Good letter Richard Posner. It "may" help. However, don't believe it will be answered, or even read by the power bosses. Their office clerks will most likely just trash it. It's too truthful and more importantly ___ too critical of the people you wish to have read it.

What's that old saying? Something like, you get a better response with a dab of honey. Understand your frustrations, but it's difficult to open a sane discussion by first smashing the other in the face, even if it is justifiable. Maybe you would consider not berating the people you wish to have listen to your just complaints and wishes.

Finally, if we all send an exact copy of your letter, the powers that be would be able to effectively track us. Right? HMMM.

You're probably correct. I'll join you but will write my own lettes. Hope you get a truthful response.

The entire monopoly media system is not a reliable source.

Didn't 67% of Americans mistakenly believe Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11 in March of 2003 when the War in Iraq began? This is a complete failure (or success depending on your point of view) of our political leaders and media system.

Why do we continue to think our cable line-up is anything more than a monopoly controlled marketing machine when we have the openess and diversity of the internet as a comparison.

"But why would the Advisory Council give us bad advice?" Marge Simpson

earth to katrina v.h.: stop being such a whimp. this health care issue has revolutionary potential, b/c it exposes so many facets of american life, one of which is who the media works for.

sad as it is...i am glad that we now have the media and government we have because it has taught us one thing. 'they' are lying first and always have been. i supported kucinich before and will again. don't believe until you have researched.

let me keep harping about reinstatement of the "fairness doctrine". our public airwaves (abc, nbc, cbs, & fox tv, plus 1,000's of radio stations) still frame the debates cable stations follow.

take back our airwaves (write your congresspersons to support the fairness doctrine)and insist on a start for real civil discourse rather than the "foxified" crap that passes as news now.

She's editor of one of the oldest news magazines in the country for Heaven's sake. Surely she can't be as clueless as she sounds. Maybe she was being facetious, suggesting that Reliable Sources just needs to check their facts.

It's no accident that when the MSM counts the number of Democrats running for President they run out of fingers at the number 7. It's no secret that Time-Warner is collaborating with the Post Office to wipe The Nation off the map along with radical rags of the other political persuasion.

jerrys, get a clue. Your congresspersons, with a few disenfranchised exceptions, aren't listening to you. Go to www.Ni4D.us and take back our democracy. We've lost it, the corporations have run off with it and they aren't giving it back. We have to take it back. One vote at a time. Get to work.

My newest bumpersticker says:

END CORPORATE WELFARE
www.Ni4D.us

If the United States starts a war with Iran, we are All gonna need a lot of health care before that disaster ends. Unless and until we have a fair and just program, to limit campaign spending, we will never have a Kucinich or any other president who will support (we the people).

Every working citizen over the age of eighteen, should be taxed one dollar a month; that money would be banked and that money and that money only, could be used for campaign expenses for those who are running for congress, the senate and or the office of the president.

Well, guess we'd better not hold our breath on any suggestion such as that and just vote for the ones who are the best male and or female prostitutes. Those who suck up to the insurance companies, the Haliburton types, the lobyists and the oil barons.

" Howared Kurtz ASSerted that Moore is "pushing gov run healthcare which no presidential candidate supports"......
ummmmmmmmmm.............. But the People support it, right????
So what if the "presidential candidates" dont support it.
I am sure none of them are wanting for healthcare.
Not to mention, I thought the GOVERNMENT WORKS FOR THE PEOPLE, NOT thier own interests which keeps happening.
Gee, if I dont do my job correctly I GET FIRED!

"the People should not be afraid of thier government,
the government should be afraid of the People."

With such an awesome responsibility as often the sole harbinger of news good and bad, we should expect much from our mainstream media. Instead, we get the titillation of the trivial. We get breathless blondes reporting on missing blondes. We get entirely uncritical fascination with unreal celebrities. We get insipid "conversations" between shouting talking heads. And worst of all, we get utterly spineless reporting with no edge, no slash and bite, no grabbing on and not letting go.

Television news, especially, no longer provides genuine news about the world. Instead it mostly settles for brief and superficial words and images. It serves only to draw in the highest viewership to generate the highest advertising dollar for the most shareholder profit.

And it does so by competing in the business of fear.

Truthfulness and accuracy have little pull at all anymore; only the most fantastical, the most horrible, and the most simplified are served up for public consumption. And we eat it, and eat it greedily, until we've become obese in mind and scared in spirit.

There's so much newsworthy going on in this vast and wonderful world of ours every day. Good news and bad pours forth day after day, much of it trite and dull and boring, but so much more so necessary and fascinating that we require computers and newspapers, radios and televisions to grab at it all for bits and pieces for which to keep in hopes of one day understanding some part of how the larger world works.

So when broadcast media, the only source of news for many of us, is more interested in pursuing audience share and turning a profit, it fails in its basic journalistic responsibilities to serve as witness to injustice and as watchdog over the powerful, and we're all the poorer for it.

