Some Letters are Best Left Unanswered

I know that I probably should just ignore Allen Novosad’s latest letter but I can’t help wondering why he thinks he has stumbled onto something that one else has been able to

pick up on. Evidently his latest theory is not his own, it comes from a person named Wayne Allen Root.

President Obama is painted as this mystical figure who just appeared out of nowhere with an intent to ruin capitalism. It’s as if 535 members of Congress don’t matter.

Universal health care like tax cuts for the rich, identifies each party. Democrats have been running on health care for at least 50 years. Obama insisted on affordable healthcare for as many people as possible and rejected plans for the public option or a single-payer and opted for a free-market exchange.

Mr. Novosad made a classic class war comment by saying that the rich people, businesses, and the middle class were going to be paying a lot more taxes and higher premiums  and that Obamacare was redistributing the wealth. He left out the part about the use of emergency room added about $1000 annually to a person’s health care premiums before Obamacare.

The writer said that Obamacare would cause chaos in the economy thereby killing decent paying jobs for the middle class and making them dependent on the government. Did Novosad completely forget about the 2008 Wall Street financial crisis that led us down this road of economic disparity?

 The Internal Revenue Service only audits 1 to 2% of tax returns because they don’t have the manpower and he thinks they will now have the time to snoop into every aspect of your life. The administration was criticized for not being able to roll out their healthcare.gov website but now they’re supposed to be sophisticated enough to use the darkest medical records to intimidate average workers and their political enemies.

No most of Mr. Root’s analysis is not happening. The economy is improving and the stock market is booming, so capitalism lives on.

And then the writer ends with a cold war quote from Nikita Khrushev that was made when President Obama was two years old. Mr. Novosad needs to move into the 21^st-century.

A perpetual cycle

This morning Joe Scarborough brought on a lot a conservative’s to agree with him that this whole defund Obamacare fiasco is Ted Cruz’s fault. I don’t like Ted Cruz either, but I can see through that smoke screen. This is being portrayed as Ted Cruz’s suicidal pact but if that is so, then the legislators who passed the recent congressional resolution bill, supplied the gun, ammunition and a bottle of liquor for him to complete his mission. All the GOP senators like the bill the House sent but they realize it will only take 51 votes to strip the defunding Obamacare out of the bill and send it back to the John Boehner.

Ted Cruz had to negotiate a deal with Harry Reid to allow him to appear to be filibustering a bill that hasn’t come up for vote. In essence he’s really filibustering the GOP bill. Unless Ted Cruz can garner 41 votes, he won’t be able to stop Harry Reid and the Democrats from voting for a clean bill without defunding Obamacare. Let’s not forget the other obstacle; the president’s signature.

The perpetual cycle goes all the way back to Bill Clinton but the tea party is still living on the results of the 2010 election. They are using the results of that election to convince themselves that America is on their side. Never mind the fact that the 2008 Democrat’s number one issue was healthcare reform. The Democrats won both chambers and the executive branch in 2008 and in 2012 they gain seats in the Senate and retained the presidency against the opposing candidate saying that he was going to repeal Obamacare… on day one. Joe Scarborough said those people did not like big government but the panel corrected him by saying that they seem to love Social Security and Medicare. Cokie Roberts surprise me by saying that the tea party dismisses President Obama and she sees a lot of racism in their rhetoric.

We’re only re-litigating the healthcare law because conservatives have never accepted it. A lot of Republicans have never accepted the legitimacy of the current president. Republicans have this tendency to ignore polls, results, or laws they don’t like. There are still some old school Republicans who accepted the results of the 2012 elections and said “ Obamacare is now the law of the land.” Of course he wants to retain his speakership, so today he singing a different tune.

Let’s talk a little reality. The Affordable Care Act is unique because the rules are set up as a compromise between government and private insurance companies. Republicans could never repeal ACA and replace it with a plan of their own because insurance companies would not cooperate with them. Think about that, pharmaceutical companies made a pact with the government before there were ever any serious talks about a healthcare plan. The insurance companies agreed to insure the uninsurable but only after being offered millions of new customers (many being the less risky young employees) and moving more people to Medicaid. If this were to go down in flames, why would private companies ever agree to make another deal with government? The reality is that they wouldn’t and we would see health care premiums go out the roof again and then we would only be left with a single- payer universal health care system.

