More Republican Hypocrisy and Obstruction

Republican legislators are well-known for flagrant hypocrisy. They don’t care. But the public is beginning to notice what has been apparent to many of us for a long time. An example is the current flap about bonuses for employees of AIG. Republicans do not care a whit about those bonuses, but they are delighted to have an issue with which they can attack President Obama.

Republican senators and congressmen have complained loudly about the AIG bonuses in an effort to ferment public outrage against President Obama and Secretary Geithner. The blatant hypocrisy of this whining is illustrated by the fact that in February of this year, when the Obama Administration announced conditions on future recipients of TARP funds, including a cap of $500,000 on senior executives' compensation, a number of Republican senators, including Kyl (R-AZ), Martinez (R-FL), Inhofe (R-OK), Bennett (R-UT), Bond (R-MO), Coburn (R-OK), DeMint (R-SC), and others said that they opposed any government restrictions on executive compensation.

The Democrats in the House of Representatives tried to get the AIG bonus money back for the taxpayer by means of a somewhat hasty tax bill that would, for people with incomes over $250,000, tax bonuses, at the rate of 90%, which were received from firms getting bailout money. The Republicans loudly opposed by bill, not because it was too hastily or carelessly written, but because they oppose restrictions on executive compensation. When the time came to vote on the bill, however, dozens of Republicans, knowing that a “no” vote would not sit well with the voters, switched their votes from “no” to “yes” and the measure passed 328-93.

I suspect that there will have to be changes in the bill taxing 90% of bonuses. Such legislation should be more carefully crafted to apply only to large bonuses. Ninety percent seems confiscatory considering that the bonuses will also be subject to state and local taxes. Although the Republicans charge that the tax will amount to a “bill of attainder” which is forbidden by the Constitution, I doubt it will fail on that account. A bill of attainder is generally a private bill punishing a single person or company. Congress has passed other laws like this one, and they have not been struck-down by the courts.

There is a bill in the Senate which might be better. It affects bonuses paid after Jan. 1, 2009, by firms receiving more than $100 million in government bailout money. The Senate bill would impose a 35 % excise tax on the companies that pay the bonuses, and a 35 % excise tax on the employees who receive them. Those taxes would be in addition to the 25 % now withheld by the IRS on bonuses up to $1 million, and 35 % withholding on bonuses above that. Retention bonuses, like the ones paid to AIG employees, would be fully taxable. The first $50,000 of other bonuses, such as performance bonuses, would be exempt. The Senate bill would also cap deferred compensation for top executives at $1 million a year. Deferred compensation above that amount would come with steep penalties.

Republicans are doing everything they can to condemn President Obama and Secretary Geithner because they are angry about the drubbing they received from the President and the Democrats last November. Instead of being Speaker of the House, our local guy, John Boehner, is now House Minority Gasbag. Recently, in the midst of a recession/depression, Boehner and his pack of conservative lemmings called for a “spending freeze!” A spending freeze? Even conservative columnist David Brooks said: “That is insane.” That brilliant concept reveals the poverty of Republican ideas. Republicans have no program for fixing the economy. All they can do is sit in the road and obstruct traffic.

Now is the time for Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and their Republican crews to get on board the economic recovery of this nation and stop the obstructionist tactics that are only going to bring them more defeat in 2010.

AIG Outrage and Misconceptions

The payment by American International Group (AIG) of $165 million in bonuses to employees of AIG Financial Products, the unit of the company that sold credit-default swaps, the risky contracts that caused massive losses, has given rise not only to public outrage but also to misconceptions about the role of President Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in AIG’s bailout. One hears a chorus from Republican attack-dog legislators, and from that rattling cacophony of empty heads, the right-wing media, claiming that Secretary Geithner should resign and that the public is becoming disenchanted with President Obama. Let us begin by clearing-up some misunderstandings.

It was not the Obama Administration that gave the bailouts to AIG. That bailout money was paid in 2008 by the Federal Reserve and the Bush Administration.
On September 16, 2008, before President Obama took office or was even elected, the Federal Reserve Bank created an $85 billion second secured asset credit facility (a sort of line of credit) to enable AIG to meet cash obligations. This was done after AIG suffered heavy losses and was facing bankruptcy. In return for the money, AIG issued a stock warrant to the Federal Reserve Bank for 79.9% of its equity stock. That, in effect, made the Federal Government the owner of AIG. On October 9, 2008, AIG borrowed an additional $37.8 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank. In November, 2008, the government revised its loan package to AIG, increasing the total amount to $152 billion.

