SNIPPETS

It was revealed earlier this week that war criminal and former Vice President DICK Cheney had suffered his fifth heart attack. Stress being a major contributor to heart attacks, I am not surprised that Cheney has had another one. One can only imagine the stress this man must be under every waking moment. After all, he and his cohort George W. Bush are indirectly responsible for the 3,000 deaths which occurred on 9/11, having been briefed on August 6, 2001, that Osama Bin Laden was planning some type of attack involving airplanes on our soil, and both having done nothing about this warning. And imagine the paranoia which has raised his blood pressure and terrorized him each day since! Consider, too, the stress and pangs of suppressed guilt that must be shooting through Cheney's veins knowing that he lied to get us into an unnecessary Iraq war which has now cost the lives of 4,000 of our soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. The aggravation he has undergone recently with a captured would-be underwear bomber singing like a canary with mounds of actionable intelligence as a result of normal interrogation methods rather than Cheney's preferred and now wholly discredited torture methods must be extreme, too. But the coup de grace in terms of stress must have happened when he heard former colleagues Colin Powell and Gen. David Petraeus shoot down his flimsy lie that President Obama is endangering the country by mishandling our "war on terror." Cheney's heart attack was described as "mild." But we all know once it finally dawns on him how badly he misjudged and misran our battle against Islamic fundamentalist extremism, how seriously his torture program damaged our Constitution and world standing, and how much innocent blood is really on his hands, Cheney's entire circulatory system will explode.



It will be interesting to see how congressional Republicans will conduct themselves in front of the C-SPAN cameras when they meet to discuss health care reform with President Obama tomorrow. Why? Because they don't want reform at all. They want to stall and eventually kill this legislation. Both that snide and mouthy House Minority "Leader" John Boehner and Senate Minority "Leader" Mitch McConnell are in no mood to compromise, and they instead want to rip up the existing, already-passed bills and start all over.But all they really want to do is attempt to weaken President Obama, the man they hate more than anything. First they're for transparency, then they're against having cameras present. First they're all for health care reform, then they're against it. These disgraceful saps, along with their conservative Republican buddies like Eric Cantor, Michele Bachmann, Pete Hoekstra, Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, Richard Shelby, and all the rest of them, are attempting to stonewall our government to a grinding halt, simply to make the President look weak and ineffective so as to defeat him in two years. They have held up numerous judicial appointments without good reason; 290 bills await action but are languishing in an unneeded procedural-delay limbo, and they lie about and distort everything the President says or does. They hate government involvement in anything, so they are trying to strangle it to death for their own political advantage. In the process, these self-proclaimed "fiscal conservatives" are wasting everybody's time and millions of taxpayer dollars. Here's an idea: if these Republicans are truly against government waste, why don't they all just resign en masse and get the hell out? For if ever there was a perfect example of exorbitant government waste, it is surely today's totally unproductive congressional Republican caucus!

I saw CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the tube this morning, explaining why hospital costs are so out rageously high. We all know the score here:$25 packets of Kleenex, $800 biopsy needles, etc. Well, Dr. Gupta said something I found to be utterly unbelievable: that hospitals only get 4% of the amount they actually invoice for a product or service! His claim was that insurance companies and government negotiate away the rest and pay only about 4% of the amount invoiced. I found this figure to be rather suspicious, and I would love for any of you out there who may know the truth to lay it on me. Assuming for a moment that it IS true, then hospitals, just like doctors and technicians, are NOT the ones responsible for our ungodly high health care costs! Nope---sure, medical malpractice suits enter into the equation, but so do medical equipment manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and - yep, you guessed it - INSURANCE COMPANIES! So, once again, they can point all the fingers they want, but insurance company greed is STILL one of the most major causes of our unnecessarily high health care costs!