CIVILIZED COUNTRIES HAVE UNIVERSAL HEALTH PROVISIONS

WE HAVE UNIVERSAL HEALTH EXCLUSION

See, our private corporate exclusionists spend all their money on cherry-picking, not on covering the population. It has been noted and needs often repetition: in order for insurance to work, it must spread the risk over the population. Otherwise the providers will avoid the needful, and the healthy will avoid the providers--until too late.

To expect the corporate employers to keep health plans is fantasy under the present system. Either they cut health to sign unions, then cut jobs to pay for it, with the added benefit of executive efficiency bonuses. See GM.

If you work for a huge corporation or the government, you might give up a lot of pay for moderate to good health care. If you are self employed with a good cash flow, you might get OK for a big outlay. If you work in other places, good luck.

The reason Germany has had universal health care since 1890-one hundred and fifteen years-is that it works and that it is indispensable to the functioning of civilized life.

We believe they have poor health services, yet if ours is so good, why do nearly half of us do with nearly none.

Insurance companies should not ever be allowed to hold the population hostage for pre-existing conditions or any other cause as long as there is an uninsured baby, veteran, or housewife on the landmass. Either spread the risk in order to carry the liability, or do business in Syria.

Or start thinking in terms of single pool, single payer, no exclusions, holdouts, exemptions, or half-measures. On the boat or bail.

Oh, yeah. We could afford health care if we would stop paying for stupid and optional wars.

CHAVEZ AND 500 YEARS OF GOLD MINING

CESAR CHAVEZ has been elected, overthrown by bush-whack, re-elected, triumphed over a bush-roving slander and recall effort, and he is the democratically elected President of Venezuela. Our Resident-select cannot hold a candle to these achievements.

The European Conquistadors, first Spanish, then mostly British, now mostly US American, have been taking gold and other resources out of the countries south of here for five hundred (500) years. We, that is, the western "democracies" of European heritage, have enslaved and exploited the Americas down south for half a millennium by military, economic force, and political subjugation because we have selected the rulers. We have not respected sovereignty or human rights or political autonomy at all.

We set up dictatorships, always with severe military backing, and then put in place our own trade tactics designed to suck the human and material goods out of the countries. We abetted plutocracy, leaving poverty and injustice, environmental rape, and iron rule for the ninety-eight percent.

Our free trade treaties are one-way sales of value-added finished goods and agricultural staples and technology. We buy only the depleteable resources that are literally dirt cheap, and through terms of the treaties, sell them back in expensive forms. Monsanto, United Fruit, GM, and a thousand more are gold mining after 500 years.

We do not invest in real in-country finished production that could make these beautiful republics real self sustaining democracies. Rather,we staple their noses with their own gold rings.

Cesar Chavez looks like a leader who is independent and trying to regain hemispheric dignity after 500 years. There is a point where someone will stand up to the bullies.

Although we the bullies don't like it, in the long run Chavez's leadership is good for Latin America and good for our own future.

We have a choice: to support dictators and war, or play like adult equal partners in prosperity.

It is good that Chavez is not a lapdog: they sometimes turn and bite.

-30-bobby

WE NEED TO APPRECIATE THE CONGRESS--EXCEPT THE COWARDS

Some congresspersons are as brave as they dare be, considering the financing scheme of getting and staying where they are. It is a stacked deck.

Tom DeLay gets all the money he needs because he markets his product-law favoring the corporate boardroom. His politics are devised and designed to serve his own ends, which are the ends of his sponsors.

There are those who do as success does. Those congresspersons are the cogs that turn the regressing wheel because advancement is toward the past. The meanest junkyard dog leads because he bites, bad. The pack follows for various reasons.

They may or may not understand the damage the Congress of the United States can do while advancing personal and mercantile positions. Following is damaging. When followers do not question the leader, there is trouble for the constituent. When obvious lies are served up, the meek pay for the caviar.

People suffer, people die. Because of corporate-some of it illegal-cash, the funds go to the ones who comply with status quo: opposition is targeted.

Machiavelli wrote the book. Populations count, and even Machiavelli knew that.

No matter what money does, it does it to sway the most important element of power: people in numbers. Even dictators need public support.

So when you know that your progressive concept is honest and productive, tell your congressperson. They need numbers to fight the anti numbers.

Nobody is perfect, so encourage relative progress in your reps.

They need appreciation as much as the dark side needs lucre.

-30-bobby

WILLIE PETE, WHISKY PAPA, SHAKE & BAKE

They say white phosphorous is not a chemical weapon just because it is called a luminant or smokescreen or some other euphemism by the US military.

The chemical weapons convention says it is a chemical weapon because it causes injury or irreparable injury or death by chemical action, and that it is illegal, spelled ILLEGAL, UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW.

DOES THIS GIVE YOU AN IDEA WHY g w bush CALLED ALL INTERNATIONAL LAW NOT BINDING ON US ACTIONS?

Back to normal screaming, we know that the current people working the crowd are radicals who would like a Hitler to liberate us. Us as in U. S.

These are the ones who can justify abrogating hard-won treaties. They can disavow habeas corpus in Guantanamo so they can do it here.

Have you hugged your congressman today?

You might have slapped his/her face for being a shill, better.

-30-bobby

ZERO COMMENTS

That is all I get, zero comments, mostly.

Though it is not the same as no comment, it could be both.