Senator Claire McCaskill Said the Democrats would not deal on delaying the individual mandate because it would mess up the funding mechanism of the program. The senator also corrected Joe Scarborough, when he tried to spread the myth that Congress was exempt from Obamacare. She said that Congress and their staff will continue to purchase insurance off the exchanges but the GOP is trying to take away the employer contribution (taxpayer funded portion) but that would be unfair; if it didn’t apply to all federal employees.

A lot of misconceptions are fueled by ignorance and unwillingness to research. For example, our local newspaper had a story about a bipolar person finally getting some help and they were called out by Matt Maples. He said he had 23 years of experience and he had not heard of spouses not being allowed on their husband’s VA policy.

According to The VA’s website:
Family Members of Veterans
Under certain circumstances, family members of Veterans are eligible for health benefits. Some of the programs offered include the Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Department of Veterans Affairs (CHAMPVA), Spina Bifida (SB), Children of Women Vietnam Veterans (CWVV), Foreign Medical Program (FMP) and Caregiver.  Using these programs may reduce or eliminate your cost for medical supplies, office visits or prescriptions.
CHAMPVA
A health care benefits program that provides coverage to the spouse or widow(er) and to the dependent children of a qualifying sponsor who:

• is rated permanently and totally disabled due to a service-connected disability, or
• was rated permanently and totally disabled due to a service-connected condition at the time of death, or
• died of a service-connected disability, or
• died on active duty, and
• The dependents are not otherwise eligible for Department of Defense TRICARE benefits.

Under CHAMPVA, VA shares the cost of covered health care services and supplies with eligible beneficiaries.

A lot room for interpretation…If  I were in that situation I would call the VA for my unique situation and not depend on someone who thinks they know.

It’s Not About Obamacare

This budget battle has always been about political posturing for the Republicans. Every single legislator who voted to defund Obamacare knew that it would go nowhere in the Senate. I don’t buy the current line that some Republicans were trying to teach Ted Cruz a lesson by putting the ball in his court. I’m not going to overlook the fact that the GOP has voted  42 times to repeal, defund or delay Obamacare. Several GOP senate candidates are running on a platform to defund Obamacare. It leaves other presidential candidates the room to use another tactic that will help them in 2016. For example, Senator Rand Paul is trying to make the federal government the boogeyman to appease the government hating group of his party. He said Justice Roberts and federal employees should be put on Obamacare. Never mind that Obamacare was never intended to take away a plan employees were already on. It was always meant as a vehicle to lower health insurance cost and to insure more people.

The chart shows that workers were being moved to part –time status way before Obamacare came along. Besides small companies will get an extra year to work out all their problems before they will be penalized,so that’s got nothing to do with funding the government this year.

Joe Scarborough, Pat Toomey, Nicole Wallace and others have stated repeatedly how unpopular Obamacare is, and they will cite polls to back up their statements. The three conveniently leave out the polls saying that 59% of Americans do not want a government shutdown to repeal Obamacare. This mornings "CNBC poll had Americans opposing defunding Obamacare(without a shut down) by a plurality of 44 percent to 38 percent.”

This morning Joe Scarborough put himself in the same company with the Wall Street Journal, Scott walker, Pat Toomey, and other reasonable conservative voices who warned the Republican legislators about shutting down the government over Obamacare. Much to the chagrin of Joe Scarborough, James Carville reminded Joe, that GOP ideas and votes are vetted on talk radio and then are implemented by the tea party. It’s obvious the current GOP is not listening to the reasonable conservative voices.

Joe Scarborough hates Ted Cruz about as much as he hates President Obama. When it was pointed out that Ted Cruz is a pretty intelligent person who is saying the right words to the base and that it just might get him through a GOP presidential primary, Joe went ballistic. He said that he didn’t want his party to make the same mistake as the Democrats did when they elected an inexperienced senator to be their nominee. When some members of the panel said they were happy on how things turned out for the democrats; Joe had to go commercial break before he completely lost it.

