This story from the NYT would warm my black heart if I thought for a nanosecond that those half-wits in the Administration would learn anything about making deals with jackals from it:
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department sued Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan on Monday, asserting that the company, the state’s dominant health insurer, had violated antitrust laws and secured a huge competitive advantage by forcing hospitals to charge higher prices to Blue Cross’s rivals.
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In the Michigan case, the Obama administration said that Blue Cross and Blue Shield had contracts with many hospitals that stifled competition, resulting in higher health insurance premiums for consumers and employers.
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The lawsuit took direct aim at contract clauses stipulating that no insurance companies could obtain better rates from the providers than Blue Cross. Some of these contract provisions, known as “most favored nation” clauses, require hospitals to charge other insurers a specified percentage more than they charge Blue Cross — in some cases, 30 to 40 percent more, the lawsuit said.
Christine A. Varney, the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division of the Justice Department, said these requirements were “pernicious.”
Yes indeed, after betraying the American people and signing a corporatist takeover bill that taxes you to line the pockets of big insurers if you can’t afford their lousy product, the Obama administration is waking up to the fact that they are in bed with some of the most evil people on the planet, running a system of mass murder that would make most brutal third world despots green with envy.
If there is, by some shockingly remote chance, a hell, Obama’s personal punishment should be to suffer an agonizing disease for all eternity while forced to fill out paperwork to desperately beg for medical treatment that his HMO refuses to provide. Perhaps due to cost? Who can say.
There’s been a lot of hubbub in the last few weeks over DADT. Central District of California Judge Virginia Phillips issued an injunction against the policy worldwide, probably overstepping her authority to do so; recently she denied a stay of her ruling, forcing the Defense Department into an awkward position, which they are dealing with by admirably complying with the ruling and accepting, for the moment, the openly gay applicants that they should have taken all along.
Legally a messy situation, but policy wise, a real step forward.
Naturally, being the enemies of sound policy, the Obama Administration has appealed to the 9th Circuit, and their appeal is a humdinger too. Instead of merely arguing over the technical merits of Phillips’ worldwide injunction, they mounted a spirited defense of the constitutionality of DADT, an inherently discriminatory policy that turns gay Americans into second-class citizens:
What is very troubling, however, is that the Administration, by and through the DOJ never – never – indicates that it considers DADT to be unconstitutional on its face. Every objection by team Obama is in favor simply of study and legislative repeal; and, in fact, they doggedly protect the constitutionality of DADT. There is a HUGE difference between the two concepts of saying it is simply something that should be fixed by Congress (increasingly unlikely, it should be added, in light of the massive gains conservative Republicans are poised to make) and saying the Administration fully believes the policy unconstitutional and invidiously discriminatory (the position Obama blatantly refuses to make).
It should also be noted that a refusal to acknowledge the fundamental constitutionally discriminatory nature of DADT is also entirely consistent with the recent history of Obama Administration conduct and statements on the issue. Whether it be Obama himself, official spokesman Robert Gibbs or Valerie Jarrett, every time the direct question on constitutionality of DADT is raised, it is deflected with a flimsy response framed in terms of Congressional repeal. At this point, you have to wonder if Barack Obama and his Administration even consider the blatant discrimination of DADT to be of a Constitutional level at all; the evidence certainly is lacking of any such commitment.
This comes a week after top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett referred to being gay as a ‘lifestyle choice’… while discussing the tragic suicide of a bullied teenager no less.
Keep in mind that President Obama is a steadfast opponent of equality for gay Americans in other arenas as well, consistently opposing gay marriage on religious grounds:
In his bestseller, The Audacity of Hope, Obama, now a U.S. senator, explains his support for civil unions, again mentioning religion and noting the strategic problems that the push for gay marriage poses:
For many practicing Christians, the inability to compromise may apply to gay marriage. I find such a position troublesome, particularly in a society in which Christian men and women have been known to engage in adultery or other violations of their faith without civil penalty. I believe that American society can choose to carve out a special place for the union of a man and a woman as the unit of child rearing most common to every culture. I am not willing to have the state deny American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights no such basic matters as hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love are of the same sex–nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount. …The heightened focus on marriage is a distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination and gays and lesbians. (pp. 222-3)
Well, since running for higher office, anyway. When he was a younger man, and a less ambitious politician, he at least claimed to hold diametrically opposed views, favoring gay marriage.
Let’s call this what it is. If President Obama opposes equal rights for gays and lesbians because of his religious delusions, then he is a bigot and a closet theocrat. If he’s opposing their equal rights out of mere political expediency, then he is a hypocrite, a liar and a coward, giving comfort to bigots.
Either way, he’s a disgusting excuse for a public figure.
