From the party who brought you Willie Horton and 9/11, folks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6vlPTfssEY&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fthinkprogress%2Eorg%2F

Since when is every four-star general an ‘honorable man’ just because he’s a four-star general, in or out of war; and since when does a political organization expressing its opinion constitute ‘treason’? What the hell do you think the military is supposed to fight for if not our rights? Read the Constitution and the military oath of enlistment, Graywolf, if you can get the blinders off your eyes.

One reason that Edwards and Clinton have set up their plans as they have is because they have a shot at getting through Congress which can’t be said for a single-payer or all-Medicare plan. In the Thurs. night PBS debate, not one of the Democratic candidates said they support a single-payer insurance plan, and I’d guess the biggest reason is it has no prayer of passing Congress. We have to get REAL here … would you rather people have NOTHING until you get your ideal plan?

And did you know that Medicare is far from an easy-street plan and that, while seniors love it, it also costs them a pretty penny?

Take one person I know who just signed up. He gets Medicare A free, but it’s extremely limited to hospitalizations and only for a short time. He has to pay $95/month for Medicare B, which helps to cover doctors’ visits, and all laboratory and other tests, as well as physical therapy, walkers, etc. and many other costs. That’s right: Basic Medicare doesn’t cover a PENNY of doctors’ visits, tests, etc. To make up for the huge gap in Medicare A and B coverage, he bought an AARP plan for $146/month.

How does the AARP plan help? If he has an operation, under Medicare A/B, he’d have to fork over $995 before the hospital would admit him. That’s right, under Medicare A, the first $1,000 for hospitalization is up to each senior.

Do you still think Medicare, as it exists, is the simple answer to everyone’s health care coverage?

Then, to get drug coverage, he had to sign up for a Medicare D plan for about $46/month + steep co-pays, and some drugs are not covered at all (on any of the plans). Then there are the donut-hole exemptions in all of the drug plans — and which Hillary Clinton addressed in the PBS debate last Thursday night.

That comes to about $350+/month to get decent coverage under the current system of Medicare.

Imagine that you’re living off Social Security and modest savings, and you have to pay out $350/month to get decent Medicare coverage … or risk having a heart attack or broken hip or something, and having to pay out $1,000 to the hospital off the top.

If you’re hospitalized over 30 days, you have to pay — I forget exactly — about $250/300 PER DAY because Medicare A only covers you for 30 days. And it goes on and on. Medicare is wonderful, but it is extremely LIMITED unless one gets the necessary add-ons.

And do you think a plan that covers all of those necessary add-ons would have a prayer of passing Congress? Think again.

Pretty typical of the no-balls crowd of ex-government pencil-necks who are still whining because Bush didn’t listen to them. Aaaaaaawwwwwww………

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3639624

at around the 18.30 mark:

George Stephanopoulos: Mayor Giuliani also hit you pretty hard for failing early on to condemn that Move-on.org ad which called General Petraeus General Betrayus. Why not speak out earlier?

Hillary Clinton: I don’t condone attacks on any American who has served our country honorably and with dedication the way General Petraeus has. I’ve said over many years how much I admire him, respect him he’s been dealt a difficult hand and you know he’s doing the best job he can under the circumstances. I also don’t condone attacks on great Americans like Max Cleland and John Kerry who’ve also served our country. But this is not a debate about an ad, this is a debate about ending the war in Iraq.

Larry Johnson, September 10: Then we have the fact that Petraeus and company are cherry picking the data and deliberately painting a false, rosy picture that security in Iraq is better and the violence is abating. Dave and his boys achieved this result by excluding car bombs and other sectarian casualties from the calculation.

Me: An honorable man does not cherry-pick data to distort the true picture when our young soldiers are being slaughtered.

Yet Hillary Clinton said it herself today: It’s not about the Move-on ad; Petraeus is an honorable man.

Clinton fails the smell test. She indulges in pander politics.

I doubt I will ever convince the creators of this blog that Senator Clinton is just more of the same old crap the United States has had to endure for the past 20 or 30 years. I trust her as far as I can throw her…and my back would give out before I could even lift her.

