To help us bust the myth that our health insurance system is fine the way it is and that reform isn't important to the American people, upload a video response to this video explaining why you want reform.
Are you serving Satan on the internet? Our salvation depends not only on our relationship with Christ, but on our relationship with other people. Archbishop LAZAR continues his discussion in this video.
The Internet as servant of Satan; how people lose their souls through the internet and with their tongues. Archbishop LAZART discusses this in this video.
The U.S. health care debate is raging, and other developed countries are part of the argument -- though not always willingly. Everyone has a health care story, so tell us yours -- no matter what country you live in -- at Link TVs new webcam discussion site, Real Conversations. http://www.linktv.org/realconversations
SEIU member Kathy Yassi captured on video the stories for regular people personally affected by our broken healthcare system as they joined together to demand healthcare reform.
It’s dangerous what a book title can do. Especially when one hasn’t even read the book yet. “Jesus for President,” by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, has settled in on my bookshelf along with several other titles yet to make it to first place on my “to read” list. When this minister turned off the television with its disappointingly kindergarten-ish debate about health care reform and moved onto the deck on a cool summer evening with the relaxing benefit of a crisp little glass of merlot, the result? A light-hearted 1st century fantasy laced with a twist of hope and a splash of the Holy.
It was late Galilee afternoon and the Rabbi and his followers were exhausted after another satisfying yet hectic 15 hour day of healing the sick. Jesus could never turn anyone away. There was always one more person with a bunion, or fever, or cough or broken bone waiting outside long after the Galilee JesusCare clinic should have closed.
The mood was one of agitation. Peter was whining: “I’ve had the lepers for four days now, please, please may I organize the migraines tomorrow?” John was scrubbing his hands again and again, more accustomed to scaling fish than preparing the mud and spittle clay Jesus used on the cataracts. Thomas followed Jesus around like a puppy dog. “Are you sure that fractured hip you touched up will really hold Ezra’s 250 pounds, Jesus? What if Ruth’s tonsils flare up again and we’ve left to go back to Nazareth? I really doubt those boils on Ebenezer’s backside are gone for good.” Jesus was used to this and smiled with amusement. Johanna and Mary had Jesus’ cloak, sewing one more round of patches at the torn hem where poking, grasping hands had hysterically tried to make contact with the popular and proven Healer. And once again (it happened every day about this time), that one giddy leprosy-healed man poked his nose in the door and said, “Thank you Jesus! Thank you Jesus!” James muttered under his breath, “We heard you, we heard you, why don’t you go find your nine ungrateful pals and teach them some manners?” Jesus looked over disapprovingly, covering his understanding smile with a cough.
In the meantime, Andrew and Matthew were up on the roof repairing a bed-sized hole. “What am I supposed to know about thatch?” fisherman Andrew said. “I do nets”. “I don’t know where we’re going to get the money for this” said Judas, (yes, that Judas) looking up from the room below. Jesus ignored them, remembering the devotion of the man’s friends, insisting that there was a way for their mat-ridden friend with quadriplegia to get access.
As a hint of an evening breeze began to stir up off the Lake, Jesus gathered his friends together. He lit the candles, “blessed are you, Lord God, Ruler of the Universe, because of you we have these gifts to share.” He poured the wine and they passed the plates of tilapia and pita bread and fat, ripe, olives.
And as they drank their wine, they remembered the day which had passed and what they had heard from the one they trusted and had chosen to follow.
When they had dismissed the children he had said, “No, do not hinder them, let the little children come to me.”
When they were overwhelmed by how much Jesus had to do, he had said, “I give you authority. Go! Cure them.”
When they asked how they should prioritize the line-up of patients he had said, “just ask them ‘Do you want to be healed?’”
Do we want the system healed?
Shane Claiborne shares what he believes to be the best case fr a just war and why it isn't following with Jesus' teachings.
A video story which appeared on the online edition of the Columbus Dispatch about the neighborhood served by Mar Cassian and about his ministry there.
By: Patricia Barry | Source: AARP Bulletin Today | August 14, 2009
Now it’s getting down and dirty. As expected, the gloves are off in President Obama’s push for health care reform. Democrats and Republicans are battling over how to fix a system they all agree is broken—that’s how Congress is supposed to work. But this summer something new has entered the political arena—a tsunami of rumors, myths, fear-mongering and misinformation about the proposals that surges around the Internet in nanoseconds. “I’m totally confused about what’s going on,” one reader wrote to the AARP Bulletin. “How do I know who to believe?”
Misinformation spreads at rapid speed
It’s a good question. Another is how this new phenomenon—the ability to spread misleading information at rapid speed through chain e-mails, blogs, text-messaging and “tweets”—will affect the reform debate.
“What we’re seeing is a flood of viral content that distorts the Obama effort to reform health care,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who codirects www.FactCheck.org, a website that examines questionable claims from all sides of the political spectrum.
Today’s opposition tools are very different from those used against previous attempts at health care reform in the Clinton era. Then, the key means of attack available were television advertising and direct-mail campaigns, which were expensive and took time to organize.
“Extremists and people who are so locked into their own ideology that they’ll distort anything have been out there forever,” Jamieson says. “But they haven’t had a way to reach out to as many people as efficiently as they have now.”
Understanding the proposals
Health care reform has “serious consequences to people’s lives, and it would be useful if as many people as possible actually understood what the proposals are about,” Jamieson says. But the rise of the Internet and the decline of the mainstream press as a prime source of information, she adds, put that prospect at risk.
To add to the confusion, Obama, while talking up his overall goals for reform, has left it to Congress to work out the details. The result: a number of committees, each developing and announcing scores of proposals, which change as negotiations progress. “This process has not been a success in garnering public support for reform, and has left people nervous,” says Robert Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. “So the headlines every day, because the bills are different, scare different people.”
Could the rumormongering affect the outcome? Recent angry exchanges and violent interruptions at lawmakers’ town hall meetings during the August recess suggest that it might. Members of Congress faced a barrage of questions based on the same Internet-spread myths.
If a disproportionate number of constituents who believe the rumors show up at meetings, while those who are happy with health reform stay home, what then? “Does that skew the member’s sense of public opinion?” Jamieson asks. “Does it send the member back [to Washington] saying, ‘I’m going to lose the election if I vote for this thing?’ ”
Blendon, though, thinks most voters, especially the independents, ultimately won’t be swayed by the myths. “The real debate for them is: What happens to me and my family out of this thing?” he says.
