SENIORS ARE THROUGHLY CONFUSED

Drug Addled
Why Bush's prescription plan is such a fiasco.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2006, at 3:33 PM ET

President Bush thought that millions would welcome his intervention. But the effort has not gone as planned. Costs are spiraling out of control, and many of the people we wanted to help are protesting that the situation is worse than ever. Three years later, the entire poorly conceived enterprise is in jeopardy.

I refer, of course, to the administration's program to subsidize the cost of prescription drugs for the elderly. This plan, which went into effect on Jan. 1, offers so many baffling options that only 1 million of 21 million eligible Medicare beneficiaries have signed up for it on their own. Many of these early adopters, along with millions of impoverished Medicaid recipients transferred into the new system automatically, have been unable to obtain their prescriptions at the promised discounted price. The specter of citizens going without needed medications has provoked action by several governors, some of whom have invoked emergency powers to pay for drugs. Meanwhile, the estimated cost of this plan that no one likes has already more than doubled and is now projected at more than $1 trillion over the next decade.

It's tempting to conclude that "Medicare D" has flopped because of Republican disdain for government. And that is indeed part of the problem. It's hard to think of a major federal program or initiative (other than military procurement and domestic espionage) that has thrived under Bush, who tends to tune out such specifics as design and implementation. With the Medicare drug bill, politically attuned but government-detesting conservatives resolved the inherent conflict between the interests of beneficiaries and the affected industries in favor of everyone. Crucial aspects of the plan were characteristically delegated to insurance and pharmaceutical companies, while the senior-citizens' lobby was appeased in various ways.

From votetoimpeach.org these items of the day:

1) The People's Impeachment Lobby is a huge success. Members of Congress received more than 70,000 letters urging impeachment.

2) A new Zogby poll will be released tomorrow showing that by a 52% to 43% margin, Americans believe that Congress should consider impeaching George W. Bush if he wiretapped the people of this country without court approval (and everyone knows and Bush has admitted that he ordered just such huge secret spying operation.) The poll, with a plus or minus margin of error of 2.9%, shows that 66% of Democrats, 59% of independents, and 23% of Republicans support impeachment for wiretapping. Majorities favored impeachment across the country: the East (54%), South (53%), and West (52%), Central states (50%). The significance of this poll can be seen by way of comparison with public attitudes in the months before the impeachment of Clinton. In August and September 1998, sixteen major polls found that only 36% supported hearings to impeach Clinton.

3) Even Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, Arlen Specter, who will be convening hearings next month on Bush’s authorization of secret electronic surveillance of Americans, said that if lawmakers find Bush violated the law regarding wiretapping (remember Richard Nixon here), then “impeachment is a remedy. After impeachment you could have a criminal prosecution."

4) There are now eight members of Congress including John Conyers, the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, who have put their name to a bill calling for a special committee to investigate impeachable crimes by the Bush Administration.

I notice that a new Zogby Poll (Repub pollster) Shows about a 52% to 43% margin in favor of IMPEACHING Bush if he did indeed wiretap American citizens phones and email. Maybe, just maybe, we are about to get rid of this zealot. However, we must then confront the real leader of the Bush cabal, Dick Cheney! If he does not resign when and if Bush is impeached, we are in for a worse stretch of hell than we have already gone through. If he resigns then our President will be Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice, which has to be better than either Bush or Cheney. Soldier on, American Patriots, we will prevail!

South

Al Gore gave an inspiring and applause interrupted, rousing speech at the Liberty Coalition meeting. If you want to read it, go to libertycoalition.net/. If you need to feel better about what is going on in our country, don't miss reading this.

South
On this day former V.P. Albert Gore took brave steps to save our country from the illegal take over by the Bush Adminstration. I will write more tomorrow, it is very late.

Well, it has been a long time since I dipped this electronic pen and stroked some words in this space. Over a year now. I have been so negatively down and psychologically out of it that my brain just kind of shut down, hoping to awaken to a GWB-less world. Has not happened and now I have been able to accept it's not happening and neither is it going to happen. The why of that is America's citizen's just don't feel there is anything they can do and they are right.

Now I'm an old guy, almost seventy and while I can handle most things because I likely have handled something very similar in the past, this situation existing in our White House, the People's House in Washington, DC is almost unbearable. The confusion of our citizens is heart breaking to watch. It is almost like we are saying, "Will somebody please tell us what to do to rid ourselves of this tick and his blood sucking friends?" And there are people crying out on the Internet and occasionally on standard media that impeachment is an option. Eight or ten Democrat politicians headed by the brave and formidable John Conyers and a few others have let it be known that they are true Patriots doing the job they were elected to do. Bless 'em. Being as confused as we are, shall we joing them? /30