New billionaire-backed anti-Obamacare ads target "swing" white female voters

With the arrival of the mid-term election campaigns, comes the all-out blitz against “Obamacare.” It aims to prey on the paranoid and ill-informed. The target audience of these ads? The white female vote. Nearly every extreme-right billionaire-paid propaganda broadside features a white female telling one sob story or another about how “Obamacare” has been a virtual death sentence for them. Frankly, I’m not certain what is the “benefit” of appearing uninformed or even ignorant about the Affordable Care Act, but I do understand why the Koch brothers and others of their ilk believe that the key to election victory is preying on the fear and paranoia of (enough) white female voters.

I have to confess that I was never impressed with the media-created theory about the “women’s vote.” Yes, a slightly higher percentage of women vote Democrat than Republican. But one should not read into it what is not there. Minority women are certainly far more reliable Democratic voters than white women; no one need be “confused” by the fact that 58 percent of white female vote was for the benefit of Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. The Koch brothers, who are spending millions on the so-called Americans For Prosperity (meaning their prosperity) anti-ACA spots, hope that they can convince just enough white female voters—since minority women are more likely to see through the racist anti-Obama motivation behind this—to turn the tide in favor of Republicans in some close elections. Why they believe that white female voters are muddle-minded is something you have to ask the people behind these ads. 

One of the targeted elections that has received a great deal of media attention is for the Michigan U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Carl Levin. One of those seeking his seat is Democratic Rep. Gary Peters, a supporter of the ACA. Peters responded to an AFP ad featuring a white female named Julie Boonstra by threatening the licenses of media outlets running them, for the reason that the ad was deliberately misleading and deceptive. One of them goes like this:

“I was diagnosed with leukemia. I found out I only have a 20 percent chance of surviving. I found this wonderful doctor and a great health care plan. I was doing fairly well fighting the cancer, fighting the leukemia, and then I received a letter. My insurance was canceled because of Obamacare. Now, the out-of-pocket costs are so high, it’s unaffordable. If I do not receive my medication, I will die. I believed the president. I believed I could keep my health insurance plan. I feel lied to. It’s heartbreaking for me. Congressman Peters, your decision to vote Obamacare jeopardized my health.”

Boonstra attended the State of the Union address at the invitation of a Republican Congressman, where she opined “I’m paying a higher cost now as far as out of pocket costs and the coverage is just not the same.”  However, she subsequently stated in the above mentioned ad that “the out-of-pocket costs are so high, it’s unaffordable,” which puts a more “sinister” twist on things.

It is easy to see how all this can mislead the fearful. It also should be easy—for those who actually bother to inform themselves, and those who were provided fraudulent or no health insurance by their employers—to see that Boonstra is so narcissistic that she is unable to sift fact from fiction. The likely reason she “lost” her current insurance plan was because her medical bills were so high the provider was only too happy to make her the federal government’s problem; it is also entirely possible that without the ACA, her premiums under her old plan would have eventually grown beyond her means, and she would then have been left with no alternatives. 

And as Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post pointed out, “First of all, many viewers might think Boonstra lost her doctor, as she mentions her ‘wonderful doctor’ and then says her plan was canceled. But AFP confirms that she was able to find a plan, via Blue Cross Blue Shield, that had her doctor in its network.”  Boonstra’ story about the ACA being “unaffordable” should really anger people in her situation but have always been rejected for coverage or forced to pay outrageously high premiums to start. As Kessler points out:

“The claim that the costs are now ‘unaffordable’ appeared odd because, under Obamacare, there is an out-of-pocket maximum of $6,350 for covered expenses under an individual plan, after which the insurance plan pays 100 percent of covered benefits. The Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in Michigan that appear to match Boonstra’s plan, as described in local news reports, all have that limit…Meanwhile, Boonstra told the Detroit News that her monthly premiums were cut in half, from $1,100 a month to $571. That’s a savings of $529 a month. Over the course of a year, the premium savings amounts to $6,348—just two dollars shy of the out-of-pocket maximum.”

AFP spokespeople have been lying and obfuscating inside and out attempting to justify the spin. One of them, Levi Russell, said that “we would assume there is an OOP max, but this is the story of Julie, a real person suffering from blood cancer, not some neat and tidy White House PowerPoint about how the ACA is helping everyone.” What is he saying? Is he blaming the Obama administration for Boonstra’s leukemia? Did Obama slip some secret cancer-causing microbe in Boonstra’s tap? Maybe in her toothpaste? Russell also points out that Boonstra’s costs may be “unpredictable.” Oh, they were not predictably “unpredictable” before?

