SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hey, Right-Wingers! Save Us From ObamaCare!

Bill a Bailout for Insurers, Disastrous for Americans

The details of Obama's healthcare plan are finally starting to come out. They are ugly. (Some of the lowlights are revealed below.) This nightmare should be aborted.

I am writing this as someone who wants socialized medicine. I am a leftie. I lost my medical insurance in December when my insurer, HIP, jacked up my rate to $920 a month.

America desperately needs smart, strong opposition to ObamaCare. The worst part of this bad plan is its "mandate," which requires the uninsured to buy insurance at hyper-inflated prices from greedy for-profit private corporations.

We can't count on so-called liberals to fight for us. Despite everything, they're still sucking up to Obama. We need a passel of old-fashioned conservatives to come to our rescue.

But old-fashioned libertarian conservatism is dead. What we've got instead are fools like David Rivkin.

Rivkin, a right-wing lawyer who worked in the Reagan-Bush Justice Department, recently fired the first salvo against Obama's healthcare mandate in The Wall Street Journal.

Requiring Americans to buy health insurance from a for-profit monopoly is stupid and immoral. But Rivkin and other Federal Society types, they of bow ties and tiny brains, rely on a different approach: suing. They say the ObamaCare mandate is unconstitutional. "If you say the government can mandate your behavior as far as this insurance goes," he wrote, "there will be nothing the government can't do. They can control every single way in which you dispose of your income."

There's a reason lawyers tend to be liberal. Most lawyers are smart.

Rivkin isn't. As late as 2009, Rivkin was still arguing that Bush-Cheney-Obama's "harsh interrogation techniques" weren't torture.

As Mark Hall, a law professor specializing in public health at Wake Forest University, points out, Congress enjoys "ample power and precedent through the Constitution's 'commerce clause' to regulate just about any aspect of the national economy." Congress can make us buy health insurance. The $750 penalty in the current version of the Senate bill being considered this week—for refusing to buy health insurance—would be enforced via the IRS. Congress has the power to tax income, Hall reminds us.

So the court challenges of the future will be fun for lawyers. And Rivkin will still be spouting nonsense in the WSJ. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be stuck with the horrors of ObamaCare.

What horrors they are, too.

Obama's proposed solution to our healthcare non-system, which is a national disgrace, will pour billions of dollars into the pockets of the very same people who caused the problem in the first place: insurance companies.

Insurance companies routinely deny valid claims. Their lobbyists help protect regional monopolies. They jack up rates much faster than inflation, underpay doctors, and kill tens of thousands of people a year thanks to denied claims and rates that are unaffordable. They pay their CEOs tens of millions a year—with our premiums.

Any sane solution to the healthcare disaster would begin with shutting down health insurance companies, then move on to nationalizing the entire system. Public health should not mix with the profit incentive.

But ObamaCare won't do a thing to rein in the insurers. Quite the contrary: for-profit healthcare stands to gain up to 30 million new customers.

Alas, these new clients will not be happy.

Under the Obama/Senate plan, the poor—individuals who currently earn under $14,500—would be required to go on Medicaid. Unless they don't qualify for whatever reason, in which case they would have to pay at least two percent of their income to private insurers, or get dinged $750 a year.

The working poor, meanwhile, would get charged a percent of their income on a sliding scale. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, federal subsidies for poor workers would be too low. People who earn between $14,500 and $43,000 a year would pay between four and 12 percent of their annual income to private insurers. (That's right: someone who makes $43,000 would have to shell out $430 a month. If they live in a high-tax place like New York,that would leave them about $2,000 a month to live on after taxes.)

And let's not forget about deductibles.

As anyone who has ever dealt with private insurance knows, deductibles are the odious practice of official non-coverage—insurance doesn't start paying (if they don't deny your claim for some BS reason) until you've already spent a certain amount that year.

I don't know why conservatives aren't talking about deductibles. They are one of the biggest secrets of ObamaCare—and one of the most damning. Like the subsidies, the "actuarial value of coverage"—the percentage of medical bills your policy would pay every year—would slide on a scale. The more you earn, the more you pay and the less you get.

Under the Senate bill, for example, a family of three earning less than $27,000—we're talking poor people here—would be fairly well covered. ObamaCare would cover 97 percent of their bills. But a family of three earning between $45,000 and $73,000 would only have 70 percent coverage. In other words, they'd have to pay a third of their medical bills out of pocket.

There would also be co-pays: $20 per doctor's visit, $250 if you had to go to the hospital, and lab tests and X-rays would come completely out of your wallet.