The fact is 80% of Americans will see very little change when the healthcare law is fully implemented. The strongest disapproval is coming from those who are on Medicare, and they won’t be affected at all by the law. Yes, the young healthy employees who hardly ever use their plan will probably think it’s too expensive and those who will now get health insurance and use it a lot, will think it’s God sent.

This current stalemate can’t possibly be about defunding Obamacare because  Paul Ryan’s budget includes savings from Obamacare to balance it. If they were to defund Obamacare, then the GOP would have to rewrite their budget and they have already gutted all the social programs including $40 billion cuts (over the next 10 years) in food stamps.

I wonder how Catholic legislators interpret the latest words from Pope Francis when he talked about the evils of income inequality. Then again we can talk about the obsession with abortion, gay marriage, and contraception issues. I still favor a secular government but some of those legislators use Bible quotations to justify their reason for cutting social programs.

What Did We Learn (if anything) Yesterday?

The Sunday talk shows have become a testing ground for new talking points. Republicans are now trying to switch the blame of a government shutdown on Senate Democrats and the president because they won’t negotiate the repeal of Obamacare. Senator Ted Cruz is trying to say Harry Reid will use every trick in the book to strip out the repeal of Obamacare portion of the bill. That’s not a trick, Mr. Cruz, that’s normal procedure. He said that Harry Reid should not pass a partisan bill. Hello, that’s what the House of Representatives did.

Here’s the deal, as long as the president of the United States is named Obama, the Affordable Health Care Act will stay intact.

The GOP has won the continuing resolution battle so far, because the sequester spending cuts are part of this bill. That’s something that the house Democrats wants to look at when the bill comes back to them.

Yesterday, Chris Wallace put up his partisan bullet points on how terrible Obamacare was, but he never mentioned that the law was doing quite well in states that have accepted the transition. Senator Claire McCaskill was ready when he mentioned that Walgreens was no longer covering their part-time employees. She explained that Walgreen's is issuing vouchers to their part-time employees, so they can purchase much cheaper health insurance. Chris Wallace tried to say that the vouchers might not be enough, but that is just an assumption. The president has always said that if you can come up with something better; than by all means do it. Chris Wallace then mentioned that the president promised that if you liked your current healthcare policy with your company, you would be able to keep it. The president did not envision the steps companies would take to deny health care benefits. I guess you could choose to blame the president if you like, but it’s a weak argument if you ask me.

 I advise reading J.R. Ortega, of the Victoria Advocate, column about the health care issue in today’s newspaper or you can read the on line version here.

I’m one who believes in polls but I never thought that we would use the results to try and repeal a law. Social Security and Medicare would not get 100% likeability in a poll. I’m surprised that we used the poll to decide whether we should bomb the Syria or not. It’s funny; the poll that states that 90% of Americans favor background checks continues to be ignored.

I don’t know why “Meet the Press” continues to invite Wayne La Pierre of the NRA to be their guest after another gun mass murder. All they have to do is replay what he said the last time and double down on it. Now he’s said that there weren’t enough good guys with guns. He was calling for those in a military to be armed on a base where civilians are the majority. When I was in the service, our rifles were locked up for a reason. We had the military police for security. Mr. La Pierre’s statements have become weirder and weirder. David Gregory asked the chief lobbyist for the gun manufacturers, why it is in reasonable to require a background check for gun sales between strangers. Mr. La Pierre said “ just down the road(Washington, DC) 13-year-old girls were being trafficked, illegal drug deals were being made, and now you want two hunters to be under the thumb of the government when they purchase a hunting rifle from each other.” We should stop fooling ourselves. Congress will not do anything except maybe make some small changes that are cleared beforehand with the NRA. The changes will have to come from communities, where the real power is. Only 35% of household own guns, so a community is not beholding to the NRA. When those communities get sick and tired of all the violence, steps will be taken as they were in New York.

