The Neon Hippo

From Rosie’s Blog – someone sent it to her and she asked that everyone pass this message along:

You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.

You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn’t get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in  Iraq.

You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.

You didn’t get mad when we gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich.

You didn’t get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.

You finally got mad when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.  Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all okay with you, but helping other Americans…oh hell no.

I found this quote in the comments of an article about this new health care bill that just passed:

No Democrat or Republican will ever get my vote again. This is about being “historic” and making Obama look good. Dennis Kucinich sold out Americans because he didn’t want the president to fail. What about US? And Republicans are to blame too. They made up this stuff about the bill being socialist medicine when it isn’t instead of actually trying to make arguments on the merits. This galvanized people who then decided they didn’t need to fight for real universal healthcare, because debate just stopped. It became about Congress and the president and the American people were just left out.

I have to agree.  We desperately need health care reform.  We have something, but I’m afraid the big winners in this “reform” are the insurance companies.  We finally have our “air tax”  a tax on being alive in the USA.  If you’re a citizen you MUST buy health insurance or you will be fined.  Yep, the great Health Insurance Bailout has begun…. as if they need bailing out.

On the other hand… it’s a start.  It’s better than we were yesterday.  Insurance companies can no longer drop you when you get sick and expensive.  They can no longer deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions.  They can no longer put a limit on how much health care you get in your lifetime.  It’s far from perfect.  It doesn’t address a lot of the issues, but it does give me hope that we now have something to build on and improve.

I don’t understand how people can say we can’t afford it.  We spend billions upon billions bailing out bankers, on foreign military installations and waging a war against whoever is the enemy of the month.  So much money is wasted, so much can be cut from the budget if they’d just use a little common sense.  We can certainly afford to help the U.S. citizens.  Without us, what is the purpose of government?  A government’s number one job is to protect its citizens.

The categories weren’t working on the old installation of this blog.  I tried fixing the problem, then decided it was taking too much time and the outcome was far from certain.  Rather than mess around with it anymore, I decided to reinstall WordPress and start fresh.  Sorry if this messes up your RSS feeds – if so I hope you’ll take the time to subscribe again.  I’ll go back and look at some of the old posts and may re-post a few of them.

I made a backup of the old wordpress installation and put it into a different location, but the database links still point to neonhippo.com and so I can’t get to it.  I suppose I could export from the database, but I’ll probably never take the time to do that, so it truly is a BRAND NEW WORLD.