Jailed for justice — this time on Facebook

March 13, 2019 a world of progress, letters, media, progressive living, progressive media center One comment

The US Chamber was so deeply offended by my comments about health care that it apparently reported me to Facebook and I am in jail for I don’t know how long.

I went to post something this morning on Facebook only to discover I can’t post, comment or even like anything.

I’m afraid I’ve been a bad girl. See, the US Chamber of Commerce has been boosting a post about how I need to tell my member of Commerce how terrible a not-for-profit health care system would be and how it would hurt so many businesses.

The damn thing has been on my timeline five or more times every day, so I started commenting on it, mentioning how many people die each year so these businesses — insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers — can make obscene profits while parents like me watch their children die from lack of access to care, about how people with insurance still can’t afford their medications or even recommended care.

I did it three times in the last two days and suddenly, big business is so deeply offended it reports me for harassment. Like their lies on my timeline every day aren’t offensive. Like they’re not being intrusive by spending tens of thousands of dollars to get their lies on everybody’s timeline. I call them out and I get silenced.

So, my son is dead from this for-profit mess and I have to see these US Chamber of Commerce posts all over my timeline, but if I reply with a critical comment, I get booted.

Well, I won’t be silent, not about health care or minimum wage or voting rights, about our so-called justice system, about our violation of human rights in the way we jail immigrant children who have been ripped from their parents’ arms so for-profit prisons can abuse them, or about education or the environment. And I especially will not be silent about the corporate takeover of our government and of every aspect of our lives.

I won’t be silent about Big Business’s takeover of the Democratic Party and the party’s abandonment of its traditional values (check out the 1976 party platform for a synopsis of what our values were just 40 years ago).

And the DNC needs to know that I will not vote for a candidate who will not commit to Medicare for All in the next two years (it’s a big effort, so I’ll allow up to two years to get it up and running), an immediate raise to a $15 minimum wage, with annual $1 raises until the wage reaches what it would be if it had been tied to inflation ($23 right now) and passage of the election reform law the Democrats approved in the House and Mitch McConnell is blocking in the Senate. That has to be followed by a credible effort to address climate change NOW.

The vast majority of Americans want Medicare for All — 70 percent overall, and 52 percent among Republicans. If the DNC continues to try and paint this as leftist and radical, it does not deserve to win an election ever again.

We are not radicals for wanting these things. We should not allow ourselves to be portrayed as such.

When we see articles like the one that appeared in the NY Times in Sunday and one that ran in the Washington Post yesterday, claiming a “centrist” is the only candidate that can defeat the creature currently squatting in the White House, we need to rise up and demand more.

Our positions are reasonable on these issues; the DNC positions are not.

You can try to silence me, but I won’t shut up. I won’t go away. I will continue to call out the lies of the oligarchs who are in control of this country right now until they’re defeated or until they kill me.

And here’s why:

Eleven years ago today, I still held out faint hope that I would have a few months left with my son. We hoped to take a road trip to New England and New York so he could see family and friends there one last time. He needed to gain 2 pounds before his next chemo appointment.

But it was not to be. In six days we would learn that the chemo wasn’t working.

On this day 11 years ago, we had just 20 days left with my son.

 

You’ll never convince Fox News lovers they’re being lied to

May 2, 2018 a world of progress, letters, media, progressive living, progressive media center No comments

Robert Mueller is not a crook, he is not incompetent. He has been a Republican and a war hero. He’s someone the right should love, but Fox News has succeeded in making him into a villain. (Image from The Blaze)

Let’s get a few things straight here.

Robert Mueller has some pretty damning stuff by all accounts. However, we don’t know what it is he has on the creature currently squatting in the White House and his cabal of crooks and liars.

I venture into Right Wing World occasionally when I see a post from one of my conservative friends that leaves me scratching my head.

“Oh, the witch hunt is over now!” or “This proves that traitor Mueller has nothing!”

I’ll just Google whatever their topic is and find the lie they’re crowing about. Sometimes I’ll comment with the truth, but mostly I just keep scrolling because you can’t argue with people who are operating from a base of Fox News lies. You can, however, post the truth on your own news feed.