As proposals are refined into a single bill, which could happen this fall, Americans will get a better handle on what matters to them—whether their own health care costs would rise or fall under reform, whether taxes would increase to pay for it, and what impact it would have on the deficit, Blendon says.
Meanwhile, here are some of the persistent myths about health care reform, how they arose, and what the three leading current proposals—a House bill, a Senate health committee bill and a set of options still being considered by the Senate Finance Committee—actually say about those issues:
Q. Will the government take over health care so we end up with socialized medicine?
No. Neither the president nor the congressional committees have suggested anything remotely resembling a government takeover of health care.
Obama has specifically rejected the idea of a “single payer” system, like Canada’s, in which the government insures all citizens. None of the leading proposals in Congress even considers going down this road—a fact that has brought strong protests from some consumer and doctor groups that favor this approach. And although Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., has long called for a “Medicare for All” program, this is not included in proposals from the Senate health committee that he chairs.
Even further off the table is the concept of “socialized medicine”—in which the government not only runs health care but also owns hospitals and pays doctors’ salaries. Great Britain has this kind of setup, as do the Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense health programs in the United States.
Where did this myth come from? Opponents of reform constantly use the term “government-run health care” to disparage the reform proposals, despite the popularity and success of existing government-run programs like Medicare. The tactic often works. Even some Medicare beneficiaries say they’re worried about a “government takeover” of Medicare.
What do the proposals say? Obama has proposed setting up a single “public plan”—available only to those without employer insurance—to provide a voluntary alternative to the many private plans that offer individual health insurance. The House and Senate health committee bills propose a national public plan to compete with these plans and meet the same requirements. The Senate Finance Committee is expected to exclude a public plan. Lawmakers are also considering state-run community health co-ops as an option.
Q. Will private insurance be outlawed or wither on the vine?
No. Obama and the congressional committees say their objective is to build on the current system—keeping employer-sponsored group insurance and giving more consumer protections to people who are employed by small businesses or buy insurance as individuals.
Supporters of a public plan option argue that it would act as a safety net for the uninsured, provide competition for private insurers and, in Obama’s words, “keep them honest.” Opponents of the public option, including the health insurance industry, contend that it would ultimately destroy private insurance because the government could offer lower payment rates to doctors and hospitals, as Medicare now does.
Where did this myth come from? Currently 177 million people have employer or individual insurance. The issue caught fire after the Lewin Group, a research consulting firm owned by UnitedHealth Group, estimated that 119 million of them would switch to a public plan, if everybody were allowed to join it. But the proposals actually exclude those with employer insurance from the public plan. On that basis, the group estimates that 34.9 million would exit private insurance—but it was the high 119 million figure that ricocheted around the Internet.
Another public policy group, the Urban Institute, calculated that after reform, 161 million (or 91 percent) would still enroll in private plans. A third group, the Economic Policy Institute, examined how employers would react to a “pay or play” mandate, which would require them to either provide coverage or contribute up to 8 percent of payroll to cover the uninsured. Fears of a mass exodus from employer insurance “are overblown,” the study found. “Millions of workers will keep the employer-sponsored insurance they have today.”
What do the proposals say? Each of the proposals calls for national or regional heath insurance exchanges that would allow people without employer or public insurance and small employers to choose from a menu of private insurance plans (and a public option, if there is one), with online information to help compare them.
Subsidies would be available for people unable to afford the premiums, on a sliding scale according to income. And under the House bill, people with employer insurance would be eligible for government help if their premiums exceeded 11 percent of their income. Small businesses would also get subsidies.
People with existing insurance would be able to keep it after reform begins. But after that date, new individual policies could no longer be sold unless they met required standards of benefits. After five years, all plans—including group employer insurance—would have to meet those standards.
Q. Will the government encourage euthanasia to save costs?
No. This false but scary idea—now surging around the Internet in blogs and e-mails—claims that the House bill would require Medicare beneficiaries to have mandatory classes every five years to decide how to end their lives earlier. Typical e-mails add: “They’re going to push suicide to cut Medicare spending!” All identify page 425 of the bill as their source.
Where did this myth come from? On July 16, Betsy McCaughey, a former Republican lieutenant governor of New York, appeared on a conservative radio show. Citing page 425, she said: “Congress would make it mandatory … that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner … all to do what’s in society’s best interest.”
On July 23, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, leader of the House Republicans, issued a statement saying: “This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law.” On Aug. 7, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin described the proposal as setting up a “death panel.”
What does the proposal say? The clause on page 424 (section 1233) would require Medicare to pay doctors for their time if beneficiaries chose to consult them for information on advance care planning, such as making a living will, appointing a health proxy, and hospice care (already covered by Medicare). Medicare would pay for these sessions only once every five years.
AARP described McCaughey’s claims as “rife with gross—and even cruel—distortions” of legislation that “would not only help people make the best decisions for themselves [on end-of-life care], but also better ensure that their wishes are followed.”
Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who has sponsored a bill that would also allow Medicare to cover end-of-life planning, characterized the death panel talk as “nuts.”
Q. Will Medicare be eliminated or gutted to pay for reform?
No. It’s inconceivable that any lawmaker would commit political suicide by proposing to get rid of Medicare. But the rumor has fast gained ground.
Where did this myth come from? Dick Morris, a political commentator, posted an article on his blog that began: “Obama’s health care proposal is, in effect, the repeal of the Medicare program as we know it.” Morris claimed that the proposals “will totally gut Medicare and replace it with government-managed care and rationing.” His article was picked up within days on some 281,000 websites.
What do the proposals say? It’s true they all seek to save billions from Medicare costs—not by cutting benefits, but by setting up new ways to pay doctors more fairly and to reward providers for quality of care instead of (as now) paying them a fee for each separate service; reducing waste and fraud; and reducing preventable hospital readmissions.
All the proposals would cut the amount of subsidies now paid to Medicare Advantage private health plans, which cost an average of 14 percent more per person than traditional Medicare does. Without subsidies, the private plans could become more efficient, or they could raise premiums, reduce benefits or withdraw from Medicare.
The proposals also add benefits to Medicare—such as covering more preventive services and narrowing the Part D “doughnut hole.”
Q. Will the government ration care?
No. But the specter of “rationing” is the battle cry of reform opponents. They say people in their 90s, 80s or even 70s will be deemed “too old” for joint replacements and cancer care—and even, in one persistent rumor, that “Obamacare” would deny treatment to people going blind in one eye as long as their other eye still works.
