West Virginia Blue
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I was channel surfing the other night during commericals and came across Sean Hannity declaring that women in the UK could not get drugs for breast cancer treatment because the UK was rationing medicine and they had decided they were too expensive......................... Any of you ever heard of that in the UK?
Now mind you he flat was on a rant about national health care trying to scare folks into believing that Canada, the UK and your socialist aussies have it so bad and your care is rationed and you often go without. ...................... When he came up with the following
"if you want our women to end up like women in the UK unable to get drugs they need for breast cancer treatments then let them pass national health care"
I understand it may be some new experimental drug he is talking about that the health services haven't approved for common use yet. .................. But I got news for hannity private insurance here often won't pay for the newest and latest greatest drugs either.................... Heck most private insurance here won't pay for bone marrow transplants even though that has been proven to save peoples lifes that get leukemia.
So have any of you folks heard about women being denied breast cancer treatment in the UK?
Cause Sean Hannity sure makes it sound like UK women are out of luck due to national health care if they get breast cancer.
I'll have to go check the statistics................... wanna bet women have a better chance of surviving if they get breast cancer in nations with national health care? ................. I bet they do. France , UK, and you aussies beat us out in all most every category of health care including longevity.
Note I found the story and hannity as usual is lying................. Story and some comments to follow this post.
Diary by wvpeach (my only edit was moving text below break. - Clem G.)
Dylan Ratigan in a way that is reminiscent of Norm Chomsky has been biting at the bullet to give in depth economic history during this financial melt down from his post at CNBC.
He is a favorite of mine for market news and I have seen this underlying current since last Sept in him. Confined to the 30 second sound bite version of news the cable networks have adopted he has been frustrated because they will not give him the time to get the in depth history of this economic mess out on a daily basis. .................. You can see it and feel it in the man as he tries to wedge in as much reporting in the cable news short version as they will allow him. Yes they have allowed him a few hastily shot documentaries on the mess................. Ran late at night off prime time. Not the opportunity to get the full story out in prime time to the nation.
This morning I posted the following comment reacting to a piece by the Gazette's statehouse reporter Phil Kabler titled Democrat lays into teachers' unions where he whips up anti-teacher's union sentiment in the way he uses an inexperienced lawmaker's own words.
The theory of "supply and demand" has failed miserably in WV for obvious reasons. The future of WV kids has been pitted against coal futures. Education here has never had much chance of getting properly funded because Big Coal spends huge amounts successfully defeating proponents of education.
The WV Coal Association's deal is quite simple. They understand that education funding comes from coal severance and property taxes. So they "invest" by electing politicians who will do everything within their power to keep their taxes low. Even as you read this, their puppets have pledged to legislate diligently "For The Sake Of The Coal" http://tinyurl.com/cn2bs5
Recent studies reveal that WV is losing qualified teachers at an alarming rate because we don't properly pay them. "Supply and demand" means that as demand goes up, so do prices. But that law is broken by Big Business and coal-powered lawmakers who believe that WV's most precious resource is NOT the minds of our children.
What you see above was immediately snatched down by the Gazette Online Overlords. Not once, but three times. And I'm reasonably certain why. The comment that they finally decided to let stand did not have the phrase WV Coal Association in it, but rather substituted the term "Big Coal"!
This story in the NY Times was an interesting piece to read. All the media outlets and junk media that I would normally condemn for their obsessive focus onHollywood actors and the lives of the rich with too much time on their hands... But this article was striking...
Whenever I discuss politics with people and hear someone quote Thomas Friedman approvingly, which happens occassionally because I do talk about politics a lot, I immediately know the person's views are not as well informed as the person thinks. I know the person is just repeating what he or she believes is the smart thing to sat. Unfortunately most people don't keep as well informed as they shouldd so Friedman's influence far outstrips his capabilities.
Vanity Fair has a nice run down of why many of us think little Tommy "Suck On This" Friedman is not a serious person.
Even though he's on the other side of the political aisle, I like West Virginia GOP executive director Gary Abernathy. Many people, including those in his own party, tend to underestimate him.
