There are five lobbyists for every member of Congress. There must be at least ten drug reps for every doctor,feeding and gifting them to push product.Legal corruption has become so ubiquitous that we no longer even notice.

Senator Baucus is the million dollar recipient of the moment.In a few weeks he'll be forgtten.

Corruption Are Us.

It amazes me that average Americans -- I'm not talking about the ones that reap the benefits of all this lobbying money -- go to the streets (i.e. teabaggers) to make sure these obscene profits made by "insurance" companies (not to be confused with actual "health care" companies) keep flowing. It's up to 'real' Americans to stop these lies. We need affordable health care for all Americans -- not just the privileged class.

anniebelle, you had me on your side until you used the now-obscene, homosexual reference to "teabaggers" in an attempt to smear legitimate public protesters.

Please...it was not necessary and reduced your credibility.

Good cartoon, Clay. Well done, biting and so true. The half-glasses was a nice touch and typical of your work.

It's not just in DC but in every state capital, as we've just experienced by the bills and laws our recent state legislation participated in. How many people and companies in this country are receipents of tax money from city, county, state and federal sources? Most people who are whining about socialism are right in the middle if they look around and follow the money.

The way 'they' are protected, one would get the notion that lobbyists are an endangered species. Closer to the truth, 'they' should be hunted, like any preditor, and then removed to a place where they can do no harm.

Anyone have such a remote place in mind?? You know someplace where even "Survivor" wouldn't visit.

Just a thought.

Thank you for your time and attention,
Woody

Unless one works on a barter basis, EaTn, all money is "tax money". We are no longer on a gold or silver standard so coinage is out...everything is printed -- by the gov't and for the gov't.

The real issue is whether or not one actually works or worked -- produced something -- for his/her money... Gov't itself does little of that...its job is to direct expenditures not produce something directly. And there is the rub...the more gov't, the more socialism.

Unfortunately, much of the tax money paid IN is for things most folks never use. FannieMae/FreddieMac come to mind; the UAW; GM; AIG et al. It could easily be said, with some truthfulness, the UAW/Teachers'Union themselves live on the dole, especially the leadership.

Max Bauccus and the gang of 8 ignore what 73% of Americans support. Guess the Senators forgot what a democracy is suppose to be. They are nothing but shills for the insurance companies.

Rolando- I don't know exactly what you think 'teabagging' involves, but it's not distinct to either straights or gays.

As for the great offense taking by the tea party folks: well they have only themselves to blame. On the occasion of their first demonstration last April, they encouraged supporters to send tea bags to their elected officials. Below is a link to one of their own web pages (inviting people to the initial event) entitled, "Tea Bag the Fools in D.C." The rest, as they say, is history.

Here's the page: http://tinyurl.com/p9wzjy

If you're going to turn the noun- tea bag into a verb (to tea bag), without understanding that it may already be a verb with an alternate meaning, you'll just have to live with the consequences. I'm afraid this is a faux pas that you and the rest of the tea-baggers will just have to live with... forever.

Wow, Rolando. OllieH sure did put you in your place, didn't he? You probably won't be able to sit down for at least a week after that profound thrashing. Maybe even (cue dramatic flair)... forever.

:-)

If we need affordable healthcare? We need affordable colleges and medical schools. We need affordable professors to teach in them. We need affordable office space for doctors to lease and affordable contractors to build them. We need affordable nurses, x-ray technicians, and support staff. We need affordable hospital management. We need affordable linen companies. We need affordable ambulances, wheelchairs, medical supplies, etc. We need affordable workers to make everything. We need affordable malpractice insurance. We need........

Where does it stop? Which part of the chain do we cut first? Every part or just pieces. We need some kind of reform but we're not going to get a magic free healthcare system for everyone. Our country is in debt over our eyeballs and both parties are to blame. We can't afford this program. No one on this board wants to take a pay cut or turn their industry over to the government. Why would or should the healthcare industry want to give it all up? They have not asked for bail out. We all know of someone with a healthcare horror story but we can say the same thing about every industry. I bought a problem house one time. I fixed the problems. I didn't tear the house down and start over. I didn't want the government to take over the housing and real estate industry? Where does it go from here? Do they take over the fast food industry next?