Where did this myth come from? It’s part of the “government takeover” argument, playing on often inaccurate beliefs that countries with national health systems severely ration care. In a widely circulated memo, political consultant Frank Luntz offered Republicans language that he believed would most resonate with Americans to defeat the Democrats’ push for reform. He suggested they say: “In countries with government run healthcare, politicians make your healthcare decisions. They decide if you’ll get the procedure you need … We can’t have that in America.”
What do the proposals say? In fact, they seek to prevent denial of care. Under every proposal, insurance companies would no longer be able to deny coverage on the basis of current health or preexisting medical conditions.
The proposals also would require plans to offer benefits packages with a comprehensive range of medical services equal to those in typical employer-sponsored plans. An independent advisory board, removed from political influence, would recommend new specific services to be covered based on scientific evidence. Annual or lifetime limits on coverage would be prohibited. None of the bills places any age limits on receiving medical care.
Where to go for the facts on health care reform proposals:
The following websites are run by nonpartisan organizations with no stake in the proposals:
An AARP Bulletin senior editor, Patricia Barry writes about health care and Medicare issues.
source: http://bulletin.aarp.org/yourhealth/policy/articles/health_care_reform2.1.html
As chronicled by Media Matters, some of the fabrications on Obama's health care reform plan are so blatant they make you want to jump up and yell "Liar, liar, pants on fire!" at the talking heads, politicians and corporate lobbyists. For example: On August 2rd, a YouTube video surfaced of from an SEIU/CAP event in 2007 featuring Obama discussing health care--specifically, the then-Senator was discussing how health insurance could transition away from a system of primarily "employer coverage."
Cut to Drudge Report and Fox News declaring, "Uncovered Video: Obama Explains How His Health Care Plan Will 'Eliminate' Private Insurance" and "2007 Video! Did Obama Say He Wants to Kill Private Insurance?," respectively. Funny, we were at that event in 2007, and that's not quite how we remember it.
Here's Media Matters for the fact check:
Contrary to cropped video, Obama did not suggest "employer coverage" would be "eliminate[d]" in 10 to 20 years. Nor did he suggest it would be eliminated by his plan. What Obama actually said [YouTube video cropped the comments in italics]: "But I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There's going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out where we've got a much more portable system.This is the most important time in the movement to fix health care; we need to continue shining a light on the distortions and biased stats. When all else fails (i.e. the facts), the right-wing always resorts to what it knows best. Could it be because they're hoping you'll be so scared, you won't ask for any?Obama stated during forum that under his plan, employers "still have the option of providing coverage." Following the remarks included in the YouTube video, Obama stated that under that "much more portable system": Employers still have the option of providing coverage, but many people may find that they get better coverage, or at least coverage that gives them more for health care dollars than they spend outside of their employer. And I think we've got to facilitate that and let individuals make that choice to transition out of employer coverage."
Later in forum, Obama stated that under his plan, pooling options would exist "in addition to the employer based system." Obama stated: "[O]ne thing that I think is important is to recognize that there are a lot of small employers who would like to get health care for their workers but they themselves can't afford it because they don't have access to large enough pools to allow them to save money. That's why I think it's going to be important for us in whatever system that we set up to make sure that in addition to the employer based system that we've got an alternative system that individuals who aren't getting it through the job can access."
Linda Douglass of the White House Office of Health Reform answers a question from outside the recent town hall in New Hampshire on why reform will empower a panel to decide end-of-life care for Americans. This is a myth that has unfortunately been spread far and wide by defenders of the status quo. There is no such panel in any of the bills being considered in Congress, period. To the contrary, the House bill gives Americans and their families more choice and access to counseling and information on these most difficult decisions if, and only if, they choose to pursue it. August 19, 2009.
In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White Houses Health Reform Office, addresses a story that makes it look like the President intends to eliminate private coverage, when the reality couldnt be further from the truth.
The Mor Gregorios Community Center is located in the white A-frame building
on the corner of Oak Hill and Michigan, across from the Webster Elementary
School. The address for the center is 1000 South Michigan Street, Plymouth,
Indiana. For more information about the video conference tomorrow, or for
directions to the community center, please call the center at 574-540-2048.
The Mor Gregorios Community Center in Plymouth will be one of the faith-based organizations around America which will participate in the nationwide teleconference with President Obama. The call will be this afternoon, Wednesday, August 19th. The conference call will start at 5 PM.
President Barack Obama has accepted an invitation to join tens of thousands of people of faith o
n a nationwide conference call to discuss health care reform on Wednesday, August 19, at 5:00 pm eastern. This is an historic opportunity, because never before has a President addressed such a large gathering of the faith community so directly and specifically on this issue.
The 30-40-50 thousand or more people of faith who will participate in this call will focus together on a moral vision for how we provide health care in the U.S. We will demonstrate that even though we may not agree on policy, we agree that our shared faith values should be at the heart of public discourse. If we hit 47,000 callers, it will symbolize our concern for the 47 million people who go without needed health care because they are uninsured. It will represent our commitment to speak truth to power until our health care future includes everyone and works well for all of us!
Call sponsors include the Faithful Reform in Health Care Coalition and a number of coalition members: American Muslim Health Professionals • Disciples Center for Public Witness • Disciples Justice Action Network • Evangelical Lutheran Church in America • Faithful Reform in Health Care • Islamic Medical Association of North America • Islamic Society of North America • Jewish Women International • National Council of Jewish Women • Network, A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby • Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), Washington Office • Progressive National Baptist Convention • Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism • Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations • United Church of Christ • United Methodist Church General Board of Church And Society.
Additional sponsors include: African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) • Catholics In Alliance for the Common Good • Catholics United • Christian Community Development Association • Faithful America • Faith in Public Life • Gamaliel Foundation • Jewish Council for Public Affairs • National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. • National Council of Churches in Christ • PICO National Network • Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference • Sisters of Mercy of The Americas • Sojourners • The Episcopal Church • The Latino Leadership Circle • The New Evangelicals • United Methodist Church, Washington Office of Women's Division, General Board of Global Ministries.
by Brian McClaren
Dear friends,
Although today I would not call myself a political or social conservative, I am grateful for my heritage as an Evangelical Christian: my faith is rooted in a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ, I honor and seek to live in harmony with the Scriptures, and I love to share the good news of God's love with others. Since my teenage years when I decided to follow Jesus, I have pursued wholehearted discipleship, and my life has been shaped by that commitment. After completing graduate school and teaching college English, I became a church planter and pastor and served in the same congregation for twenty-four years.
