The Conservatard

Mr. C is pleased that somebody, other than he, is upset by the latest trampling of the Constitution by our beloved King George. In the Seattle Post Intelligencer, local peace activist Marie Marchand wrote a guest column titled “The president is threatening me“.

She, as all American citizens should be, is extremely concerned about the powers that the current residents at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have given themselves. Combining the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act of October 2006, and the recent slew of presidential executive orders, the state of freedom for average Americans is in a perilous state.

The undermining of our civil liberties by King George and Emperor Cheney, leads Mr. C to beg the question, who are the real terrorists? Is it the “Islam-O-Fascists” that hate Mr. C for his freedoms? Is it the King George /Emperor Cheney regime,that also hate Mr. C for his freedoms? Which group poses the greatest threat to Mr C’s personal safety, civil liberties, freedom and overall way of life?

Thankfully, Mr. C has never been the target of a terrorist act. However, by merely writing The Conservatard, he and his reader(s?) are certainly making themselves a likely target of Bush/Cheney regime! Frankly, Mr. C is more afraid of being abducted, imprisoned and tortured by his own government than falling victim to acts of terrorism. Mr. C knows who the greater threat to his person is, do you?

The president is threatening me

By MARIE MARCHAND
GUEST COLUMNIST

In case I get picked up and taken away under President Bush’s Military Commissions Act of October 2006, I want it on record that I am not a terrorist or an enemy combatant, and that the organization I run in Bellingham is not associated with any terrorist cell.

The Whatcom Peace & Justice Center works non-violently to end the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is committed to envisioning and creating a world for our children where diplomacy and friendship are the measuring stick for our foreign policy. We have never intended, planned or considered violence as a means to peace.

In case my assets, which are few, get seized and my hard drive gets robbed under Bush’s new executive order of July 17, 2007, I want you to know my name so that I am not disappeared. I have a 6-year-old son to raise, and, like so many intelligent, passionate peace activists, the world needs me to be a leader in ending my country’s imperial addiction to warfare.

The new executive order blocks property of certain people who undermine efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq. Its language leaves the door dangerously open to broad and flagrant interpretation that could label as a terrorist suspect anyone who holds a political viewpoint opposite that of the White House.

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Mr. C just finished watching an astounding video called “Zeitghist“, which is a German word literally meaning “time (Zeit) spirit (Geist)” but in practical terms it means “the spirit of the age”.

The movie is broken into three sections:

Part one covers the mythology of Christianity and proposes that modern Christianity is in reality a continuation of previous Astrological religions. The closest example would be the Egyptian religion that predates Christianity by over 1500 years.

This part was completely new to Mr. C. He was always aware of “pagan” influences on Christianity like Christmas, Easter, and idol worship ( think statues of Jesus). However this film strongly argues that Christianity is most likely a continuation of several pagan religions that are all based on astrology. This part will probably be the most enlightening or shocking part of the movie for most of TC’s reader(s?).

Part two covers the mythology of 9/11 and gathers together several sources that indicate or prove that 9/11 most likely was an inside job. None of this was a shock to Mr. C, because he has seen other movies that say the same thing.

Part Three covers the formation of the private entity know in America as the Federal Reserve. It lays the groundwork of how it works and how it has and still is manipulating our lives, including inflation , unemployment, war, peace and international trade deals that affect all US citizens.

The film takes all three parts, Religion, 9/11, and the Federal Reserve and ties them all up together showing how each is being used to basically snow over the public in large and allows the corporate elite to use and abuse everybody in the pursuit of power and wealth.

Mr. C thought this is was a really good movie to help open up peoples minds that they have been used and lied to by their governments and corporations. Mr. C would advise that people not believe anything that they hear or see in this movie just on the movie makers word, but use their own minds and research every part that they are not knowledgeable of.

To the movie makers credit, they have a statement that basically shadows Mr. C’s words of caution along with a list of sources used to make this movie.