The fact of the matter is that the ACA disallows any such “unpredictability,” that the ACA forbids people with pre-existing conditions to be denied coverage. The insurance exchange program in Washington doesn’t even ask if you have a pre-existing condition, only what your income level is. Of course it remains to be seen how total costs and revenue may shake up how the ACA works in practice, but for now there is no rational reason to believe that its intent is not to provide the same level of coverage that most Americans would expect—even hope—to be provided.

On the other hand, it is not at all certain that the Koch brothers and their Republican puppets believe that ordinary Americans should have a similar level of health coverage as they enjoy, which is no doubt why they are fighting so hard against the ACA. It’s “socialist” medicine to provide all with affordable, adequate health care.

Private space flight venture can't be powered on dreams alone

I have always been a “curious” person, although in the present context I mean my own reactions to what I see around me. A week ago I was wandering around the south of Kent when I came across a business campus that was singularly mysterious, located at the corner of 212^th and 76th Ave. S. From the street sides, it was surrounded by a fence, beyond which was a partial moat, trees that obscured the buildings behind them, and even bushes between the trees. Even more curiously, there was nothing identifying the place; two ancient, moss-covered stone markers were outside the fence, one of which only indicated the street address. 

From the railroad track side you can see a long, tall central construction; about half-way up is a window which only provides further fodder for curiosity. Through it I could see what appeared to be a door that opened to a ledge that seemed to go nowhere. Its purpose? Perhaps to observe whatever was going on below—or above. Obviously, there was a desire to keep prying eyes blind to the goings-on within; perhaps to make certain of this, I observed a man walking a dog which was sniffing around the perimeter of the fence.

I was determined to discover the truth behind this mysterious business. I suspected that it might be difficult if not impossible, that this was some secret government operation that the public was to be purposefully kept in the dark about. 

I was only partly correct in this assumption. There was a reason to keep the operation within a “trade secret,” but it only took a one search query with Google to discover that this was a company called Blue Origin, a private aerospace venture founded by Amazon.com mogul Jeff Bezos. Bezos apparently has had a life-long fascination with space travel, and has this "dream" of allowing private individuals (with a lot of money to burn) to take (brief) vacations in space. Its initial “projection” was to begin suborbital manned flights in 2012; however, it is nowhere close to doing so.

Thus the company, founded in 2000, has not surprisingly been “tight-lipped” about the current state of its operation. Space flight is no cakewalk, as the massive expenditures in the 1960s proved; the victorious mission to the moon required 4 percent of the federal budget. In today’s terms, that would be about $150 billion each year, and eight times NASA’s current allotted budget; predictably that “buys” little that inflames the public’s imagination. It would take 100 private billionaires to exhaust their wealth in just one year to manage NASA's annual budget during its peak years. And yet it is a fair question to ask if more money would actually advance the technology required to send manned missions beyond the moon, or establish a “colony” of more than a dozen people on the moon or in orbit. More powerful supercomputers have done little to aid the human brain in developing more powerful and efficient rocket propulsion to send us into the Star Trek Era. 

To date, Blue Origin has not successfully launched even one manned or unmanned suborbital test flight. Currently the plan is to develop a two-stage craft called the “New Sheppard,” said to be able to carry three or more people into suborbital space. The project certainly has advanced “incrementally,” with an apparent priority on allaying any fears that future astronauts for fun and frolic might have. Information concerning the company’s goings-on at its test range in Texas are rather sketchy, but a 2011 mishap to what apparently was a launch vehicle was perhaps the reason for a crew capsule “escape” exercise, in which a full-scale capsule was launched into the sky, and successfully parachuted back to Earth. 

Blue Origin seems to have had more Earthbound success in recent ground tests of its BE-3 liquid hydrogen engine, which managed to go through several stages of propulsion without any apparent hiccup. This engine is to power the actual suborbital launch vehicle; the next stage would be to put a rocket on top of it, and manage a controlled flight. There is no target date for that, although Blue Origin’s attempt to bid for the rights to NASA’s Launch Complex 39A suggested an optimistic timetable of 2018 for the first manned flight. 