But for almost that many years, I have been growing more and more deeply troubled by the way so many from my heritage in conservative Christianity – in its Evangelical, Charismatic, and Roman Catholic streams - have allowed themselves to be spiritually formed by various conservative political and economic ideologies. It's been disturbing to see how many Christians have begun to follow and trust leaders who live more by political/media/ideological codes than by moral/spiritual/biblical ones.
As a result, I sometimes think that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Fox News may now influence many conservative Evangelicals, Charismatics, and Catholics even more than Billy Graham, Rick Warren, T.D. Jakes, Pope Benedict, or even the four gospels.
Now in a free country, people certainly have the right to choose their ideology. But Christians of all sorts, I think we all can agree, have a special calling - to increasingly harmonize our lives (including our lives as citizens) with the teaching and example of Jesus. My concern is that many of my sisters and brothers, without realizing it, have begun seeing Jesus and the faith through the lens of a neo-conservative political framework, thus reducing their vision of Jesus and his essential message of the kingdom of God. As a result, too many of us are becoming more and more zealous conservatives, but less and less Christ-like Christians, and many don't seem to notice the difference.
Thankfully, many Christian leaders are far more thoughtful and nuanced in their integration of faith and public life. They don't jump on talk-radio's latest conspiracy theory bandwagons, nor do they buy flippant talk of "death panels" or inappropriate comparisons to Hitler and so on. But still, so many of them remain silent about what's going on, and thereby grant it tacit approval.
I too was silent for a long time during my years as a pastor. But during the lead-up to the Iraq War, as I saw how little discernment was being exercised regarding the moral logic of pre-emptive war, I began taking risks that I hadn't taken before. I was similarly moved to speak out when, in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, relatively few Christians in America took a stand against torture. (In fact, according to survey data, Southern White Evangelicals were the group most likely to support doing unto others as they would never want done to themselves.) And when I heard Christians (mis)using the Bible to argue against environmental responsibility, again, I could not be silent.
Now, in the debate about health care, I am similarly disheartened to see the relative silence of thoughtful Christian voices as counterpoint to the predictable rhetoric of the more reactive voices. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been getting mass-emails and weblinks from Evangelical and Charismatic organizations that present frightening and outlandish claims about what President Obama is planning to do regarding health care. I’ve checked into these claims, and in case after case, they are simply false. They’re based on rumors spread by certain dramatic radio and cable-tv personalities, but they are not based in truth.
Again, people are free to disagree humbly and respectfully with their fellow Christians and their government. (As readers of my books know, I take this freedom seriously in my own life). But we Christians, it seems to me, have a high calling – to be radically committed to integrity and civility, even (especially) with those with whom we disagree. God, after all, is merciful, generous, and kind to "the just and the unjust": how can we not have that same obligation regarding those with whom we disagree? Even if others resort to dirty political tricks and distortion of the truth through exaggeration and fear-mongering, we simply cannot. At the very least, we should be seekers of truth, seekers of wisdom, not consumers (or purveyors) of propaganda – even if it comes from members of our own political party and people who quote a lot of Bible verses (often out of context). We have a higher calling.
So, without going into health-care reform specifics (which is still difficult to do, since there are many fast-changing proposals in play and the process of developing a vote-able proposal is far from over), I would simply like to plead with conservative Christians – conservative Evangelicals, conservative Charismatics, conservative Catholics, and so on – to take a stand for integrity and civility in the health care debate, alongside and in solidarity with those of us who love Christ just as you do but do not rally around the conservative political banner.
If you take this stand, you will be heard by your fellow conservatives in ways that some of the rest of us can’t be heard. And lives could be saved as a result of our joint calls for Christian integrity and civility: we've already seen what happens when people translate religious and ideological passion into violent action. Recalling the words of that great 19th century British conservative Edmund Burke, think of what could happen in the next few years if too many good conservative people sit back and do nothing ... while less scrupulous and more desperate conservative people whip their followers into a frenzy through fear and inaccurate information.
I will continue to speak out on these issues as I have done in the past. But I don’t expect the most extreme Christian conservatives to listen to me much. Since I was an outspoken supporter of President Obama’s candidacy, and since before that I was equally outspoken against torture, against the invasion of Iraq, for environmental stewardship, etc., many of them have written me off (sometimes with quite spicy language). But if you are a conservative Christian who cares about integrity and civility in communication and debate, perhaps they will still listen to you when you call them to a higher standard. I hope you will take the risk of speaking out with that in mind.
As my friend Jim Wallis recently said so eloquently (http://blog.sojo.net/2009/08/06/truth-telling-and-responsibility-in-health-care/), we may have honest differences with our fellow Christians on the issue of health care and many other issues too, but even in our differences we can agree that debates should take place in the light of truth and civility, not in the shadows of misrepresentation and prejudice.
Be assured, I am no uncritical supporter of health care reform. I am no more in favor now of rushing into expensive health care reform without sufficient debate than I was a few years ago when we rushed into an expensive pre-emptive war without sufficient care and discernment. I’m eager, like many of my conservative friends, to see the kind of reform that encourages small business and entrepreneurship. I'm interested in the kind of reform that reduces the power of both unaccountable mega-corporations and unaccountable government bureaucracy. I’m eager to see the kind of reform that doesn’t pave the way for powerful health insurance companies to do to the public in the next few decades what "too big to fail" Wall Street debt-repackagers did to us over the last few. I’m eager to see the kind of reform that in the long term reduces rather than increases our growing national debt and that truly helps our poorest neighbors without creating reductions in real service for our more prosperous neighbors.
Getting the kind of reform we need won’t be easy, especially with so many powerful interests spending huge amounts of money to achieve their own ends, with too little concern for justice, the common good … or the truth. That’s why, for there to be the kind of debate that produces good results, we who call ourselves Christians - conservative or otherwise - need to stand for full integrity in communication, whatever our political leanings. We need to be sure that the best arguments on both sides are heard ... not being satisfied to compare "our" best with "their" worst, as unscrupulous politicians and media personalities so often like to do, and not reducing the views of others to absurdity, even if we disagree with them vehemently.
The moral authority of Christians has been severely compromised in our culture in recent years. The most serious kinds of sexual scandals have rocked the Catholic, Evangelical, and Charismatic communities, not to mention financial scandals, ugly denominational lawsuits, and high-profile divisions. Studies have shown that some kinds of Christians are not only more likely to support torture - they are also more likely to hold racist views, to engage in domestic violence, and to end their marriages in divorce. No wonder young people are turned off as never before to a hypocritical face of Christianity that radiates shame, anger, and judgment rather than grace, love, and truth.
