Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Existing in New York City: Stirring Up a Cauldron of Trouble

Foto by tgw, New York City, March 2012
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Say goodbye to: Earl Scruggs
, a bluegrass master who along with Lester Flatt brought bluegrass music into national prominence back in the sixties when they did the theme song for the Beverly Hillbillies teevee show. Earl Scruggs, 88, American bluegrass musician, natural causes.
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Say goodbye to: Jerry McCain, blues harpist extraordinaire, at 82. Hear Jerry play "Steady": www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbipF0qaKhQ
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Obamacare
Why is suddenly Obamacare being held up to liberals and progressives as "affordable health care" with no alternatives offered us to counter it? If I remember correctly, Obamacare was composed by the pay-or-die health insurance giants, the pharmaceutical industry, and the for-profit hospital industry, and the committee to come to an agreement on it was under the chairmanship of a Power-Elite-asskissing Senator from the backward-thinking state of Montana, Max Baucus, head of the Senate Finance Committee, who right-off-the-bat said he would NOT put single-payer health insurance anywhere near that table where these health industry lobbyists were busy trying to figure out how to drill into the Medicare and Social Security vaults and steal as much of that money as they could with the blessing of President Obama, who stood firm in his opposition to single-payer health insurance and firmly opposed to a National Healthcare System where everybody would be fully covered under Medicaid and Medicare no matter their plight in life.

The fact that this Obamacare forces everyone to buy some kind of health insurance or face a penalty on their taxes during this time of economic depression hit me as sort of draconian from the get-go, though now that the rightwinger nutjobs have brought it before the Supreme(ly dumb) Court (5 of whom are Ayn-Rand-follower nutjobs who worship the pay-or-die health insurance (remember, Ron Paul said he'd let his best friend die in an emergency health situation should that friend come to him without insurance and ask for his help)), yes, I'm concerned because these creeps want to destroy whatever "fair" healthcare system we have left, though these mixed-bag creeps in Congress get the finest healthcare known to man from We the People of the USA, we who just financed a new heart for one of the most evil-minded bastards to ever grace the halls of the District of Corruption, the old pig who had his hand up Little Georgie Porgie Bush's asshole for two stolen terms as president, and who shot his hunting partner in the face and wasn't even questioned about it by the local police.

Now, however, so-called Liberals and Dumbocrats are lining up behind Obamacare and selling it to us as THE greatest healthcare plan ever devised by a civilized nation, a plan that if the scumbag rightwingers destroy it, will leave this nation helpless in the greedy arms of the pay-or-die health insurance industry and the for-profit hospital industry.

This is the same president who will not stand up behind Medicare and Social Security now, agreeing with the Neo-Con nutjobs and the Teabagger nutjobs that these endowments have to be viciously cut or privatized. I get so pissed off seeing this two-faced president being lauded as the lesser evil in a pack of evil sleazebags, which to me makes no sense. President Obama, ironically a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has extended our involvement in wars and has never blamed or held accountable Georgie Porgie Bush for lying us into two economy-wrecking wars; has gone gung-ho for drone flights now buzzing these little killer robots even over the USA; has given himself executive privileges that include assassinating his own citizens (he's already killed 3 Americans in Yemen--where just today (March 29) it was revealed that Obama is going hogwild with his drone attacks, killing any person wearing a towel on his head or a woman wearing a burka or child who just happens to be playing or praying in a wrong spot); who has increased all his "national defense" agencies spying on all Americans even to allowing the CIA and the US military to spy and enemy hunt inside US borders; who has allowed our crooked banks to go on with their derivative schemes and to go on foreclosing on peoples' homes and lands with gleeful impunity; who has in spite of the Fukushima disaster (and we don't know yet how bad this really is) continued authorizing the building of new nuclear plants in the US and continues to push nuclear energy as clean and safe energy; who in spite of the Gulf Coast oil spill has gone on reopening the drill, drill, drill policies and allowing British Petroleum (a very crooked company) to continue deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and also opening up our Alaskan Wilderness to them to drill, drill, drill up there; who has flip-flopped on this Keystone pipeline controversy, first saying he was blocking it and now suddenly giving his go-ahead blessing to its construction at the southern end of it; who has continued building that worthless boondoggle fence between the US and Mexico at a cost in some places to We the People of the US of millions of dollars per mile to build; who has continued and promoted these free-market schemes, the most recent one with South Korea that costs the US 150,000 jobs --and he is the lesser evil among this pack of evil sons of bitches? I mean how much worse could a fat slob like Newtie Gingrich be as president? (No, I don't want Newtie as my president.) I mean when you analyze the difference between Obama's and Georgie Porgie Bush's administration and you see G.W. Bush was a kinder gentler president than Obama, what does that tell you?