My son is more in tune with the right-wing than I am because he was a Republican until the rise of this thug. And as much as my son hates him, he still hears most of what the right has to say, and he still believes some of it.

Stuff like: “It’s all based on the Steele Dossier and all of that is illegally obtained.”

Don’t ask me why they’re saying that, but I have it from a reliable source, even though I can’t watch Fox News myself.

The raid on the office of Michael Cohen wasn’t based on the Steele Dossier. It was based on decades of dirty dealing in the Southern District of New York, and if the creature fires Mueller now and seals all his records, there’s nothing he and his thugs can do about the evidence in New York.

And although the creature tweets almost daily that he’s not guilty of anything, he well might be. Even if no crime was committed, it is still illegal to try to impede an investigation.

We need to understand what the creature is doing here because fascists and petty dictators do this all the time. They discredit the media by claiming the most reliable and venerated members of the press are lying. Keep repeating that same lie over and over and over again and people will believe it.

Keep claiming an investigation of very real crimes is nothing more than a witch hunt and you may have enough people believing that the FBI and the officials in the Southern District of New York are corrupt and maybe you can prosecute them for”crimes” and maybe get away with your crimes.

The creature is a pathological liar. He has been caught in lies thousands of times since he took the oath of office. But Sean Hannitty, et al, keep defending him and their followers just trot merrily along behind.

They are dismantling our once great nation bit by bit. This administration is the culmination of a decades-long conspiracy by the oligarchs to take over control of the country and dismantle all our social programs so they can create a permanent underclass to serve them.

Look at what we have already: A minimum wage that’s just one-third of what it would have been if it had kept pace with inflation; a de-funding of the public education system that they don’t want or need, since they send their children to private schools that the rest of us can’t afford; cut after cut after cut to nutrition programs that feed low-income people; trade agreements that benefit them but send all our living-wage jobs overseas, where workers are paid even less than our minimum wage; privatization of the military and our prisons and the gutting of the one law that gave us some real improvements in access to health care.

To seal their power, they have attacked voting rights and now they’re stacking the courts to keep those unconstitutional laws on the books.

Robert Mueller is not a crook, he is not incompetent. He has been a Republican and a war hero. He’s someone the right should love. (Image from The Blaze)

The constant state of alert caused by the shitstorm in the White House is meant to distract us from what’s really happening.

And now the people who perpetrated the dismantling of the middle class are jumping ship. They’ve done the damage and it will take decades to rebuild — if we ever can.

So, what can we do? Support legitimate journalism. Do your homework when you see something you want to share on social media. Check for other sources of that information. Google it, check on Snopes.com or another reliable web site.

It’s bad enough that the right has people only believing Fox News and its approved sources; we don’t have to buy into that. I sent something to a conservative the other day and he claimed it was an unreliable liberal source because it came from the Washington Post. It was an op-ed piece by a Republican, but he wouldn’t believe it because it came from the Washington Post.

And above all, VOTE. Yes, the Democrats are controlled by Wall Street, but they are better than the right, and we can oust them, too, if they don’t start to undo some of this damage.

We can’t afford to perpetuate the ignorance coming from the right. We have to look for — and broadcast — the truth.

The truth is that we as a free nation are at great risk, and it may be too late already to save us.

 

Roger Ailes is dead, thank God

May 18, 2017 a world of progress, letters, media, progressive living, progressive media center No comments

Yes, I know we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, and I never wished him dead, but I’m relieved he’s gone.

This is a man who lead the charge on the dismantling of our Democracy. Ever since he made Richard Nixon look pretty, he has led America down the path of fascism disguised as conservatism.

My father was a conservative, but he never denied science. He knew the dangers of pollution and climate change. He knew poor people needed a hand sometimes and that workers deserved a living wage.

My father didn’t want to know what went on behind people’s bedroom doors because it was none of his business, and the only marriage he worried about was his own. He was happy to pay into Social Security and Medicaid, even though he only lived to age 67.