Even if we disagree on health care reform and other political issues, I hope we can agree that it is time for us to start walking - and talking - more worthy of the calling to which we have been called, to use Paul's words, to speak the truth, and to do so always in love. Or as James said, we must remember in this fire-prone political climate that the tongue can set off tiny rhetorical sparks that create huge flames of unimagined and unintended destruction. It can spread a false wisdom that sounds good on the surface, but beneath the surface is driven not by love but by bitter envy and selfish ambition. In contrast, he said (3:13 ff),
"The wisdom that comes from above is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace raise of harvest of righteousness."
+++++
By the way, if you’d like to do some fact-checking about the health care debate, here are some faith-based sources that I believe can be trusted to avoid uncritical and inaccurate reporting about health care. I understand they will be offering correctives to rumors and misinformation in the months ahead.
http://blog.faithinpubliclife.org/
http://www.sojo.net
http://www.catholicsinalliance.org/
source: http://www.brianmclaren.net/archives/blog/an-open-letter-to-conservative-c.html?loc=interstitialskip
“We hold these truths to be self-evident…” so said the framers of the US Declaration of Independence. And some of their fellow countrymen seem even today to hold certain beliefs as self-evident truths.
Here’s one I came across the other day:
Universal healthcare is theft
Now it could be argued that such a statement should not be taken at face value; that behind it lie arguments with lots of subtle nuances and so on.
But in my experience many Americans do seem to take such statements at face value. They treat them as statements of principle, setting out the attitudes with which one approaches a debate. It is held by many as an axiom, a self-evident truth.
For some, universal health care might be an aim, an ideal, a desirable goal. It might be a sort of daydream, a “wouldn’t it be nice if” kind of thought. This is the thought that it might be nice if health care was available to all people.
And one might say of such a thought or goal or aspiration, that, desirable as it is, it is impractical, that there are too many obstacles to its achievement, and so on.
But this statement does not make such criticisms of that goal. It does not say that the goal of universal health care is impractical or too difficult to achieve. It says quite flatly that it is undesirable and immoral. It is, according to this view, wrong to want everyone to be healthy.
The underlying value system of the statement that “Universal health care is theft” is that profits are more important than people, and that money is the highest value, to be loved above all else. And whatever the origins of such a value system may be, it is not Christian. In fact from a Christian point of view the statement “universal health care is theft” is an indication of gross moral turpitude.
The statement “universal health care is theft” is not an expression of Christian values, but precisely the opposite. From a Christian point of view, one could say that what is theft is not universal health care, but the lack of it.
As St John Chrysostom says, in a sermon on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31)
“See the man,” He says, “and his works: indeed this also is theft, not to share one’s possessions.” Perhaps this statement seems surprising to you, but do not be surprised. I shall bring you testimony from the divine Scriptures, saying that not only the theft of others’ goods but also the failure to share one’s own goods with others is theft and swindle and defraudation. What is this testimony? Accusing the Jews by the prophet, God says, “The earth has brought forth her increase, and you have not brought forth your tithes; but the theft of the poor is in your houses.” Since you have not given the accustomes offerings, He says, you have stolen the goods of the poor. He says this to show that they hold the goods of the poor even if they have inherited them from their fathers or no matter how they have gathered their wealth. And elsewhere Scripture says, “Deprive not the poor of his living.” To deprive is to take what belongs to another; for it is called deprivation when we take and keep what belongs to others. By this we are taight that when we do not show mercy, we will be punished like those who steal. For our money is the Lord’s, however we may have gathered it. If we provide for those in need, we shall obtain great plenty. This is why God has allowed you to have more: not for you to waste on prostittutes, drink, fancy food, expensive clothes, and all the other kinds of indolence, but for you to distribute to those in need. Just as an official in the imperial treasury, where he neglects to distribute where he is ordered, but spends instead for his own indolence, pays the penalty and is put to death, so also the rich man is a kind of steward of the money which is owed for distribution to the poor. He is directed to distribute it to his fellow servants who are in want. So if he spends more on himself than his need requires, he will pay the harshest penalty hereafter. For his own goods are not his own, but belong to his fellow servants (St John Chrysostom, On wealth and poverty: sermons on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus Luke 16:19-31)
So not only is universal health care right, but it is right to fund it out of taxes (”tithes”).
And the failure to do this is not merely not theft, but it is itself the worst kind of wickedness, as St John Chrysostom says:
This cruelty is the worst kind of wickedness; it is an inhumanity without rival. For it is not the same thing for one who lives in poverty not to help those in need, as for one who enjoys such luxury to neglect others who are wasting away with hunger.
The rich man in the parable would no doubt have agreed with the statement that “universal health care is theft”, but he could not even offer minimal health care to Lazarus, the chronically-ill man whom he saw every time he went in and out of his estate.
Most of us fail to live truly evangelical lives, according to the gospel. We all tend to grasp what we have and to fail to share with the poor and the sick. But, says St John Chrysostom, even approving the patience of the poor man and abhorring the cruelty and inhumanity of the rich man is a start. “These are no small indications of a virtuous disposition. For even if we do not seek virtue, but at least praise it, we shall perhaps be able to attain it; and even if we do not avoid evil, but at least censure it, we shall perhaps be able to escape it.” But if we regard the statement that “universal health care is theft” as a self-evident truth, then we censure virtue and praise evil, and that is why the statement is an indication of the greatest moral turpitude.
By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet
This article was published previously on AlterNet.org.
The recent spate of town hall dustups may look like an overnight sensation, but they’ve been years, even decades, in the making.
Since the days in the late 1970s, when the New Right began its takeover of the Republican Party, it has cultivated a militia of white people armed with a grudge against those who brought forth the social changes of the ’60s.
These malcontents have been promised their day of retribution, a day for which they are more than ready. Few seem to understand that they are merely dupes for a corporate agenda that will only worsen the conditions in which they live.
Why, you may ask, would men of power and fame shake the rough, unmanicured hands of gun enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists, gay-haters, misogynists and racists?
Because somebody’s got to do the dirty work. Magnates don’t like to soil their French cuffs, and it’s hard for a bunch of rich guys to garner sympathy for threats to their bottom lines. It’s the classic inside-outside game that the right wing of the GOP has played for the last two decades.