Faced with a slow-motion disaster like this, America needs opponents on the Right ready, willing and able to fight back. What we've got instead—incoherent Tea Partiers, idiotic lawyers like David Rivkin, and Rush Limbaugh, who claims that the existing system is perfect as it is—might as well be working for Rahm Emanuel.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously.")

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Cartoon for March 19, 2010

ObamaCare's plan to mandate Americans to buy insurance from greedy companies charging inflated prices is not a recipe for contentment. Why can't Obama help people instead of companies?

Cartoon for March 17, 2010

Obama repeatedly argues that the economy would be even worse if not for his banker bailout. If the unemployment were calculated the same way it was in 1934, the rate would be the same. How does Obama dare argue that--even if it's true (which is doubtful)?

ANIMATION: How to Save Newspapers

Check out David Essman and my new Animated Editorial Cartoon: "How to Save Newspapers!" It's fun, it's fun, and it's depressing.

Countdown to Afghanistan

The plan: Return to South Asia this summer to find out what's really going on in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan. I'll travel to Taliban-controlled areas as well as some of the most remote parts of the country where reporters never go...and I will be unembedded.

No body armor. No armed guards. Just me. And a friend.

Needed: $25,000 in travel expenses. Includes airfare, local transport, bribes to get around and evade capture, hiring fixers, etc. Believe it or not, this is a very low budget. I'll spend at least $10,000 of my own money to do this above that.

How: I'm raising the money through an appeal at Kickstarter.

But time is running out.

Total backers: 134 so far (thanks, everyone!)

Total raised: $11,105

Days left: 20

If you'd like to pledge money (your card only gets charged if the money is raised, and I refund it if I don't go on the trip for any reason), please click the link.

Thanks!

Cartoon for March 15, 2010

The Depression isn't all bad.

My gift to you: a return to classic 1990s-style Rall office-themed toonery!

A Day Late and a Dollar Short

Not being a habitual watcher of FOX News or a listener of AM radio (since I'm under the age of 60), I'm not in tune with the rantings and ravings of the Right. But I've got to give the "Day Late and Dollar Short" award to Glenn Beck, for this statement:

"I beg you, look for the words ’social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church website. If you find it, run as fast as you can!"

Yes, Mr. Beck. With 30 million people unemployed and homeless people by the millions and one in seven people in need of food assistance, everyone's gonna run away from the words "economic justice" like a swarm of locusts.

This is what's called being a day late and and dollar short. Shoulda peddled that crap in the 90s, when people were listening to it.

http://tinyurl.com/yfb8592


Susan

A Final Solution to the Afghan Question

Gee, why didn't we all think of this?

There are much better solutions for Afghanistan:

1) Build roads and electrical grids. Employ Afghans to do this.

2) Employ the thousands of Afghan widows in the country in weaving Persian carpets. Pay fair trade wages.

I can go on and on about what we can do in return for occupying the country. If we want an oil pipeline through Afghanistan, or a geopolitical and geo-economic presence there, we have to give something in return. That's just the way it is. Eventually though, we will have to come home. It just costs too much.

Susan

It's Been a Nice Run

After years of hosting my site, Blogger is kicking us old-school FTP types off their servers. Unfortunately, the Google-owned company's "solution" doesn't work for me--a prequel-based "rallblog.blogspot.com" type URL doesn't work here.

So I'm off to another platform.

This will mean some inconvenience to regular Rallbloggers, meaning that you'll have to re-register in order to post comments. But I am making effort to migrate all the old posts and archives to the new site so that your old comments will live on forever, just as your children would want.

This will happen sometime in April.

Sorry, but don't blame me. Blame Google!

Cartoon for March 12, 2010

Obama wrote this one for me by channeling RFK's "If not now, when?" The answer seems obvious: when you had 60 votes in the Senate?

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Triumph of the Swill

"The Hurt Locker" Supports the Troops—and the Lies

The Motion Picture Academy's choice of "The Hurt Locker" as best film of 2009 is a sad commentary on the movie business as well as America's unwillingness to face the ugly truth about itself nearly a decade after 9/11.

"The Hurt Locker" is about a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit operating in U.S.-occupied Iraq in 2004, one year after the invasion. They get called in to disarm improvised explosive devices (IEDs) of all shapes and sizes: homemade chemical explosives, old bombs looted from Iraqi military arsenals, even roadside bombs planted inside bodies. The EOD unit in "The Hurt Locker" also comes under fire from Iraqi resistance fighters.

The setting is inherently political, yet director Kathryn Bigelow studiously insists that her movie isn't. "Did you want to make sure that the film didn’t divulge into choosing a political stance?" an interviewer asked her. "I think that was important," she replied. "There is that saying, 'There is no politics in the trenches,' and I think it was important to look at the heroism of these men."

