. At one point, it seemed that his U.S. Taxpayer's Party was to Operation Rescue what Sinn Fein is to the Irish Republican Army -- the political wing of a movement steeped in violence. (In Terry's case, the violence was in rhetoric and obstruction designed to incite others to act.)

Conspiracy of Silence

On Aug. 4, Terry, who is seeking to make a comeback with his new organization, Operation Rescue Insurrecta Nex, sent out an e-mail blast urging followers to attend health care town halls convened by members of Congress.

Trotting out the trope the that health-care reform bills provide for taxpayer-funded abortions, he urges his followers:

Stir up some dust!

Be "unreasonable!"

In fact, you might want to be a little noisier and a little more intense than you might normally be.

I put it this way: If you were in danger of being murdered, and I could possibly save you at a town hall meeting, how would you want people to behave in a town hall meeting?

At a July press conference, Terry warned of "random acts of violence" that would occur if the health-care bill passed. There would be violent "reprisals against those deemed guilty," he said.

Think Terry's too out on the fringe to matter? Think again. When AlterNet reported that the Supreme Court nomination hearing of Judge Sonia Sotomayor was being disrupted by Terry's followers, not one Republican senator condemned him by name.

When Terry staged a demonstration outside the White House featuring men in Obama masks "whipping" him, not a distancing word was placed between him and the GOP establishment.

And now he is promulgating the false Republican claim that health-care reform will mean socialized euthanasia for the aged.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin also has links to Phillips; for seven years, her husband, Todd, claimed membership in the Alaska affiliate of the Constitution Party -- the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, whose convention Palin addressed last year via video.

Every other day, it seems, I receive an e-mail from one right-wing organization or another, warning of the grave consequences of health-insurance reform.

The subject line in an e-mail from Human Events magazine screams at me "Grandmas and babies exterminated by Obama 'health' plan," even as another of its e-mails asks, "Obama birth certificate destroyed?" The anti-gay American Family Association warns: "Liberals seek to silence and demonize those who oppose their socialism."

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council sent a plea for money to finance a television ad that features an elderly couple complaining of the government's denial of surgery for the man while financing abortion with taxpayer dollars.

Think these organizations are not the Republican establishment? Consider that the annual Values Voter Summit sponsored by the Family Research Council's PAC will feature former "moderate" GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a keynote speaker.

In the corridors of Washington's K Street lobbying offices, in the district offices of Republican members of Congress, and in the executive suite of one singular mogul, the men of power must be well-pleased with themselves, watching YouTube videos of the mayhem they have unleashed on the rest of us. But they may just get their pound of flesh.

Lewis Black on Heatlh Care Reform

H/T Bruin Kid