It is preposterous beyond words to sit back and allow him to pass himself off as some sort of moderate while he uses religious fanaticism to publicly justify depriving gay Americans of their equal rights, and refuses to take simple actions entirely at his discretion to stop persecution of American citizens based on their sexual orientation. It is sycophantic beyond belief to point at the minority party in the Senate and act as if it was their nefarious schemes that prevented Obama from stopping DADT, or somehow forced him to make bigoted statements about gay marriage based on his hokey sky-god religion. Obama got into this mess on his own, by reversing his earlier position and by pushing delay after delay instead of acting to defend the Constitutional rights of his own citizens.
He could end DADT today, at least in terms of implementation. He does not, contra his repeated assertions, have to enforce a law that is unconstitutional on its face, and he certainly doesn’t have to vigorously appeal to protect the assertion of its Constitutionality. He could stop trying to insert religion into the public sphere on gay marriage.
He could also hire some advisors who aren’t so gobsmackingly stupid as to defame a dead teenager for his ‘lifestyle choice’ while he’s at it.
So the question becomes: does Obama really believe that gay Americans deserve to live as second-class citizens because of some badly translated Iron Age superstition? Or does he believe that they should live that way to serve his political ends?
This controversy is so stupid, and so obvious, I’m actually surprised to see how many online liberals are falling for Conway’s scam.
Quick background: A GQ piece floating around recently details that Rand Paul, being a deeply bizarre individual, was up to some strange things in college. He was part of a secret society of, essentially, atheists and irreligious types, who published an underground anti-religious zine and pulled stupid pranks on the hyper-religious Baylor University he was attending at the time.
Libertarians have a long history of flirtation with Atheism, albeit of the ‘I don’t believe in God but gee I think the Free Market is magic’ variety, so this should come as a surprise to precisely nobody; yet of course, it does, because Paul is running as a Republican, though from the Tea Party wing.
There’s a much darker side to that GQ story too: in another incident from his secret society days, Paul and another member supposedly bound and abducted a woman, attempted to force her to smoke pot, and when that failed, forced her to worship ‘Aqua Buddha’ in a creek.
The strangest episode of Paul’s time at Baylor occurred one afternoon in 1983 (although memories about all of these events are understandably a bit hazy, so the date might be slightly off), when he and a NoZe brother paid a visit to a female student who was one of Paul’s teammates on the Baylor swim team. According to this woman, who requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, “He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.” After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. “They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him,” the woman recalls. “They blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’ At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”
Naturally, his opponent, Jack Conway, putatively a Democrat, made an ad about this story. What outraged Jack most?
Well, it sure wasn’t the alleged kidnapping. Here, watch for yourself.
Transcript:
“Why was Rand Paul a member of a secret society that called the Holy Bible a ‘hoax’? That was banned from mocking Christianity and Christ? Why did Rand Paul once tie a woman up, tell her to bow down before a ‘false idol’ and tell her his god was ‘Aqua Buddha’? Why does Rand Paul now want to end all federal faith based initiatives, and even end the deduction for religious charities? Why are there so many questions about Rand Paul?”
Get that? He ‘tied a woman up’, but that is clearly far less serious than the fact that Paul wasn’t a devout Christian, that he mocked ‘Christ’ and the ‘Holy’ Bible and that he made his abductee ‘worship a false idol’. Oh, and Paul wants to end faith-based initiative bailouts, which Conway asserts is a very bad thing indeed.
All stories and accounts about Jesus begin to appear in writing about a half-century after his supposed death. There is far more hard evidence for Atlantis than Jesus.
Yet here we have a DEMOCRAT plainly asserting that an alleged kidnapping is far less important than that Rand Paul didn’t always believe in Jesus. That he prayed to a ‘false idol,’ whatever that means, is more important than binding and kidnapping a college co-ed.
Bonus: Jack Conway is the current Attorney General of Kentucky; a man who thinks that saying bad things about a fictional character trumps kidnapping.
Such is the monstrous perversity of religion.
The perversity of liberal politics, however, means that this incredibly self-indulgent theocratic insanity is actually attracting praise, sometimes from commentators who have long warned against conservatives pushing theocracy!
Digby thinks this is just the sort of advertising we need.
Sarah Posner thinks the ad should have been even more about religion and less about, you know, an alleged felony.
Markos Moulitsas misses the point, but that’s nothing new. Extra special stupid bonus: he thinks it’s just fine that as an Atheist he himself is unelectable in much of America. Well, ok, more like virtually all of America.
So glad to see an Atheist willing to settle for second-class citizenship. Moron.
America continues to disgust me, but the Democrats always find new ways to make it worse.
Update: Conway’s whole campaign seems to be fucking nuts; the religious issue is always more important to them:
“Values matter. Rand Paul chose to join a secret society the university banned,” said Allison Haley, a spokesman for the Conway campaign. “Tying up a woman, no matter what the reason, is nothing to laugh at.”