Soldiers exhibit extraordinary courage in every war, on every side. Sam Peckinpah's searing 1977 film "Cross of Iron" successfully makes the case for heroic behavior—bravery, anyway—on the part of Nazi forces participating in the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1943. So there's nothing wrong with Bigelow's basic assumption. It should be possible for a moviemaker to "look at the heroism of these men" despite the fact that the cause for they're fighting is evil.

The trouble with "The Hurt Locker" is that it, like too many other American war films, whitewashes history.

In this film neither the EOD unit at the center of the film or soldiers belonging to other units ever make a mistake that kills or seriously injures an Iraqi civilian. You keep waiting for it to happen, and you'd almost be OK with that one stray shot. Like the camera that put the audience behind the killer's mask in "Halloween," Bigelow has created a claustrophobic, soldier's-eye view ominous with paranoia, all too justifiable. It's hot and dusty. Everyone's dog-tired. You can almost taste the stress. Her camera jumps from one potential threat to another: is that garbage on the side of the road just litter? Why is that guy on the roof of the building across the street staring so intently?

Even the perfect set-up for the accidental killing of an Iraqi civilian—while defusing a roadside bomb, an observer goes for his cellphone—turns out to be justified. The Iraqi was an insurgent, using the phone to detonate the charge.

And this is where a supposedly apolitical film turns into a nasty bit of pro-U.S. propaganda. As the film critic Andrew Breitbart writes, "The Hurt Locker" stripped its Iraqi characters of their humanity "and turned [them] into story-props: villains, victims, foul-mouthed hustlers, or strange alien beings who keep an awkward distance and mourn the dead by yelling savagely at the sky."

For the purpose of this small film about a group of guys, one of whom is (laughably, as though such a character would be tolerated in an elite bomb squad unit) a go-it-alone cowboy who makes his comrades understandably nervous, it doesn't matter that they/the U.S. shouldn't be in Iraq in the first place. That can be for another film. (Indeed, it already was. David O. Russell's brilliant "Three Kings," a 1999 effort set in the 1991 Gulf War, presages the 2003 invasion and serves as its ultimate cinematic rebuke.)

Yet creative liberties have limits. One is historical truth. Unless you're making a live-action cartoon like "Inglorious Basterds," you can't make things up wholesale. But "The Hurt Locker" does. It creates an alternate universe to the one real Iraqis lived under in 2004, in which U.S. troops took as much care not to hurt civilians as AIG took with our taxdollars.

In the real world of U.S.-occupied Iraq in 2004, American soldiers were blowing away anyone who failed to slow down at (often unmarked) highway checkpoints. They were raping, robbing and murdering civilians for the fun of it. Countless soldiers recounted driving through towns and villages, randomly shooting at houses and people standing on the street. According to Iraq Body Count's extremely conservative estimate, between 8,000 and 10,000 Iraqis had been killed by April 2004. The truth was probably fiftyfold.

Marine Sergeant Jimmy Massey, 26, testified in December 2004 that men under his command killed "thirty-plus" civilians within 48 hours while manning a checkpoint in Baghdad. "I do know that we killed innocent civilians," Sgt. Massey said, stating that his unit fired between 200 and 500 rounds into four separate cars. Each had failed to respond to warning shots and hand signals.

In September 2004 the Knight-Ridder News Service reported that more Iraqi civilians had been killed by U.S. forces at checkpoints than by insurgents. "At the Baghdad morgue, Dr. Quasis Hassan Salem said he saw a family of eight brought in: three women, three men and two children. They were sleeping on their roof last month because it was hot inside. A military helicopter shot at them and killed them: 'I don't know why,'" said the wire service.

The reason for the bloodshed was simple: U.S. troops had been trained to shoot first, ask questions later. They didn't care about the civilians they were supposedly there to liberate. "My platoon had to learn [checkpoint techniques] on the fly," wrote Marine Captain Nathaniel Fick in The New York Times in March 2005. "For example, once while driving through a town, we cut down a traffic sign—a bright, red octagon with the word 'stop' written in Arabic—and used it at checkpoints. Who knows how many lives this simple act of theft may have saved?"

We don't see any of this in "The Hurt Locker," only good, confused American boys in uniform trying to muddle through a scary situation as best they can.

It is sad that a film so devoid of texture can earn critical plaudits. It is sadder that so few Americans can watch such a picture without losing their lunch. Not only is the history it seeks to revise ridiculously recent, one can only shudder in horror at the thought of what Iraqis and other Middle Easterners will think when pirated copies start showing up at local bazaars.