Charleston Gazette columnist Phil Kabler writes on his blog:
When it comes to the many upgrades ongoing at the Gazette's website, I must admit I'm mainly a befuddled spectator. However, I have been amused to see how some conservative commentators, including the GOP's Gary Abernathy, saw conspiracy lurking behind one of those new innovations, a weekly (or thereabouts) live on-line chat with public officials.
snip
Nonetheless, Abernathy and his ilk saw Tennant's participation as, at best, shameless self-promotion, and at worst, some sort of conspiracy to assure that, like Rockefeller and Manchin before her, she can use the SoS as a stepping stone to higher office.
Sorry guys, there's no black helicopters here. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a few Republicans show up on future live chats.
Kabler takes Abernathy's words at face value and mocks him and the other Republicans as seeing "some sort of conspiracy."
But what Kabler misses and what Abernathy and other Republicans have done very well over the years is, to use a sports analogy, "coach to the refs."
Abernathy and the Republicans complain about the "liberal media" out to get them and Kabler and others in the media respond like Pavlovian dogs and promise to bend over backwards to treat Republicans equally.
You can even see how effective it is in Kabler's own response:
...I wouldn't be surprised if a few Republicans show up on future live chats.
It's genius on Abernathy's part. Because the reality is Democrats dominate the elected offices in the state. Treating Republicans equally is in itself biased towards them because there are so few of them holding elected offices. There should be more Democrats on the live chats from the Gazette and throughout the memdia because there are more of them in the state and in elected office. There's not a single Republican holding a statewide office equal in stature to Natalie Tennant as Secretary of State to have done the Gazette's first chat. None. The only Republican holding any statewide office is Supreme Court "Judge" and Don Blankenship's pool boy Brent Benjamin. And he's one of five judges on the bench.
But Abernathy's working of the refs helps assure that Republicans get more attention from the media completely out of proportion to his party's actual numbers.
The corporate owned media of the state, heck even the public radio and television, bend over backwards to present the views of Republicans way out of proportion to their numbers in elected office. The media does it out of fears of being called "biased" and "unfair." Look at the Martinsburg Journal for a good example. In Berkeley County, the number of registered Democrats and Republicans are split almost right down the middle (Democrats have a very slight lead at the moment thanks to the work of the volunteers, but I digress). Yet there is not a single opinion columnist from the left on the Journal's editorial page. There are many reasons why the Martinsburg newspaper is losing so many readers (there was some scandal not long ago about how many newspapers are distributed by the Journal and so the Journal stopped using the auditor that kept track of such things so the true number is unknown to anyone but the Journal) and it's safe to say that is one of them.
So where Kabler tries to diminish Abernathy for promoting a "conspiracy theory" I see Abernathy playing Kabler very effectively.
I remember 2000 and 2001 pretty well. I was a Republican at the time, and we have talked before about how excited I was to vote for Bush. I remember not being able to sleep, waking up early to go vote as soon as the polls open, and I remember going to see a movie during the afternoon to take my mind off the election ...
snip
I also remember the aftermath, and I do remember a lot of anger. I remember the "Selected, not Elected" stuff, I remember protests and a sullied inauguration, I remember a lot of anger. People are just pretending if they say there were not a lot of angry people on the left. It was there, and it was real. Democrats who try to deny that today are full of it (and in fairness, I see very few people who deny that there was a lot of anger).
I also remember what was going on at the time. There was a mild economic downturn, but the country overall was in pretty good shape. The big crises in the first couple of months in the Bush administration was the story about "W" keys on the White House keyboards (since debunked), the continuing fallout of the Marc Rich pardon, the sad case of the US submarine that t-boned a Japanese fishing ship, and I remember an Air Force plane being forced to land in China. That was the "big stuff," if my memory serves correctly.
Other than that, the big issue was the tax cuts. Our surplus was going to be too big, and we had to return the money to the people. I remember Alan Greenspan concern trolling the country about too much government ownership of private companies. I know, I know. We got the private ownership of companies anyway, Alan, and this all sounds like the history of an alien universe considering the mess we are in right now. And I remember a lot of Democrats were really opposed to the tax cuts, and called them irresponsible and said they would lead to real financial problems and that we had a lot of stuff. I remember them repeatedly saying it was bad policy and it should be stopped.