When television "journalists" want always to pitch a fight between polarized views rather than convening public discussions to find serious answers, we're all the poorer for it.

When television news substitutes emotion for fact, feel-good human interest stories for hard-nosed reporting, and sound bites for political discourse, we're all the poorer for it.

Rx for America: Kucinich. Hurray for Denny the K!

kathyodat:

given up? ready for an armed relvolution? or maybe try to use the system to get back the system. or do we just shoot 'em all? we have a great system that was stolen by the corporatists.

it doesn't mean the system doesn't work, it means it's been hijacked. and you have to start somewhere:

1) fairness doctrine
2) corporations aren't persons
3) money is not speech

all achieveable within the system and grassroots efforts.

i have a clue........and a better plan than giving up like you.

Wanting out of Iraq seems to be "fringe idea" according to all the pundit authorities spouting the conventional wisdom that instructs the manufactured consensus. So they hope.
Kucinich? That fringe character is dismissed as a crank. What does it matter what he advocates?

'...Moore is "pushing government-run healthcare which no Presidential candidate supports."'

Wow, talk about what topics are open for discussion. If Hillary or Obama aren't preaching it, it must not exist.

Reliable (Corporate News Media) Sources with Howie Kurtz...
Our normal topic for discussion "Is the press treating Bush unfairly?" or "Is the press giving a pass to the dumbocrats?"

Let's see, pretend well supported bills in congress don't exist, label a popular program taken for granted in most modern countries a "fringe idea", ignore the existence of certain candidates -- sounds like a vast corporate conspiracy backed by one of the most wealthy interests in the country. The insurance industry funds the candidates theat the corporate media "recognizes."

Try reading Noam Chomsky instead of Howard Kurtz. This has been one of Chomsky's talking points for ages it seems like. Polling data consistently shows that well over a majority of Americans favor a national single payer health care system when the option is fairly presented to them. But the political elite that run this country consistently call it a 'political non-starter'.

Howard Kurtz' role is not to inform viewers. Its to tell them what to think. So he deliberately tries to slant the debate in such a way by framing a single payer health care system as something that unrealistic, unobtainable, and thus something that should not even be talked about. That way he can then move the discussion to the phony debate of which of the health care plans that does more to protect the insurance industry and the HMOs should America be adopting.

How many insurance ads, HMO ads and big pharma ads do you see on CNN? That's who's paying Kurtz to say this.

jerrys, no way am I giving up. You misread my post. Did you go to that website before you accused me of giving up? And if you have a plan besides calling your congresspersons can you share it on this post? And I do call my congresspersons, for all the good it does.

I believe Mike Gravel has found the solution to this problem of the corporations hijacking our democracy, but it will take a lot of work from all of us, we need 50 million signatures. And the only way to get the word out is to do it ourselves. I don't see any other way of taking it back, except by a revolution, which would be messy to say the least, and won't happen without a bloody fight. And Bushco is readying for that with his Halliburton prison camps. This is a democratic, peaceful and Constitutionally practical way of reclaiming our citizenship, to become citizen legislators. It has worked beautifully in Switzerland, it can work for us.

kathyodat......

yes, i perused the website......it's one of many and they're all purposeful. however, they do not operate in a political vaccuum.....they need to use their influence within the system first..that's my point.

whether it be by protests, by petitions, or by referendum.......every voice counts and education is the first step. that's why i feel the sooner we reclaim the public airwaves (and there are tons of sites dedicated to just that) the sooner the debate will become a tad more honest......

Hey jerrys did I miss something? I did not read anythig where kathyodat wrote a word about biving up. He or she was just telling it like it is. Maybe you missed her point?

On a related note, I was flipping channels the other day and saw Jeff Greenfield on CBS giving a report and I stopped to see what he had to say. His report was about how Canadians and Europeans are happy with their single-payer universal coverage systems but Americans are just different. The creep had the audacity to suggest that the US system is different because the great majority of people like it this way instead of because our government is in the pocket of the healthcare industry. If he admitted the truth, he might have had to admit that our political system is completely corrupt and broken, but for the MSM it is running just fine the way it is. The MSM will be the last to tell us we have entered a post-democracy era in the US.

Exactly.

Go, Katrina.

I've tried to read Howard Kurtz's editorials and essays in the Washington Post, but I get through a few sentences and think, "This guy's an idiot" every time.

We surely need single payer, universal health care. I don't think it will happen in my lifetime, but I keep hoping.

ITS THE CONSERVATIVES STUPID!

I understand you boys want to get elected and under current corrupt law you are allowed to sell your souls to Corporate America to do so. So we get a health care system that doesn't work and nobody wants. I hope you all rot in hell except for Kucinich.