Insurance companies and hospital's should be run by doctors instead of business people. In my opinion....The big problem started with all of the medical management companies. Doctors wanted to be doctors. They allowed business companies to buy and manage their practices so they didn't have to deal with business end. It sounded like a great idea at the time but it hasn't worked out. Doctor's did not require a credit application to see them until business got into the picture.

The Cleveland Clinic is probably one of the best examples of a well run hospital in the US. The head of the Cleveland Clinic is a doctor. Now we have lawmakers trying to rebuild the healthcare industry? Would you have your plumber repair your electrical system? I don't think lawmakers or insurance companies are going to give us the ideal system. Maybe,we should start with doctors and nurses. They know more about patient care than either one.

Well, OllieH, I remember when mother, coke, and gay had completely different meanings, too. As I am sure you are aware, "tea bag" and "tea-bagging" are two completely different phrases with distinct differences in meaning. Don't pretend differently, please.

"Tea-bagging" had essentially one very limited usage definition before the [half] wits on MSNBC or whatever used it to describe TEA Party protesters...makes one wonder what those [half] wits have been up to.

-----------------------------

Yes, Vandy, it IS [or was] used in a predominantly homosexual environment. It takes little imagination to picture the result should one male -- hetero or otherwise -- pull that on a confirmed hetero male...death would be in the air...literally. Homosexuals just get a laugh.

Well, Lightnup, it WAS a bit hard to get up off the floor, what with the laughing and all.

I laughed so hard and long my "grinnin' muscles" started to hurt. I hate it when that happens.

Maybe we should have ACORN run these forums. That way, we could vote multiple times for the posts we like instead of just once.

anniebelle repeated the oft-mumbled line of the anti-capitalist left: ..."these obscene profits made by "insurance" companies."
________________________________________

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12494701...

"Health insurance companies aren't quite as profitable as many critics seem to think."

"For every premium dollar that they take in, about 83 cents goes out in medical costs -- doctors, hospitals, and drugs," says Carl McDonald, health insurance analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. The rest is spent on overhead. Net income comes to just a few cents per dollar of premiums."

"Consider WellPoint, the biggest private health insurer on Wall Street, which has about 35 million customers nationwide. Last year, it paid out 83.6% of revenues in expenses. Net, after-tax income as a percentage of total revenue came to a princely 4.1%."

"In other words, simply eliminating profits would only allow the public option to undercut the private sector by 4% or so."

"Returns on assets, a key measure of profitability, are typically pretty modest too. According to analysis by FactSet, WellPoint's ROA has averaged 5.8% over the past five years, Aetna's, 4.2%. Those were, remember, supposedly boom years. UnitedHealth was higher, at 9.6%, but fell to 6.4% in 2008. These are reasonable, but hardly spectacular, results. By comparison, Wal-Mart averaged a 9.2% return on its assets and Dell, Inc. 12.4%."
__________________________________________________________

Lightnup- your really need to understand the difference between registration fraud and voter fraud. There were fraudulent voter registration forms submitted among the ACORN voter drives, but the organization would have been in violation of election law had they NOT submitted the forms (no matter how suspicious they may appear).

Now, we get to actual election fraud, that is, an individual going to the polls and casting a ballot under false identity or pretense. The number of these cases over the past decade are minimal to non-existent. And how many of those cases were associated to ACORN? None. That's right, there is not one case of a person committing actual vote fraud as a result of ACORN's efforts. Not one, ever, anywhere.

The registration fraud that ACORN committed was due to the people who collected the forms, and were compensated by the number of voters they registered. That's very different than the registration fraud perpetrated by Republican operative Nathan Sproul.

As Republican Congressman Chris Cannon summarized during a joint hearing for the subcommittee on commercial and administrative law back in May 2008: "The difference between ACORN and Sproul is that ACORN doesn't throw away or change registration documents after they have been filled out."

