Sarah Palin says Personal Responsibility is the Solution to the Health Care Crisis, So Why the Lawsuits?

In January of 2008, in her address to the Alaska Legislature, Sarah Palin proclaimed, “Let’s take personal responsibility in all areas of life—including health.” We have known for weeks that Sarah Palin has done quite the opposite.  As a child, Palin’s family relied upon the Canadian government’s national health care. It has also become a matter of public record that Palin’s own grandchild, Bristol’s son, receives health care through the government. Now, Alaska has joined 19 other states who have sued the federal government over health care reform.  It was Sean Parnell, the Republican that followed in the footsteps of Palin, who authorized the suit.

In case you are confused, let me explain.  Almost half of the states in the United States are using money earned by the hard working individuals in their states, to sue themselves.  The defense of those lawsuits will be funded by federal tax dollars, which represents money you and I paid in taxes to our federal government.  Thus we are suing ourselves, and the cost to us will be not only the exorbitant cost of the attorneys on one side of the case, but we have the privilege of paying the attorneys on both sides.  No matter the outcome of the case, we will pay millions of dollars in attorney’s fees in an attempt to save money. Countless hours will be spent, and thousands or millions of dollars will be spent on a suit with dubious merit, and that most agree will be unsuccessful.   Many Constitutional law experts say that the health insurance mandate falls within the Constitutional purview of Congress.  It is ironic that the purported motivation behind these suits is to save taxpayers from excessive spending, but in fact these suits will likely only add to the cost of health care reform.  A majority of voters (54-40%) think that the lawsuit is a “bad idea”.

Not surprisingly, virtually all of the states who have sued the federal government over health care reform have Republican Governors.   The only conclusion we can draw from these lawsuits is that if you are a Governor, and a member of the minority political party in Congress, then you can express your disapproval of Congress by costing state and Federal taxpayers more money.  You can make headlines by instituting frivolous suits that don’t cost your political campaigns any money, but cost the taxpayers dearly.  Perhaps if we held all the Governors personally responsible for the cost of these suits if they should loose the case, we would see many fewer suits.  Since Sarah Palin is no longer the Governor of Alaska, she won’t have to waste her valuable time on such frivolous matters.  Perhaps the silver lining in these suits is that they help the job market, as they ensure the continued employment of a lot of attorneys.

Write Your Own “Rebuttal to the Rogue”

In 2008, Sarah Palin, and John McCain’s nomination of her as a Vice-Presidential candidate, were so offensive to me that I felt compelled to write “Rebuttal to the Rogue”, and start this blog. It’s been over a year since McCain lost the election, and almost a year since Palin resigned her position as Governor.  I had hoped that Palin would simply disappear.   To my amazement, Palin seems to think that people still care about what she says.

Palin is no longer a politician, she is not a competent professional and she is not a dedicated mother.  If she were motivated to facilitate change she would have continued to serve as Governor.  Instead her efforts seem to be focused on money.  I don’t begrudge her the money.  If people are willing to spend their hard-earned dollars to hear her speak or have a picture taken with her, it is totally within their right to waste their financial resources.  What is appalling to me is that she feels it is her place to criticize politicians who are devoting their careers and lives to attempting to improve our country.  Even though she is no longer a politician, and barely completed college, she feels it appropriate to criticize Barack Obama who is unquestionably more educated, more experienced and more committed to making our country a better place than Palin ever was.  Palin seems to think that it is her place to criticize the President, the Nobel Prize Winner, the one who won the election by a landslide, the one who was elected by a majority of women, the one who’s first law to sign within days of taking office was the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the one who  appointed Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latina Supreme Court Justice, the one who has brought new respect for the United States of America from around the world, the one who has instituted new educational benefits for mothers including Pell Grants, the one who awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Sandra Day O’Connor, Billie Jean King, Nancy Goodman Brinker, Chita Rivera and Mary Robinson, and the one who has now facilitated the enactment of health care reform when his predecessors were unsuccessful.

If you are reading this blog you are probably as offended by Sarah Palin as I am, and wish that you could find an appropriate way to express your outrage.  Today I have a suggestion to offer.  Yesterday on her Facebook page Palin suggested that the legislators who passed health care reform had disregarded the “will of the people”.  Palin stated that we should be printing “pink slips for the members of Congress who voted to enact this change and who will be running for re-election in 2010.  It’s time to make the “will of the people” known.  Let’s print our own “pink slips” for each of these Representatives to help them with their re-election campaigns, and type on the slip “Rebuttal to the Rogue”.   Let’s send each of these Representatives a dollar to help them with their campaign and paper clip the pink slip to the dollar.  Let’s copy our friends and those who will benefit from health care reform on the list below, and encourage them to send a dollar to each of these Representatives.

