On health care and birther/deather crazies

It's ironic that we're now visiting relatives in Vancouver, BC, where universal health care is a given -- and we're hearing many tales of how our relatives and their friends here have personally benefitted, even though there are occasional waits and administrative inconveniences (not that the American system is any better -- ask me sometime about trying to convince insurance companies that two procedures last year were, in fact, two procedures, and that they weren't being double billed, even though the bills came from different providers with different dates, etc.), while the crazy people in the States are besieging and hollering about 'death committees' and spreading absolute lies with fervor, all but drowning out the sane majority who think it's high time to get universal health coverage as an option -- it is, after all, only some 70 years since it was first proposed by Francis Perkins back in FDR's second term. As a number of people have pointed out, the senior citizens most vocal seem not to be aware that Medicare and Medicaid, along with Social Security, are all examples of the government programs they violently oppose. The cynicism of the right wing commentators and congresspeople who are orchestrating all this is blatantly obvious. Which doesn't seem to matter. Barney Frank's response to the woman in Massachusetts who compared Obama to Hitler (!!!!) was classic. In case anybody missed it, check out www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGX-2oTNens -- or, for the full town hall meeting (with several other odd people, it's at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss3PnhP8cp0

And there are also the crazy 'Christian' preachers announcing that they're praying for President Obama to die; see
www.talk2action.org/story/2009/9/2/12392/06622 for the third one to surface. (This particular preacher, by the way, has no training; his church's website states proudly, "Pastor Anderson holds no college degree but has well over 100 chapters of the Bible committed to memory, including almost half of the New Testament." Wonder which half of the New Testament that is? And just wait until he has it all memorized. Then he'll declare himself a bishop or archbishop, no doubt. Organized religion again proves its usefulness in attacking anyone perceived to be opposed to some doctrine or other. These calls are so extreme that they've caused a backlash, as in a veteran of the Iraq war who compared these statements to the more fanatic calls of extremists mullahs -- www.wtsp.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=112785 for more details.