It’s Not That Difficult to Understand

I don’t know what’s it going to take to convince house Republicans that they only control one-third of one-half of our government. There are 234 Republicans in the House of Representatives and 201 Democrats, so simple math will tell you that it takes 218 “yes” votes to pass legislation in the lower chamber. John Boehner knows that he has 40 far-right members of the tea party who have no interest in compromising or governing for that matter. If the speaker doesn’t yield to them, then the only way, he can pass legislation is to rely upon the votes of the opposition party. If he opts for the latter, he can kiss his speakership good-bye.

There’s no question that Speaker Boehner cannot control his party because in March of this year, he said that the defunding Obamacare would lead to a government shutdown. Yesterday, he said his party would attach an amendment to defund Obamacare in the continuing resolution (CR) they will send to the Senate. They know full well that Majority Leader Reid will strip the defunding Obamacare and send it back to the House. Some tea party members are trying to spin this off as; the Senate is opting to shut down the government. Let’s go back to the math, one-third of one-half of the government do not make a ruling party. For example, even if the Senate went along with some portion of it, the executive branch would veto it. The president put it best yesterday when he said, “what would happen if the Senate sent a bill calling for a 20% hike in the corporate rates?”

Humans have a knack for taking a simple proposition and then spin it enough to make it very difficult to understand. I have not commented on letters to our editor recently because I don’t understand what the letter writers are trying to say. One writer was clearly trying to equate our constitution to a religious document, and another writer attempted to make a case for isolationism. They are pretty good at quoting sound bites like “Obamacare is a train wreck.” It’s perfectly legitimate to have an opinion, but it helps if you have the statistics to back it up. The Congressional Budget Office is on record saying that the Affordable Care Act will help lower the deficit, and we know that healthcare costs have stabilized; maybe not for all but for the majority it has.

Yesterday on “CNN’s Crossfire” Governor Rick Perry and Maryland’s Governor Martin O’Malley debated the virtues of their respected states. I believe it’s common knowledge that more people would rather live in Texas than in Maryland but due to the ineptness of our governor, Maryland won out as the most likable place to live. Rick Perry thinks that the citizens of Texas would rather use the emergency room than have healthcare, because it allows them to keep their freedoms.

I’m just guessing, but I think that the 40 tea party of the House of Representatives represents about 600,000 people, and that’s all they care about because believe it or not, there are people in those districts further to the right than those representatives. There’s a bench load of wing nuts waiting for their chance. They’re protected with gerrymandered districts and are funded by special-interest groups, so we’ll have to put up with this for a few more years, unless they shut down the government. Remember all the Democrats need is about 18 more legislators and Nancy Pelosi will become the speaker again. Grandpa may belong to the tea party, but he loves his Medicare and Social Security.

A War of Messaging

Two minutes into the segment of “Morning Joe” I could tell that the words of President Obama angered Joe Scarborough. President Obama told George Stephanopoulos that the beltway media is about style points, and that he was more interested in the right policy. That message was for Joe Scarborough, Maureen Dowd, Andrea Mitchell and Peggy Noonan because they form the world’s perception through their own eyes. I can’t imagine any country not fearing the military might of United States; those five warships in the Mediterranean influence policy just by being there. Tom Friedman stunned the panel of “Meet the Press” when he reminded them that the United States did not have a thing to do with the successful turnover of government in South Africa; Nelson Mandela did. Barney Frank said that some of those on the panel were talking as if Syria was the 51^st state.

Joe Scarborough thought he was going to win the Obamacare argument after reading some polls where 44% of Americans think that the Affordable Care Act is a bad thing. I believe the numbers because that same poll said that only 30% of Americans understand the healthcare law. Since 70% of the population doesn’t understand what the new healthcare law is all about and all they hear is mainly negative things supported by billions of dollars of pessimistic ads, the results are self-evident. The GOP knows once those subsidies  start kicking in January, the game is over and the Affordable Care Act will be as popular as Medicare. It's funny how the questions get different results. A question about Obamacare will automatically poll badly while a question about the Affordable Care Act will get a lot of "I don't know."

The more Obamacare obsessed wing of the Republican Party thinks they have a winning hand. Their latest proposal is to delay the implementation of the individual mandate portion of the law until 2015 and attach it to the continuing resolution bill to fund the government until mid-December. Why would the Democrats agree to that? It’s the same rationale that the Republicans used by filibustering Social Security in 1936.