When the Federal Reserve and the Bush Administration gave the money to AIG, they failed to attach any conditions as to bonuses. The Obama Administration is stuck with that.

Those persistent right-wing critics are lying when they say that the President and Treasury Secretary Geithner knew about the bonuses months before they were handed out. President Obama and Secretary Geithner did not learn about the bonuses until a couple of days before they were paid. Secretary Geithner promptly called the CEO of AIG, Edward Liddy, and demanded that the bonuses be cancelled. Liddy, who had been put in the job by the federal government, said that the company was bound by contract to pay them. The President and Secretary Geithner are taking steps to recoup the money.

Another blatant lie being circulated by the conservative media is that a clause inserted in the stimulus bill by Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), and allegedly approved by President Obama and Secretary Geithner, guaranteed that contracts for bonuses at companies receiving bailout funds would stay in place. In fact, the opposite is true. The economic recovery bill did not require that compensation contracts entered into by companies like AIG "had to stay in place," nor did the bill require AIG to give the bonuses. Rather, the relevant provision in the recovery bill, which was based on an amendment by Sen. Dodd, actually restricted the ability of companies receiving funds under the act to award bonuses in the future.

There will have to be more bailout money paid to AIG, but that is just the federal government paying money to itself. Why is this important? Well, AIG is not only the largest insurance company in the world, it is the insurer of most to the United States financial sector. If AIG is allowed to fail, so will many of the large banks and other financial institutions in America. This is why U.S. officials believe that it's a necessary evil. If there was no bailout of AIG, and the primary banks and financial institutions in America failed, we would be faced with an unimaginable economic catastrophe.

So stop complaining about government bailouts! They are essential for the economic recovery of our country. And stop complaining about President Obama and Secretary Geithner. They did not create this problem and they are doing everything they can to solve it. And stop listening to the lies and distortions of right-wing prevaricators.

The President's Mortgage Bailout Program and the Undeserving Poor

Conservatives claim that the President’s mortgage bailout program (the “Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan”) will help undeserving losers keep their homes at the expense of responsible borrowers who live within their means. They contend that millions of poor, unqualified people (especially detested minority people) were able to get homes and mortgages because of the bleeding hearts of liberals like Bill Clinton, Chris Dodd, and Barney Frank. They believe that poor people deserve to live only in crowded, grimy, putrid slums.

Most of these conservatives know nothing about the causes of the mortgage crisis in America. They assume that all of the foreclosures taking place today were caused by irresponsible poor people getting mortgages they did not deserve. They do not consider the fact that this country has lost 4.4 million jobs since the Bush Recession began. People without jobs tend to have trouble paying their mortgages and other obligations.

These conservatives also fail to consider the fact that the economic downturn has resulted in a sharp decline in housing values, causing houses to be worth less than the principal amount of many people’s mortgages. This prevents people from refinancing or selling their homes. Moreover, the skyrocketing costs of medical care in America have driven large numbers of people into bankruptcy and default on mortgage obligations. More than half of the 1.1 million bankruptcies filed in America in 2008 were the result of people being crushed by staggering medical bills.

While right-wingers bristle with contempt for the less affluent people who had the effrontery to ache for their own homes, lawns, and gardens, they ignore the real culprits. The real culprits are Bush and his gang who catered to the fat cats. They deregulated the banking and securities industries, thereby allowing predatory lenders to prey on innocent homebuyers, stockbrokers to bundle sub-prime mortgages into gigantic risky bonds, and banks to buy-up billions of dollars of such shaky investments.

Yes, there are irresponsible people out there who knew they could not afford the houses they were buying. But President Obama is not trying to rescue them. The President said: “The plan I’m announcing focuses on rescuing families who have played by the rules and acted responsibly. It will not rescue the unscrupulous or irresponsible by throwing good taxpayer money after bad loans. This plan will not save every home.” The plan will not help those who took risky bets by buying homes for the purpose of resale, or buyers who signed-on for loans they knew they could not afford.

The program has two parts: One is to work with lenders to modify the loan terms for up to 4 million responsible homeowners who have made their monthly payments and fulfilled their obligations but have seen their property values fall. They want to refinance into lower interest rates but are unable to do so because their homes’ values have sunk below the amount of their mortgages. The second part is to enable over 5 million homeowners who have suffered financial reversals such as losing their jobs or having their hours cut back, and who are now struggling to stay current on their mortgage payments but are facing possible foreclosure, to refinance into more affordable fixed-rate loans.

