Tax cuts move ahead in Senate - Chicago Sun-Times

Just a reminder to everyone who deigns to read this:

This is not a tax cut from the bounty of the Right. This is to keep the tax rates at the current levels. The "cuts" happened years ago (remember the little $600 milk bone you got a few years back? Me neither.)

When the next round of elections come up, and you are told that you got a glorious tax cut because of the Republican controlled House, please, think twice- it's alright.

Tax cuts move ahead in Senate - Chicago Sun-Times

So it goes, and goes, and goes...

Grieving Santo

Today is Ron Santo's funeral. Sad, but inevitable.

Sigh.

Yesterday, according to the Sun-Times:

"A grieving Ron Santo fan was arrested Thursday night for allegedly writing a tribute to the former late Cub on a CTA platform wall.

Ron Brakes, of Wheeling, told police he was upset after attending Santo’s wake and was “trying to do a good thing” when he defaced the Red Line’s Grand Avenue stop with a Sharpie.

“Good! Buy! Ron Santo! Cubs Best Cub Thirt-Baseman Forever Love Always God,’’ Brakes, 48, scribbled on the platform wall, according to a police report.

Brakes was charged with criminal defacement of property and possession of a marker with intent to deface."

Intent to deface? What is that, exactly? Does that mean that anyone with a Sharpie (tm) or a pen or a crayon or whatever can be arrested because they might do something criminally related?

Remember the movie "Minority Report"?

So it goes...

The REAL Death Panel

So, does everyone remember the big health care debate our mighty nation endured just a few short months ago?

Or were we just watching Dancing with the latest American Idol?

As you may recall, there was a portion of the proposed health care bill that provided for end-of-life counseling for those who were facing the inevitable.

The vaunted and lovely Sarah Palin, the one who is the alleged Republican front runner for the 2012 Presidential election, and highly paid shill under contract with Fox News, said that this amounted to "death panels."

Now we all know that this was a gross exaggeration on her part.

We do, right?

The Huffington Post reported in August of '09 that former Gov. P's opinion of our impeding doom was this:

"...government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

Sarah is also a Jan Brewer fan.

Ahem.

In yesterday's New York Times, I learned that in Arizona (Brewer Country to you and me,) there actually ARE death panels:

"Effective at the beginning of October, Arizona stopped financing certain transplant operations under the state’s version of Medicaid. Many doctors say the decision amounts to a death sentence for some low-income patients, who have little chance of survival without transplants and lack the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to pay for them."

"Organ transplants are already the subject of a web of regulations, which do not guarantee that everyone in need of a life-saving organ will receive one. But Arizona’s transplant specialists are alarmed that patients who were in line to receive transplants one day were, after the state’s budget cuts to its Medicaid program, ruled ineligible the next — unless they raised the money themselves."

So, let's review: In Arizona, if you are poor and in need of a life-saving transplant, you will die.

Since the most recent mid-term elections, Republicans have been screaming that the American people have firmly spoken and that there is now a mandate (see Republican agenda) that needs to be adhered to.

This is how far we have fallen.

So it goes...