Blue Rain*--The Final Cut

Hooray! President Obama has delayed his trip to focus on health care. We're becoming a banana republic when the President flies overseas and has to worry what mischief is going to play out in D.C.

Thank you , Frank Schaeffer. On http://www.frankschaeffer.blogspot.com/ , my favorite repentent co-creator of the Religious Right morphs back into his Calvinist mode to sternly lecture us all that under our "fickle noses" this is a time of national rebirth and he's delighted with President Obama, even more than he has been. He rips the shrivelled old conservatives abnd blasts the left for dumping on Obama. He proceeds to list all his achievements in the past year and taunts Obama's critics as they say" that's not good enough."

Rachel Maddow interviewed Nancy Pelosi last night. While not my favorite politician, the Speaker has been ferociously effective as a leader. Every one of the President's campaign promises except immigration reform passed the House last year. Now over 290 bills are bottled up in the Senate.

Could some one please muzzle Larry O'Donnell? Last night was another bummer about the health care bill. This was after a day when Harry Reid sent a blistering letter to Mitch McConnell on why he is going to use reconciliation and the House leadership walked away from dealing with Bart Stupak and the anti-abortion crowd. But Larry focused on the strange news yesterday that the Republicans say that Republicans asked the Parliamentarian whether President Obama would have to sign the Senate bill before reconciliation. Now we have no statement from the Senate Parliamentarian on this and on the face of it it doesn't make any sense considering past uses of reconciliation. But never mind, let's all worry..

The CBO price tag came in. The Healthcare bill saves about $190 billion over ten years and another $1 trillion in the second ten years. And it comes in under $900 billion. So the Speaker of the House is beginning to mark it up on Monday.

Democratic pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen warn Democrats about passing healthcare because of the dire consequences in the fall. Their long column in the Washington Post recites the depth of American opposition to health care reform.. Interesting thing is that they only quote our friend Mr. Rasmussen on his polling data--which conveniently didn't ask about the specific provisions of the bill. Last night Nancy Pelosi effectively laid out the meaning of healthcare in her interview with Rachel Maddow. She pointed to both the human and fiscal necessary for it and did it in great detail.

Now as I turn the curve on my taxes, let's make healthcare costs personally. Remember my eye operation is being billed this year. For 2009, the McColm family, which takes no medicines and last year had nothing wrong, spent cash out of pocket for medical expenses and insurance--$25,100. That is over half the average income of the American family. It is no joke to say that if anything serious happened, I would have to declare bankruptcy. That's why I want healthcare reform.

All is not well in GlennBeckistan: After the Jesuit dog whistle, conservative Catholics followed suit in their criticism of his positions on religion. Wakening from his deep slumber, Jim Wallis of the Sojourners, called on Christians to boycott Beck. His own church said that the Book of Morman was almost entirely a book about social justice. Let's not carried away guys. However, the term "social justice" does appear some 180 times in Morman doctrinal texts.

After "changing American history"--that was his promise--with the Eric Massa interview, Glenn Beck decided to go after FDR. We know from the Wall Street Journal and Amity Schlaes that FDR prolonged the Depression. Actually, we know from economists trained in the period that FDR cut the unemployment rate from 25-12% and did other things like create Social Security and the FDIC. But Beck's complaint about this President who was as popular as Obama was that he hired Communists. Yes, he did after the U.S. formed an alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II. In my mind, I always wondered why the Communists ended up in the Department of Agriculture.

Anyway, Beck then extolls Joe McCarthy's crusade against these characters and mentions the Dies Committee. (He should have disclosed his mentor the Morman" historian" was a staffer for the Dies Committee and was subsequently fired by J.Edgar Hoover from the FBI for being "paranoid and too extreme in his anti-Communism".) And he brings up the conservative's favorite hero Whittaker Chambers. A little dirty secret--Whittaker only ratted out the NKVD cells that were not longer functional to protect the one left behind. Conservatives love the rumpy looking Whittaker Chambers for bringing down fancy pants Alger Hiss. But they love him even more for saying that the United States already lost the Cold War in the 1950s.

Now how this relates to Barack Obama I don't know. But he gets around to Woody Guthrie and the song "This Land Is Your Land". I wrote about how delighted I was last year when Pete Seegar sang the uncensored version of the song at the Lincoln Memorial. A year later Beck picked this up. And said that this was a song about the Communist dream. He told his audience that Barack Obama's initiative to save millions of acres for the wilderness was a Maoist plot. Actually this was an extension of Theodore Roosevelt's vision , a man Beck hates worse than Mao.

Beck also decided to attack the union movement for harboring communists. For future shows I hope he mentions that the AFL-CIO's international department was led by the former head of the American Communist Party , Jay Lovestone. This could provoke another Jesuit-style backlash by older union types.