Thank you for your interest in Zeitgeist.
Zeitgeist was created as a not for profit expression to inspire people to start looking at the world
from a more critical perspective and to understand that very often things are not what the
population at large think they are. The information in Zeitgeist was established over a year long period
of research and the current Source page on this site lists the sources used / referenced.
Soon, an interactive transcript will be online with detailed footnotes and links.

It’s important to point out that there is a tendency to simply disbelieve things that are
counter to our understanding, without the necessary research performed.
For example, some information contained in Part 1 and Part 3, specifically, is not obtained
by simple keyword searches on the Internet. You have to dig deeper. For instance,
very often people who look up “Horus” or “The Federal Reserve” on the Internet
draw their conclusions from very general or biased sources. Online encyclopedias or text book
Encyclopedias often do not contain the information contained in Zeitgeist. However, if one takes
the time to read the sources provided, they will find that what is being presented is
based on documented evidence. Any corrections, clarifications & further points regarding the film
are found on the Clarifications page. Downloadable formats are also now available, along with DVDs
by request.

That being said, It is my hope that people will not take what is said
in the film as the truth, but find out for themselves, for truth is not told, it is realized.

Before the 2006 election Mr. C read about how Florida passed laws that were so punitive for voter registration organizations, that the League of Women Voters stopped registering voters for the first time in its history. Ohio also set up punitive laws that suppressed voter registration just before the 2006 elections.

Between the states suppressing democratic voters, the federal injustice department switching from real crime enforcement to prosecuting the “plague of voter fraud” (conservatard code word for vote suppression), its a wonder that the democrats were able to win any seats at all in the 2006 election cycle. I guess that just goes to show you that Americans will only take so much abuse before they act to put a stop to it.

Below is a good article from Alternet.org summarizing how the states systematically suppressed voter registration by creating outrageous laws to discourage voter registration. Near the end it ties enforcement of these “laws” in with Alberto Gonzalez’s department of injustice voter suppression tactics.

Are Voter Registration Drives Being Put Out of Business?

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on July 25, 2007, Printed on July 25, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/57815/

In 2004, Floridians overwhelmingly voted to raise their state minimum wage after low-income advocates collected ballot petition signatures, registered thousands of new voters and turned out the vote. The following spring, Florida’s Republican-majority Legislature reacted. It passed a law that so severely regulated voter registration drives that before the 2006 primary, Florida’s League of Women Voters stopped registering voters for the first time in its history. The League feared mistakes on just 14 voter registration forms could result in penalties equal to its entire $70,000 budget.

Florida’s actions were not unique. In Ohio, where the 2004 presidential election lingered as its Electoral College votes were challenged in Congress, Ohio’s Republican-majority Legislature passed a series of election reforms including tough new rules and penalties for voter registration drives. In 2006, that law stopped the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, and community and church groups from registering voters in the state.

“In Florida, it absolutely shut down voter registration by all groups going up through the primary election of 2006,” said Wendy Weiser, Deputy Director of the Brennan Center, a New York-based public-interest law firm that challenged the Florida and Ohio laws. “In Ohio, before there was an injunction in the case, voter registration was halted.”

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Mr. C just finished reading an interesting op-ed from the Houston Chronicle. It demonstrates just how “compassionate “King George W. Bush is to the challenges of the average American. The title of the op-ed is says all you really need to know about what the King really thinks of his royal subjects.

That’s the problem
President Bush suggests uninsured children go to hospital emergency rooms for their care.

After the Senate Finance Committee approved an expansion of the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program to cover nearly 10 million kids, President Bush offered a strange rationale for threatening to veto it.

“People have access to health care in America,” he told an audience in Cleveland. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

As any executive of a Houston hospital can attest, that is precisely the problem created by the high number of uninsured people in the United States. Texas has the highest rate of uninsured children in the nation, and Harris County the highest in the state. Those who lack insurance coverage frequently delay seeking medical care until they are seriously ill. Then they swamp hospital emergency rooms that are required by law to treat them even if the patient has no ability to pay.