Am I crazy? I guess I am.

Yet, there are pundits out there who agree with me. Like Glen Ford over at the Black Agenda Report Website. He recently said the following at the Left Forum:

No matter how much evil Barack Obama actually accomplishes during his presidency, people that call themselves leftists insist on dubbing him the Lesser Evil. Not only is Obama not given proper credit for out-evil-ing George Bush, domestically and internationally, but the First Black President is awarded positive grades for his intentions versus the presumed intentions of Republicans. As the author says, this “is psycho-babble, not analysis. No real Left would engage in it.”


Read the whole thing at blackagendareport.com/?q=blog/101:

Yes, in 2008, I saw Obama with a chance to become our greatest-ever President; a true president of the people as a whole. People all over the world, including the Muslim nations, were wearing his tee shirts and championing his cause and hoping alas this first Black US president could put an end to this War on Terror, this phony War on Terror designed and devised by the biggest bunch of lying bastards ever to steal two presidential elections and lie us into two wars that have now lasted longer than any of the wars we've ever been lied into by presidents (most wars the US has been involved in since World War I, the war to end all wars). Yet, what does Obama do the minute he gets into office? The American lefties and progressives and New Dealers know what he did; they're just ashamed to admit it. Progressives like Russ Feingold who is now helping with Obama's campaign. [I posted a blog before the 2008 election saying I had read in Obama's book, which nobody else seemed to read, that Obama admitted his two presidential heroes were Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan (for his economic policies) and that Wall Street financiers were his present-day heroes--he said that in his book.]


I should give up my tirades on politics, but I can't. I go to Bellevue Hospital here in New York City several days a week and I sit for hours among people with serious health problems and I sit there one of a very few White people in that group of mostly Blacks (including Caribbean and Central and South American Blacks) and Latinos (from the Caribbean, Central, and South America) and I watch as most of the doctors are White--I have not seen, I swear, one Black doctor since I've now been going to this blessed hospital (and it did save my life and its cardiovascular unit has a sterling record among NYC hospitals) for going on two months. And what I'm emphasizing is the inequality among people in this country. When I say Bellevue is a great hospital among my White friends, they tell me Beth Israel would be their preference--and, yes, I spent some time years ago in Beth Israel and, yes, the majority of the patients in that hospital were White people. And now I see this country as racially divided--Blacks and Latinos separated from Whites by boundary lines in the neighborhoods, the workplaces, in the sales forces, in the advertising world, in the executive board rooms, etc.

I have said all along that White men would never let this Black president actually lead this country away from the White agenda that is the basis for the country existing. Sure, the White Power Elite, men like David Axelrod and Emanuel Rahm, took Senator Obama and realized how through him they could replay their White Democratic heyday under Slick Willie Clinton, a president who liberal Whites still consider a great president in spite of all the ruin he brought us through repealing the Glass-Speagall Act; in spite of his giving us the Patriot Act; in spite of NAFTA and GATT and GAPP and the World Trade Organization--don't get me started. You know I do not like Slick Willie "I Did Not Have Sex With That Woman" Clinton.

Whew. I haven't growled so damn viciously in I can't remember when. But then that's my role in this continuing drama we've dubbed The Daily Growler, a blog that started off a whimsical satirical comedy of errors (ironies) and has now been blown by the winds of change into a cauldron of bubbling witches brew:

from Macbeth

A dark Cave. In the middle, a Caldron boiling. Thunder.

Enter the three Witches.

1 WITCH. Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.
2 WITCH. Thrice and once, the hedge-pig whin'd.
3 WITCH. Harpier cries:—'tis time! 'tis time!
1 WITCH. Round about the caldron go;
In the poison'd entrails throw.—
Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one;
Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i' the charmed pot!
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
3 WITCH. Scale of dragon; tooth of wolf;
Witches' mummy; maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark;
Root of hemlock digg'd i the dark;
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,—
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For the ingrediants of our caldron.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

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