Unfortunately, Blue Origin did not win the right to use LC-39A. Another private space flight venture, SpaceX, did. A possible reason for this is SpaceX—based in California and founded by Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk—is somewhat ahead of its competitor in developing working rockets. It’s privately-funded Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launch vehicles have both achieved orbit, and its Dragon spacecraft (via the Falcon 9) has the capacity for cargo (and possible human) delivery to the International Space Station. The proposed Falcon Heavy launch vehicle is supposed to be as powerful as the Saturn C-3, which was proposed in the early 1960s for the Apollo moon-shot, but was scrapped in favor of the Saturn V. SpaceX certainly is thinking big; it actually proposes to send a manned mission to Mars, which seems highly unlikely, but it is good to keep the spirits up.   

Blue Origin obviously has some catching up to do, and if you have the know-how, its website lists a host of job opportunities for would-be geniuses to get in on the action.

The Ukrainian and Russian historical antipathy now a matter of Putin's Soviet era anti-West attitude

The Russian invasion of the Crimean Peninsula, which is Ukrainian territory but includes a major naval base that once serviced the Russian navy, is part of Russia’s power play to prevent the Ukraine from falling under the “sphere” of the West.  We saw this kind of bullying before during the Russian invasion of a breakaway province in Georgia, a newly independent country which also had longstanding resentment toward Russian domination.

Russia under Vladimir Putin continues to prove that it has an “us” against “them” mentality when it comes to dealing with the West, and clearly has no intention to enter into any “cooperative” arrangement with the West. Its continuing adversarial stance obviously engenders distrust in the West. There should be little question that Putin is an autocrat at heart who does not believe in democratic principles; the cable television program RT (Russia Today) may continue to mendaciously parrot the line that Putin is a “progressive,” but no one should be under any illusion that this anti-U.S. propaganda organ is a tool of the Putin government, busily “exposing” America’s faults, while painting Russia as a wonderland of “liberty.”

It is interesting to note that the attitude of today’s Russia in regard to foreign relations has a great more in common with the previous regime than Czarist Russia, which placed a great deal of importance on maintaining ties with various European sovereignties. With the ascension of Peter the Great, who traveled about Europe (mostly in disguise), there was an effort to “reform” what was regarded as a backward Russian society. This was not accomplished without a great deal of opposition, especially from hidebound boyars, even over Peter’s efforts to enforce a dress code and appearance modeled on that of the more “advanced” social circles of Europe. Eventually the aristocratic, intellectual and middle classes were thoroughly “Westernized,” although the vast majority of people, the working class and peasants, remained mired in Medieval-like conditions. 

But while countries like Japan embraced at least the outward appearance of Westernization—so much so that Japan took advantage of Western technology to emerge the victor in the Russo-Japanese War in the early 20^th Century—Russia would again turn inward following the Communist takeover. This was “necessary,” since the influence of Western liberalism—and one should not make the mistake of equating Communism with “liberalism”—with its notion of individual rights and freedom, was regarded as anathema to the authority of ruling elite. The party of “workers” would soon become nothing more than a self-selecting dictatorship which kept the population in line by promising personal security; any intimation of discontent was subject to harassment, detention, and sometimes death. 

With the end of the Soviet state, the West-leaning Boris Yeltsin permitted a somewhat chaotic period of “liberalization,” which Russia certainly wasn’t ready for, and soured many Russians (particularly older Russians) on the benefits of liberal democracy. They wanted a return to the “security” offered by the previous regime. Putin offered them that, not out of any great desire of help people, but because the former KGB agent had a taste for unfettered power and its corruptive influence. Putin knows that freedom—whether of assembly, the press, and politics—are “Western” ideals and anti-Russian, or at least anathema to dictatorship, which in fact is essentially how Russia is ruled today.

Being anti-West, Russia’s current ruling class naturally sees enemies everywhere. Putin stills sees the so-called independent states of the former Soviet Union as part of the Russian sphere of influence, and any attempt to align with European organizations are seen as threats to Russian security. Belorussia controls much of the former Soviet Union’s western frontier with the rest of Europe, yet it is no threat to Russian security, since it is more clearly a dictatorship aligned with Russia. 

