One of my colleagues in progressive rabble rousing, known to readers simply as Hunter, has an interesting essay out at Daily Kos that brings the pain to presidential hopeful Dr. Ron Paul. It turns out Dr. Paul’s own campaign manager, Kent Snyder, who had raised millions for the enigmatic Texas congressman, died from pneumonia. The 49 year-old Snyder was uninsured — reportedly because a preexisting condition rendered private health insurance unavailable — despite raising millions of dollars for Paul as a full-time staffer.

It was in that context that Paul was asked by moderator Wolf Blitzer if the uninsured should ‘just die’ at the Republican national debate last week. This was when Paul muttered something inane about freedom and was explaining how churches and communities could raise the dough, and audience members screamed out “Yes,” let them die.

Paul indeed tried to raise money to pay Snyder’s mounting $400,000 medical bills, but fell far short at $35,000. Here’s a taste of where Hunter’s post goes from there:

For a long time, a solitary glass jar sat on the counter of our local convenience store, seeking donations towards the medical expenses of a much-loved longtime resident whose own unexpected tragedy had left an impossible financial burden. Barbecues, church socials, yard sales, bake sales or whatever else can be cobbled together; a town of any size will have something like that every weekend, if you follow the flyers or the signs, all dedicated towards raising just a few hundred dollars here and there to put a dent in the hundreds of thousands needed. Cancer, heart disease, or an accident; a husband, a mother, a child, a best friend.

You cannot live in America without seeing it. So does it work? Do churches contribute a hundred thousand, here and there? When was the last bake sale you attended that raised $50,000? The last yard sale? Just how much change can fit in a glass jar on a countertop, once you count it all up?

The Michigan House of Representatives has passed a bill barring state agencies and related offices such as universities from offering benefits to same-sex partners. The bill is predicted to pass the Republican controlled Senate and be signed into law by Governor Rick Snyder, all before October 1st when the benefits would have started:

The bills, HB 4770 and 4771, prohibit any government entity – including universities and city governments – from providing such benefits and prohibit unions from including them in collective bargaining agreements.

Here the Teaparty Republicans have scored a twofer. They played into bigotry and handicapped unions. The latter is just as important as the first in revealing conservative dishonesty. The first item in the Bill of Rights, the Very First Inalienable Right the founders wrote down, was that the federal government could never make it against the law to freely assemble and petition the government in pursuit of individual or collective interests. Which is exactly what public sector unions composed of police or professors or firefighters do.

 The usual suspects will drone on about how the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to states. What kind of whiny little armchair lawyer fuck would hide behind that flimsy excuse? You either believe in that freedom as a core universal civil liberty or you don’t, and the extreme right loves to preach on about how much they believe personal liberty trumps everything else. They claim to hold the Founding Fathers in almost religious reverence. They wring their hands and worry the government is too big, or too powerful, or too intrusive. The government has run amok they say, and is violating people’s rights with impunity. But here they’ve made it illegal for constituents to even talk to the government about changing public employee policy. And they’re proud of it.

Of course this just illustrates the not so hidden agenda: Teaparty conservatives don’t give a shit about the constitution or state’s rights or the nation, except when they think it might help them win power and force their peculiar religious practices on everyone else by force of law. They’re a bunch of ignorant fundamentalist megalomaniacs who hate democrats in general for winning elections, with a sub-bunch of good old-fashioned racist assholes who hate Obama specifically for winning while black.

It has been known for more than a decade that some dinosaurs had feathers. Particularly the Dromaeosauridae, better known as raptors, which could almost be described as an early clade of flightless birds. Some of these birds just happened to be big enough to take on a pride of lions and were armed with big pointy teeth and razor-sharp semi-retractable claws. Now, dino feathers beautifully preserved in amber found in Canada (Abstract) hint at the dazzling diversity and breathtaking beauty of these extinct creatures:

Scientists have posited that feathers developed first as single, hair-like protrusions meant for insulation. Then they began to grow in clumps before evolving into increasingly complex structures, each branching off from a central shaft. They were probably used for other purposes, such as attracting mates, before becoming essential for flight.