Where do you boys get the gall to try to sell us on slavery to corporations? You actually smile and make promises to us while selling us out to the super rich. Every one of you know that we know what is going on and still you smile and smile.

evelyn smith:

"Your congresspersons, with a few disenfranchised exceptions, aren't listening to you." was her quote.

she's given up on reclaiming our airwaves and on conversing with her representatives. apparently only her website gets things done. that's crap.

many of us seek the same goals, albeit by different means.........she chose to say my means were useless........"get a clue" was her quote

amy goodman, robert mcchesney, bill moyers, and many others have espoused reinstatement of the fairness doctrine.........to dismiss my and their process is giving up...........especially when disarming the radical right's dominance on public airwaves takes away their big thunder

Brainwashed Americans will continue having to deal with our current rip-off, dysfunctional, fraud-ridden health care non-system until enough of us wake up from our mesmerized state and demand change. The corporatists now have the docile populace they have long dreamed of having. No more mass movements challenging their supremacy in this part of the world, right?? Let the rich continue to get ever more obscenely rich, dropping crumbs to the masses as they laugh all they way to the bank, and continue letting yourself be bought off by the modern version of bread and circuses. The last big mass movements here in the 60's and 70's and the anti-nuclear movement in the 80's scared the corrupt establishment to its boots, but now it seems that we have fallen into a deep sleep. Let's see if Michael Moore's film can "Sicko" can stir us awake again.

jerrys, you talk of reclaiming the airwaves, which of course we must do, but you don't say how to do that. I have spent decades doing the protests, petitions, "working within the system" thing, but getting nowhere except worse. So what's your game plan? More of the same? Time for a new approach unless you have a better idea. Do you?

kivals, I like your related note. On that topic, we are also the only country in the world where exit polls are wrong. And people swallow that story without a gulp. Denial's a wonderful thing.

Thanks Evelyn Smith for your support. No, I'm not giving up (I'm a she). But I am fighting an urge to get a passport and open a Swiss bank account. But I am getting frightened. I don't want to end up in a prison camp. This present administration is evil, and I've never used that word before, but I've never run into a Dick Cheney before either. He claims executive privilege to withhold information, and then claims he's not part of the executive to withhold information. Talk about insanity.

jerrys, just read your new post. Why do you keep misrepresenting my posts? I never said I've stopped talking to my representatives, I just said it's not working. I never said I've given up on reclaiming the airwaves, I said I believe the only way to do it is to become citizen legislators. Our two party system is making sure it stays that way (remember the 2000 debates when they locked Nader out even though 70% of Americans wanted to hear him?) and the DLC is doing everything short of assassinating progressives to keep them off the ballot, and the corporations don't particularly care who wins, they win every time anyway. Sure they prefer Republicans, but they'll settle for Democrats. Why not. its clear the Democrats will listen to them before they will listen to the voters. All these wonderful progressives you named are preaching to the choir. No one else is listening to them, they don't even know who they are. But the American mass is uneasy, they know something is wrong, and when I talk with people who have never heard of Dennis Kucinich, they like the idea of becoming citizen legislators.

So again, what's your great idea for taking back the airwaves? Exactly what is this process you refer to without spelling it out? I'm waiting. And hoping it's not just calling your congressperson.

And just what is you hostility toward becoming citizen legislators?

kathyodat-

just as you have a website movement..so do others. and i trust moyers, goodman, and mcchesney more than i trust your website.....is that a problem?

they suggest working within the constitutional framework. is that a problem?

and if it is......short of armed revolution, what do you do....just follow "yourwebsitedreams.com"?

take the baby steps first.....we're all anxious to get our democracy back......and the first step is to regain our voices and lower the shouts from the right wing echo chamber (public airwaves)

kathyodat:

"get a clue" and "get to work" were your prefacing and closing statements........

i simply asked people to contact their representatives because the issue of the "fairness doctrine" is being promoted and discussed NOW!!!

your previously stated pompous demands, however you justify them, are myopic at best.

i know my senator. i've been in his office. i know my governor.....he's asked for my input.....i converse with my major newspaper editors periodically on a first name basis.....but apparently you know these people and you know they don't listen

enough said

jerrys, this is not "my" website, and it's within the Constitutional framework. Mike Gravel developed the initiative, based on what was written into the Constitution. The founders of our Constitution foresaw and feared the power of the corporations taking over our democracy and provided a way for us to become citizen legislators if that happened. Well it has and we need to take action. Now people can take their own action any way they want. Everything we've been doing hasn't been working and the legislature has become unresponsive to the citizenry, they're too busy running to K street. The three branches of government have sold out to the corporations. and the fourth estate has become a fifth column, fallen under the control of the corporations. Reporters can lie or lose their jobs. This psychotic administration is establishing gulags and inquisitions and private armies (trained in urban warefare in Iraq), and Americans will be next in line. Bush has declared the right to declare martial law whenever he chooses. I consider the situation to be getting pretty desperate. The majority of Americans are clueless although not happy with the "direction we are headed".