But the Ukraine is a different matter altogether. “Ethnic” Ukrainians may be little differentiated from other Slavic groups, but they nevertheless have a history that predates the formation of Russia itself. The first major political entity in what is now the European portion of Russia was that formed around Kiev (the capital of the Ukraine), which lay along a major trade route between the Byzantine Empire and Asia. The Kiev state would eventually expand northward nearly to the Baltic Sea. The word “Rus”—which would eventually be transformed into “Russian”—was the description variously used to identify either the Viking invaders who founded the political unit centered in Kiev, or to what Russian scholars believe was a “sophisticated” subset of Slavic people already present. 

The region directly surrounding Kiev and to its west would become known as the Ukraine, with its own distinct cultural identity. It was the only large state of the former Soviet Union where there was a significant Catholic presence, and despite significant pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church—which predominates in western Ukraine—a version of Catholicism remains a major presence in the eastern part of the country. This coincides with the fact that there is a higher percentage of ethnic Ukrainians in the east, while ethnic Russians predominate in the west. This attempted suppression of (anti-Russian) religious belief would be part of the “Russification” of the Ukraine, basically an “ethnic cleansing” of Ukrainian culture and national identity, particularly during the Stalinist era. 

But before Russian control, the once powerful Kiev state would experience a long decline, during which the Mongols, Tartars, Lithuanians and Poles would claim sovereignty over Ukrainian territory, until the rulers from the state based in Muscovy (Moscow) would claim the Ukraine as part of its domain. However, when Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk during World War I (in order to get the Germans off his back so that he could deal with anti-Bolshevik  forces in Russia), the Ukraine briefly enjoyed an autonomous status, at least while the Kaiser’s Germany remained intact. But the Treaty of Versailles would end (for the time being) German influence in Russian affairs, and with it the possibility of Ukrainian independence. Stalin’s subsequent brutal policies in the Ukraine—which included the infamous enforced famine which saw 3 million Ukrainians die of starvation—allowed Ukrainians to see Hitler’s German invasion force as “liberators,” although they would soon be disabused of this notion. 

Given that the Ukraine was once a powerful state with its own history and culture, it should come as no surprise that Ukrainians chaffed under the domination of Russia. It is ethnic Ukrainians who are driving the rebellion against the virtual rule of Moscow, while ethnic Russians in the west continue to be of uncertain loyalty to the state. Putin’s bullying tactics are clearly designed to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty, and indicative of his anti-West paranoia and personal autocratic tendencies. While the Ukraine has one of the largest armies in the world, it might not be big enough to dissuade Putin from advancing from the Crimea.

Putin clearly is as contemptuous of world opinion as North Korea’s ruler is, and it will require the combined “might” of the U.S. and Europe to put a break on his Soviet-era ambitions.

Does God love a bigot?

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who has no issue about signing bills that promote racial bigotry, seems to have succumb to pressure from many sides to the so-called “religious liberty” bill passed by the Arizona legislature. To be certain, Senate Bill 1062 doesn’t require anyone to show their “papers” like in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or apartheid South Africa, or permit police to arbitrarily harass, detain or arrest anyone for no reason other than their race or “ethnicity.”  Nor does it ban Hispanic Studies in high school because they might promote “anti-white” feeling. It doesn’t even have a requirement that anyone running for president must “prove” that they are an American citizen before being allowed on the state ballot (and who would make that determination?). None of these things bothers white America much after a few days, when they think they are the only ones who have forgotten.

No, what S.B. 1062 did propose to do was to allow business owners to use their religious beliefs as a reason to deny service to certain people. It has been portrayed as an “anti-gay” bill by the media,  but there are many so-called religious types (like Christian Identity) for whom a whole range of people could be regarded as violating some religious principle, such as “race-mixing.” As might be expected, the bill itself is somewhat obscure in who would most likely be targeted, since there are groups in this country that are more easily “identifiable in fact, rather than theory. For example, a racial minority cannot hide his or her “offense,” while a gay or lesbian person—especially one who is white—cannot be identified unless they call direct attention to their sexual orientation. 

People who support this bill claim that their religious “freedoms” are under siege by the Obama administration policies in regard to the right of people to live the way they wish, which of course includes the gay and lesbian lifestyle. Some people say that this is against the law of God and is a sin, and they don’t want to have “sinners” in their midst, or provide them services. But who is really without sin? Hating another fellow human for no just cause must be a sin itself. My own belief is that if there is a God, then it is up to him to pass final judgment, not some hate-filled bigot who has this strange idea that he or she is going to be looked upon favorably at the pearly gates. People who have to answer to themselves when the time comes; if their conscious doesn’t bother them now, then it is their problem later. 

