In Roskam world 40 million medically uninsured simply don't exist

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My IL 6th District congressman Peter Roskam has finally thrown in the towel. After 47 votes to abolish the ACA (Obamacare) he has come to terms with its institutionalization into our social safety net as surely as Social Security and Medicare. Now he's pivoted to save face by using his website www.roskam.house.gov to completely misrepresent the ACA to the gullible folks who constitute his base in the 6th, and to placate his Tea Party handlers in Washington using the ACA as the Rosetta Stone to undermine the Obama presidency.

Check out his link The Health Care Law – What You Need to Know to get the picture. There is not one word extolling its enormous benefits to the 40 million medially uninsured; not one word about the end of reprehensible, heartless insurance company practices that capriciously deny insurance for pre-existing conditions, enforce unconscionable deductibles, deny coverage on technicalities and cap maximum payouts. Read the entire piece and all those benefits are slyly summed up as "minimum essential coverage", which, horrors, are going to bring calamity to the tiny portion of folks who have terrible private health insurance. In Roskam's bizarre world view, these predator insurance companies, who pay their CEO's tens of millions in salary to find creative ways of denying medical payments, are the cuddliest companies extant, now being preyed upon by the evil Obama administration. Roskam won't tell you that insurance companies have always been raising rates, raising deductibles, cancelling policies, limiting coverage, literally allowing their rich officers to dance on the bankruptcies, broken health and even graves of the chumps who make them millionaires. Instead, Roskam uses sly innuendo to greatly exaggerate insignificant technical issues and faux cancellation horror stories utterly devoid of substance to reap political capital.

Awhile back I urged the congressman to take my Obamacare Challenge: go without health care insurance for three months to get just an inkling of what those tens of millions go through 365 days a year. In Roskam's case that might only involve tapping into his substantial personal wealth to pay for what the chronically uninsured simply go without and in some cases die.  They are getting help now, no thanks to a congressman, who, it he had the power, would keep them in poor health and penury simply for his political gain. Roskam may have passed on my Obamacare Challenge, but even worse, he continues to pass by the medically uninsured as if they don't exist. All things considered, that is not a good way to serve the people of the 6th District.

 

Kass' Obama "selfie" column reads like a Seinfeld episode

If Jerry Seinfeld were to do a "Seinfeld" episode about Trib columnist John Kass, he'd title it "The Solemnity Nazi" (TSN). This comes to mind after reading Kass' "Self-made man in spotlight at each and every occasion" in Wednesday's Trib. It would feature our intrepid wordsmith solemnly pouring over photos and sound bites of our 44th Prez to ensure he has not violated the TSN's threshold for proper solemnity in his performance as Commander in Chief. Obama's Chicago origins are grounds for Kass making up stuff about the Obama "bowing" to the "lords of the Chicago machine" and equating it to "shaking hands" and "bowing" to the "executioner of Cuba" Raul Castro. Oh my God, the President did a real estate deal with the felon Tony Rezko. Call out the Solemnity Police! Then TSN takes umbrage with Obama not including a photo of the subject of his tweets such as Nelson Mandela and Rosa Parks, but instead uses only HIS photo. Horrors!

In TSN's bizarre world Obama is simply bowing his way through his Presidency instead of achieving a list of accomplishments that Kass has never supported and never will. He's too busy minding the President's manners. Alas, Seinfeld exited stage left years ago so this imagined episode will never occur. I've got it! John Kass could do a guest host spot on Joan River's fabulously funny "Fashion Police". Joan could retitle it in Kass' honor "Solemnity Police". Joan and John could flash photos of the President's imagined trashy manners while trying mightily to make up funny one liners. That would be one challenge even mighty mouth Rivers would flub. Try as they might, trashing the President's manners is neither not funny nor relevant. And spending a thousand words carrying water for the "hate Obama" crowd is an utter waste of good ink and paper.

When football came back to the U of C

It was a chilly, grey day Nov. 8, 1963, as I headed one block from my Pierce Tower dorm to attend my first ever college football game pitting the Chicago Maroons against North Central College from Naperville. The event was memorable on several levels. The Maroons were not really a team but a "club" whose players were trained in a football "class". The game itself was billed merely as a scrimmage, representing baby steps by the U of C testing the football waters considering their last official game was 25 years earlier against mighty Illinois. Then Chancellor Robert Hutchins abolished football as antithetical to a vigorous intellectual life. The several hundred of us fans were soon thwarted by several dozen students who staged a sit-in on the 50 yard line to keep Hutchins vision intact. Administrators were called in negotiate including Jim Newman, one of my profs, who was completely discombobulated by the protest. Then several paddy wagons appeared and I still remember one of my dorm mates, Paul Aronson, barely 5 feet tall, being hustled into a squadrol by one of Chicago's pot bellied finest. Another student keep screaming "God Bless America" as the door closed on him. I had enough and left historic Stagg Field in disappointment. Reading about the protest recently, I discovered the game, or scrimmage, did occur but don't know the outcome. I imagine the Maroons faired a bit better than their November 25, 1939 swansong against the Illini. They lost that one 46-0, capping a 3 game Big Ten season in which they were outscored 192-0. No electronic record exists of the actual game 50 years ago but we do have audio from the pre-game "class" that gives you some idea how football came back to the U of C.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=xd_-1Zlo2hM

A Mandela moment worth remembering

 

Nelson Mandela, South African freedom champion, and first black president who unified the country instead of dividing it, is rightly called among the most significant human beings of the 20th century. A Mandela moment worth remembering for me occurred in the 21st century; January 30, 2003, to be exact. On that date the former president addressed an international women's forum in Johannesburg, South Africa. He subject: the impending US criminal war against Iraq. Nobel Peace Prize winner Mandela didn't mince words:

"It is a tragedy, what is happening, what Bush is doing. What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust."  Mandela said President Bush was "trying to bring about carnage" and appealed to the American people to launch massive protests  against his policies. He heaped just deserved scorn on President Bush's "poodle" British Prime Minister Tony Blair, stating, "He is the foreign minister of the United States. He is no longer prime minister of Britain."

Obviously stung by such spot on truth offered by one of the most revered public figures on the planet, the Bush administration meekly responded that Mandela was a great leader who simply doesn't see "eye to eye" with President Bush. With so many members of the world community, the media and a sheepish populous cowed by Bush's lies, fear tactics and propaganda, the carnage was unleashed just 48 days after Mandela's remarks.

A hundred years from today, Nelson Mandela's status as possibly the most significant figure of his time will only rise.  President Bush will be remembered mostly for what he is today: an uninvestigated, unindicted and unconvicted war criminal.