There’s no question that the Affordable Care Act will be difficult to implement because besides the Republicans, there’s the hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, private insurance companies and some doctors who love the status quo. For example, hospitals hate the penalties that will be imposed for their high rate of infection and patient readmission rates.

Obamacare is the new bogeyman for the right; it’s what keeps them up at night ,as they continue to try and come up with new gimmicks to get rid of the law. They think that healthcare is a privilege for those who work hard, and it’s not for those lazy poor people who failed to make it in a free-market economy. They are convinced that the government cannot do anything right, so a new entitlement is doomed to fail. They will not be convinced with evidence of bending the cost curve, or the efficiency of Medicare, Social Security and the VA.

Shutting down the government for a few days, by not passing a continuing resolution won’t hurt the economy as much as it would if we decided not to raise the debt limit. Not raising the debt limit would have a downward spiral effect on the world economy. A government shutdown will hurt the GOP in the 2014 elections; even though a lot of people think that we shouldn’t raise the debt limit without agreeing to more spending cuts. President Obama is adamant about not negotiating the debt limit because of the message it sends to our creditors. How would your creditors like it if they were on the list of the bills that might not be paid?

I think we’re slowly hitting reset button by moving away from the thinking that led to the policies of President Ronald Reagan. It’s a slow messy process, and you got to give credit to the Republicans and Frank Lutz for doing everything they can to win the messaging war at the expense of any pretense of governing.

Oh, Whatever

This morning was one of the few times when I have ever agreed with Joe Scarborough, but I approved when he said that the non- crazy wing of the Republican Party is starting to realize that the wing nuts of their party have lost all sense of reality. It’s one thing to argue about economics’; it’s another thing to rally around shutting down the government over an obsession to defund Obamacare. I could hardly believe my ears when I heard Senator Ted Cruz tell CNN’s Candy Crowley that President Obama would agree to defund Obamacare under the right conditions. Joe Scarborough laughed hysterically when conservative/ libertarian Senator Jeff Flake responded to an ad that was running against him because he refused to defund Obamacare. Senator Flake responded with a simple tweet “oh, whatever.”

I’ve got to remember to tell myself “oh, whatever” when I see a post stating that hospitals don’t make a huge profit and that the insurance companies and the government are the reason for the high cost of health care. Last night, Chris Hayes said a bag of saline, including the ingredients of salt and water cost about 44¢ but they charge the patient $191.00 and another $1000 for the use of the operating room. That one poster  I mentioned said that the charge for attending nurses and other costs were part of the saline cost but that’s not true. Every item that a hospital charges has its own unique price. I’m thinking how much my orthopedic surgeon saved the insurance company by using an outpatient service and sending me home the very same day.

Another “oh, whatever” moment is the fallacy that welfare is going to lead us to financial ruin. The $235 billion we spend on the non-working poor amounts to about 10% of the federal budget according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. There’s a formula using census data to figure out where this money goes. First you have to combine all the costs of such programs to come up with the base total. Then you have to subtract spending on the elderly, and the disabled. In that figure will be vets, children, survivors of parents who have died, people on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SSI. Finally we have to add up unemployment insurance, EITC and child tax credits understanding that people move in and out of these programs all the time. These programs come under the Non-discretionary spending and are required by law, so the battle is always about a percentage change or the amount of cost of living adjustments. You will see the GOP fixated on these programs in the upcoming budget battles and the Democrats will fight to keep the cuts as small as possible.

All the insignificant stuff will have to take a backseat to whatever we do militarily against Syria in the next few days. No serious person will question the amount of money we spend to send Syrian president, Bashar al Assad, a message that the international community will not tolerate the use of sarin gas on civilians or military personnel. The last I heard, it costs us about a million dollars to launch just one Tomahawk missile. According to the polls, Americans do not want us to engage in any type of military intervention in Syria but this is one of those cases where the president will have to take action despite the will of its citizenry. President Obama might have one of those “oh, whatever” moments.