But here is what I don't remember. I don't remember one single Democrat standing up on national television and loudly proclaiming "I hope George Bush fails." I simply do not remember it happening at all.
I was one of those angry about the Brooks Brother suited staged riots from the Republican Congressional staffers at Florida election offices and the crooked decision from the U.S. Supreme Court when they selected George W. Bush, ignoring that Florida's election laws were not being followed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But throughout the administration of George W. Bush, I don't recall hoping for failure. I remember hoping against hope that he wouldn't be a failure. I even remember hoping against hope that they would find the WMDs in Iraq even though I knew they wouldn't and that the entire war was built upon a flimsy stack of lies. But I wanted, I desperately wanted, to be wrong about that because I knew it would be an even worse disaster than the invasion itself for the country if it was shown we invaded on totally false premises. Rightwingers often misstate that the left wanted us to lose the war in Iraq. Many of us saw there was nothing to be won, an entirely different view point. People critical of Bush's policies, people ashamed of his policies, but people actively rooting for his failure? I don't think so. I only recall one rock singer who stated something even close to hoping for failure and to this day I don't listen to her though I loved her music.
Just because those of us who were critics got so much right about Bush and we knew everything he touched turned to sh@t that doesn't mean we cheered for it to happen that way like Rush Limbaugh and his Republican stooges are now. It would have been nice to have been wrong about Bush occasionally, but unfortunately we weren't.
Question to consider: Would we be able to tell the difference if the Martinsburg Journal's "news" stories and editorials about Shelley Moore Capito were written by her PR staff instead of the Journal's "reporters" and "editors"?
Just think if Glenn Greenwald read the Ogden-owned newspapers in West Virginia. He'd be even more pessimistic.
Is it even theoretically possible to have a worse, more deceitful and more moronic press than the one we have?
Many of the commenters have mentioned how bad the Martinsburg Journal and other Ogden papers are at covering their communities. Instead of the old adage of a newspaper's role to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," they use their opinion columns, and often their news stories as well, to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted.
I thought Appalachia was what right wingers like to call the "REAL America." So, why does Bill O'Reilly hate Appalachia and its people - the people that Jim Webb writes about in "Born Fighting" - so much? Here is some of what O'Reilly had to say:
I submit to you that the culture in Appalachia harms the children almost beyond repair... There's really nothing we can do about it," O'Reilly told Sawyer.
She had a different view, of course. She said, "The great opportunity is the information economy... These kids are as smart as the kids in India."
"Sure," O'Reilly agreed. "But their parents are screwed up. That's the thing... Kids get married at 16 and 17. Their parents are drunks. I'm generalizing now. (Gee, ya think?) There's a lot of meth. There's a lot of irresponsibility. There's fear to go. Look, if I'm born in Appalachia, the first chance I get, I go to Miami. Because that's where the jobs are. But they stay there. And the cycle of poverty for 200 years - boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I don't want to sound hopeless about it but I think it IS hopeless."
Last election, we noted that poor whites--in the form of Appalachians--are one group you can still get away with insulting in otherwise "polite company." Bill O'Reilly is picking it up right where many others left off.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) -- A group that wants to amend West Virginia's constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman is running an online ad that likens same-sex marriage supporters to snipers targeting families.
The group, The Family Policy Council of West Virginia, has yet to register as a charity with state officials, though it's reported raising enough to trigger that requirement.
The council wants the Legislature to allow a statewide vote on the amendment, similar to those passed in at least 30 states.
snip
The video has caught the attention of bloggers and other media this week. The Huffington Post was among those dubbing it the "gay snipers'' video. It also received online mention from The Washington Monthly and Politico, earning it tens of thousands of views on YouTube.
But the important thing is this hate campaign from out of staters is getting more attention thanks to Harrison's great post.
The next step will be disclosing Republicans and Democrats who sign on to such stupidity. And we know if you're pushing anti-gay measures, you're in the same company as Republican Sen. Larry "Wide Stance" Craig and rightwing fundamentalist preacher Ted Haggard.
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