The Health-Care Industry Executive
Imagine you’re an executive at a pharmaceutical company. Your U.S. operations are your cash cow; they earn you wild net profits because, unlike in other industrialized nations, you do not experience the price controls of a government-administered program in which the government negotiates for the best price on prescription drugs and devices.
Along comes a government plan for health-insurance reform that includes a public, government-financed plan. The public option, they call it. As part of the plan, you will be required to negotiate with the government for the price of medications and devices to be distributed within the plan.
Now that could really screw up your massive profit margins. Private plans might then insist on prices more like those the government is getting.
Instead of increasing your profit by double digits in the worst year the economy has seen since the Great Depression, as did an outfit called The Medicines Co., your shareholders may have to settle for profits more in line with the overall growth of the economy. And wouldn’t that just stink?
Meanwhile, polls show a clear majority of Americans—you know, regular Americans, the kind who don’t want to own an AK-47, or who do accept the president’s citizenship status—favor the public option. In fact, in June, CBS News found that majority to be 72 percent.
So, whaddaya do? Well, if your lobbying firm counts former Rep. Dick Armey, R-Texas, as its senior policy adviser, you don’t have do much. Dick will take care of the rest through FreedomWorks, the ostensibly grassroots, nonprofit organization of anti-taxers, cold warriors and affirmative-action opponents, which he chairs.
Need to make it look like regular Americans oppose the health-insurance reform bills now being considered by Congress? Make sure a handful of those angry white people turn up at the town hall meetings now being conducted by members of Congress throughout the country. Make sure they disrupt the meeting and rattle the congressperson.
Capture it all on amateur video and put it up on a faux, amateur-looking Web site, and try to kid the media into thinking there’s a widespread rebellion happening. After all, the media are gonna want that dramatic footage.
The Republican Member of Congress
Now, suppose you’re a Republican member of Congress. Your party got totally throttled in the 2008 election, and if you don’t derail this health care thing, it’s going to be a big win for your Democratic opponents, as millions of underinsured and uninsured Americans finally have some health care coverage—one bright spot in a largely dismal economy.
Meanwhile, you get a lot of your campaign cash from health-care-related industries and from the Wall Street bankers and brokers who want to keep those profits soaring.
A public option is going to stink for you, too. So, while Armey’s army of taxphobes is useful to you, it would be great to get some really hard-core types to further stoke the fires—especially if marshaled by guys who know how to really tar Democrats with racist imagery and slurs of unpatriotic behavior.
That’s where Grassfire.org and its brother networking site, ResistNet, come in. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who promised to make health-care reform President Obama’s "Waterloo," is a big fan. Says so right there on the Grassfire Web site. ResistNet is yet another right-wing hub for organizing the disruption of health-care town hall meetings.
The Media Mogul
Okay, now put on the hat of a media mogul, one who rails against the minimal restrictions the U.S. has on multi-outlet ownership, and one for whom the bottom line is everything. In fact, you actually own the Wall Street Journal.
If you can nip this health care thing in the bud, you could stand in the way of a president who wants to rein in Wall Street’s worse excesses and who may depress the profit margins of health-care companies in which your readers invest with his dastardly public option. What’s a mogul to do?
Why not hire a guy known for riling the discontented to host a show on your cable news channel, and empower him as an organizer? Let him create a little project pegged to fear and nationalism—something, say, like 9/11—through which he mobilizes bands of those aggrieved by the fact of a black president to disrupt town hall meetings.
That’s exactly what Rupert Murdoch did when he hired Glenn Beck to host a Fox News Channel show and to put together a little organizing site called The 9-12 Project.
Although Beck’s stated goal is to bring America back to where it was on Sept. 12, 2001—a nation pulled together in the wake of the terrorist attacks the day before—he draws together only those who embrace the goals of the right.
But his project site is shaped like a social-networking tool, and activists in Florida credit the Tampa 9-12 chapter as turning them out to a town hall they helped turn into a ruckus.
Put these three scenarios together, and you have the phenomenon that has become the summer of the town-hall scuff, a heated season of right-wing disruptions of civic fora.
Add to that an oppressed-white-people narrative that has its roots in the origins of what used to be called the New Right, and you have a confluence of interests ready to elevate to prime-time status a disgruntled and paranoid minority with a penchant for misplaced blame.
FreedomWorks and the K Street Lobbyist
In Washington’s K Street corridor, Dick Armey is a very important man—so important, in fact, that he was scooped up, upon his retirement from Congress, by the lobbying firm DLA Piper.
It’s been widely reported that Piper lobbies on behalf of health-care industry interests, including Bristol-Myers Squibb, but its top health-care-industry client, according to OpenSecrets.org, is The Medicines Co., a small, below-the-radar firm that has paid Armey’s lobbying firm nearly $2.4 million since the beginning of 2008—nearly 15 percent of DLA Piper’s overall lobbying income for the period.
I called The Medicines Co., requesting an interview with someone on staff who could spell out the company’s position on the pending health care bills, and I got back a rather empty, generic statement via e-mail from the company’s public relations firm, FD:
The Medicines Co., a small biotech company, was founded on and continues to follow our mission of saving lives, improving patient outcomes and reducing health care costs. Any suggestion that the Medicines Co. has opposed or retained anyone to oppose the pending health care reform bills is entirely mistaken.
I sent an e-mail back, asking for the company’s position on the health-care bills what it spent $2.4 million to lobby for, and received no response by press time.
The Medicines Co. operates so below the radar that it is not even listed as a member on the Web site of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturer’s Association (PhRMA), which opposes the House bill because it empowers a non-elected panel of experts to oversee cost-containment in public programs.
PhRMA also claims the House plan will raise premiums on senior citizens enrolled in the Medicare prescription drug plan, a plan, as currently construed, largely seen as a giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies.
Last year, The Medicines Co. saw net earnings on its major product, the anti-coagulant Angiomax, increase 17 percent over the course of a single year.
Because of The Medicines Co.‘s tight lips, we may never know whether it feels it’s getting its $2.4 million worth out of Piper, or its senior policy analyst, Armey, in his effort to derail health care through the FreedomWorks astroturf site.
Go to the site, and you’ll find a Health Care Action Kit (PDF), complete with talking points and Armey’s "ObamaCare translator" of key terms in the health care discussion, laced with Armey’s own witticisms. There’s even a mock "ObamaCare insurance card" (PDF) you can print out and pass around at town halls. It promises, among other things on a bulletted list, "Rationed health care" and "Anxiety, pain, risk of death."