Since emergency care is far more expensive than a scheduled visit to a doctor or clinic, hospitals wind up with large costs that they then pass on to insured patients using their overtaxed facilities. As a result, insurance companies raise their rates ever higher to cover the increased payouts, making their policies too expensive for more working families. The result is a health care system spiraling out of control and more children left unprotected and in poor health.

The senators who voted 17-4 to expand the S-CHIP understand the situation. Their plan would boost funding for S-CHIP from $25 billion to $60 billion for the next five years with the aim of covering 3 million more children. The measure would provide a uniform eligibility level of three times the poverty line for a family with four children, $51,510. The increase would be primarily funded by a steep hike in federal taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products

The Bush administration insists on holding the increase to $5 billion over the five year period, a level that U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said would not even maintain the current number of children enrolled.

Administration officials claim that expanding the program would undermine the insurance industry. But having more children insured would lower costs passed on to private insurers and employers.

Perhaps the most dubious reason cited by the White House for opposing the increase concerns the tax hike on cigarettes, which would go up from 39 cents a pack to a dollar. According to spokesman Tony Fratto, it would unfairly penalize the poor “to finance a new subsidy for the middle class.” He didn’t mention that higher tobacco taxes would likely reduce teen access to cigarettes and lower the health care costs of treating millions of Americans for respiratory disease and cancer caused by smoking.

America’s health care system is broken. Expanding S-CHIP is a stopgap measure that would expand the number of Americans with access to health care.

Mr. C just finished reading an interesting article on Alternet.org about healthcare by Barbara Ehrenreich. The article is pretty good by pointing out the obvious fact, health insurance corporations are for profit corporations and that they are in business to make money, not take care of peoples health.

What Mr. C found most fascinating were some of the comments right after the article. One commenter called EagleMB espoused the tired old corporate talking points that innovation will be stifled if not outright killed if private corporations are not allowed to make a profit. He dribbled off some B.S. statistics like %50 percent of all “new” drugs are make by American pharmaceutical companies. He uses examples like Merck and Pfizer.

Well Mr. C has news for you sunshine, Merck is not an American owned corporation. Phizer is American based, but in reality is a multinational corporation that has purchased smaller companies for most of its “inovative” drugs over the last seven years. EagleMB goes on about how if big pharmaceutical profiteers can’t make boatloads of cash off of useless drugs, they will go bankrupt. Well again sunshine, countries with “socialized” medicine purchase drugs from these corporations. In turn, these corporations agree to sell it countries with “socialized” medicine.

Last time Mr. C checked the headlines, Sweden has not invaded the corporate headquarters of Merk or Phizer. If corporate pharmaceutical giants were loosing money from these deals, they would refuse to sell to these countries, or go belly up. If corporate pharmaceutical giants were truly in favor of  a “free and open” market, they wouldn’t spend millions a year to bribe politicians to help protect their monopolies.

Anyhow, here is the origional article by Barbara Ehrenreich. Mr. C would suggest that TC’s reader(s)? follow the link and read some of the comments right after the article. It just cracks Mr. C. up when suposed “free marketers” get all defensive when they see potential threats to their well purchased monopolies.

Health Care vs. the Profit Principle
By Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbaraehrenreich.com
Posted on July 17, 2007, Printed on July 18, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/56965/

It’s always nice to see the President take a principled stand on something. The man formerly known as “43,” and now perhaps better named “29″ for his record-breaking approval rating, is promising to battle any expansion of government health insurance for children — and not because he hates children or refuses to cough up the funds. No, this is a battle over principle: private health care vs. government-provided health care. Speaking in Cleveland this week, Bush boldly asserted:

I strongly object to the government providing incentives for people to leave private medicine, private health care to the public sector. And I think it’s wrong and I think it’s a mistake. And therefore, I will resist Congress’s attempt … to federalize medicine…In my judgment that would be — it would lead to not better medicine, but worse medicine. It would lead to not more innovation, but less innovation.