Remember, don’t look for a new blog tomorrow but please keep checking because I might be back sooner than later…

I’m Really Really Trying to Understand

There are three sitting legislators who have discussed the possibilities of articles of impeachment being brought against President Obama at their town-hall meetings. The lawmakers not pushing the legislation but they’re keeping the issue alive by not informing their constituents that their dream of impeaching the president is not a reality.

A lot of pundits and taxpayers are not taking the town-hall discussions about impeachment seriously. The talk of health care death panels started on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page and went straight to the town-hall meetings. We then heard Republican lawmakers talking about government death panels on the Sunday talk shows and on CSPAN.

Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI) admitted that “it would be a dream come true to impeach Obama", Rep. Farenthold said the House had the votes and now Senator Coburn (R-OK) said the president is perilously close to impeachment. I don’t know representative Bentivolio but it didn’t surprise me that Farenthold would appease his base. Senator Colburn is a staunch conservative but I’ve always thought that he was truthful and honest. He is a friend of President Obama and his wife is friends with Michelle, so I can’t figure out why he said that.

There’s no legal definition of what is considered high crimes and misdemeanors, the president would have to commit in order to be impeached. There are the obvious constitutional infractions or criminal behavior but there’s not any evidence that he committed any of those.

This Congress has repealed Obamacare or parts of it 40 times, so their logic is not based on a judicial principle, the possibility of conviction, ethics, or fair play. No, their goal is to delegitimize this president and act, as though he was never elected, and if he was, the people who voted for him were duped. It’s the same way for Obamacare. I guess they think they are saving us from ourselves.

Today, the president was at a town-hall meeting talking about the problems of higher education, and afterwards, he took some questions from the audience. President Obama questioned the need for it taking four years to complete law school. He said it could possibly be cut down to two, and the students could save some money. It’s ideas like this that we need to throw around for discussion, but we can’t do that if a major network like Fox chooses not to air it. Instead, they were discussing Delta Airlines blaming Obamacare for their financial problems and the recent talks of impeachment.

A hurricane starts as hot air and then develops as it hits the warm Gulf waters, so don’t say the impeachment talk is a just a lot of hot air. The ones pushing impeachment talks don’t care what it will do to the Republican Party because that’s just collateral damage. The GOP is having weekly meetings discussing ways of defunding Obamacare, so how much trouble would it be to form a sub- committee to discuss impeaching the president? It’s not like they are going to discuss jobs, a GOP health-care plan or ways of improving the economy.

The House of Representatives can  only bring the charges of impeachment but the Senate has to the convict the president before he can be removed form office. There's no fear of the president being removed from office but Articles of Impeachment will divide this country and possibly cause riots in the streets because we are near the boiling point and as of right now,we don't have that Republican leader who will stand up to mob rule. I just hope it doesn't come to that.

Lying Should Have Consequences

After looking through several dictionaries I settled for this definition of  lying: “the deliberate act of deviating from the truth.”

Some people in the position of authority don’t realize that their lies can set the wheels of motion  that might have devastating consequences for their subordinates.

A friend of mine told me a story that had me seething yesterday. He said that his premium increase in his health care coverage will cause him to withdraw from his 401k and use that money to pay off his mortgage.

The friend said that his old company had been bought out by another company. The new company representative said that their company had to raise their premiums because of Obamacare and that they should have considered that when voting for Obama. You see what happened? The representative knew that the employees would start grumbling about the higher health care premiums, so he defused that by getting them to start blaming their fellow coworkers for voting for Obama. As the meeting went on, the representative told them the new company would not match their 401k contributions like their old company did.

My friend is a reactionary, and he does not leave anything to chance. He immediately removed all of his family members from his health-care plan and created a new budget for the rest of the year, which included the complete withdraw of his 401k. He is not 59 ½ years old, so he will have a 10% penalty and have to pay the taxes on his 401k withdraw at ordinary income tax rates. He will have a mortgage free house but his savings plan will have to start all over and will have to wait until he can afford to put his family members back on his plan, even thou he makes $75,000 a year.