At the risk of mixing messages (a big public-relations no-no), Armey also advises health-care protesters to raise their opposition to the energy-reform provision called "cap and trade" in the health-care town halls.
Coincidentally, DLA Piper’s lobbying portfolio includes a number of oil and energy companies.
Then, there are the actual members of FreedomWorks, who leave the most enlightening comments on the Web site:
This, from Constantine Ivanov:
June 27, 2009—3:40pm
The problem is that no matter how passionately we are here condemning the socialized (better to say "Socialistisized") Medicine, "die eisernen Stiefel" (the iron jackboots) of Obamistas are methodically and systematicly destroying the very core of our country.
And I recall German troops who at a steady gait moved as close as 10 miles to Moscow in 1941.
Or, this, from Joe Massana:
June 27, 2009—4:00pm
[Obama] and his socilist party are ruining this country ... I know that if I was a black man right now, I would be able to get help from the government with my construction business and household bills.
If an entity providing 15 percent of the lobbying income at Armey’s day job took objection to any of this, do you think Armey would be overseeing the FreedomWorks outfit?
DLA Piper also earned $300,000 since early last year lobbying on behalf of the American Council of Life Insurers, which opposes the long-term care provisions in the House bill, which it sees as competition.
Grassfire and ResistNet
The FreedomWorks commenters are tame by comparison with those found on ResistNet, a project of Grassfire.org. Using a social-networking platform, Grassfire claims some 400,000 members who are dedicated to "resisting" the "Democratic agenda," which, by their lights, includes "open borders" and "taxpayer-funded abortions."
A 501(c)(4) nonprofit, Grassfire has been named as a "stealth political action committee" by Public Citizen. Its founder and president, Steve Elliott, has held up MoveOn.org as a model for where he would like to take his organization.
ResistNet, has become a major hub for turning out hard-core right-wingers to health-care town hall meetings. The organization took in $1.5 million in 2007 (the most recent year for which information is publicly available).
It’s difficult to find out much of anything about Elliott; he manages to keep a very low profile. But SourceWatch and Public Citizen report that Grassfire is represented by the Washington public relations firm Shirley & Bannister, whose principal is Craig Shirley, the man who gave us the Willie Horton ad of the 1988 presidential election.
Shirley promoted the movie, Stolen Honor, a Swiftboat-style smear piece made about 2004 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. Today, Shirley’s clients, according to the Shirley & Bannister Web site, include the National Rifle Association, author Ann Coulter, religious right co-founder Richard Viguerie, and other religious right figures.
But Shirley & Bannister retains ties to GOP establishment figures; its Web site bears an endorsement from William Kristol, who served in the administration of the first George Bush, who happens to be the candidate whose campaign reaped some of its victory from Shirley’s Horton ad.
The firm also promotes the books of former Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., (now of MSNBC) and former George H.W. Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan (who promised us a "kinder, gentler nation")—books published by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins.
The site also lists several other major publishers as clients for the promotion of books by right-wing authors.
I called Shirley & Bannister on Friday morning, asking if Grassfire/ResistNet was its client, since it is not listed on the Web site. I was told that Amy Haas, the person who could answer my question, was on the phone, and would get back to me. She did not.
On its introductory page, Grassfire.org complimentary words from Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., and Sen. DeMint.
"Grassfire has done a great job and has done a great service to the American people," reads the DeMint quote.
Grassfire makes the point often that it will show the president respect and refrain from personal attacks, as ResistNet, which touts a "no tolerance policy" (they can’t say "zero tolerance," since "Zero" is the nickname by which many of their members call Obama—a play on the first letter of his last name) for "personal attacks, lewd or profane language, or militancy against Barack Obama or others."
Yet a boxed statement on the opening page of the ResistNet site offers this: Welcome to the online community for patriotic citizens who are opposing the Obama-led socialist agenda …"
ResistNet is full of comments and blog posts that violate its purported "no tolerance" policy, including those calling for social insurrection and even the death of Obama. It promises that such comments will be removed by a moderator, and yet they live on the site for months.
Here’s a comment that appears below a letter one ResistNet member named Joel wrote to his congresswoman:
Comment by RBJ 1 day ago
Joel, I hate to be the one to tell you this, you remember the old saying about "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
Well that is all that we are doing here, just throwing words at the crowd of Socialist in D.C., aka "D.C.Terrorist"…
As we all know, when words fail, reach over and get a 2 X 4 and get after it. Words don’t hurt, but a good solid A$$ Whooping will get there attention everytime!
Once you have their attention, then you can talk.
Or check out this one, posted by George and Pat Wilkins on Aug. 6, in which they close a long post warning that "the statists will pass socialized medicine in September" by wishing for the death of the president:
Waiting lines will be long, those waiting will find operable conditions be found to be inoperable, Hospice and palliation for comfort will be their fate. Others will die. Why is this being done? back door reparations. I pray that God will strike Obama dead, and all who stand with him they are evil.
And those just two recent examples. Posted on July 2, and still living on the ResistNet site as I write is a video by the Rev. James David Manning, who warns that "white folks are gonna riot in the streets, and I’m gonna join them." Throughout the video, Manning, an African American, refers to Obama as a "half-breed Mack Daddy"—slang for a kind of megapimp.
Then there’s this charming bit of propaganda, Obama = Hitler (which you can view at the bottom of this story), which dubs video of Obama delivering a speech with the voice of Adolf Hitler, and interposes swastikas and Obama’s campaign logo; Obama is shown wearing a swastika armband; Hitler is shown with the Obama logo as a belt buckle.
Footage of Obama supporters, most of them African American, is run side-by-side with Hitler’s adoring crowds. As Obama waves and moves his mouth, the dub is Hitler yelling, "Sieg Heil!"
The ResistNet site is also peppered with posts touting the birther conspiracy, and other right-wing favorites. After Thursday’s scuffle at the Tampa, Fla., health care town hall, Eric Erikson (cross-posting from RedState) blamed the violence on "SEIU thugs," an emerging right-wing theme reported earlier by Steve Benen.
I tried to contact Grassfire President Steve Elliott to ask him about the conflict between ResistNet‘s "no tolerance" policy and the vitriol I found on his site. I also wanted to find out if there are health-care interests among his donors. Elliott, said Tina, the woman who answered the phone, was traveling, and his spokesman, Ron DeJong, was on vacation. She promised to text Elliott with my contact information, but I never heard back.