The preserved feathers are a big deal for two reasons. They’re so well preserved color can be observed in some and inferred in all of them. And they represent the leading theory for how feathers evolved and diversified from simply hair-like filaments to complex flight feathers. It’s clear from the new find that dino feathers were likely as diverse as those found on modern birds today. Since dinosaurs existed for over 150 million years and dominated every continent it’s fair to speculate there would have been feathered dinos so well endowed color and plumage they would have given peacocks a raging case of feather envy.

So much for Rick Perry’s jobs miracle in the Lone Star State:

The unemployment rate in Texas rose to 8.5 percent in August, putting the state in the middle of the pack nationally and undercutting GOP presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s argument that he is the best job-creator of the governors nationwide. The numbers were released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday.

When cornered by the inconvenient facts Perry’s office blamed it all on Obama but that should come as no surprise: Rick Perry’s jobs miracle is a fraud from beginning to end. What little difference there was between the national employment average and Texas was the direct result of a 1) state government hiring binge fueled by federal stimulus funds Perry happily accepted and then bashed, and 2) luring low paying employers from other states by turning Texas into the equivalent of an Asian labor camp.

Fortunately the facts and the national media are starting to catch on to his schemes with a vengeance and with plenty of time left to prevent Perry from screwing the nation like he has screwed the people of Texas.

House Speaker John Boehner is worried about the growing communication gap between Republicans and Democrats. Heavens to Betsy:

And while we have a good relationship sometimes the conversations that we have would be like two groups of people from two different planets who barely understand each other. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but there is a reason why you have two major political parties with big disagreements.

Really? I mean, REALLY? Democrats and Republicans are just not communicating well enough? Let’s run with that.

Democrats were upset that Republicans invaded Iraq while bin laden was still on the loose and blew a trillion tax dollars on rebuilding Iraqi schools, bridges, and oil fields with nothing to show for it except a bunch of dead and injured Americans. Republicans are upset that Barack Obama and family engineered a massive international plot to fake his birth certificate while he was in utero so that he would be eligible to be President 50 years later.

Democrats are angry that conservatives crashed the economy, transformed a budget surplus into a 7 trillion-dollar hole in the deficit, and required a trillion-dollar bailout for the richest people on earth. Republicans are angry Barack Obama won’t mindlessly continue exclusively using those same conservative policies to fix the catastrophic consequences of those conservative economic policies.

Democrats are disillusioned with Obama for presiding over the largest tax cuts in history as measured by dollars. Republicans are furious with Obama for raising taxes more than any other President in the 6000 year history of the world.

Democrats are worried the conservative ideology is too control freaky, obsessed with deeply personal decisions such as who can marry who and forcing 12 year-olds to bear the children of their rapist. Republicans are worried the government is forcing hundreds of thousands of people into FEMA concentration camps and creating death panels designed to knock off grandma.

Democrats are frightened of the security state created by conservatives where citizens can be tortured in secret prisons without due process, where warrantless wiretaps are the norm and energy policy is decided in secret meetings by oil company executives appointed to positions of great power. Republicans are frightened the government has run amok in violation of the Bill of Rights by vaccinating children against cancer.

I could go on like this for quite a while, juxtaposing the laughably inaccurate caricature Republicans have created out of whole cloth against the empirical facts of recent history the rest of us use, but hopefully the point is clear. This isn’t an innocent communication gap, it’s a product of the GOP intentionally prying their base away from reality by fabricating bizzare stories and creating a fake history and fake science. Democrats seem angry over events that have actually happened and caused immeasurable harm, or items the GOP is publicly working hard to bring about. Republicans ignore their serial documented failures, when not trying to pawn them off on opponents, and the base is constantly kept whipped into a frenzy of hatred and fear over non-existent fringe conspiracies and tabloid plots. The two don’t speak the same language because they don’t occupy the same rung on the ladder of reality and any person, personality, celebrity, or media venue that pretends otherwise is not credible.

Minutes ago as I write this Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal appeared on Chuck Todd’s MSNBC program Daily Rundown and endorsed Rick Perry. When asked why he chose Perry over Romney, Jindal evaded the thrust of the question, looked straight into the camera with a charming smile and lied his conservative Christian ass off (paraphrasing), “It’s about the economy, Governor Perry created almost a million jobs in Texas and Obama has lost millions of jobs. Gov Perry understands that jobs don’t come from government spending, they come from the private sector.”

