In the second half of this audio clip from Monday’s PBS NewsHour, senior Utah senator Orrin Hatch rips apart the federal health care law. The gist of his argument is it’s too expensive. He says he’d love for everybody to have health coverage, but “they outta trash the bill and get rid of it” and come up with a bi-partisan bill.
[audio:http://newshour-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2011/02/28/20110228_healthredo.mp3|titles=PBS NewsHour: Health care compromise]
Hatch says Utah’s health care [PDF link] is good, so maybe I should read up on how it compares to what we have here in Massachusetts, enacted into law by Mitt Romney, who has his own ties to Utah. If Hatch truly opposes government health care coverage, I assume he must not take advantage of it himself, as he is entitled to do as a United States senator.
Federal taxes for the rich were cut, reducing distributions to states and, in turn, communities. Thanks to financial deregulation Wall Street defrauded everybody, further reducing tax revenues and clobbering pension funds, then Wall Street was bailed out by the American taxpayers. And now cops, firemen and teachers are being denounced for being greedy? Huh?
I live in Massachusetts, the leader in public sector pension fraud, especially in Boston. The fire department has been particularly rife with abuse. The most notorious case was the allegedly disabled firefighter who was into competitive bodybuiding. But the real abuses are at the top. Retired state senator Billy Boy Bulger is a smooth operator who really knows how to work the system. He’s the brother of crime boss James Whitey Bulger, who knows how to work the other side of the fence. One of the first things that Mitt Romney did as governor of Massachusetts was force Billy Bulger out as President of UMass, but there was nothing Romney could do about Bulger’s sweet pension. Later, Romney introduced a health care system that became the basis for what the Democrats enacted in Washington. Romney has a tendency to shift his stated position as it suits the moment, but he’s not corrupt and when push comes to shove he does what he knows is right — like Scott Brown, come to think of it. I had my doubts about Brown as senator, but he’s AOK.
Speaking of brothers taking all they can get, there are the Kochs, who have done an impressive job of building up the wealth that was left to them by their father. They’ve set their sights on Wisconsin, and it seems plausible that they intend to buy up the no-bid contracts for operating that state’s power plants, but they don’t want to employ public union workers, so Governor Walker is determined to bust the unions for them.
I’m not familiar with what Governor Daniels has done in Indiana, but I agree with what Brooks and Shields say here about Governor Walker. Mark Shields reminds us of the importance of the G.I. Bill after WWII. My father went to college on the G.I. Bill, and he met my mother there. After the war Joe Sinnott worked with his father at a cement factory for a few years. Joe’s thousands of fans have the G.I. Bill to thank for making it possible for him to attend the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Lawrence O’Donnell has Keith Olbermann’s former 8 PM weekday slot on MSNBC, and tonight he’s ripped apart “Irish bully” Bill O’Reilly. O’Donnell’s style can occasionally be combative, but tonight he’s his more typically controlled and metered self, and he’s done a good job of picking apart O’Reilly and what passes for news at Fox.
There’s a daily radio news program based here in Boston, called The World, that’s co-produced with the BBC World Service. They explain the cuts that are being implemented:
Internet access in Egypt has been cut. Whether or not the protesters intend to overthrow the government in favor of a Muslim-based system, the fact is that the value of radio is obvious in these situations.
Obama’s SOTU speech is on TV, and every so often I turn off muting, but every time I do that I’m not too excited by what I hear. So, instead, I’m going to watch Stephen Colbert absorbing Keith Olbermann’s power, only to find it too much, even for him.
