WorldNetDaily expounds on how evil Senator Edwards is for trying to divide the nation between rich and poor people, and all the bad things that can happen with big-government, like no more FEMA/Katrina bungles. Wait, what?
Former Sen. John Edwards has announced that he's once again running for president, where he rallied the crowd by asking them to shout ''yes'' if they want him to be president and/or have suffered a neck injury from a passenger-side airbag. The announcement was made in New Orleans, home to what pro-big government bureaucracy Democrats say is proof of what gets bungled when big-government bureaucrats are in charge of things. Despite this built-in paradoxical reason not to vote for a Democrat, Edwards is primping and ready to go. .. The message that has been sent by the left, and was sent again today by Edwards, is dizzying in its doublespeak, but not shocking. The government failed, so the only way to combat that is by throwing money at that failure until it succeeds.
The problem with this narrative is that while the New Orleans disaster happened for many reasons, what happened afterwards was entirely the fault of not just the government, but ultra-conservative hero George W. Bush. You see, FEMA was given a makeover by President Clinton because it was under funded, mismanaged, and unguided. They were mostly bystanders when natural disasters struck, and Clinton knew they could actually do something to help people other than hand out checks. All of Clinton's progress was rolled back when President Bush took office and he put a horse show manager in charge of federal disaster management.
To compound things, FEMA was rolled into DHS, stripped of critical funding, and smothered by a new layer of bureaucracy that made it impossible for the agency to act own its own -- precisely what it needs to do during emergencies. The man who ran the show had never so much as put out a brush fire in his back yard, much less marshaled a federal agency into action during one of the countrys worse disasters in history.
Yes, throwing money at FEMA is part of the solution, because the retards in Washington under funded it in the first place. Yes, we're pro-government, minus the 'big'. We like FEMA, we want FEMA. FEMA helps people when it isn't massively dysfunctional. So yes, I'll take a 'big-government' bureaucrat over a Texas oilman who thinks it's better to appoint your friends to positions like the head of FEMA than someone with actual experience. You guys can have Michael Brown.
From John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and on down, Democrats, who have rarely met a government program they didn't like, have crawled out of the woodwork complaining about how the government failed the people during and after hurricane Katrina.
I notice that no where in this article does Powers tell us how the government didn't fail everyone in New Orleans and other gulf-state regions. So how is our complaining bad? The government totally dropped the ball and a Republican led Congress issued a report that condemed FEMA and the administration for what happened. Democrats boycotted the report for the most part believing it was just going to be another rubber stamp, but it turned out to be a flame thrower pointed directly at FEMA and the White House.
Before you think Edwards is finally starting to ''get it,'' consider the reason the problem is being brought to our attention: so Edwards can apply his solution. The ''solution'' is that monstrous programs simply aren't adequately funded, nor are there enough of them.
Yeah, because it's not like Senator Edwards hasn't been in New Orleans before he decided to run again, right? Whoops..I guess he's been there a multitude of times, even establishing a foundation around his efforts. This is spin, moving on..
Edwards' making the announcement of his '08 White House bid in New Orleans is proof positive that he plans to continue using the ''two Americas'' mantra in an attempt to part America as skillfully and evenly as his hair.
Damn it! Why won't those poor people stop trying to take money from us? Won't don't they just go away? Sheesh, you'd think they were starving to death or something.
Are there really ''two Americas?'' For Edwards there certainly is. As just one example, there is one America without health insurance, and another America that has made a fortune driving insurance costs so high that the astronauts on the orbiting International Space Station may have to be sent out to retrieve the operating budgets of insurance companies and health-care providers.
I'll tell you a little something about health coverage, and I have to apologize for dragging a family member into this, but I think it's important to talk about. A member of my family was sick recently, and we didn't know what was wrong. She was nauseous with constant diarrhea. Anything she drank, anything she ate was gone from her system in minutes. I had the unfortunate pleasure of driving her from a doctors office to a hospital emergency room to get IV's because of how dangerously dehydrated she was. This went on for a month straight, and near the end, she took a trip to a gastroenterologist and had two procedures done, an endoscopy that goes down the throat, and another in a much more unpleasant place. I mention this because the combined bill for these things were just about $2,000.
Yeah, that's two thousand dollars to have a camera on the end of a long tube stuck down your throat, amongst other places, and the kicker is neither one of these revealed what was wrong with her. I'm sure you must be a fairly well trained and very knowledgeable doctor in that specialty to do these things and I'm sure the equipment isn't cheap, but two thousand dollars to have a camera look at your insides through your throat is absolutely ridiculous.
This person had medical insurance through where she worked, and I think she only ended up having to pay $80 for that visit, but in the end was still hit with a bill in the $500-1000 range. Think about that for a while. Her medical insurance means she had to pay $80, and we got to keep our electricity on for a month+ and still eat at the same time. Now think about this:
Approximately 46 million Americans, or 15.7 percent of the population, were without health insurance in 2004 (the latest government data available).
The number of uninsured rose 800,000 between 2003 and 2004 and has increased by 6 million since 2000.
Nearly 82 million people - about one-third of the population below the age of 65 spent a portion of either 2002 or 2003 without health coverage.
The percentage of people with employment-based health insurance has dropped from 70 percent in 1987 to 59.8 percent in 2004. This is the lowest level of employment-based insurance coverage in more than a decade.
Millions of workers don't have the opportunity to get coverage. A third of firms in the U.S. did not offer coverage in 2004.
It just goes on and on. This is not a small issue, or a wedge issue, or a liberal issue, this is a large portion of your fellow Americans who are sick and simply can't afford to go see a doctor, and it has nothing to do with having low paying jobs. The cost of this stuff is insane, and by comparison to other places, unconscionable. You can walk into a hospital anywhere in Britain or Canada, get anything you need done, and walk out without paying a dime. Universal health coverage, because it's already in their taxes. And what do we have?