This blog has had over 3,700 views just this month.  If we work together, and if each of us could encourage just five more people to send a dollar, the impact could be staggering!  If every person who receives this list passes it on to five more people, we could ensure that our voices will be heard!  We will each make our “Rebuttal to the Rogue” heard, and maybe Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and demonstrators who feel it appropriate to spit on Congressmen, will understand that every time Sarah Palin targets someone, it will only help that politician, and not hurt them.

Thanks for your support!

From Sarah’s Facebook:

We’re going to reclaim the power of the people from those who disregarded the will of the people. We’re going to fire them and send them back to the private sector, which has been shrinking thanks to their destructive government-growing policies. Maybe when they join the millions of unemployed, they’ll understand why Americans wanted them to focus on job creation and an invigorated private sector. Come November, we’re going to print pink slips for members of Congress as fast as they’ve been printing money.

We’re paying particular attention to those House members who voted in favor of Obamacare and represent districts that Senator John McCain and I carried during the 2008 election. Three of these House members are retiring – from Arkansas’s 2nd district, Indiana’s 8th district, and Tennessee’s 6th district – but we’ll be working to make sure that those who replace them are Commonsense Conservatives. The others are running for re-election, and we’re going to hold them accountable for this disastrous Obamacare vote. They are: Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ-1), Harry E. Mitchell (AZ-5), Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-8), John Salazar (CO-3), Betsy Markey (CO-4). Allen Boyd (FL-2), Suzanne M. Kosmas (FL-24), Baron P. Hill (IN-9), Earl Pomeroy (ND-AL), Charlie Wilson (OH-6), John Boccieri (OH-16), Kathy Dahlkemper (PA-3), Christopher Carney (PA-10), John M. Spratt, Jr. (SC-5), Tom Perriello (VA-5), Alan B. Mollohan (WV-1), and Nick J. Rahall II (WV-3).

See the comments below for the addresses and e-mails for each of these Representatives.

McCain and Fox News Take Advantage of Poor Sarah

For centuries men have exploited and taken advantage of women who did not have the education or experience to be in a position to fight back.  It is however the 21^st Century.  In the United States of America, women are more educated than men and share equally in being financially responsible for the support of the family.  When John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate, I was offended and outraged.  His choice was clearly motivated by her appearance and little else.  With five other female Republican Senators and three other female Governors at the time, McCain clearly felt that a women’s job was to look pretty and stay quiet.  McCain had no expectation that Palin would contribute intellectually to his campaign.  In fact, he did his best to prevent her from interacting with the media or the American public.  It seems he thought women would vote for a woman, and men would think of him as a stud if he surrounded himself with pretty women.  McCain was wrong.

Fox News hired Palin as a “political analyst”, attempting to give the illusion that Palin was capable of analyzing anything.  In the recent interview of Sarah Palin by Bill O’Reilly, it became apparent that Fox News is attempting to use Palin, much in the same way that McCain did.

http://palintv.com/2010/03/21/governor-palin-on-oreilly-discussing-health-care-vote/

Having watched this interview several times, a few conclusions are obvious:

1. The total length of the interview was 7 minutes and 17 seconds.  During that time O’Reilly interrupted Palin 7 times, referred to Palin as the “former” Governor only once, and referred to Palin as the “Governor” four times.  In case Fox is confused as to her status, she quit, she is no longer a Governor of any state, and she no longer holds ANY political office.
2. Palin used a word that does not appear in my dictionary, “repill”.  I listened to the tape five times, thinking that I misheard what she was saying, and each time, I heard “repill” which is not a word.
3. The first question O’Reilly asked Palin was to identify the thing she found worst about “Obama-care”.  When Palin finally answered his question she explained that what she objected to was the notion that “leftists” could push a policy through Congress without regard to the will of the people.  O’Reilly disagreed with Palin, explaining that the real problem was that voters elected a Democratic House of Representatives, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President.  O’Reilly suggested that voters gave the Democrats the opportunity to enact policies to which O’Reilly objects, and that voters should do everything in their power to elect Republicans in November.   Palin finally caught on and agreed with O’Reilly.
4. O’Reilly asked Palin to agree that there were some positive things that the health care legislation addressed, like insurance company abuse.  Palin wouldn’t even agree with him on that.
5. The interview of Palin takes place outdoors in Alaska.  There is no reason that an interview of this sort should ever take place outdoors, but it was a way to divert the attention of the viewer from Palin.

