Dammit, almost had three days in a row there. Ah, well. I guess it's too much to expect oneself to whip out any words of wisdom on St. Patrick's day, right? I did look at the computer last night, but it was at a 45-degree angle and glowing a rather unhealthy blue and there were...stomach issues and it was rather late. Fun night, though. I'm sure you understand.
Right, so if you scroll down and see that Scotsman story about the Department of Health & Human Services planting faked news stories with television stations in the South, you'll also see my comments about not being able to verify it.
Well, I did.
So, yeah, The Washington Post ran an article about it on March 11 (I'm too lazy to post a link, but search for "GAO" & "Health & Human Services"), but the Post's focus wasn't that they pulled that scumbag a move, nor was the story about the GAO investigating them for pulling a scumbag move, but instead, the Post published a story talking about how the GAO found that what they did was legal. Yeah. Completely legal, although they did complain that there were "omissions" in the story. Uh-huh. A little puff piece that doesn't talk about increased fees, reduced coverage and even more handouts to the insurance companies is faulted by having a few "omissions".
Y'know, there may be just no fucking government agencies that I can respect.
Also on the Medicare front, check this shit out:
Late one Friday afternoon in January, after the House of Representatives had adjourned for the week, Cybele Bjorklund, a House Democratic health policy aide, heard the buzz of the fax machine at her desk. Coming over the transom, with no hint of the sender, was a document she had been seeking for months: an estimate by Medicare's chief actuary showing the cost of prescription drug benefits for the elderly.
Dated June 11, 2003, the document put the cost at $551.5 billion over 10 years. It appeared to confirm what Ms. Bjorklund and her bosses on the House Ways and Means Committee had long suspected: the actuary, Richard S. Foster, had concluded the legislation would be far more expensive than Congress's $400 billion estimate — and had kept quiet while lawmakers voted on the bill and President Bush signed it into law.
The article goes on to say that Foster claimed (to Bjorklund) that he'd be fired if he released the real numbers to her before the congressional Medicare bill (y'know, the one that passed by all of 5 votes after being held open on the floor for three hours?). So, yeah, it was scam. We all knew it was a scam, and none of us has done anything about it.
We suck.
So, here's the problem: All this shit that the Republicans in Congress and the White House staff (and fucking "Justice" Scalia) keep pulling they keep getting away with. One is covering the other. The Dems are getting killed. And all these deals, the ones that will kill the poor & middle-class folks in the next twenty years or so, are being put into place more and more commonly, and nobody's stopping it. Why? 'Cause the Conservative Hive Mind owns 2/3'rds of the U.S. Government and has a lien on the rest, as soon as some of the more decrepit Supreme Court Justices shuffle off to Buffalo. So you & me and all the other folks who don't make a million or so a year are getting butt-fucked pretty hard right now, and that butt-fucking is going to become more and more institutionalized if the Dems don't get their asses in gear.
And please, everybody out there, if Osama Bin Laden is "captured" sometime right before the election, don't believe it, right? The propaganda machine is laying the groundwork right now, feeding the media more and more stories about U.S. soldiers "encircling" camps where Osama or his top men are "suspected" to be hiding. Bullshit. If Osama pops up in U.S. custody in any time to influence the election, understand that it's a lie or a setup. Osama went off the radar when Jr. started bullying Iraq but that hasn't worked out so well, so now he's back. And Bush can't afford to have the fucker running around without much better news to hand the American people, y'know? It's gotta be something big to offset the years of shit we've had, right? Can you think of anything much bigger?
Right, out. Talk to you....uh....sometime.
p.s. Btw, Ashcroft wants the Internet to be rebuilt so that the Feds can watch everything you do that much more easily. Really, we're all living in the groundwork for 1984. Go look up the story. You should be relatively horrified.
G'night.
Right, so if you scroll down and see that Scotsman story about the Department of Health & Human Services planting faked news stories with television stations in the South, you'll also see my comments about not being able to verify it.
Well, I did.
So, yeah, The Washington Post ran an article about it on March 11 (I'm too lazy to post a link, but search for "GAO" & "Health & Human Services"), but the Post's focus wasn't that they pulled that scumbag a move, nor was the story about the GAO investigating them for pulling a scumbag move, but instead, the Post published a story talking about how the GAO found that what they did was legal. Yeah. Completely legal, although they did complain that there were "omissions" in the story. Uh-huh. A little puff piece that doesn't talk about increased fees, reduced coverage and even more handouts to the insurance companies is faulted by having a few "omissions".
Y'know, there may be just no fucking government agencies that I can respect.
Also on the Medicare front, check this shit out:
Late one Friday afternoon in January, after the House of Representatives had adjourned for the week, Cybele Bjorklund, a House Democratic health policy aide, heard the buzz of the fax machine at her desk. Coming over the transom, with no hint of the sender, was a document she had been seeking for months: an estimate by Medicare's chief actuary showing the cost of prescription drug benefits for the elderly.
Dated June 11, 2003, the document put the cost at $551.5 billion over 10 years. It appeared to confirm what Ms. Bjorklund and her bosses on the House Ways and Means Committee had long suspected: the actuary, Richard S. Foster, had concluded the legislation would be far more expensive than Congress's $400 billion estimate — and had kept quiet while lawmakers voted on the bill and President Bush signed it into law.
The article goes on to say that Foster claimed (to Bjorklund) that he'd be fired if he released the real numbers to her before the congressional Medicare bill (y'know, the one that passed by all of 5 votes after being held open on the floor for three hours?). So, yeah, it was scam. We all knew it was a scam, and none of us has done anything about it.
We suck.
So, here's the problem: All this shit that the Republicans in Congress and the White House staff (and fucking "Justice" Scalia) keep pulling they keep getting away with. One is covering the other. The Dems are getting killed. And all these deals, the ones that will kill the poor & middle-class folks in the next twenty years or so, are being put into place more and more commonly, and nobody's stopping it. Why? 'Cause the Conservative Hive Mind owns 2/3'rds of the U.S. Government and has a lien on the rest, as soon as some of the more decrepit Supreme Court Justices shuffle off to Buffalo. So you & me and all the other folks who don't make a million or so a year are getting butt-fucked pretty hard right now, and that butt-fucking is going to become more and more institutionalized if the Dems don't get their asses in gear.
And please, everybody out there, if Osama Bin Laden is "captured" sometime right before the election, don't believe it, right? The propaganda machine is laying the groundwork right now, feeding the media more and more stories about U.S. soldiers "encircling" camps where Osama or his top men are "suspected" to be hiding. Bullshit. If Osama pops up in U.S. custody in any time to influence the election, understand that it's a lie or a setup. Osama went off the radar when Jr. started bullying Iraq but that hasn't worked out so well, so now he's back. And Bush can't afford to have the fucker running around without much better news to hand the American people, y'know? It's gotta be something big to offset the years of shit we've had, right? Can you think of anything much bigger?
Right, out. Talk to you....uh....sometime.
p.s. Btw, Ashcroft wants the Internet to be rebuilt so that the Feds can watch everything you do that much more easily. Really, we're all living in the groundwork for 1984. Go look up the story. You should be relatively horrified.
G'night.
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