Sunday, May 31, 2009

Who Are The Fools Fighting Healthcare Reform?

You think health care is expensive now, wait until it's 'free.'

Guaranteeing affordable health care choices for all will require some tax revenues—$50 to 100 billion per year depending on the plan—plus modest contributions from companies and individuals. But it will save us $1 trillion in health care spending.We'll be able to slash administrative costs, emphasize preventative care, reduce emergency room visits and cut down on unnecessary procedures with electronic medical records.

What they are talking about is nothing but socialized medicine.

Conservatives opposed great reforms like Social Security and Medicare by screaming socialism. They were wrong then, and they're wrong now.Guaranteed affordable health insurance would not make doctors and other health care professionals work for the government. The progressive plan is about making sure you have good health insurance you can afford and the ability to go to the doctors you want.
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Water Boarding Our Constitution

We watched Christopher Hitchens and Erich "Mancow" Muller spend a few seconds on a waterboard and emerge convinced that waterboarding is torture. While I welcome their conversions, their stunts really did not teach us anything new. Though the initial panic of having water come at them was suffering enough, they both quit before the real effects of waterboarding kicked in: they have no idea what would come if the torture did not stop when they cried "uncle.

Torture is the systematic use of trauma to provoke a change in consciousness: the only goal of torture is to drive a person to unbearable madness. The purpose of the torture -- interrogation, extortion -- immaterial. Mancow and Hitchens spent a short time on the waterboard and saw that rabbithole in the distance. They bailed before any of the real terror kicked in... But what if ending the torture at will was not an option? What if they would have undergone waterboarding as Bybee prescribed?

The Bush administration deliberately deceived the American people about its enhanced interrogation program. In doing so, they depended on the fact that Americans have a Rambo understanding about torture. In particular, they counted on people and policy makers to miss the fact that it is systematic trauma -- not necessarily acute pain -- that creates torture and drives people to break. We have television and movie images of electric shocks and red-hot pokers that lead us to miss the fact that damaging visible human flesh only makes up small class in the larger set of ways torturers use suffering to drive a person to madness. Torture works by attacking the emotional centers of the brain -- it breaks down the limbic system and triggers the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Trauma damages an essential part of the limbic system called the hippocampus; the head breaks down when the limbic system is compromised.

There is much noise from apologists that water never gets through the cloth to actually drown the prisoner. What they do not tell you is that this does not matter. When normal breathing gets interrupted, so does normal swallowing. During waterboarding, the prisoner's head is tilted back so that any liquid -- including saliva or nasal fluid -- will build up at the back of the throat. This creates a constant aspiration threat. It is the fight to control this liquid at the back of the throat that sometimes results in the prisoner swallowing his own tongue and suffocating to death -- hence the need for a trachiotomy kit in the interrogation room.As carbon dioxide builds in the blood, the body becomes locked in the fight to keep from aspirating at the same time that it fights to take in air. As the waterboarding continues, the prisoner is slowly dying. After forty seconds or so, he gets a few breaths. But he still has to fight to keep from aspirating the liquid at the back of his throat when he gets that short break -- and then they start over with a new cycle of water.This is not a "little dunk." It is a controlled execution that is systematically interrupted each time it starts to become lethal -- a grisly hypoxic/anoxic torture.

NOT IN MY NAME. NO TORTURE. PROSECUTE NOW.

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