Here's a modest, soft spoken, but informative reminder about what Georgie has done for our country.

"The Latest Bush Mega-Catastrophe Is Now Pharmaceuticals
By Harvey Wasserman
The Free Press

Monday 16 January 2006

No matter what you think of George W. Bush, he is staking out his claim as a bona fide Horseman of the Apocalypse.

With his Hand of Hell in Iraq already yielding countless dead, $200 billion wasted and a global war again Islam well on its way to Armageddon, Bush has definitively established his ability to wreck unparalleled disaster on a global scale with zero positive outcome.

By drowning New Orleans and turning its alleged rebuilding plan into a sinkhole of corruption and disarray, he has shown he can lay waste to an entire American city.

And now he is visiting disease and death on tens of millions of our elderly and ill with a botched Medicare/Medicaid drug plan that has plunged the nation's pharmacies into total chaos while driving the states even closer to bankruptcy. As you read this, millions of Americans are without medications that may be life-sustaining because of what Bush has done to "improve" their pharmaceutical plan.

One can only shudder at what might come next.

There have, of course, been lesser catastrophes, or ones whose long-term devastation is primarily political.

Bush's No Child Left Behind program has utterly poisoned our national educational system and gutted state budgets.

Bush's economic programs have taken a national surplus and turned it into a gargantuan debt, almost incalculable in its devastating implications for our future.

Bush's "War on Terror" has in fact been a war on civil rights and liberties, stripping the US of its basic democracy while leaving us more vulnerable than ever to terror attacks on nuclear plants, chemical facilities, our ports and air lanes.

Bush's "Homeland Security" agency is by all accounts a fetid swamp of corruption, mismanagement and ineptitude.

Bush's Patriot Acts I & II have shredded our most sacred document, the Bill of Rights, and opened the door to full-scale dictatorship while defiling everything the men and women who founded this country stood for.

Bush's embrace of torture has cast the US in the role of a sordid, sadistic demon wallowing in the very "cruel and unusual punishment" forbidden by its own Constitution.

Bush's universal spy program has turned a nation founded on reverence for privacy, free speech and due process into a cynical Big Brother with utter contempt for individual rights or liberties.

Bush's theft of two consecutive presidential elections has turned the right to vote into a tragic joke. Team Bush-Rove has gutted the ideal of free and fair elections while giving the GOP a death grip on the nation's electronic voting machines, creating a permanent one-party franchise.

There is, of course, much much more.

This new pharmaceutical crisis has yet again an administration that is amazingly incompetent by any and all non-partisan measures of basic management skills.

One can have an opinion about the war in Iraq. But no one on any side of the issue can argue that the effort has been run with anything but complete arrogance, idiocy and incompetence.

One can have an opinion about New Orleans. But even an administration overtly intent on killing the city could hardly have done a more thorough job.

And now we watch Bush lay utter waste to a Medicaid/Medicare program defined by red tape and inequity, but which has at least delivered pharmaceuticals to people who rely on them.

Bush's "reform" is a gratuitous, greed-based scheme to pour still more billions into drug company coffers. And now millions of poor, sick Americans are being turned away from pharmacies because Bush's plan is incomprehensible, unworkable, and has left them unable to pay for the medicines that are keeping them alive.

To their credit, many states are trying to pick up the slack. But some are not, or cannot.

One could say that this relentless injection of chaos and confusion into the body politic fits a conspiratorial pattern for utterly demoralizing the nation. One could argue that it's a conscious shot at total social deconstruction, provoking the End Times so fervently embraced by the fundamentalist fringe of Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson, the most unChristian men in America.

But at this point, even conservative Republicans are scrambling to distance themselves from the utter, astonishing incompetence of a national leader so obviously unfit to handle the job on the most basic administrative levels.

Nothing could be more indicative of the utter contempt Team Bush harbors for average Americans than the concept, design and execution of this latest catastrophe.