Glenn Beck and the 9-12 Project
Which brings us to Glenn Beck. There’s little I can add to what’s been reported (click here for AlterNet‘s Tana Ganeva writing on Beck’s racism), except that when I went to the Web site of Beck’s 9-12 Project, another hub of organizing for disrupters of health-care town hall meetings, I found that the comments section had been shut down.
The message left by someone named "Editor" bore no time stamp, only a date: August 6, the date of the infamous Tampa brouhaha at which anti-health-care protesters, according to the St. Petersburg Times, said they had been inspired by Beck and his project.
Each of these organizations have this in common: They’re all promoting a march on Washington for Sept. 12. Others in the mix include TeaPartyExpress.org, and the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, which was founded by Howard Kaloogian in the heat of the presidential campaign.
Kaloogian was the chairman of the "Recall Gray Davis Committee," which succeeded in unseating the Democratic governor of California. Our Country Deserves Better ran the "Stop Obama" bus tour during the 2008 presidential election, and was faulted by Fact Check.org for airing misleading anti-Obama advertising.
The Inside-Outside Game
The right wing of the GOP has long played this kind of inside-outside game, from the earliest days of the founding of the religious right by Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips and the late Paul Weyrich. All were veterans of the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, and all had experience within the establishment Republican Party.
Viguerie, following a model pioneered by Morris Dees for the 1972 Democratic primary campaign of Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., harnessed the power of direct-mail solicitations to land Ronald Reagan in the White House. Weyrich founded the Heritage Foundation, which became a fax-generating spin and policy factory for the Reagan administration.
Phillips took the game outside, organizing on-the-ground misanthropes, and eventually founding his own political party, the U.S. Taxpayer’s Party (now the Constitution Party) to exert pressure on the GOP from the outside.
The strategy firmly established the right’s foothold in the GOP, leading to the party’s takeover. Any remnant of the old establishment of the Republican Party was crushed in 1996, when defeated presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan, now a MSNBC commentator, threatened to walk the delegates he had won in his primary war against Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kansas, out of the Republican National Convention and into the arms of Phillips’ U.S. Taxpayer Party if the GOP platform did not firmly enough oppose abortion. He also insisted the platform incorporate a host of other right-wing demands, such as a condemnation of the United Nations.
The GOP forked over the writing of its platform to Phyllis Schlafly (another veteran of the Goldwater campaign) and Buchanan’s sister, Bay, and the takeover was complete. The right wing became the Republican establishment.
All of the narratives today embraced by the ResistNet, FreedomWorks and the Glenn Beck crowd find their legs in the one-man clearinghouse that is Howard Phillips.
Through his Conservative Caucus, Phillips disseminated the "birther" theory that Obama is not an American citizen, gave right-wing operative Cliff Kincaid an award for researching Obama’s alleged socialist roots, and for years has railed against "socialized medicine"—even arguing that Medicare is unconstitutional and warning darkly of a time when the government might determine who shall live and who shall die.
"[W]hen the supply of medical care is controlled by politicians and bureaucrats," Phillips told a 1997 gathering of his Conservative Caucus Foundation, "and the demand for that care exceeds the supply, then individual human beings created in God’s image become price factors in the eyes of medical gatekeepers—they’re not even medical, they’re bureaucratic gatekeepers—who determine medical decisions not on the basis of medical needs, but on the basis of bureaucratic priorities."
Phillips’ disdain for feminists is palpable, and his language about LGBT people, routinely labeled on his Web site as "perverts," "homos" and "sodomites" is contemptible. He refers to Planned Parenthood as "Murder Incorporated."
I called Phillips for comment on this article, but he was en route to Mexico where he has convened a press conference to protest the nonexistent North American Union, another right-wing conspiracy theory. (Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, is an invited speaker.)
Phillips advanced the career of Randall Terry, founder of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue. At one point, it seemed that his U.S. Taxpayer’s Party was to Operation Rescue what Sinn Fein is to the Irish Republican Army—the political wing of a movement steeped in violence. (In Terry’s case, the violence was in rhetoric and obstruction designed to incite others to act.)
Conspiracy of Silence
On Aug. 4, Terry, who is seeking to make a comeback with his new organization, Operation Rescue Insurrecta Nex, sent out an e-mail blast urging followers to attend health care town halls convened by members of Congress.
Trotting out the trope ... that health-care reform bills provide for taxpayer-funded abortions, he urges his followers:
Stir up some dust!
Be "unreasonable!"
In fact, you might want to be a little noisier and a little more intense than you might normally be.
I put it this way: If you were in danger of being murdered, and I could possibly save you at a town hall meeting, how would you want people to behave in a town hall meeting?
At a July press conference, Terry warned of "random acts of violence" that would occur if the health-care bill passed. There would be violent "reprisals against those deemed guilty," he said.
Think Terry’s too out on the fringe to matter? Think again. When AlterNet reported that the Supreme Court nomination hearing of Judge Sonia Sotomayor was being disrupted by Terry’s followers, not one Republican senator condemned him by name.
When Terry staged a demonstration outside the White House featuring men in Obama masks "whipping" him, not a distancing word was placed between him and the GOP establishment.
And now he is promulgating the false Republican claim that health-care reform will mean socialized euthanasia for the aged.
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin also has links to Phillips; for seven years, her husband, Todd, claimed membership in the Alaska affiliate of the Constitution Party—the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, whose convention Palin addressed last year via video.
Every other day, it seems, I receive an e-mail from one right-wing organization or another, warning of the grave consequences of health-insurance reform.
The subject line in an e-mail from Human Events magazine screams at me "Grandmas and babies exterminated by Obama ‘health’ plan," even as another of its e-mails asks, "Obama birth certificate destroyed?" The anti-gay American Family Association warns: "Liberals seek to silence and demonize those who oppose their socialism."
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council sent a plea for money to finance a television ad that features an elderly couple complaining of the government’s denial of surgery for the man while financing abortion with taxpayer dollars.
Think these organizations are not the Republican establishment? Consider that the annual Values Voter Summit sponsored by the Family Research Council’s PAC will feature former "moderate" GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a keynote speaker.
In the corridors of Washington’s K Street lobbying offices, in the district offices of Republican members of Congress, and in the executive suite of one singular mogul, the men of power must be well-pleased with themselves, watching YouTube videos of the mayhem they have unleashed on the rest of us. But they may just get their pound of flesh.