My father was a newsman who never watched Fox News because, even though he was conservative, he could spot a lie a mile away, and Fox News was all about lies.

Roger Ailes built a “news” channel that peddled lies about climate change, about taxes, about immigrants, about the “need” for wars and about poor people.

In this most recent election, the lies were about Hillary Clinton. The e-mail server she used was the same kind of server used by Colin Powell when he was Secretary of State, but Fox never mentioned that.

Three Americans died in Benghazi, and that’s a tragedy, but more than 50 Americans died at embassies around the world under George W. Bush. and that was never mentioned on Fox. Some 250 US Marines died in Beirut in the early 1980s and Ronald Reagan took responsibility, although no one criticized him or called him a criminal because of it.

Ailes, himself a sexual predator, may not have supported the sexual predator in chief before the Republican National Convention, but once the nomination was secure, Ailes allowed the criminal who currently occupies the White House to slide on any number of issues so that Republicans could take power once again.

Ailes was never punished for his crimes. He was fired from Fox News, but he died a free — and wealthy — man.

The lies his network perpetuated allowed the current occupant of the White House to get there. Slowly, over the course of many years, Fox News has misinformed Americans and encouraged people to dismiss the truth as “the other side of the story.”

This is largely why I left the news business. I was being pressured to quote Tea Party lies as “the other side of the story,” when they were lies, pure and simple. If I quoted them, I also debunked them because sometimes “the other side of the story” is nothing more than a bald-faced lie.

He led Americans to deny science and to the view that a belief holds as much weight as a fact.

The Earth is billions of years old, not 6,000.

Evolution is real; creationism is a myth.

Climate change is real, so real that our planet could become uninhabitable from the changes in 100 years or so.

But Ailes’ followers continue to fight — and vote — against their own best interests.

When you cut taxes on the wealthy, nothing trickles down.

When workers don’t make a living wage, the economy suffers because nobody can afford to buy anything.

Poor people are not lazy.

Unions protected workers from the unfettered greed of the 1 percent.

These things are all true, even though Fox tells people every day that they are not, and people believe it.

One study showed that people who watch Fox News exclusively knew less than people who watch no news at all.

Ailes knew that if he could divide people, if he could make “ordinary” people hate the “elites,” he and his cronies could win. He was stunningly successful, and that’s why we have a mentally ill criminal in the White House, and a Speaker of the House who brags he wanted to kill Medicaid when he was a college frat boy getting trashed at keg parties.

The damage done by this one man is hard to measure. I never wished him dead, but I’m relieved he’s gone.

 

The deceitful, shameful, hate-filled NC GOP played us again

December 22, 2016 a world of progress, letters, media, progressive living, progressive media center No comments

Late in the afternoon Wednesday, state representatives waited for word that the Senate had taken action to repeal HB2. The Senate didn’t do its job.

I don’t know why anyone thought the North Carolina Republicans could be trusted.

Again and again, they have played us for fools, and we keep thinking they might do the right thing, just once.

Nope.

The GOP leaders brokered a deal with Governor-elect Roy Cooper and the City of Charlotte, and yesterday, they reneged on the deal.

So, first, some background:

Earlier this year, Charlotte passed a law offering protection to transgender people, codifying their ability to use the rest room of the gender with which they identify. Immediately, the NC General Assembly was called into special session and the GOP rammed through a bill, known as HB2, that nullified Charlotte’s law.

But there’s more. The so-called Bathroom Bill was about a lot more than bathrooms. It robbed local governments of the ability to set a minimum wage higher than that of the state. It robbed local governments of the ability to pass any non-discrimination legislation. It robbed workers of the ability to sue employers for discrimination in state courts.

Retribution was swift. States began banning business travel to North Carolina. Sports organizations pulled their games and tournaments from the state, costing us tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

And the whole rest of the world saw us as backward and hateful.

And while the majority of North Carolinians are not backward and hateful, the state Republican Party has gerrymandered voting districts so that it takes more than two Democratic votes to do the same thing as one Republican vote. They they passed a law that would make it more difficult for African-Americans, students and the elderly to vote (because these groups tend to vote for Democrats).

