Froma Harrop says it today in The Sunday ProJo, Doris Kearns Goodwin said it last week on The Daily Show, and I’ve been saying it for weeks — although I seem not to have actually written it down anywhere so I can’t prove it — let the Republicans be seen filibustering a Health Care Reform bill. One reason I prefer to wait for Harrop to write about important issues is that she does research and supports her arguments with facts and logic. I should try that sometime. Today she cites Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell,

Rendell urged Democrats to get the bill “as strong as they can” and put it through the Senate reconciliation process, which requires only 51 votes. Make the Republicans filibuster it, he said. “Call their bluff.”

Yeah, let ’em filibuster. Let Republicans filibuster a bill that would close the “doughnut” hole in Medicare drug benefits and add Medicare coverage for preventive screening services. Let them kill heath-care reform, without which the cost of employer-sponsored coverage for families would nearly double by 2019, and the number of Americans without coverage would balloon to 57 million. Let them support a system that in seven short years would leave $0 in the Medicare hospital-insurance trust fund.

As Doris KG explained it — They have to stay on their feet, only drink milk or water, and they can’t go to the bathroom. They’re gonna look like jerks! The Republicans still hold the record with Strom Thurmond at 24 hours and 18 minutes, but that was before Depends (now in small, medium, large, and the newly introduced Fill It Buster! with velcro cloture).

In a recent monologue, the excellent Bill Maher opined “I was originally opposed to the death panels, but I’m beginning to come around.”  Amen to that. The recent protests have prompted some pretty dark thoughts in even the most benign of souls. The Greatest Generation? I haven’t heard that appellation in quite a while.  If Nana and Pop-Pop think their grandchildren are going to remember the sacrifices of sugar rationing as they remove their own tonsils, I think they are sadly mistaken.

Providence Journal columnist, the equally excellent Froma Harrop, is distressed as well. In her piece on August 13, ‘Greedy geezers not nice people’ she suggests that perhaps the elderly should be allowed to experience life without a government-run insurance program,

I am one who has long fought conservative efforts to let Medicare, in former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s words, “wither and die on the vine.” But then you see so many beneficiaries of this liberal program parroting lies about liberals wanting to kill them. Makes you think.

Okay okay, so we can’t really lure them into our ‘facility’ with half-price meatloaf, but we can join the protest and make our voices heard as well. To find out how, contact Peter Asen at Ocean State Action.

6pm, Wednesday, Representative Langevin hosts a town hall meeting at Warwick City Hall, 3725 Post Road
5:30pm, Thursday, Senator Whitehouse hosts a community dinner at the West Warwick Senior Center (gird your loins, people) 145 Washington Street

It seems possible that people may have missed Froma Harrop’s excellent column yesterday in the ProJo — Welcome to ‘Nepotism Nation‘.  This country got its start by kicking out a hereditary monarchy, and yet we have this annoying habit of anointing certain families and giving their scions a pass on such things as brains, experience and book-larning (see: Bush, George W.).

The recent trotting out of the inexperienced and, I might add charisma-free, Caroline Kennedy for the soon-to-be-vacant New York senate seat is just ludicrous.  Her single qualification seems to be that she will rake in the dough for other Dems.  But as Ms. Harrop asks quite correctly,

Would someone please draw a dark line of distinction between what we call a scandal in Illinois and business as usual in New York? Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is accused of trying to sell a vacant Senate seat, while New York Gov. Paterson is expected to give a Senate seat to the woman whose family can raise lots of money for his benefit.

It bugs me from the feminist standpoint as well. This politically expedient fast-tracking of totally inexperienced women (Sarah Palin comes to mind) does nothing to help the women trying to succeed by merit. Having these untested nitwits and dilettantes making all the headlines is embarrassing and frustrating.

Well, I’ve been riding this hobbyhorse for a while now and it turns out I have an ally over at the Providence Journal — the much smarter and more articulate columnist Froma Harrop.  In yesterday’s paper, she blasted the foolish and wasteful ‘War on Drugs’ and found quite a bit of support in a recent trip to Washington, where comparisons to the failed Prohibition experiment were made.

Former law-enforcement officers gathered here to draw the parallels. Their group, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), has called for nothing less than the legalization of drugs.

And before you say, “We can’t do that,” hear the officers out. They have an answer for every objection.

These are enumerated in the article, with LEAP members concluding that they…

…want to legalize drugs because they’re tired of being shot at in a war they can’t win. They’re tired of making new business for dealers every time they arrest a competitor. They are tired of busting people in the streets of America’s cities over an ounce of cocaine, while the Andean region produces over 1,000 tons of it a year. They’re tired of enriching terrorists.

Also present was one, Eric Sterling, “head of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, which joined the call for legalization. As counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in the 1980s, Sterling helped write the anti-drug laws he now opposes.”  Okay?  The guy who wrote the laws wants them repealed.