The only logical conclusion is that Fox News, like John McCain, is using the charisma and appeal of Sarah Palin to further its objectives.  Poor Sarah seems to be oblivious to the fact that she is being used.  If Fox News is willing to pay Sarah Palin enough money, she seems to be willing to let Fox use her as they deem appropriate.  I thought it was against the law to pay women to do what made men feel good?

That “Hopey-Changey Thing” is Looking Pretty Good

At the Tea Party Convention Sarah Palin mocked the President of our Country, asking how that “hopey-changey thing is working out for ya?”  Today after the United States House of Representatives passed health care reform, I would answer Palin by telling her that it’s looking pretty good to me!  In the election of 2008, 69,456,897 people voted for Obama, while only 59,934,814 voted for John McCain.  Barack Obama made his position on health care reform crystal clear.   He promised the voters that if elected he would work diligently to ensure health care for all the citizens of this country.  He kept his promise.  In the span of approximately one year Obama accomplished what has been advocated for decades, but no politician had been able to achieve.  Before this landmark reform, 46 million people had no health care and 25 million were underinsured.  Thus more people were without health care, or underinsured, than the total number of votes cast for the winner of the 2008 election.

Palin explained at the Tea Party Convention that the voters are going to “hold them accountable” (referring to those liberal Democrats).  Surprise, we expected our Congressmen who voted for health care reform to be accountable and they were.  People associated with the Tea Baggers demonstrated outside Congress this week spitting upon our elected officials, and suggesting that the members of Congress would lose their seats in the next election.  The reality is that the protesters represented a minority of the people in this country.  I would venture to guess that if any of those protesters contracted a life-threatening illness, they would not be able to obtain the necessary medical care without health care reform.

Throughout the campaign Obama explained that health care should be a right, and that our system was fundamentally flawed.

http://www.ontheissues.org/Health_Care.htm#Headlines

John McCain and Sarah Palin explained the health care is a responsibility.  They explained that the family should make health decisions, not the federal government.  However, we now know that Palin’s family didn’t consider health care a family responsibility.  She relied upon the Canadian Nationalized Health Care System as a child, and now her grandson, Bristol’s child, is taking advantage of governmental health care provided to people who have a distant relative who has some Alaskan Native ancestry.  We know McCain married a wealthy woman so he was never worried about his own health care.

What will health care look like in America five years from now?  Nobody really knows.  What we do know as of today is that the status quo is no longer acceptable, and some type of change is essential.  As the years go by, I am sure there will be many changes to the law and the system, but at least we have begun the process of fixing one of the biggest problems in this country.  I respect the Representatives who voted for the change, who were willing to enact a law with the idea that something had to be done.  It is our job to ensure that we support those Representatives when they are up for re-election, to make sure that they know we have not forgotten that they were willing to attempt to make our system better.

Yes, I am worried about the nation debt.  Yes, I am worried about abuse in the system.  However those concerns are not a reason for inaction.  The answer is to ensure that we remain vigilant to address the national debt and to minimize abuse in the system.  If we work together to make the system effective, health care will be better, and lives will be saved.

Palin’s Legacy?

Despite my hope that one day Sarah Palin will fade from our country’s collective memory, becoming at best a footnote in American history, I fear that her legacy will linger long after she has tired of “writing” Facebook notes and shilling for every conservative group that throws money her way.

Everyday I am inundated with Palin’s rabid, vitriolic rhetoric and while I am obviously free to just change the channel or flip to another page in my newspaper, I cannot ignore the malicious and unconscionable behavior that Palin has advocated. Every time that Palin incites her loyal legion of followers, I grow more fearful of what is becoming of the people in this country. I fear that her insufferable intolerance and ignorance has begun to permeate to even those beyond the right-wing fringe as evidenced by the video below.

Despite what people like Palin and Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh might have you believe, we still have freedom of speech. You are free to say what you feel, think and believe. You are free to voice your like or dislike of the President’s approach to health care reform. You are even free to voice your like or dislike of the President himself. Sadly, you are also free to mock those without health insurance and those with incurable diseases like Parkinson’s.

Do not allow yourselves to be silenced by a vocal minority. Speak up for what you know is right. Health care is a basic human right, not a luxury.