What makes this unusual is that Schmidt is a Republican. And, oh yeah, he’s openly gay, but then so are eight of the 10 candidates running for the three seats up for grabs on the five-person council, according to BAR.
But one central, over-riding fact in the debate over health care always gets lost — it was lost in the 1994 debate over “Hillarycare,” and it was never addressed in the debates in 2009 and last year that resulted in the Affordable Care Act reforms.
It’s this: The huge, multi-level crisis we’re facing in health care was, in fact, created by the private health insurance companies. The failure of the private “system” that has left millions of Americans without health-care coverage is a result of policies created — not in Congress, not in an Executive Branch regulatory office — but in the executive suites of private health-insurance corporations.
Sarah Palin needs help – I don’t mean psychological help. (She probably needs that, too, but I am apathetic about her personal or psychological well-being.) The professional help she needs is political.
As I wrote last week, she has surrounded herself with political neophytes whom she can dominate, rather than experienced professionals, whom she can’t, and the neophytes are enabling her self-destruction.
In the early hours after the gun attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on Jan. 8, experienced aides — or, really, anyone with common sense — would have advised Palin to, pardon the war metaphors, hold fire, keep her powder dry and not go off half-cocked before details about the tragedy were confirmed.
Instead, her team of know-nothings panicked, apparently in reaction to an early erroneous report on Fox that Giffords had died. They were desperate because they knew that sooner or later the folks at MSNBC would re-broadcast an interview with the late Rep. Giffords from March in which Giffords herself laid blame at Palin’s feet:
Oh my goodness.
Via LadyBunny.net, this is the most spot-on, and apt, separated at birth set ever. Nice job with Photoshop.
Now, with Speaker Boehner having scheduled a vote on the tea party’s signature issue, repealing the Affordable Care Act, a new poll finds that public support for the repeal has dropped to just 25 percent.
But first, here’s the week that was:
In an article titled, “6 Lunatics Inspired by Fox News and Glenn Beck,” published on Oct. 28 — so six weeks before before Jared Loughner’s terror attack in Tucson that left six people dead and 13 wounded, including Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords — Jim Edwards, columnist for BNET, recapped six instances over the past two-and-a-half years in which lunatics who committed violent acts, or were thwarted before they could act, later said they were inspired to violence after intense exposure to propaganda from Fox and Glenn Beck:
A week or so after crazed gunman Jared Loughner’s Jan. 8 alleged terror attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her constituents in Tucson that left six dead and 13, including Giffords, wounded, it’s the consensus now that Loughner was not driven to mass murder by Sarah Palin’s crosshairs map.
The fact that there is no provable causal link between Loughner’s actions and Palin’s map does not mean Loughner, in his madness, was not influenced by GOP-tea party toxicity. As we noted on Jan. 12, Loughner was definitely influenced by a right-wing kook named David Wynn Miller and his “sovereign citizens” movement, which advocates declaring oneself exempt from laws set forth in the U.S. Constitution. Some of the more extremist factions in the right-wing militia movement are founded on a similar concept.
The Los Angeles Times also published a report on Loughner’s influences on Jan 12:
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