Here’s the reality:

Despite being one of the loudest critics of President Obama’s stimulus, Perry used billions of dollars of federal money to patch Texas’ budget shortfalls, and was thus able to create and maintain lots and lots of public sector jobs. In fact, if you look at net job creation between 2007 and 2010, it’s clear the only thing keeping Texas buoyant was government jobs.

Not only did the growth of state-government jobs make the difference in Texas when compared to other states, those state jobs were only made possible by zillions in federal stimulus funds, AKA government spending, handed to Gov. Rick Perry by President Obama and the 2009 democratic congress. The same spending Perry is running against with every fiber beating in his evil little heart.

We all know Bobby Jindal is a fundamentlist lunatic who buys into faith healing and exorcism, we all know these scumbags will lie at the drop of a hat at every chance. But it was startling to watch Chuck Todd look on blankly as the whopper unfolded despite knowing full well he could correct the record for viewers and even, gasp, ask Jindal to defend the lie.

Have you ever pondered how is it you can be confident your car insurance or your fire insurance or your health insurance will be there if you need it? The answer is simple: government regulation and a network of oversight agencies which audit insurance companies for compliance. If a company is not in compliance, it cannot sell insurance. In the event a particular company goes belly up, there is a super fund maintained by all member insurance companies to pay claims for that defunct firm. Thus secured loans are much cheaper, risk is managed, and consumers benefit along with everyone else.

But Teaparty Republicans and conservative libertarians have a better idea: magic! The magical free market will eliminate those companies that can’t pay claims because they won’t have customers. True, if an insurance company went around saying, “By the way, we plan on going bankrupt in 2008,” the free market approach would work great. The reality is quite the opposite, companies will smoothly assure customers and reporters everything is fine — right up until the day the company’s stock opens at zero.

Perhaps the Teaparty truly believes the average US consumer is capable of performing their own research on insurance companies and predicting the safe ones? Good fucking luck with that! Broker-dealers and rating agencies pay analysts big bucks to follow specific companies and issue recommendations for various stocks and bonds based on those findings. Even with decades of experience, the benefit of required disclosure for publicly traded companies, and advanced degrees from the best universities in the world, insurance analysts failed to predict which financial services companies would survive the mortgage meltdown of 2008 — in fact analysts as a group failed to predict when or if the meltdown would even happen. The idea that a young art teacher or a retired policeman would do better by orders of magnitude is utterly ludicrous.

Our entire capitalist system rests on a foundation of regulations and agencies empowered to enforce them. Without it there wouldn’t even be an insurance industry. The same applies to virtually every other modern industry whether it’s banking or farming or underwater basket weaving. The irony here is conservative billionaires are trying to destroy the system makes them billionaires by funding conservative groups and keeping them ignorant, the most recent incarnation being the Teaparty. That the conservative grass-roots is blissfully unaware of the part they play in smashing that wrecking ball into the nation is evidence of how powerful and dangerous a well managed campaign of ignorance can be.

An article by National Public Radio flips over some slimy rocks in Rick Perry country and finds the usual slithering political critters:

In his career as governor of Texas, a state where millionaires are plentiful and contribution limits are lax, Perry has raised about half his campaign cash from just 204 big donors, according to an analysis by the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice. And his administration has helped many of those donors, even when it comes to disposing of radioactive waste.

Guys like Simmons have been polluting politics as long as they’ve been messing with Texas. He was the biggest financial backer of Karl Rove’s Swift Boaters against John Kerry in 2004. True to hypocritical form he’s also the grateful beneficiary of the very government spending used to whip the wingnut foot soldiers into a frenzy. In 2003 a site owned by Simmons — located right next to a critical aquifer in West Texas — became the final resting place for radioactive waste produced all over the nation when the once public disposal program was privatized. And Simmons is happy to use his family to fuel his schemes. The New York Times reported that in 1993 that Simmons was found guilty and fined for using trust funds set up for his daughters’ to funnel illegal campaign contributions to conservative politicians.