I don’t know if the company approved of what the representative told the new employees, but I sort of doubt that he did on his own. The company probably has plausible deniability, which is another form of lying. I believe that the healthcare premiums' increase had more to do with their insurance company than anything else. It wasn’t as if Mitt Romney or the GOP, for that matter, had this great new health care solution that would have prevented the increase. According to my friend, this is not an isolated incident. He told me that his cousin in Lubbock was told the same thing under similar circumstances.

So what happened here? The new company has just convinced most of their employees to vote Republican, and only then will they have a chance to see their premiums go down. That is on the very edge of lying to their employees. Something tells me that the company will later shift to Health Savings Accounts; making it even harder for their employees who live paycheck to paycheck.

Later during the day as I was watching the George Zimmerman trial, I saw witness after witness swearing that the screams for help were coming from their friend George Zimmerman. Last week, I saw testimony where the witness said the complete opposite. Either someone is lying or they all have convinced themselves that they are telling the truth. Why not, there’s no penalty for opinions and we hardly ever punish anyone for perjury. We never punished the major league baseball players for lying in a congressional hearing, by saying that they never took performance enchantment drugs. Former Atty. General Alberto Gonzales lied to both congressional chambers under oath. Just recently, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper apologized to Congress for lying to them, so that’s about the best we can hope for.

I had to bite my tongue

My wife and I had a pleasant journey to Corpus Christi this morning, and it's always a relief to hear the GPS lady say, “you have arrived at your destination." We anticipated some rain but we just got scattered showers on the way up there.

Our company decided to turn over their retiree healthcare plan to a company called Extended Help who will help us with the transition. They even set up a free seminar with the company. I admit that I had a little anxiety because change is hardly ever easy.

As we entered the Holiday Inn hallway, I noticed an old friend  and a couple of other people with him as he was pointing at me and laughing. In the five or six seconds, it took to approach him; lot of things were going through my mind," did I have egg McMuffin on my chin or was my fly open?" It was a relief to hear him say," there is one of those Obama voters who is responsible for us being here." As we were going to our seats my wife asked me “what’s this plan have to do with Obamacare?" I just shrugged my shoulders, sat down and started looking around the room at faces that I recognized but couldn't place a name to. I estimated the crowd to be about 150 to 200 people, but some were from Corpus Christi.

When the speaker said “good morning" you could have heard a pin drop because everyone in the room was anxious to hear every word she said because this was an introduction to a very important decision, we had to make. We all wanted to get all the information we could, before we signed up with the new plan.

As it turns out, we had nothing to worry about because it's a simple choice between a Medical Advantage plan and a MediGap plan. The plans may be less expensive than what I'm on now,  but I will be required to fill more new paperwork. That’s OK because  this company is getting paid by our company to take me through the most economical steps.  She advised us to use a land line or a freshly charged cell  when it came time for the processing because the complete interview would  take one hour or more.

We did learn that the government would not let us be denied for pre-existing conditions, and that the plan will have no lifetime caps... The instructor told us that these plans had nothing to do with Obamacare, which drew a lot of laughs from the skeptics. At the beginning of the seminar, we were handed cards where we could submit our question for the instructor. Three of the seven cards that were submitted asked if this plan had anything to do with Obamacare. On our way out, another old buddy of mind wished us a safe trip and then said, “I don't believe for a minute that this has nothing to do with Obamacare." And that's just it," you can lead a horse to water, even stick his nose in it, but you can't make him drink."

On our way back and as we were approaching I-37N, we could see that it was going to rain, but we never anticipated that we would be driving through a big downpour. For the next 15 miles or so, the cars around us, we're not traveling more than 45 miles an hour. Many cars were parked on the emergency lanes, and I thought of that but looking for a place to exit was more dangerous than remaining in the middle lane and plowing ahead.

We had already forgotten our little excitement until we got into downtown Refugio, when out of nowhere we heard the loudest siren ever. I didn't know what it was, I assumed it was a tornado warning, and I didn't know what actions I was supposed to take, so I just kept driving forward. I wasn't alone, because people were just milling around filling their cars, going into restaurants, and doing their business as if the siren never went off. Refugio needs to go digital.

Up until three years  ago,I didn't think we had that many skeptics or naive people. I used to laugh at the preposterous tales and say to myself “no one will believe that." Oh yes, they will!