"The truth is 'The Hurt Locker' is very political," wrote Michael Moore. "It says the war is stupid and senseless and insane. It makes us consider why we have an army where people actually volunteer to do this." That's true. But the politics are terrible. And that's the wrong question.

We need to stop wallowing in self-indulgent, sentimental pap about how bad war is for the U.S. military forces that fight them. After all, the U.S. has started every war it has fought since 1945. What we should be considering is what our forces do to others in the course of invading and destroying their countries.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously.")

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

March 2010 Ted Rall Newsletter

LAST CHANCE TO SEND ME BACK TO AFGHANISTAN

Thanks to Kickstarter.com, I have raised $9,325 out of the $25,000—for travel expenses, including bribes to avoid capture, etc.—that I need to go to Afghanistan and report back about the state of the Afghan people and the US occupation.

People have been very generous. 113 have pledged sums ranging from $10 to $1000. But time is running out.

I only have 24 days to raise the remaining $15,000+. If I don’t, all the pledges will be returned—those are the rules. So if you have been sitting on the fence and can help out, now would be a great time to make a pledge to support independent, unenbedded war correspondency.

Small donations are more than welcome, but I obviously could use some big ones too. Go to the following link and, as you will see, the bigger donations get me to come to your town and speak—feel free to charge for tickets, and you might even make a profit:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tedrall/comix-journalism-send-ted-rall-back-to-afghanista-0

This is the crunch time for this project.


BOOK DEAL FOR AFGHANISTAN BOOK

If I get the money to go, there will be a book. Hill & Wang, part of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, which is known for publishing beautiful books including graphic novels, will publish the resulting tome, probably in Spring 2012.

People who pledge over a certain amount on Kickstarter.com will get copies of the book and/or personal thank-yous in the book!


NEW BOOK FOR FALL 2010: POLITICAL MANIFESTO

I have completed my new political manifesto, which argues that the United States government is headed toward economic and political collapse, and must, well, go. It is now being edited and will come out Fall 2009 from Seven Stories Press. Editorial cartoonist and graphic illustrator Matt Bors is working on the cover. Title to be announced; it’s currently too hot to release!


TED RALL ANIMATIONS ON YOUTUBE

I am producing, along with David Essman, some of the most outrageous political cartoons available in animation, for the Internet. But I won't be able to keep doing them unless some websites start paying for them. If you're working for a website interested in edgy political content, please check them out and get in touch. I am willing and able to package them with my weekly opinion columns.

http://www.youtube.com/user/tedralltoons

You can also see them on Ted Rall Online at:

http://www.rall.com/goodies.htm

Up most recently, “In Search of the Democrats,” about the Party of Hope’s impotence.

SIGN UP TO GET TED’S CARTOONS AND COLUMNS

I have begun serializing pre-edited copy from my upcoming Political Manifesto through the 2010 Ted Rall Subscription Service. This is EXCLUSIVE to subscribers. Everyone else will have to wait until the book comes out this fall.

Subscriptions for the Ted Rall Subscription Service are open now for 2010. For $30 a year you get my cartoons and columns emailed to your in-box, in many cases days or even weeks before they go online or appear in newspapers! You also receive big discounts on any original cartoons you request ($100 cost instead of $500).

Go to: http://www.rall.com/subscription.htm


EVENTS - APRIL

Hey New Yorkers! I’ll be at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art ArtFest (MoCCA) April 10-11.


BUY A SIGNED COPY OF “THE YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY”

You can still get a personally signed copy of my “The Year of Loving Dangerously” for $23.90 (includes shipping within the United States). There are only a few copies left. Then the offer is null and void.

Check out: http://rall.com/buyyold.htm


FACEBOOK

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/profile.php?ref=profile&id=500182857


TWITTER

http:www.twitter.com/tedrall


DEMAND THAT YOUR NEWSPAPER CARRY ME!

The Internet is cool. But it doesn't pay. If you want to keep seeing good cartoons, write to your local newspaper and demand that they carry my stuff. It works more often than you'd think!

Cartoon for March 10, 2010

I can't imagine how Democrats think they'll be able to motivate their neglected, insulted and abused base this fall.

Libertarians gone wild! http://ping.fm/drRIs

Cartoon for March 8, 2010

True story: other countries are gearing up for a territorial Cold War over Arctic resources that are becoming accessible due to global warming--but the U.S. isn't involved because of climate change denialism.

Cartoon for March 5, 2010

Obama and Bush pursue the same policies on important issues, but only Bush catches liberal opprobrium.

Cartoon for March 3, 2010

It's like a Mexican standoff--no one wants to hire first.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Don't Be Evil—Edit It

A Different Take on the Italian Google Verdict

Should I be allowed to smear you?