Harold Simmons is a textbook example of Rick Perry’s pay-to-play political style alright. On the national stage that kind of unsavory association shouldn’t reflect well on anyone, especially someone running for President of the United States. But as long as Perry isn’t “palling around” with a college professor that may have said something radical back in the 60s, don’t expect to learn more about Simmons or any of Perry’s other crony donors watching Fox News or listening to Boss Limbaugh.

All through my recent medical odyssey one thing kept coming through loud and clear: I was damn glad I had comprehensive health insurance benefits. Without it I would now owe the doctors and hospitals something like $50,000 and that’s assuming I got the same level of care, and the same deeply discounted rates large insurance companies pay for medical services.  

In the Republican presidential debate this week, Wolf Blitzer posed a hypothetical question to Dr. Ron Paul. If someone chooses not to have health insurance and gets badly injured, who should pay for it? Dr. Paul answered in part, “What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself, … That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk. This whole idea that you have to compare and take care of everybody…” ” Blitzer then asked if we should just “let the person die?” Several in the audience screamed out “YES!”.

Here’s a question: How about those of us who have paid for health insurance? Should we be allowed to “just die”?

I ask because it happens that, in addition to the employer-sponsored insurance that probably saved my life this week, I have been paying premiums into another comprehensive plan that is statistically likely to save my life many times over in the years ahead. I started paying in 35 years ago, when I was 14 years-old, and because I’ve paid in so faithfully for so long, I could collect now if unable to work. But odds are I’ll stay healthy and pay in many thousands of dollars more between now and the day I start using the insurance. After what happened last week, especially in the light of the Republican just-let-em-die attitude, it feels good knowing I’m paid up and covered. 

That medical insurance plan is called Medicare. And what’s alarming is many of those same right-wing libertarians, who insist paying for insurance be a prerequisite for getting treatment, are hell bent on taking away my bought and paid for Medicare insurance, after I have covered my part of the bargain for more than three decades.

It’s ugly that some Teaparty wingnuts are so proud of letting the uninsured “just die” that they’ll shout it out in public — what impressive Christian family values they have! But those sickos are eclipsed by a second brand of Teaparty clowns so vile, so evil, so perversely twisted that they’re fine with letting people like me who have paid for medical insurance “just die.”

OK, there probably were no rumors. But I did feel close to death over the last few days, and for a while there I would have welcomed the Grim Reaper. On this last post on Saturday afternoon I had just been back from the ER after treatment for a fracture between the right floating rib and a lower vertebrae. I thought the worst of the ordeal was over then. W-R-O-N-G.

Just a couple of hours after that post, breathing became very difficult. Which was one of the signs the ER staff had warned me about. So, back to the local ER, back through a CAT scan machine, and by the time they had read the new data I was writhing in agony despite more than a milligram of Dilaudid. I remember the painful main events of being put on a cold, hard gurney locked in the back of an ambulance, then riding with the lights and sirens going full blast. I recall being wheeled in to another, larger ER and having my clothes cut off while a team worked on me. After that it gets hazy for a couple of days.

But one strange experience I wish could be forgotten: I was delirious with pain, sobbing like a little kid as an ER nurse was swabbing down my back with antiseptic for a chest tube procedure. I was begging her to give me more painkiller, knock me unconscious, induce a coma, or just kill me. It was that bad (I’m just astonished at how much pain the human body can produce, intelligent design my ass). And then a freaky thing happened then. She put her hand on my shoulder and said “Jesus HEAL this man.” And then crossed her self or whatever they do.

The reason that was horrifying was in part because it didn’t do a damn bit of good, no surprise there. But also because it hit me: there I was, surrounded by enough drugs to knock down a herd of charging elephants at the nexxus of all the medical technology a level 1 trauma center can offer, and the best immediate option that poor gal had on hand to shut me up was amateur faith healing. A cynical little smile managed to part my bone dry lips for a split second, before the grimacing took over again.

Later I found out the lung had almost totally collapsed and some other, savage complications were starting to crop up. It’s probably a  good thing I decided to head in and get it checked out. Hopefully, the worst really is over now and things will get back to normal around here.