Tag: Ronald Reagan

The Single Payer Scourge.

There is already a very large single payer health care system operating in this country.  It’s called Medicare.   It has been around since 1965, beginning 44 years ago.  The relevant Wikipedia article reads, in part…

“Medicare is a social insurance program administered by the United States government, providing health insurance coverage to people who are aged 65 and over, or who meet other special criteria. Medicare operates as a single-payer health care system …(emphasis mine).”

Did you note that the first sentence described Medicare as a “social insurance program?”  If the talking heads on the major television networks are to be believed, doesn’t that sound like socialism, which is at least a first cousin, if not an identical or fraternal twin of communism?  

Bill Moyers-James Thindwa

James Thindwa, whose campaign for economic fairness for working people in Chicago has brought him up against the city’s powerful political establishment and corporate giant Wal-Mart.

“”Your average person is getting up every day to go to work, and to care for a family, doesn’t have a lobbyist in Washington. They don’t have a lobbyist in the city council. They don’t have a lobbyist at the state legislature. The community organization gathers facts for them. They call meetings. They invite people to come. They invite elected officials to come, attend those meetings, so that they can listen to the community’s grievance. It makes for participation.””>>>>Read Transcript & Watch

Sister Ortiz

“I intend to speak the truth to you tonight. It’s not pleasant, and certainly for me…It’s very painful. However, it is my hope, my prayer, that by being here tonight, I can open the door, provide you with a tiny glimpse of the tortured and of our moral and Christian responsibilities, to not only oppose, but to prevent torture.”

What – no AstroGlide?

Who manage to get appointed to plume federal jobs, that we pay the salaries for, by the way.

I just caught this little gem a few minutes ago, will FOX and O’Really be reporting on this, seems right up the O’s alley.

Ronald Reagan came into office with three major ideas in mind. Vastly expand defense spending, cut taxes on the wealthy, and do something about the annual budget deficit, then hovering around $80 billion a year. He did increase defense spending, something rightwingers still like to falsely claim sent the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. And he did cut the top tax rate from 70% to 50% to 38% to 28%, giving already wealthy Americans gigantic increases in income while starting us down the road toward a Third World skewing of the ratio between rich and poor. He achieved this with the assistance of more borrowing than all the Presidents who had preceded him. Compared with the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania, however, Reagan was a piker.

The Great Communicator had image-conscious speechwriters. When Reagan first addressed Congress in February 1981, he said:

I’ve been trying … to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion is.  The best that I could come up with is that if you had a stack of $1000 bills in your hand only four inches high you would be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of $1000-dollar bills 67 miles high.

Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, before a television audience, President Ronald Reagan initiated one of the grandest defense boondoggles of all time, the Strategic Defense Initiative. Like many boondoggles, it was couched in sweet talk and lies:

The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor. We maintain our strength in order to deter and defend against aggression — to preserve freedom and peace. …

What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?

I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of the century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it’s reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of efforts on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.

Those lines and the rest of the speech sure sounded good to many. As had been the case almost since the arrival of Werner von Braun and the other V-2 rocket engineers at the end of World War II, when it came to space, America talked peace and prepared for war. After sputnik went beeping around the planet every 96 minutes in 1957, the effort was greatly intensified, always with the threat of Soviet attack as the rationale. This was true whether it was JFK campaigning about a bogus “missile gap” or a 1980s Pentagon inflating Moscow’s military power at the urging of the Committee on the Present Danger’s nascent neo-conservatives. Reagan’s speech was nothing new on that score.

In fact, U.S. talk about putting weapons onto the ultimate high ground of outer space started well before President Reagan gave his Star Wars speech. In 1947, German Major General Walter Dornberger, who had headed the Nazi rocket program, began officially advising the U.S. Air Force. Like any good Nazi, he recommended putting nuclear bombs into orbit to attack Soviet cities and military installations. He also proposed a space-based defense against missiles, an orbiting ring of hundreds of satellites, sentries armed with small rockets capable of destroying enemy ICBMs.

And Immigration.

Think they don’t mix?

Well, GOP lobbyist had no work permit

And guess who he worked for:

Today Bob Herbert takes his whack at the “Ronald Reagan didn’t use racist tactics” piñata. He scores a  direct hit:

To see Reagan’s appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in its proper context, it has to be placed between the murders of the civil rights workers that preceded it and the acknowledgment by the Republican strategist Lee Atwater that the use of code words like “states’ rights” in place of blatantly bigoted rhetoric was crucial to the success of the G.O.P.’s Southern strategy. That acknowledgment came in the very first year of the Reagan presidency.

Ronald Reagan was an absolute master at the use of symbolism. It was one of the primary keys to his political success.

The suggestion that the Gipper didn’t know exactly what message he was telegraphing in Neshoba County in 1980 is woefully wrong-headed. Wishful thinking would be the kindest way to characterize it.

Thank you Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman. Shame on you David Brooks.