Under the President’s plan, many homeowners could see their mortgage payments drop by over $1,000 a month. The plan will also give bankruptcy judges the power to order changes in mortgages on primary residences. The criteria for eligibility will include having sufficient income to make the new payments.

I find it tiresome listening to moralists like Cal Thomas talk about how we are losing our sense of personal responsibility. Perhaps, heaven forbid, the President’s plan will help some irresponsible people as well those who have been responsible. While these Puritans wring their ice-cold hands over the loss of tax money to help the undeserving few, I will rejoice for the over 9 million homeowners whose homes will be saved.

Faith, Healing, and Morality

There has recently been a lot of talk in the media about the power of faith to heal people. While much of it talks about the placibo effect of faith, there is also a lot of talk about God interfering in human life for the purpose of healing sick people. The idea seems to be that God, an omnipotent being who exists in some separate realm called heaven, is willing to help human beings in distress in response to prayers offered on someone’s behalf. While millions of people the world over are suffering and dying from myriad illnesses and other causes, this being called “God” is paying attention to whether people pray for somebody, and acts in response to the prayers.

I know and understand that belief in the willingness and power of God to heal the sick is comforting to people. Why does it bother me? It bothers me not only because it is absurd but because it is a refutation of rational thought and logic. Why would God heal one person and not heal everybody in the world? Does he need prayers in order to step in and perform a healing miracle? Must the prayers be said only by Christians? I can’t understand how thinking people believe it.

All religions tell of miracles performed by their gods, or by their holy men, not only in the past but also in the present day. Within Buddhism, for example, miraculous healings occurred among the general population at the moment of Buddha's birth. Later in life he raised the dead, healed incurable diseases, and walked across the mile-wide Ganges. Are we supposed to believe that Buddhist miracles are bogus but the miracles of Christianity are authentic?

Islam abounds in stories of miracles both by the prophet Mohammed and by wonder-working saints. Moslem Shiites travel from all over the world to the shrine of Reza in the Iranian city of Mashad to be cured of illnesses. Crowds strain to kiss or touch the silver cage housing Reza’s tomb. The sick and lame attach themselves by lengths of thread to a lattice window looking on the shrine, camping and praying there for days and weeks in hope of being healed.

Sudanese refugees prepare the mihaya, a traditional healing drink. Verses from the Koran are written on a wooden plate, the plate is washed with water, and the water is drunk by the sick. In some sects of Islam the verses of the Koran are thought to have healing properties. In Kashmir people travel from all over to see Peer Munshi Syed Hussain Kazmi heal people with prayers and restorative Koranic verses.

The Hindu religion reports many miracles. The Hindu residents of Bali practice Melasti, a purifying ceremony that heals and prepares the community for the New Year. Millions of people believe that the South Indian guru, Sathya Sai Baba, performs miracles of healing and many other kinds of miracles. They believe that he is a god who was born of a virgin mother. Like all such miracle workers, he is a fake, a phony, a magician who performs his tricks with slight of hand.

The followers of Santeria worship Santos and use a rooster in a sacrifice intended to cure the sick. In Venezuela the people perform velacion or the candle ceremony in which a sick patient lies on an oracolo, a drawing of esoteric symbols made on the ground. He is surrounded by candles and fruit and is showered with flower petals meant to impart energy.

In Lac Albania, followers of Shna Ndo believe that they can be healed by touching a rock. The shamans of Siberia communicate with the spirit world and summon the spirit using the bodhran, a kind of drum, for the purpose of healing people.

Tribal religions worldwide are replete with miraculous healings. The cultural gap between the witch doctor of the Mersi tribe in Africa and the televangelist, Benny Hinn, is not wide. The Mersi are the people who implant large plates in their lips to extend them grotesquely. The warriors of the tribe have competitions in which they batter each other with poles. It is a primitive type of sword fighting and a rite of passage for young men. Some are badly injured. They suffer broken bones and terrible cuts and bruises. They go to the witch doctor for recovery. She waives her hands over them, recites some incantation, and they believe that they are healed. It is no different than the healing by Benny Hinn and many others in the various sects of the Christian religion.

