There is going to have to be a point where many of us realize that this is total horseshit and there isn’t really any change. The only change is the name of the Party. I for one don’t know what I was thinking was going to actually change, because when something as big as reforming healthcare gets put on the table we now get to see where campaign promises become utter bullshit. This is the point where blind partisanship makes you a total hypocrite. I would call Bush out on it and I’m calling Obama out on it. The special interests are winning and the back room deals with big Pharma are disgusting. Anyone remember Cheney meeting with the Energy Companies his first 6 months? Such a crock of shit and I’m not defending it. I am saddened and sickened at myself for actually thinking that things were going to be different in any way.
WASHINGTON — The drug industry has authorized its lobbyists to spend as much as $150 million on television commercials supporting President Obama’s health care overhaul, beginning over the August Congressional recess, people briefed on the plans said Saturday.
The unusually large scale of the industry’s commitment to the cause helps explain some of a contentious back-and-forth playing out in recent days between the odd-couple allies over a deal that the White House struck with the industry in June to secure its support. The terms of the deal were not fully disclosed. Both sides had announced that the drug industry would contribute $80 billion over 10 years to the cost of the health care overhaul without spelling out the details.
So awesome! I’m sure I’m going to be told it’s raining when in actuality AZeneca is peeing down my leg. God forbid we impact their profit stream. They need all that money for R&D. I can’t think of where a $150,000,000.00 could be spent more wisely, but what do I know. Making billion dollar drugs that get rushed through the FDA without being properly researched is hard work. It takes millions and millions of campaign and lobbyist dollars. You can’t just raise that out of thin air. We have to pay our researchers tens of thousands of dollars and our lobbyists hundreds of thousands! You just don’t understand you pathetic, pond sucking, neophyte aka joe six pack. Trust us. If we say it is expensive to make a drug and our CEO is making 45,000,000.00 a year, well that’s because of all the R and D!!! Sure we give tens of millions to lobbyists and another truckload of money each year to Politicians, but the R and D! The R and D, that is expensive.
If I’m feeling it, and then I turn to Rich on Sunday and he is feeling it, then I know I’m not crazy. (too crazy)
But this mood isn’t just about the banks, Public Enemy No. 1. What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” He promised to smite them.
We really are stupid humans for buying into this crap. We should know by now. What’s even better is that the GOP can’t do shit about it either. What are they going to say? How are they going to attack Obama with there normal gusto when the people normally doing the attacking are the special interests? It should be amusing to watch them try to attack Obama. I would love for them to do it. But they won’t. They can’t.
But the Democratic members of Congress those hecklers assailed can hardly claim the moral high ground. Their ties to health care interests are merely more discreet and insidious. As Congressional Quarterly reported last week, industry groups contributed almost $1.8 million in the first six months of 2009 alone to the 18 House members of both parties supervising health care reform, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer among them.
And we all lose because of it. Team America, Fuck Yeah!