The voting districts have been struck down twice by the courts, and the state will have to redistrict yet again and pay for another election in the fall of 2017 because the 2016 election was so tainted by the districts as the GOP drew them.

The federal courts also struck down most of the provisions in the voting law.

Gov. McCrory, the only governor in the country to lose re-election, was defeated because of HB2.

So, last week, McCrory called another special session to pass legislation to send much needed help to areas of the state devastated by flooding from Hurricane Matthew and by recent wildfires.

The GOP used that special session to call another special session, in which they stripped power from the incoming governor. Then they went home, and McCrory signed the bill.

News came on Monday that the General Assembly was willing to repeal HB2 — the entire thing — if Charlotte would agree to repeal its anti-discrimination law. The incoming governor urged the city to take the deal, and Charlotte repealed its ordinance.

I went to Raleigh, hoping to witness the GOP doing the right thing for once, but I came home disappointed.

Instead of the clean repeal of the bill that was promised, Republicans added an amendment that would have prevented local governments from passing any anti-discrimination ordinances for six months.

Democrats balked, and rightly so. The so-called cooling-off period was not part of the deal, and the whole idea of repeal was so that cities and counties could have the autonomy to ban discrimination.

Republicans doubled down, amending the amendment to extend the “cooling-off” period to 30 days beyond the end of the 2017 legislative session. It also would have given them the option to extend the moratorium again and again.

In other words, the GOP was never sincere about working with Democrats.

Rev. William Barber, president of the state NAACP, issued a statement after the session closed.

“Our elected officials should have worked to protect all the people of North Carolina but instead they wasted our time and tax money,” the statement read in part. “Both the House and the Senate’s all white Republican caucus have proven that they are not fit to govern North Carolina.”

Toward the end of the special session, which cost taxpayers $42,000, Republicans in the Senate stood up and insulted everyone who disagrees with their narrow-hate-filled vision of what North Carolina should be. They called us lunatics and accused us of being “under the influence of California and other places.”

They lied through their teeth about what had happened during the day, even though we who sat in the Gallery witnessed it.

After the Senate failed to pass the repeal, I spoke to Rep. Chris Sgro, who is a gay man and executive director of Equality NC, and he held out hope that something good could come of the special session.

It turned out his hope was misplaced, along with the hopes of the hundreds of North Carolinians who came out to witness the state GOP finally doing the right thing.

This state’s Republican Party is incapable of doing the right thing. Its leadership is made up of lying, thieving, narrow-minded thugs who care nothing for the people of this state — they people they are supposed to serve.

I was there yesterday. All day and into the evening. I saw what happened.

Once again, we were betrayed.

 

Trump’s words were not just idle chatter

October 13, 2016 a world of progress, letters, media, progressive living, progressive media center One comment
I believe the women.

I believe the women.

As an increasing number of women come out and say Donald Trump assaulted them, some of his supporters still snort and say he’s innocent of such things.

But let me tell you, I believe the women. The former writer for People Magazine painted a picture so real I felt like I was watching a video clip.

I have been a woman in the workplace and I know what unwelcome advances are like.

There was the supervisor who turned down the heat in the office so he could see women’s erect nipples. When one of us overheard him bragging about it, we all started wearing loose sweatshirts at our desks.

Then there was Bob, a man at a small newspaper who pursued me every damn day for weeks, even taking to calling me at home with lewd suggestions. When I reported him to the publisher, the man said, “Oh, that’s just Bob.”

So, I went back to my desk, and within a few minutes, Bob was there, suggesting we take a couple hours away from the office.

I asked for his home phone number, and, leering, he gave it to me. I stood up.

“Attention, everyone,” I said. “I need witnesses to this.”

I turned to Bob.

“If you ever utter another word to me that isn’t work-related, I will call your wife. I will tell her what hell you have put me through here at work, and I’ll bet I can find other women to back me up.”

Bob skulked away and behaved himself after that, but I found another job as quickly as I could because I didn’t want to be in the same town as Bob anymore.