Let's say that no comment on a blog is not a negative, whereas negative comments would be. But if a commenter means no comment, he should register it by saying "I have read your offering, and have no comment."

Then there are the positive comments, registered as "I like your twisted logic", or that "you are the most inspired genius of the new century."

Negative comments, a simple "I hate you" will do, are not really what a blogger might aspire to, yet they are acknowledgment.

I check in to see if I'm read, even if I don't write each time.

So encourage me. Please.

-30-bobby

THE ARTERY

IN HOUSTON THERE IS THE ARTERY

Nowhere else but here is the place where art covers the ground, the trees, the walks, walls and wayward artist. He is greeted by the master of arts, master of light, dimension and communication. He, that is, i am greeted with importance because I truly am appreciated for my own underachieving self.

At The Artery we get to refuge away. Here we are captured in a net, voluntarily schooling to swim out again, recharging and being recharged. Mark is the fisherman, casting and casting back, reschooling the novice and jaded, too.

Mark did not teach me to draw: he taught me that I could draw.

On Wednesdays I go there when I can. I get to practice and brag on myself and sometimes model. I suspect i shock a little, too. Yet they let me just practice there, maybe 'till I get it, or they get it. But it is the allowed home.

Out of the quiet brilliance of Mark Larsen, Houston is the recipient of The Artery.

-30-bobby

I VOTED - WHAT DID KARL ROVE DO?

TODAY I TOOK MY WIFE TO WORK AS A PRECINCT CLERK IN THE ELECTION.

THEN I WORKED AT UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON AS THE FIRST TIME ART MODEL IN THE DRAWING CLASSES. I WAS THE FIRST TIME MODEL IN THREE CLASSES. NINE HOURS, SO FAR TODAY.

THEN I VOTED AND ATE SOME RICE AND BEANS.

NOW I AM GOING TO HELIOS TO MODEL AGAIN, FOR MAYBE ANOTHER HOUR. FOR THUY.

ONLY IN HEAVEN DO OLD GOATS GET TO UNIVERSITY VIRGIN MODEL 10 HOURS AND STILL VOTE IN THE SAME DAY.

Didn't vote for a single Rep-ublican.

Not today or ever.

Make heaven happen.

-30-bobby

THESE GUYS

THESE GUYS WE LET LOOSE ON OURSELVES

Why can't we learn--see, they never do what they say, unless it is bad.

Bad, they do.

Look at the Terminator, I mean the other one, in California. Only feels obligated to his worst promised nightmare.

Our local one, the EXterminator, delivers consistantly. He never bothers to make a goood promise.

Hammer one for the dark side.


Our voter message to them should be to stop lying, start producing goodness.
Progress, education, services.

Stop killing, withholding, locking up, lying about security, WMDs, healthcare, and immigration.

But we must do homework....know what answers to question.

Vote only for progress, progress, progress. Not fear, not security without freedom- it is impossible to have security without freedom.

Mainly, VOTE, but not for bigots.

-30-bobby

VOTE 8 NOV, BUT CUT THE DECK

W. C. FIELDS said to trust everybody, but always cut the deck.

It has been my observation that in most countries, especially this one, the political equivalent of Republicans control the equivalent of the counties.

Battle of Hastings, 1066: Look at the rewards for successfully winning.

The king paid off the generals with land and title. The responsibility of tribute was laid to the counties--places where things are counted. What is counted must be collected--taxes.

The Magna Carta created another countable--votes.

Fast-forward to 2000--guess who is counting. Tom DeLay. The census?

Zip to 2004--the count is tallied by the death of a thousand cut votes.

Morph to next Tuesday--what do you expect? I expect more fraud.

For instance, a friend who is blind called the county for a mail-in ballot. He was told, "Sorry, you're voting the wrong party--click".

The Primary System which declares party preferences gives the bean counters a statistical advantage--preclusion as well as exclusion of the opposition.

Watch out when you vote--vote in person and don't let them see your party registration.

Remember the old Dixiecrats? Well, just say that when rats abandon a sinking ship, they jump to a pirate schooner.

Watch your back, don't trust recycled bigots, plus cut the deck, and scream rape.

You have been raped.

-30-bobby

GITMO SHAMES HUMANITY

W and only the most ruthless dictators have lots of policies in common. Their bottom line is secrecy, their purpose is not nice.

Secret prisons and policies do not protect anything but power and corruption.

We have held hundreds in secret hell holes in Guantanamo for years without charging them. If they are bad, they should be charged.

They are not charged for only one reason: it would embarrass government to charge people with bad evidence. We have arrested many because they were in the wrong place. Others for practicing their own human rights. Some for a dozen mistaken reasons.

It is the paranoid police of profile justice. Lack of cultural understanding is a big problem in the US military. These are not anthropologists, do not understand other cultures they are trained to destroy.

You fear what you don't understand, then punish the victim.

It is absurd to think that useful information is obtainable from anyone who has been held incommunicado for four years. Anything he knows is obsolete simply due to time. Further, any enemy organization worth its salt would change every procedure possible once those secrets were jeopardized.

Holding prisoners illegally for obsolete information is not helpful and injures our moral standing in the world. This w has lost the good faith we had built up.

It is the time for all good men to act like it and run the bums off, then lead us to lawful and ethical behavior.

Justice is the way to peace.

-30-bobby