That's the question journalists ought to be asking in the wake of an Italian court decision that found Google criminally responsible for content uploaded to one of its sites. (The case revolved around the video of an autistic boy getting beaten up in Turin. The father sued, successfully arguing that his son's privacy had been violated. Three Google executives were handed six-month suspended sentences in absentia.)

Instead, the story has been framed as an attack on freedom of speech.

"The Web as we know it will cease to exist" if the ruling stands, claim Google's lawyers.

"It absolutely is a threat," affirms Danny O'Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "If intermediaries like Google or the person who hosts your website can be thrown in jail in any country for the acts of other people and suddenly have a legal obligation to pre-screen everything anyone says on their website before putting it online, the tools for free speech that everyone uses on the Net would grind to a halt."

Even the State Department has issued public statements supporting Google.

The more I think about it, however, the more I think it's time to civilize "the Web as we know it."

Let's return to the question I asked at the beginning of this column: Should I be able to libel you as, say, a drug-addicted child pornographer?

This column appears in print newspapers. If I were to write that you were (for example) a drug-addicted child pornographer, my editors would ask me if it was true and demand that I source my allegation. Worried about getting sued, they'd either redact the relevant section or refuse to run the piece entirely if I couldn't answer them satisfactorily.

And editors should be worried—publications are legally liable for what they print.

On the other hand, there are no gatekeepers online. Because there are pesky editors worried about getting sued online, I can post that atrocious lie about you being a drugged-out kiddie porn entrepreneur to my blog and to my Facebook page in a matter of seconds. I can sum it up on Twitter. Within a few hours, thousands of people will have read it. They might forward it to tens of thousands of their friends—two of whom might be your spouse and your boss. And there's nothing you can do about it.

Of course, you could sue me. But because I'm not rich, there's no big paycheck down the road. You'll have a hard time finding a lawyer.

Not in Italy, though. Lawyers, juries and judges would look at my blog, which is hosted by Blogger, which owned by Google. They'd ask: what difference does it make whether Ted Rall's column ran on Blogger or appeared in The New York Times? Answer: there is no difference. Without a medium—printed or online—the libel wouldn't have occurred.

In Italy, these Internet companies would have to dig deep into their very-deep pockets and pay you for the harm done to your reputation if the column ran.

Google and other self-styled "intermediary" online companies argue that they shouldn't be held responsible for material hosted and posted on their services because they don't have editors and aren't selecting the content. "They didn't upload it, they didn't film it, they didn't review it and yet they have been found guilty," said Google's senior communications manager, Bill Echikson, of the three execs.

This reasoning is common in the online world. Several years ago I learned that NYTimes.com didn't have editors—it had programmers. It was astonishing. Syndicated and wire-service content was uploaded directly to the site without anyone at the Old Gray Lady's online version bothering to even take a look-see and make sure things were spelled correctly, much less check to be sure it's accurate or, say, non-libelous. Among this unedited content were my cartoons. Naturally, one or two a year—out of 150—were controversial. If they'd had an editor, they probably wouldn't have run those particular pieces. But editors cost dollars, and newspapers are pinching pennies. Ultimately the paper canceled all of my cartoons. It was easier and cheaper than hiring an editor.

I suspect that courts, and not just in Italy, will see Google's "free speech" argument—"We don't review content! We let anyone post anything they want whenever they want!"—as less of a defense than an admission of culpability. After all, Google chooses not to review content, at least in part to reduce their costs.

It might be different if Google and other Internet aggregators weren't for-profit enterprises. It also might be different if they were what they say they are: service providers. You can't sue a service provider for the nature of the content it carries. The phone company merely provides a platform; it can't be sued if someone uses their lines to slander you.

From a legal standpoint Google is an old-fashioned content provider, relying on a business model that is no different from The New York Times. They post content—much of it stolen—in order to generate ad revenue.

Of course, Google is a little edgier than The Times. A late 2009 study by the Fair Syndication Consortium found that the company was responsible for 53 percent of the overall piracy of copyrighted newspaper articles online. Google illegally scanned millions of books without asking the authors' permissions. And the ad money rolled in—$1.97 billion in profits during Q4 of 2009 alone.

It's not like Google can't afford to hire an editorial staff. Shouldn't they have to make sure that, for example, I don't libel you as some crazy porn gangster?

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously.")

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Cartoon for March 1, 2010

This one was inspired by the recent publication of several books about bored rich white people searching for spiritual whatever.

Cartoon for February 26, 2010

Over a year--still no accomplishments. But liberals still keep making excuses for Obama. Why can't we get such soft treatment at work?