Another time, while I was on a sales call, a man cornered me and started groping and trying to kiss me. I managed to get away and he made some remark about how he understood why I was divorced because I was a “frigid bitch.”

My boss found out about it and went to visit the offender, offering to take a baseball bat to the creep if he ever made a move on a person in his employ again. I didn’t need my boss to do that, but it was nice to know a man in a position of authority had respect for me.

There was the company president who didn’t hire me because he didn’t like having women work for him because of their “monthly unreliability.”

I was fired once because the boss thought my shoes were “slutty.”

I have been paid less than men doing the same work because of my gender.

I have been called Baby and Honey and Sweetie.

I have been talked over and interrupted as though my professional opinion meant nothing.

I have been groped and pinched.

I have been molested.

I have been raped.

Women don’t make this shit up, and when a man admits he can kiss a woman without permission, that he can grab her genitalia, simply because he wants to and he can get away with it because he’s rich and/or famous, that doesn’t come from thin air.

Yes, men talk smack and exaggerate, but when women start coming forward with stories as detailed as these women, when first one, then another, and then another come forward with credible, creepy stories, I tend to believe them.

Don’t start talking to me about Bill Clinton or Bill Cosby as though I somehow defended their behavior because I never have. I have only said that Clinton’s Oval Office blow job was consensual, which it was.

If Trump were running for dogcatcher, perhaps his utter disrespect for women wouldn’t make a difference, although he still wouldn’t get my vote.

But he is running for President of the United States, and he actually has millions of supporters — or at least millions who think he’s somehow a better choice than his opponent.

This is just another example of the rape culture that is so pervasive in American society now. We believe men who make comments like this and then say they were “only kidding,” but we either refuse to believe women who say they have been assaulted or we blame them.

We tell them they were wearing the wrong thing or we were in the wrong place (alone with a male colleague in his office, for example). We shouldn’t have accepted that invitation to talk about an ad campaign over dinner or to work on a project after hours so we could make a deadline.

Or in the case of the People reporter, we interview a man for a story. As a former reporter, I can attest to the fear we sometimes feel when we land alone with someone we think might be a predator. I made it a practice to do interviews in a public place or with people nearby who could hear me if I screamed. I never let story subjects buy me a meal.

Still, there were plenty of men who made suggestive remarks (although there were fewer as I got older) when they thought no one could hear.

So, why don’t we say something then and there?

Because he’s more powerful than we are and he could ruin us, and to defend himself, he probably will. Because we know we’ll catch the blame for the incident in the end.

If you want to support Trump, that’s your choice. If you believe he’s innocent of all charges, fine. Believe what you want. It’s your vote.

However, if you come onto one of my posts on social media and start telling me I have no right to be creeped out by this monster, I will block you.

If you troll on another woman’s post in the same manner, I will block you. Because if you have so little respect for women that you can’t understand why we find him abhorrent in what he says and does, I have nothing in common with you.

My experience with men like Trump is real and I will not allow anyone to invalidate it.

 

 

 

A little R-E-S-P-E-C-T, please

April 20, 2016 a world of progress, letters, media, progressive living, progressive media center No comments
Here we are, about to go into Sen. Thom Tillis's office for some disrespect and verbal abuse.

Here we are, about to go into Sen. Thom Tillis’s office for some disrespect and verbal abuse.

I went to Washington, DC, for the final day of Democracy Awakening with the NC NAACP, and it was a glorious, frustrating, infuriating and affirming day.

The bus arrived in time for the rally at Columbus Circle, which was followed by a march to the U.S. Capitol, where about 300 or so people were arrested for standing on the steps of OUR building. While that was going on, the rest of the crowd of more than 1,000 people was pushed back 500 or so feet by the Capitol Police. It make the crowd look smaller when it was filmed by the few media outlets that were there to cover it.

I brought along a documentary film-maker, a 28-year-old student at UNC Asheville named Robin, who hasn’t done a lot of activism. She’ll do more if she continues to hang out with me.

