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This is Rachel revealing the true professional PR consultant/corporatist membership of supposed "grassroots" GOP protest movements. I'd like to say that this is really brilliant reporting but its actually quite obvious stuff. She pulls most of her critical investigative information directly from the websites of these wingnuts. Still, Rachel is smart and that's extremely cool. Stating what is obvious and the truth is actually sort of revolutionary in the U.S. political landscape. Rachel is there most days just telling it like it is and being only slightly smug about it.
We're living in a country where something very like 50% of the population is offensively ignorant, bigoted and Christian. Maybe its just me, but there seems to be some kind of relationship between those three things that is quite hard to overcome. Personally, I think it is one of the purposes of organized religion to keep people relatively stupid. If it were otherwise people would more readily admit that creationism is just a lovely myth instead of trying to get it taught in science classes across the country opposite the teaching of the theory of evolution and the processes of natural selection.
Old-timers must be truly blinkered if they think that a single payer or public option health care system would hamper them in any way. I mean, aren't they enjoying the benefits of Medicare? Medicare is a government run system of socialized medical coverage. I guess that escapes their attention.
Here's wiki on Medicare:
Medicare is a social insurance program administered by the United States government, providing health insurance coverage to people who are aged 65 and over, or who meet other special criteria. Medicare operates as a single-payer health care system. The Social Security Act of 1965 was passed by Congress in late-spring of 1965 and signed into law on July 30, 1965, by President Lyndon B. Johnson as amendments to Social Security legislation. At the bill-signing ceremony President Johnson enrolled former President Harry S. Truman as the first Medicare beneficiary and presented him with the first Medicare card.
My thinking is that if a single payer program fails to gain any traction this time around that we should start going after Medicare and the medical benefits of congress-critters too. Let's get everyone onto the same bullshit private insurance system with which everyone else has to contend.
If everyone suffered collectively and equally under the thumb of the profiteering health insurance industry then, and perhaps only then, would we see real progress on the health care reform issue.