I was discussing this with a deeply devout Catholic woman recently. I asked her whether she considered all of these healings by people of other faiths to be false, or whether she accepted them. She was confused, but claimed that Catholicism is the only true religion, and that the healings within Catholicism are the only ones that have been documented and verified. She pointed to the healings at Lourdes and Fatima. When I informed her that no faith healing has ever been proven, she claimed that many have been proven. When I pointed out that if there was truly a God, and he was a good God, he would heal all sickness, injury, and evil in the world. She said that we must not question God. God has his own ways, and we are unable to see or understand God’s will. We see only narrowly. I pointed out if God was real, he would not be good or even mostly good. He would be the height of evil. If he has the power to heal people, and does sometimes heal people, and does not use his power to heal all of the millions of people all over the world who right now are suffering from horrible, devastating, painful, hideous, unspeakable diseases and medical conditions, he is the most callous, unfeeling, cruel, evil being in existence.

We not only can question God, we must question God. We have a moral obligation to question God. If God exists, he is the very essence of immorality, a being who could easily step-in and stop all suffering in the world and who does practically nothing. According to Christian belief, he does step-in once in a while, but for the most part he is unwilling to interfere. That is grotesquely immoral. That is pure evil. Thus, the God that most people, most Christians, believe in is horribly evil.

The answer given to me by most Christians is that although there appear to be problems with Christian beliefs, we need to accept them as a matter of faith. Faith is the basis of all Christian religion. It allows people to ignore the obvious contradictions and simply accept that we cannot know the reason for God's actions. Faith is a cop-out. It is the abandonment of rational thought in favor of ignorant and confining discipleship.

So we have to ask, what is morality? Most dictionaries give the standard definition. Morality is: 1. The quality of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct; 2. A system of ideas of right and wrong conduct; or 3. Virtuous conduct. The dictionaries are inadequate in their definitions of morality.

There is more to morality than simply good conduct or good thought. Fundamental morality is the use of the human mind to apprehend the good. No person who abandons the search for truth is truly moral. No religion that pretends to have the full truth without proper examination can ever be moral. No religion existing today is moral. The failure to question God and question the very existence of God is grossly immoral. It is what enabled the 9/11 hijackers to fly into the World Trade Towers and kill thousands of people. It is what enabled the officials in Salem to hang innocent women as witches. It is what enabled the leaders of the Spanish Inquisition to burn thousands of heretics and Conversos at the stake. It is what enabled the forces of the King, at the behest of the Pope, to murder and destroy the Albigensians and the Waldensians. It is what drives all religious persecution and intolerance.

Historians say that Queen Isabella of Spain, wife of King Ferdinand, was a devout person. She lived a life of goodness and kindness to others. Nevertheless, she inaugurated, promoted, and thoroughly supported the Spanish Inquisition. She drove all of the Jews out of Spain causing unimaginable hardship. She was the kindest, sweetest, most evil and horrible bitch in history. There have been many other such people. A number of such persons have been declared saints by the Catholic Church.

I believe that it is simply impossible to be moral and to believe in God. In order to believe in God one has to believe that God is all-good, omnipotent, and omniscient. Yet, at the same time, one has to believe that God, who created the universe, has decided to allow enormous, outragous, unspeakable evil to exist in the universe. In order to accept this contradiction, one has to believe that our rational powers are simply insufficient to know or even search for the truth. The truth is beyond our comprehension, and therefore, we must accept a set of doctrines handed down to us by men burdened with the same insufficient powers of reason as us. We have to believe that these men were contacted by God and given special knowledge. We have to abandon our own powers of reason, stop asking questions, and accept the tenets of the religion handed down by these men. Although it takes the use of our minds in order to accept these doctrines, that acceptance is the limit on how far we are allowed to think. If God declares that Abraham must take Isaac to the mountain for a sacrifice, so be it. We must accept the will of God.

So what is morality? Morality is the maximum use of one’s mind in the search for truth and goodness. The opposite of morality is to abandon the search for truth and to accept the inflexible doctrines of some religion. Although we must accept that our minds are limited and often mistaken, we must use our minds to their utter exhaustion searching for what is true and right. The most moral humans have always been the people who stood up to religion and to accepted doctrines and dared to think beyond the morality of the day. We can be like Isabella and Torquemada and live lives of adherence to some religious doctrine while authorizing unspeakable crimes, or we can be like Socrates, Galileo and others who dared to search for truth.

The Budget, Stimulus, and Socialism

We have been living through an era in which powerful industries such as oil, insurance, pharmaceutical, securities, and medicine, along with enormously rich individuals, were able to control the wealth of America with their financial power and were able to transfer the lion’s share of that wealth to themselves. They did this in part through the dominance of Reaganomics. Their Supply-Side or “Trickle-Down” economics coddled the rich with tax and economic policy. They claimed that trickle-down would, in the long run, benefit everybody including the poor. Instead, it resulted in the widest discrepancy in income and wealth in our nation’s history. The rich got richer and the poor were foreclosed.