After the rally, most of our group went to the Russell Senate Office Building, hoping to get some time with one or both of our senators, while Robin and I stayed to get some shots of Rev. Dr. William Barber, president of the NC NAACP, and Rev. Dr. Cornell Brooks, the national NAACP president, as they gave statements after being released from custody.

The purpose of all this is to try and get Big Money out of politics. Once we do that, we can begin to fix the mess the uber-wealthy have created for the rest of us.

When Robin and I finally made it to the Senate Cafeteria, we were just in time to join the group for an appointment at Sen. Thom Tillis’s office.

Now, Tillis doesn’t care for us Moral Monday folks. He literally ran away from us a number of times when he was Speaker of the House in North Carolina. As a Senator, he has refused delivery of petitions from us, having a staffer tell us to mail it in.

I don’t think he expected the NC NAACP delegation to join the Democracy Uprising people, although I can’t believe how he couldn’t figure out we would hook up.

But, there we were, about 25 of us, ushered into a conference room where we met with a low-level staffer.

She proceeded to roll her eyes a lot and ask insulting questions. One example was when she asked where we get the money for public campaign financing. Vicki Ryder, a Raging Granny, member of the NC NAACP and fellow Moral Monday activist, suggested we could shut down the building of outdated and unnecessary fighter jets or shut down a few of the 1,000-plus bases we have around the world, and this staffer looked incredulous as she said, “Defense? You’re talking about eliminating the defense budget?”

Of course she knew no one was talking about eliminating the Department of Defense or disbanding the military. She just didn’t know she was talking to people who are well informed and not easily intimidated.

She didn’t look at people who spoke to her and her facial expression was one of utter contempt for all of us. She rolled her eyes at everything we had to say.

When we started to talk about giving the president’s Supreme Court nominee a hearing, she said something about “let the people choose.” Four of us at once said, “The people have chosen.”

I mentioned that Tillis had said right after Antonin Scalia died that blocking a hearing would be obstructionist, and she denied he ever said it.

But of course, we do have recording devices in this day and age, and we all know he said it and then backed down, probably under pressure from party leaders.

Several people said they remembered him saying it and she said, “no he didn’t,” as though repeating her lie would somehow make us back down. It reminded me of the Monty Python skit in which people could pay John Cleese to argue with them. It was that ridiculous.

“Yes he did.”

“No he didn’t.”

“I could look it up. He said it.”

“No he didn’t.”

(But, in fact, you can hear him say just that on the Tom Cralle Show at http://soundcloud.com/tylercralle. Scroll down to the first Thom Tillis interview and listen. I didn’t link to it here here because it comes up as a huge photo of Cralle, but type or copy and paste it into your browser, and there you have it. )

I came thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis close to saying, “You’re a fucking liar and you know it.”

Rather than show as much disrespect to her as she was showing to us, I clenched my jaw, picked up my camera bag and said politely, “Excuse me, I have to leave now.”

I walked out of the room to find more Moral Monday friends from the NC Council of Churches in the waiting room and in the hallway. A few seconds later, Robin emerged from the meeting. We warned them to take several dep, cleansing breaths before going in because they were going to need it.

“I wasn’t as nice as you were,” Robin said to me. “I’m so mad I’m shaking. How can people be so disrespectful. She was utterly contemptuous.”

What made the experience even more surreal for her was the dead possum on the wall that she kept hitting with her head. I really wish I had gotten a picture of that before I was told to put down my camera.

Naturally, we weren’t allowed to record any of this because, as Tillis already knows, recordings can come back and bite you in the ass.

Richard Burr’s people were no more in agreement with us than Tillis’s automaton, but they were polite and respectful. The staffer who met with us took notes, handed out his card and said, “This isn’t my area of expertise, but I will pass on what you have to say here and you can e-mail or call me with any more questions.”

I left that office knowing I disagree with the senator, but a bit less angry and frustrated than I had been with Tillis.

I left Washington once again fired up to register people to vote, to fight voter suppression, to fight Big Money and to work for a more just society.

As we say in the Moral Monday Movement:

Forward together! Not one step back!