Howell Raines finally wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, chastising his fellow journalists for not mentioning that for the first time in modern American history we have a self-proclaimed news agency identified with a single political party. He called on his feloow journalists to start going after Roger Ailes and his right-wing Echochamber. A little late but welcomed.

My interest in Rep. Paul Ryan's Blueprint for the Future was only reinforced yesterday as the American Spectator and other conservative publications have endorsed it. Ryan asked the CBO to score his budget plan--using only his revenue figures. The plan called for the total dismantling of all entitlement programs, an increase in taxes on the Middle Class, a substantial reduction in taxes on the rich and corporations. Even people like Andrew Sullivan seem infatuated with the Ryan plan. Maybe it's like figuring out some mathematical formula to eliminate our deficit.

The final results for the Ryan plan were ruinous. If adopted, the federal government would be gasping for air and deficits would run so large through 2019 we couldn't ever recover. That's using his revenue figures. This is the new Supply-Side theory and I promise you it will be part of the Republican platform in 2012. I call it Aircraft Carrier Economics. The United States would become a gigantic platform from which one can launch endless wars but there would be no benefit to any Americans. I think Paul Ryan would have gotten along great with Brezhnev. They share the same worldview.

Leonard Pitts wrote a column lamenting the fact the GOP's own campaign now is based on fear. Sentimental guy that he is he waxed nostalgic for the days when politicians from both the right and left encouraged us to adopt higher principles that united us. It's not morning in America, he writes, it's now High-Noon every day.

To my conservative friends who believed President Obama would not donate his Nobel Prize money to charity, yesterday he did and the charities are all posted on line. Actually he made some good choices, emphasizing educational funds for minority students, including Native Americans. He also gave a sizeable gift to the Clinton Haiti Fund. Conservatives always liked to brag about how Dick Cheney gave his earnings from Halliburton to charity when he took office. The charity was the Richard Cheney Vice Presidential Library--believe it or not.

You will have noticed that I have not been referring to the FreeRepublic website lately. Yesterday their bloggers said that if health care reform passes they can't wait until 2012. They must engage in armed struggle now. At this point, I can't help but believe the Secret Service is n camped out at that website and in Jim Robinson's office.

A retired General sent me his latest article , which called for Revolution, because Washington is adopting progressive socialism and we constitutionalists must stop it. It reminds me of Sterling Hayden's great performance as a right-wing general with a private army in Winter Kills, which was about the JFK assassination. I don't respond because his notion of constitutionalism is based on the white nationalist movement and he doesn't even know it.

On President's Day, leading ministers of the Southern Baptist Church prayed to God for the death of President Obama. They think he is either the one to usher in the age of the Anti-Christ or the anti-Christ himself. Nero was the real Anti-Christ because he persecuted early Christians and inspired the Book of Revelations. Tim Lahaye of the Left Behind Series said it was Gorbachev because he had the mark of the beast on his forehead. Sarah Palin's minister believes the Anti-Christ is gay,which, I guess brings us back to the Vatican. But all this contradicts some of the think of the Southern Baptists, who believe the rapture ic coming in May 2012, before our next election. So no need for armed struggle or assassination--everything is solved.

Our Texas School Board problem hasn't been solved by the defeat of the wingnuts. They still refuse to include a section in the American History text why we have separation of church and state. They also want to include a section on the Emancipation Proclamation that it raised expectations of minorities too high.

George Will writes that Roberts should boycott the State of the Union address and wants more people to do so. After all we have a Black President and he's too uppity--I'm just translating. But Roberts, who is miffed by Obama's justified criticism of the Citizens United decision, should have been on the court of John Marshall when he ruled for the Cherokee Nation against its forced removal to Oklahoma. Andrew Jackson ignored him and the press asked about the Supreme Court Decision. Jackson said,"Let him (Marshall) enforce it."

Drudge reminds us that Obama's approval rating fell to its lowest point in Gallup of all time! Gallup reminds its readers that Obama's weekly approval ratings are very consistent and holding up. Rasmussen must be pleased he's getting traction--imaginary though it is. RS2000 has Obama where he was last week with a slight drop in the disapproval ratings.

We have an immediate consequence of the Citizens United ruling. Millions of dollars are flowing through front organizations with the usualy names like Americans for Free Donuts. The Corporate flood is a last gasp to defeath healthreform. I have never seen a time when corporate America has waged such an unrelenting war against the American people. Whether it's health reform or fiscal reform. And they don't even pay taxes or create jobs here!

The Democrats pledged they will not use earmarks for corporate funding anymore. The Republicans came in a day late and said they would do this also--for one year! The group of Republicans who signed onto this plan netted over $400 million in earmarks last year. K Street is in deep mourning and generating op-eds to defend their work on behalf of corporations.

* Hendrix's last cut on the album.