Medicaid Wheezing

How much longer does it have to live?

The National Governors Association offered sweeping bipartisan proposals on Wednesday to rein in the growth of Medicaid, saying states should be allowed to charge higher co-payments to beneficiaries and should be entitled to larger discounts from drug companies and pharmacies.

Read the gory details here.

The Black List

It's been whittled down, and Frist should still be on it as an honorary racist.

List.

Frist Loves Lynching

Anyone surprised?

Link.

Dean Speaks For Me

Sign up.

Read more about it here.

Up or Down

This is bullshit.

Here's the critique.

Here's a list of the likely suspects.

We Want You As A New Recruit

I'm not much for stories that are about one person who doesn't echo in the national sense, but by all means you should read this and then get ready to feel sick.

Nothing To See Folks, Move Along

From the NYT,

"There's nothing farther from the truth," Mr. Bush said in his first public comments about the so-called Downing Street memo, which has created anger among the administration's critics who see it as evidence that the president was intent to go to war with Iraq earlier than the White House has said.

"Look, both of us didn't want to use our military," Mr. Bush added. "Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option."

Mr. Blair, standing at Mr. Bush's side in a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House, said, "No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all."

Personally I think the horse cock joke was funnier, but I'll let George have his way on this one. If you're still unclear about the Downing Street Memo, which provides a hellishly damning account of Bush and Blair's desires to fix intelligence about Iraq in order to go to war, you should read it. But hey, none of that really matters since whatever Buddy Boy says is true. I'm just waiting for a right wing blog (like... I don't know, maybe Powerline, I just pulled that out of thin air) to come out and echo Bush's assertion that everything in the memo is undeniably false and that it was a Democratic plant in order to wage partisan politics. Because that's never happened before and Powerline is always correct.

Corruption That's Hotter than Global Warming

Just check this article out.

Isn't this the saddest but least surprising story you've ever heard? Like this example:

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

There's nothing subtle about the word fundamental. This just goes to show how tame the media has become in condoning deceit. The man is fundamentally contradicting hard evidence gathered and worked on by scientists. Did that use of fundamental strike anyone as subtle?

Yet what's even worse is that the article manages to high-handedly gloss over the most damning part about the story.

Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.

Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the "climate team leader" and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training.

In what sane world would an oil lobbyist be a good candidate for the chief of staff for anything dealing with environmental quality? It's not just the Boltons and the Gonzaleses of the world we need to be worried about, although as controversial as they are they seem to get appointed anyway, it's every possible position. Why have we never heard of this guy before now? Why is the Times content to let it go at that? I think we can trust Cooney on environmental issues as much as we can trust Wimpy when he promises to pay you on Tuesday.

Hypocrisy

Today I was thinking about why I hate hypocrisy. We all hate it, no one will stand up in support for it, but do we really know why we hate it?

I think it comes down to a matter of trust. All human relationships are built on a modicum of trust on one level or another, and when someone says something and then does something that contradicts that, we wind up not being able to trust that person. That violation of trust then leads to a sense of betrayal and that the other person does not have integrity. This can very much destroy people's respect for other people.

Politicians, take note.

Moral Majority Hypocrisy

One of the things that stood out at me while I was driving down south through the Smokies was the incredible number of billboards for porn. These were in very conservative areas and it really struck me as odd. Why would these areas that tout holier than thou morals be shilling for porn? Just struck me as yet another hypocrisy of the Republican party.