Anger and lies on the right

September 27, 2013 a world of progress, letters, progressive living No comments

As the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces finally open for business, opponents of health reform are getting desperate.

Take, for example, the 21-hour circus sideshow fake filibuster by Texas Republican Ted Cruz in the Senate.

Take the willingness of Republicans to take down the entire government in a desperate last-ditch effort to kill the law.

Look at the TV ads with the frightening Uncle Sam head popping up behind a doctor’s examining table.

In the last week, my son read stories about how Georgia will be the most expensive state in the county to buy insurance. I did some reading on my own and found the numbers in the story were NOT the average prices but the worst-case scenario — you know, someone my age who would not be eligible for assistance.

In fact, Georgia is not the most expensive, it’s the middle of the the pack, and if you make less than four times the federal poverty level (about $46,000 for an individual, $60,000 for a couple and $93,000 for a family of four), you will get help paying for your premiums.

Then yesterday, I heard North Carolina will be the most expensive. Look at the graphic here. It’s in the middle of the pack too, along with California and New York. I’ll bet they have similar misinformation campaigns in every state.

In all, prices are about 16 percent below what was first predicted. Granted, it’s not cheap, but for most people, it will be affordable. The hysterics are nothing more than lies perpetrated by the very people who want the law gone. These are the people who are going around telling young adults to “burn your Obamacare draft card.”

I suppose people could do that if there were an Obamacare draft card, but there isn’t.

Those creepy Uncle Sam head TV ads also are lies. You will buy your insurance from a private company and you will see your own doctor.

Your insurance company can no longer deny necessary treatment, thanks to the law.

They can’t charge you a co-pay for annual physicals, cancer and other screenings or immunizations, thanks to the law.

They can’t put annual or lifetime caps on coverage.

They can’t throw you to the curb if you get sick.

They have to pay out 80 to 85 percent of what they collect in premiums on direct services.

And they don’t like all this regulation because it cuts into their obscene profits.

Because of all the money spent to spread the misinformation, 70 percent of the people who are eligible for help in paying for their premiums don’t know it. More than one-third of Americans think the law was repealed.

The truth is the Republicans in the House of Representatives have voted 41 times to repeal the law, but have failed to get it done, thank God.

The truth is that 45,000 Americans died in this country every year from lack of access to care before the Affordable Care Act, and thousands will continue to die because of GOP-led efforts to deny Medicaid expansion.

These are not pro-life people, no matter what they say. I have had some argue that point with me, but the truth is that if you want to deny people access to life-saving care, if you lie to convince people not to take advantage of access to care, you are not pro-life, no matter how much you love unborn babies.

 

 

 

Too crazy

October 10, 2012 a world of progress, letters, progressive living No comments

Rep. Paul Broun from Georgia, says he believes people existed with dinosaurs. He is on the Science Committee in Congress.

A generation ago, someone who doesn’t believe in evolution wouldn’t have been on the Science Committee in Congress, and someone who espouses the death penalty for sassy children would have been laughed out of the public eye.

A generation ago, the media might have called Mitt Romney out on his lies during the debate instead of declaring him the winner. And a candidate who was caught in the number of flat-out lies and scope of deception of the Romney campaign would have been shamed out of the campaign long before the convention.

We used to have something called common sense that helped us weed out the crazies; now we seem to welcome them with open arms.

The guys who claim women can’t get pregnant from “real” rape get to stay in the race and maybe even win the election.

We who fought for women’s rights in the 1960s thought we had won some of these battles — like the right to access to contraception and safe abortions, and the right to keep our jobs regardless of whether we’re on the Pill and not married.

I can actually remember when a woman could be forced to quit her job if she got pregnant because she belonged at home with her baby. It wasn’t her decision to make; her boss could make it for her.

Blatant lies like the ones put out there about the Affordable Care Act — the death panels, the $716 billion “theft” from Medicare — used to be dispelled by the media, which now repeats them over and over as “the other side of the story.”

Our previous president lied us into war, tortured prisoners and suffered no consequences for his war crimes. Our current president kills innocent people with unmanned drones on a regular basis and it doesn’t even make headlines.