The bill should not have been that hard for Brewer to veto it, since a person whose religion preaches bigotry is perfectly at “liberty” to espouse such in private. One thing that Brewer didn’t mention in her remarks was that the bill was in direct violation of the principle of separation between church and state, as well as permitting the violation of the civil rights of whole classes of people. This is Jim Crow all over again. This is all just par for the course in Arizona, the state from which the extreme right found a “mainstream” standard bearer in Barry Goldwater. Although he was trounced in the 1964 presidential election, the Republican Party slowly, but inexorably, morphed into the party of the white, gun-toting, anti-government bigots who fancied themselves as the “instrument” of “God.” 

Another recent incident reminds of the fact that Arizona resisted the creation of a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday; Gov. Brewer herself voted against it when she was a state senator, and it was only from the attention of the rest of the nation that a bare majority of Arizonans approved the holiday in a referendum in 1992. Last month, a white fraternity at Arizona State University “commemorated” the holiday by parodying “black” culture, wearing basketball jerseys, deporting themselves like gangsters, eating watermelons; it was the same fraternity that had been put on probation when some of its members were linked to the beating of  black student. Not only was the assumption that black college students were “gangsters” offensive, but the fact that there were allegedly “educated” white students who found it perfectly “acceptable” to express their racism openly, and this says  much about how the atmosphere of bigotry in the state is a state of mind.

Of course, this says nothing of the attitude of many whites in Arizona in regard to Latinos, regardless of their “status,” which tends to be of little consequence anyways. A roast in “honor” of the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio found state Sen. John Kavanagh cracking ”jokes” about Arpaio’s racial profiling and harassment in general of Latinos: “Going out with Joe is always an adventure, because usually when we walk into a restaurant, most of the waitstaff and cooks dive out the back window, and when they don't, I never know what the hell's in my food…just to show you how unreasonable the federal monitor is, when Sheriff Joe sends his new deputies to the academy, he will no longer just train them to do the Miranda warning in Spanish, he will have to teach it in English too…The sign over the booking intake door in the jail will have to have ‘welcome’ and just not ‘bienvenido.’” Although Kavanagh’s comments have been accused of being racist, it rather seems to me that what he did was embarrass Arpaio and draw attention to the fact that his department is currently under monitor by federal officials for its plainly racially-motivated policing activities.

Of course, Arizona isn't the only place where you might find evidence of this. I recall years ago on my way to my sister's wedding in Wisconsin stopping in a Greyhound Bus station in Chicago; I was "stunned" to see in the waiting area two sections of seating: One entirely occupied by whites, the other by blacks.

Not that the state of Washington is beyond reproach, of course. At a corner gas station/convenience store in Kent there is a Mexican food van. I suppose it passed city codes because one night I saw some tough-looking fire inspector used his vehicle to block the van’s door so the proprietor wouldn’t make a run for it, but it has remained in operation since. To drum-up business, the proprietor put up a banner held up by metal stakes; it remained upright for all of one night, after which it ripped apart and lay ruined on the ground. I suspected that the culprit was an inebriated bigot from the redneck bar a half-block away, and probably “motivated” into action by the nearby signage: “Buy American – Eagles 20s”—a brand of cheap cigarettes “made in the U.S.” There is some guy on the Internet who apparently makes his living smoking cigarettes; his YouTube review of the brand notes that Eagle 20s “taste good,” produce a lot of smoke, are lightly packed and burn quickly.  

I went to a Jack in the Box near the airport to buy a couple of burgers when I noticed that it was kind of crowded with short, dark-skinned Latinos, all dressed-up nicely in dresses, suits and ties and seemingly of pleasant demeanor. I figured they were part of some church group. I found a place to sit down and decided to wait until the line shortened; after all, it was midnight and I would have expected a very small number of customers to start. Unfortunately, no sooner was I prepared to make my move that a fresh wave of the same arrived, and this continued for an hour until I decided I should just leave. As I was exiting, I noticed a grungy-looking white male with his grungy-looking white girlfriend sitting at a table. I had seen them before, not there to buy anything but sit in one of the now well-occupied sofas for awhile and make themselves “comfortable.” The male scanned the proceedings with an evil look in his eye. Me, I was just annoyed; him, his eyes were full of hate—race hate.