Except for the one that will come next…. "

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i agree perfectly....... im sure that tk and rory have different views.....of course their view is from deep inside their own asses as they hate America and love Bush

The other day I was at my pharmacy. In front of me was a frail woman at least 80+ years old. She was picking up a prescription for a stomach med. It rang up as $124 after whatever insurance she had. Most likely Medicare. I thought she was going to drop from shock right there. She said she couldn't afford it and left. It's not right! She should get free meds IMO.

Just like Bush promised, right? He wouldn't lie to us would he? wait.... wait....

"She said she couldn't afford it and left. It's not right! She should get free meds IMO'

Nice of you to whip out the debit card and cover it for her Stlhd. Oh You mean somone else should pay for it just as long as it is not you. Did you shove her down on your way to the counter. Someone should smack your parents for raising a low rent like you.

It's called empathy, TK. Stlhead was feeling empathy. Actually a fairly common emotion. Not among neocons of course.

Tell the old lady to take two empathy's with a glass of water and she will feel good in the AM. What a dolt.

"The poor old lady has seen the price of her meds double and triple since Bush took office. But hey, drug company profits and CEO pay is astronomic."

Prove it.

One of the wierder things TK's hero put in the new medicare drug bill was a provision forbidding the government to negotiate any agreement with drug companies to lower drug prices.

Add to that the fact that you must sign up for an insurance company plan to receive benefits, and it's clear the whole dam thing was designed to be a boondoggle for the drug companies and the insurance companies, not to provide assistance to the elderly.

I wonder how many elderly and disadvantaged persons could recieve a price break if the industry stopped their innapropriate marketing. Why should I "ask my doctor" for any given drug?
Or, take one week's worth of our operating costs in Iraq and re-invest into free medical programs for seniors with need.

TK does not know about the increasing price of medicine/presciption drugs in America because he does not buy any (against the pleading, begging advice of his shrink of course). He needs other people to "prove it" for him as his own observations will not work in this situation.

I know I said to ignore him but I just could not help it... the leftist devil have me do it.

Brand name drugs doubled . How many insurance companies allow you to buy brand name drugs if generic are available? Not medicare not the majors. I am sure the elderly without coverage are do not. The only reason to buy brand name is if the patent is still active and no generics are available. I think we should provide low cost drugs to seniors. With the exception that if they smoked or now smoke are alcoholic or obese they get nothing for conditions stemming from their choice.

You break your leg mountain climbing you get no treatment because it was your choice to engage in risky behavior? Let em all die? How neocon of you. So, if you think neocon you get no mental health treatment because you chose to be insane.

If you want to be a moron and compare healthful activies to destructive activites knock yourself out. I know the name of the first person to climb mount Everest but have no idea who the first person to die from smoking related disease was I wonder why?.

And you'll decide which activities are healthful and covered and which are not right? More neoconism. Visit a country where malaria is a potential, get Malaria, your fault and no treatment so say the neocons. Eat beef and get mad cow? Have a cavity? Did you eat something sweet? no coverage. Hurt in an auto accident? Were you driving a small car? No coverage. Fall off your horse? Shouldn't have been riding in the first place. No coverage. Devlope diabetes? Should have lost that ten pounds. No coverage. Long live the little world of neocons!

Shows how stupid you are. Big difference between smoking, drinking, obesity and any of your silly examples. Go ahead and be obtuse and a fool.

What's the big difference? Or are you just going to keep with the name calling?

Wacky,

Smoking, drinking, obesity and related illness cost the US health care system billions of dollars a year and are destructive personal choices. Now if everyone new that the cows were loaded with mad cow and still ate them then cut them off as well. If cavities related to candy consumption are a problem and killing health care with costs we should look at them.

So if something costs the system money and is a destructive choice it should not be covered? You are brilliant! Who determines destructive personal choices? You?

Which do you weight more heavily? The cost on the system or the destructiveness of choice? Or is it a carefully balanced calculation only the elite few are privy to?