Instead, we get to hear all about which celebrity is looking at jail time for drug abuse, who is divorcing whom, who wore the lowest-cut dress to whatever awards ceremony last week, cute fuzzy-puppy stories from Middle America and sports, sports, sports.

We are obsessed with Honey Boo-Boo and America’s Got Talent, but we can’t be bothered with the real issues long enough to demand that the corporate media explain the real ramifications of public policy instead of giving equal weight to the truth and the lies.

Instead of a media that searches for truth, we get a lying sack of crap declared the winner of a debate because he looked “sharper.”

I worry about this country’s future as people lose access to real information about real issues. Even the president is out there talking about Big Bird. Drop it already and talk about how we lower our military spending, make huge corporations behave and pay their share of the public load, regulate their greed-induced ill behavior and invest in education and other things that ensure a stable future for our children and families, not to mention our nation.

 

“Wonky?” What about the lies?

October 5, 2012 a world of progress, letters, progressive living One comment

Today’s paper had a headline on the front page: “Debate reveals Romney’s wonky side.”

I don’t know if I would call it wonky to stand up there and lie for 90 minutes.

If you look for the headline online, you won’t find it, but it’s there in the print edition.

I’ll admit Obama wasn’t at his best, and if Romney had told the truth at all, I would give the debate win to him.

But he didn’t. Here’s just a sample, taken from the Daily KOS:

  • When he claimed, “Pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan.” They’re not.
  • When he said President Obama had “cut Medicare by $716 billion to pay for Obamacare.” Obama didn’t.
  • When he denied proposing a $5 trillion tax cut. He did.
  • When he said President Obama had “added almost as much to the federal debt as all the prior presidents combined.” Not even close.
  • When he resurrected “death panels.” That’s been called “one of the biggest whoppers of the night.”
  • When he stated that half the green energy companies given stimulus funds had failed. Only if three out of nearly three dozen is half.

He stood there, smirking, and called President Obama a liar after telling dozens of lies about his policies and refusing again and again to offer specifics about his budget and job creation plans.

If you want to call than wonkish, if you want to call that winning, that’s your call; it isn’t mine.

 

More lies in the mail

October 3, 2012 a world of progress, letters, progressive living No comments

My husband is registered to vote, but not in either party (I’m a registered Democrat; you could look it up). As a result, we get stuff in the mail from both parties.

The ones that get me the most are the lies about health care reform, or “Obamacare.” The latest one repeats the lie that the law will cut Medicare services by $716 billion. It will not. That is an out-and-out lie. No matter how many times they repeat it, it still will be a lie.

The Affordable Care act does NOT cut services for seniors. In fact, services should improve.

For example:

  •  As of Oct. 1, hospitals will be fined if Medicate patients are discharged and then readmitted within 30 days.
  • The Affordable Care Act closes the prescription “doughnut hole” for seniors.
  • Seniors now get their annual checkups with no out-of-pocket costs.
  • It cuts millions of dollars to private, corporate-run “Medicare Advantage” plans, which are more expensive for seniors anyway.

There’s more, but you get the drift. The $716 billion number is actually the estimated amount that will be SAVED by taxpayers over the next 10 years by the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

And as for the “death panels,” that un-elected board will only be gathering data to ascertain the most efficient and effective treatments for various illnesses and disabilities. No one’s actually been doing that.

For example, one hospital in Utah studied treatments for prostate cancer in older men and found that aggressive treatment in older men actually results in worse outcomes than the “watchful waiting” tactic.

The board will not have the authority to limit any treatments but instead will allow doctors to inform patients of the efficacy of various treatments. That’s information I want to have, don’t you?

And yes, Obamacare does raise taxes on prescription drug makers, whose profits are obscene and who are not re-investing those profits back into research. We are the only country in the industrialized world that doesn’t regulate drug prices. I think the least we can do is make these companies pay their fair share in taxes.

So, there you have it, the truth about that flyer you got in the mail yesterday. If you want to know more, go to www.healthcare.gov. The truth is there for you to read.

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