To give you an idea of how far this country has drifted into the nutball fringe-right ‘red zone,’ Justice John Paul Stevens was appointed to the Supreme Court by Ford as a conservative Republican — today he is considered one of the most liberal justices on the court.

Take her health plan. Please. The real solution is to cut out the 1/3rd of health care spending currently going to health insurance company profits and administrative overhead by expanding Medicare eligibility to all Americans, not just those 65 years of age or older. Medicare spends 3% of its funds on administration, or roughly 1/10th of what it costs to run the health insurance industry in America. Old people loves them their Medicare. If it’s good for old farts, why isn’t it good for the rest of us? But Hillary’s plan is to force the American people at gunpoint to support the health insurance industry by forcing them, at gunpoint, to buy health insurance. WTF? How is that a plan for achieving universal coverage of all Americans?!

Still, Hillary isn’t the only candidate without the guts to take on the health insurance mafia. Of the Democrats, only Dennis Kucinich, who has about as much chance of winning as Fred Flintstone, has come out for Medicare For All. And as Larry has pointed out, she appears to be the only candidate with the guts and experience to take on the VRWC, she’s been doing it for the past 15 years and has gotten good at it. There is literally nothing that the VRWC says about Hillary Clinton anymore that will change anybody’s mind in any way. The VRWC could publish photos of her dining upon dead kittens and people would just shake their heads and say “there they go again.” For better or for worse, everybody already has their opinion of Hillary, and it isn’t going to be easily changed by Swift Boating or other such tactics, especially since Hillary isn’t one to back down from that ilk.

So I am slowly resigning myself to the thought of saying “President Hillary Clinton”. Okay, so she’s a Republican. But she’s a *smart* Republican. Which is why she’s a Democrat, I guess.

August 8, 1999
Inclusive America, Under Attack
By GERALD R. FORD
Of all the triumphs that have marked this as America’s century — breathtaking advances in science and technology, the democratization of wealth and dispersal of political power in ways hardly imaginable in 1899 — none is more inspiring, if incomplete, than our pursuit of racial justice. The milestones include Theodore Roosevelt’s inviting Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, Harry Truman’s desegregating the armed forces, Dwight Eisenhower’s using Federal troops to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School and Lyndon Johnson’s electrifying the nation by standing before Congress in 1965 and declaring, ”We shall overcome.”

I came by my support of that year’s Voting Rights Act naturally. Thirty years before Selma, I was a University of Michigan senior, preparing with my Wolverine teammates for a football game against visiting Georgia Tech. Among the best players on that year’s Michigan squad was Willis Ward, a close friend of mine whom the Southern school reputedly wanted dropped from our roster because he was black. My classmates were just as adamant that he should take the field. In the end, Willis decided on his own not to play.

His sacrifice led me to question how educational administrators could capitulate to raw prejudice. A university, after all, is both a preserver of tradition and a hotbed of innovation. So long as books are kept open, we tell ourselves, minds can never be closed.

But doors, too, must be kept open. Tolerance, breadth of mind and appreciation for the world beyond our neighborhoods: these can be learned on the football field and in the science lab as well as in the lecture hall. But only if students are exposed to America in all her variety.

For the class of ’35, such educational opportunities were diminished by the relative scarcity of African-Americans, women and various ethnic groups on campus. I have often wondered how different the world might have been in the 1940′s, 50′s and 60′s — how much more humane and just — if my generation had experienced a more representative sampling of the American family. That the indignities visited on Willis Ward would be unimaginable in today’s Ann Arbor is a measure of how far we have come toward realizing, however belatedly, the promises we made to each other in declaring our nationhood and professing our love of liberty.

And yet. In the last speech of his life, Lyndon Johnson reminded us of how much unfinished work remained. ”To be black in a white society is not to stand on level and equal ground,” he said. ”While the races may stand side by side, whites stand on history’s mountain and blacks stand in history’s hollow. Until we overcome unequal history, we cannot overcome unequal opportunity.”
cont’d

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9505EFD61230F93BA3575BC0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print

Small wonder Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford remained close, lifelong friends. And the irony of GWB commenting on the U of Michigan case – a public university where he would have not been accepted. He was denied admission to U of T’s law school.