Now, with the election of a luminous and exciting new president, a new social movement is taking place. That movement is supported by the vast majority of Americans who seem to have suddenly awakened from a long period of lethargy. At last look, the polls showed that 67 percent of Americans approved of the President’s performance. A poll taken following President Obama’s speech to Congress on February 24 showed that 80 percent of the speech-watchers approved of the President’s plans for dealing with the economic crisis.

With several bold strokes, including his stimulus plan and his 10-year budget, President Obama has inaugurated the most far-reaching social changes since the New Deal. Needless to say, his proposals have been angrily denounced by reactionary conservatives, including that fat, ignorant, boorish, drug-addicted blowhard, Rush Limbaugh. They scream that the President is leading us into European-style socialism. Well, it certainly is not socialism, but there are several things about Europe that we might want to replicate. One is universal health insurance.

President Obama’s budget will overhaul health care. It will create a $634 billion, 10-year “health reform reserve” as a down-payment to create affordable health insurance programs for individuals and employers and to finance disease prevention and wellness programs. The budget also includes $15 billion a year for renewable energy programs like wind power, solar power, and the building of more efficient cars and trucks right here in America. It attacks global warming, expands the federal role in education, and cuts taxes for the middle class.

The President plans to finance much of this by obtaining higher revenue from rich individuals and polluting industries, and by slashing billions in direct payments to agribusinesses and farmers with more than $500,000 in annual revenue. The President has called for roughly $100 billion a year in tax increases on the wealthy — mostly delayed until 2011 when the recession will presumably have ended. The plan will also eliminate corporate subsidies (that economists have long criticized) for health insurers, oil companies, and other big businesses. The budget will reduce the costs of war primarily through downsizing the war in Iraq. It will also reform entitlement programs, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

One increasingly hears the refrain that President Obama is leading us toward socialism. This comes from people who know nothing about socialism, capitalism, or history. It could hardly be called socialism where the President seeks to keep the automobile, insurance, and banking industries private and alive with government help. It could hardly be called socialism where the President is providing tax breaks for small business owners. His plan will eliminate all capital gains taxes on startup and small businesses in order to encourage innovation and job creation. Moreover, the budget authorizes the Small Business Administration (SBA) to support loan guarantees of $28 billion to small businesses.

Government exists to do for people that which they cannot do for themselves. The modern history of America is replete with instances of government stepping-in to help its citizens and help the economy. Consider the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the 1980s bailouts of the S & Ls and of Chrysler, farm subsidies, aid to the arts and sciences, and much more. These governmental initiatives have not made us a socialist country and have not prevented us from being a robust free market economy.

H.R. 676 and Health Care in a Time of Desolation

In addition to the more than 72 million Americans lacking health insurance or underinsured, now there are additional millions of newly unemployed people losing their health insurance. The United States is the only industrialized country where the economic catastrophe will also be a healthcare catastrophe. All of the other industrialized countries that have economic woes also have governmentally provided health insurance for all of their citizens. The time has come to change our inefficient, fragmented, and costly health care system. We must join with our more enlightened European neighbors to enact a single-payer health insurance system in order to save billions of dollars and millions of our citizens from medical disaster.

This can be done quite easily through enactment of the United States National Health Insurance Act (USNHI), H.R. 676, introduced by Representative John Conyers of Michigan and supported by over 90 congressmen. The bill would provide to all individuals residing in the United States and in U.S. territories with all medically necessary services including primary care and prevention, surgery, inpatient care, emergency care, outpatient care, prescription drugs, dental, hearing, vision, eye care, psychological, and chiropractic—everything!

The bill is not modeled after the Canadian plan. Instead, it will be a kind of Medicare for all. It will not constitute socialized medicine. There will still be private doctors, and people will be free to choose their own doctors, hospitals, clinics, and practices.

According to Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), in its first year the single-payer program will save over $150 billion on paperwork and $50 billion by using rational bulk purchasing of medications. These savings are more than enough to cover all of the uninsured and improve coverage for everyone else. In case you are worried about the people in the private health insurance industry who will be put out of work, the bill provides replacement of two years salary, up to $100 K, to displaced workers.