Now you don’t have to have seen “Sicko” to know that if there is one area of human endeavor where private enterprise doesn’t work, it’s health care. Consider the private, profit-making, insurance industry that Bush is so determined to defend. What “innovations” has it produced? The deductible, the co-pay, and the pre-existing condition are the only ones that leap to mind. In general, the great accomplishment of the private health insurance industry has been to overturn the very meaning of “insurance,” which is risk-sharing: We all put in some money, though only some of us will need to draw on the common pool by using expensive health care. And the insurance companies have overturned it by refusing to insure the people who need care the most - those who are already, or are likely to become, sick.

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Since Nancy Pelosi’s famous quote from 60 Minutes last fall of impeachment being off the table, the American public is much more aware of the Sins of the Bush cartel. You can tell this when traditional conservatives are starting to think that the world can’t wait for the rein of King George and Emperor Cheney to end in January 2009.

Last Friday Bill Moyer had two guests on his program, one conervative (Bruce Fine) and the other liberal (John Nichols). Both guests are in complete agreement that not only shold impeachment be put back on the “table” of congress, but that impeachment is essential if we want to continue to be a democracy.

You can watch the entire episode here, broken into five parts. (Limitation of YouTube, not Mr. C).

Part 1: 

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

If you haven’t’ seen Michael Moore’s “Sicko” yet go see it today. I saw it over the weekend and it is an eye opener. Yes it is one sided, like all MM films. However, it is presenting the one side that the American public will never see on main stream media. It tells the side of average working people being screwed over by the American health system.

The BC/BS BS talking points come from a leaked internal memo by an executive from Capital Blue Cross named Barclay Fitzpatrick. It seems that Mr. Fitzpatrick actually paid $8 or so to see “Sicko” in a local theater and took notes on the movie, the audience reaction and discussions by audience members after the movie. Sometime after seeing the movie Mr. Fitzpatrick sent out a confidential memo detailing the movie, and a list of talking points on how Blue Cross / Blue Shield can counter the expected public backlash. The complete writeup can be viewed on Michael Moore’s site at the following link. Moore had provided PDF versions of the memo at the following location.

I fully expect to see the talking points presented in this memo to be rattled off by ditto head conservatards on every talk show. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see these empty talking points being rattled off on Fox Noise Network this evening. Anything to keep the profits rolling in and the American public under their money grubbing thumbs.

Mr. C felt that he would reproduce the BC/BS Memo, just in case Moore receives a cease and desist order from the Bustard corrupt court system. The talking points are at the end of the article.

Friday, July 6th, 2007
BlueCross Secret Memo Re: ‘Sicko’ … “You would have to be dead to be unaffected by Moore’s movie…”

July 6th, 2007

Friends,

An employee who works at Capital BlueCross has sent us a confidential memo written and circulated by its Vice President of Corporate Communications, Barclay Fitzpatrick. His job, it seems, was to go and watch “Sicko,” observe the audience’s reaction, and then suggest a plan of action for how to deal with the movie.

The memo, which I am releasing publicly in this email, is a fascinating look at how one health care company views “Sicko” — and what it fears its larger impact will be on the public. The industry’s only hope, the memo seems to indicate, is if the movie “flops.”

Mr. Fitzpatrick writes: “In typical Moore fashion, Government and business leaders are behind a conspiracy to keep the little guy down and dominated while getting rich.”

No. You don’t say! That can’t be!

BlueCross V.P. Fitzpatrick seems downright depressed about the movie he just saw. “You would have to be dead to be unaffected by Moore’s movie,” he writes. “Sicko” leaves audiences feeling “ashamed to be…a capitalist, and part of a ‘me’ society instead of a ‘we’ society.”

He walks out of the theater only to witness an unusual sight: people — strangers — mingling and talking to each other. “‘I didn’t know they (the insurers) did that!’ was a common exclamation followed by a discussion of the example,” according to Fitzpatrick.

He then assesses the film’s impact: “[T]he impact on small business decision makers, our members, the community, and our employees could be significant. Ignoring its impact might be a successful strategy only if it flops, but that has not been the history of Moore’s films … If popular, the movie will have a negative impact on our image in this community.”

The BlueCross memo then suggests a strategy in dealing with “Sicko” and offers the BCBS “talking points” to be used in discounting the film.

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