Sproul's brand of registration fraud was much different than that of ACORN. During the 2004 election, Sproul was accused of attempting to destroy registration forms of Democratic voters in Nevada. That same year in Oregon, Sproul & Associates allegedly instructed canvassers to only accept Republican registration forms in addition to destroying those turned in by Democrats.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Sproul's firm was accused of actually firing workers who brought back Democratic registration forms. Similar problems related to Sproul & Associates popped up in Pennsylvania and West Virginia

So, while the ACORN voter registration controversy involved no criminal acts whatsoever, the GOP's Nathan Sproul was involved in registration fraud that actually broke the law. But who gets crucified for trying to rig the system? The group that's out registering poor people who are more likely to vote for the Democratic candidates.

Maybe some people should take their minds out of the gutter. It only leads people to wonder how someone has such intimate knowledge of unusual and obscure terminology used by those who live alternative lifestyles.

Ollie has it right. This disjointed movement referred to as the "tea partiers" began exactly as he described. Tea BAGS are their mascot. So they are nothing short of self-proclaiming tea-baggers.

Now that I am on the road to recovery from my bout with H1N1, it's time to get back to business.

I'm going to remain completely neutral on this one. With each passing day that time is wasted in passing amendment after amendment to attach to a bill that will do nothing to reform health care, it's clear to me that our lawmakers are hopelessly corrupt and are beholden to a sector that claims it cannot afford any meaningful reform efforts.

But it has billions of dollars to dump into the pockets of our lawmakers to sway them to stall and resist doing what is right. And very few have the willpower to resist that kind of influence.

It used to be that people in this country, when faced with an insurmountable task, would not be dismayed when someone said, "it cannot be done." People would roll up their sleeves and say, "Let's find a way to do it."

I watched "Apollo 13" the other night. It's a great movie that has a great lesson it it. Back in 1970, had those Government workers not rolled up their sleeves and found a way to do the impossible, several times over several days, three men would have died in space. They did the impossible and got those men home alive.

Nothing has changed since the first day that health care reform has been proposed. The players are all the same. The money being spent to derail it is still flowing and it's being tracked very carefully.

Mediocrity is not going to cut it this time. People are tired of it, and heads are most definitely going to roll if our politicians do not do the jobs they were elected to do.

It's going to come down to votes OR the money. They do not go hand-in-hand any longer. If the money is too appealing to them, then the votes are going to put them out of office.

The mind games are no longer working, and they had better wake up to that fact very soon.

I amend my previous post:

Maybe we should have ACORN and Nathan Sproul run these forums. That way, we could vote multiple times for the posts we like instead of just once.

Feel better now OllieH?

I just received an e-mail from a friend who is attempting to write a series of historical novels. He's having trouble with "parties" too.
I thought I'd include the note here.

"Much on the same topic - but seriously....

In the writing of my books, I am wrestling with the problem of what constitutes the nitty-gritty of the mind-sets for liberal and conservative people.

Lincoln was a flaming liberal - despite being a founder of the Republican Party. He felt "there must be a better way" than just doing what was the proper time-honored procedures of the past.

The founders of America seem to be liberal relative to the English of their time. There must be a better way of making a government.

Darwin's evidence was accumulating that time moved forward and not just cycling around and around in the same pattern.

Is the feeling that one can move to a different and higher level the essence of what it means to be liberal, and remaining in place within the proper order of things and not rocking the boat means to be conservative. One liberates from out of the rut, while the other wants to be "in the groove."

Of course, sticking with the tried and true is not adventurous and one can predict the future. But trying to move to a different way of doing things is fraught with the possibilities of stumbling and messing things up, but, as they might say, you can't get there without trying."

Folks should stop assuming the worst about others without proper background study and research.

As detailed in depth elsewhere, academic study and professional experience are necessary for the proper evaluation of case files concerning the sexual appetites and preferences of various social and sexual deviants in our society before pronouncing them as limited security risks to our national security. This includes professional study [non-practical], interviews, etc and insider hidden word-meanings.

"Teabagger" [or "teabagging"] is one of those words. It was used here in the insulting sense. "Mailing a tea bag" and "teabagging" are two quite different and distinctive things in this context. As we all know well.

As for "carrying a tea bag"...well, that IS reaching. Spin as you like...we all know better.

In closing, unlike some others here I am quite comfortable in my masculinity -- and my heterosexuality.

Apparently not.

"Thou protesteth too much."

C:-)