Employers who currently provide coverage for their employees now pay an average of 8.5% of employees’ payroll towards health coverage. Many employers can’t afford to provide coverage at all. Private health insurance companies divert 30 cents of every healthcare dollar for CEO salaries, profits, and administration. Under this Act, employers will pay a modest 3.3% payroll tax per employee. The Act eliminates all other employer payments towards health insurance. The average yearly cost to an employer for an employee earning $35,000 per year is currently $2975. Under the new act it will be reduced to $1,155, less than $100 per month.

It is quite simple. Your health insurance costs under USNHI will be dramatically lower than they are today. Seniors as well as younger people will all have the comprehensive medication coverage they need.

We all know that insurance companies put their bottom line ahead of our health. People are denied coverage because of age, prior condition, or current illness. Some are dropped when they get sick. The enactment of H.R. 676 will guarantee full health coverage to every American no matter what age, prior condition, or the state of health. It will entirely eliminate any consideration of profit from medical health decisions.

Hundreds of organizations support H.R. 676, including Physicians for a National Health Program, the National Education Association, the United Federation of Teachers, The United Church of Christ, the Methodist Church, The American Medical Students Association, the National Association of Letter Carriers, Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans, Ohio State AFL-CIO, and many others. You can see the list at http://pdamerica.org.

Myths about the Stimulus Package

Ardent Republicans have been served a set of myths about the stimulus package. The myths have been dished-out by GOP members of Congress and spread by right-wing media pitchmen like Cal Thomas. The conservative faithful have swallowed them whole without examination or suspicion. Perhaps it is too much to ask them to do a little bit of checking.

One such myth was created by an erratic wing-nut named Betsy McCaughey, former Lieutenant Governor of New York under Governor George Pataki. McCaughey, while Lieutenant Governor of New York, managed, through bizarre behavior and pronouncements, to embarrass and antagonize the Republican Administration of Governor Pataki of which she was a part. When Pataki ran for a second term he dropped McCaughey from the ticket.

McCaughey wrote an opinion piece for Bloomberg.com in which she claimed that the stimulus bill would create a new office called the “National Health Information Technology Coordinator” (NHIT Coordinator) that would act like Big Brother, overseeing every decision by your doctor and disapproving procedures and treatments that were not cost effective.

The Fact is that the "new bureaucracy" McCaughey described is not new at all. The NHIT Coordinator was established with bipartisan support by a 2004 executive order of President Bush. The purpose was to start the transition to electronic medical records. The coordinator serves as the lead adviser to the Secretary of Health and Human Services on health information technology issues. He does not look over the shoulders of doctors and veto needed medical treatment.

The economic stimulus bill strengthens the Coordinator's role and increases his funding. The Coordinator’s job is to see that every American has a "certified electronic health record" by 2014. The transition to electronic medical records will benefit all medical patients and will save patients and our entire medical system billions of dollars.

The Cal Thomas column about the McCaughey article was as bizarre as Betsy herself. Thomas claimed that the stimulus package’s increase in funding for the Coordinator would lead to the euthanasia of old people! He seems to think that it is a driving desire of liberals to snuff-out the older senior citizens of our country. Amazing!

Ms. McCaughey and people like Cal Thomas seem to think that we are in danger of having needed medical treatment denied because of government involvement in health care decisions. That is simply not true. The real danger of denying needed treatment comes from the profit motive of private health insurance companies that continually deny coverage and look to the bottom line rather than the needs of patients.

The criticism by dingbat McCaughey is part of a program of attacks by Republicans who have invented a series of bogeymen nestled in the pages of the stimulus bill. They claim that the bill contains earmarks for all kinds of pet projects of Democratic congressmen and senators. It doesn’t.

One claim is that that there is an $8 billion appropriation for a high-speed rail line from Disneyland to Las Vegas—supposedly dear to the heart of Senator Harry Reid. Not true. There is money appropriated for unspecified high-speed rail projects, but nothing specifically for this one. In addition, not one penny is slated to save the salt marsh mouse in Nancy Pelosi’s district, and not one penny is slated for ACORN.

The bill does not contain spending for "golf carts" as claimed by one Republican congressman. It has $300 million to promote the development of fuel-efficient vehicles, a worthwhile project. Despite another GOP congressman's claim that the bill "will fund" butterfly parks, Frisbee golf courses, or water slides, there's no money in the bill for any of those projects. The congressman culled those items from a list of 18,750 city projects that the U.S. Conference of Mayors cobbled together and promoted as examples of "shovel-ready" projects.

I know that millions of Republicans are angry about their humiliating defeat last November, but it is sickening to see their leaders purveying misleading myths about the President Obama’s efforts to save the economy of our nation.