Do you think we can just nicely ask Congress to give us back the airwaves? They've caved in to the corporations on every issue.

jerrys:

It's great that you talk to your reps. like corporate money does. I wonder who they'll listen to?

jerrys, excuse me, but what are my pompous demands? And how are they myopic? It's nice that you are on a first name basis with your senator and governor (who asks your advice) and your newspaper editors. I also talk with my newspaper editors, who are polite, but go on doing what they want; I try to communicate with my senators and representatives, who don't respond (I must not be as well connected as you are). How come with all this influence you wield, nothing is changing? I find I don't seem to have any influence with these people, so I'm trying something else. But please, go on advising your governor.

I never said to stop contacting our representatives, I just said I believe we need to do more. I don't know what state you live in but in my state they aren't listening to us, and less than 70 out of 435 Representatives have signed on to HR 676, and we still can't stop giving Bush whatever he wants to keep on murdering Iraqis until they agree to privatizing their oil.

kathyodat:

get a clue is a demand

get to work is a demand

to tell me my voice isn't heard is pompous.....you don't know me.

ALL TOOLS should be used......

they stole our country a small piece at a time and we'll only regain it the same way......

i've already suggested the redefinition of corporations and of speech and work online with many organizations to fulfill those objectives. I ALSO TALK TO MY REPS!!!

so get off your "onlysolutionwebsite.com" and you get to work and get a clue

jerrys & kathyodat, i think you are a husband & wife team having a spat on C-D on your separate computers in separate parts of the same house. CALM DOWN.

if calling your reps does something, why not call up the decider guy at the white house? why wouldn't that work? 202-456-1111

Dedicated to Howard Kurtz and all the insurance company dinosaurs and their paid retainers in legislatures everywhere:

The Rimes They are a Changin'
Bob Dylan

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Jerrys and Kathyodat: You need a referee, I'll take that post. (Jerrys ___ you lost.)

You did not make a lick of sense and have made a fool of yourself and showed it to everyone who read the blogs. I and everyone else who has read them in our neighborhood percieves that Kathyudot IS grown up and does make a lot of sense. Take a cold shower and then take your own advice and stop acting and whining like a spoiled brat.

We mostly are all attempting to learn from one another, share ideas and support and you are not in the game. Your self centered egotism is preventing you from playing.

Kathyodat, just consider the source and let it go. Cheers everyone.

Maybe someday we will have discussions of significant issues on television, but by the time that happens, the 2008 election will be long forgotten. Until we have such, we will continue to have our noses rubbed in the latest sad murder, the most recent SUV crashes, the current celebrity criminal, and so on . . . . Television is an even worse wasteland than it was in the 1950s. Reliable sources, indeed.

Single-payer is not "government-run" health care. To say so is to repeat right-wing propaganda. Like Medicare, patients (not "consumers") would be free to visit any physician, including specialists, to use any clinic or hospital or pharmacist. Right now, if you think about it, the insurance industry makes all those decisions for most Americans. At least 2 million of their employees are "denial specialists" who try to increase profits by refusing claims. Universal single-payer would get rid of reasons like "pre-existing condition" as excuses not to pay. If you're sick, you're sick.

Read HR 676, the Conyers bill supported by Kucinich and almost 80 others. One important detail is its 10-year phase-in to avoid delivering an economic shock to the insurance industry that changing the system overnight would cause.

All the Massachusetts-like plans and the Obama/Edwards/Clinton plans so far seek to provide coverage for all WITHOUT ADDRESSING THE REAL PROBLEM: Health care is a human right, not a commodity. We will not have a good system until we recognize that.

(See Representative Betty McCollum's proposal that we amend the Constitution by declaring health care a basic human right. She gets it.)

Thank you Jedediah and Evelyn Smith. You're both right (although fortunately jerrys and I don't know each other), and I do have to say that jerrys calling "get to work" a demand isn't unreasonable. I'm not in a position to make demands of anyone but myself.

This forum is best used to discuss and find solutions for the horrendous problems we're facing and support each other.

Bernice, you make great points. Especially that we are spending our healthcare dollars on 2 million denial specialists. That should be an ad focus. If we could find a venue that would let us say it out loud.

Howard Kurtz is just another two bit whore on the corporate gravy train. The problem with health care in this country is that the insurance companies - which deal exclusively in cash - are a huge slush fund for Wall Street. To transfer to a single payer (government) system would cause the stock market to collapse.

Next up: Glen Beck reveals that liberals hate capitalism so much, they want to give free healthcare to aborted gay stem cell terrorists. But first, the Supreme Court finally rules that corporations maintain the right to free speech, but students do not, even if they're off school grounds. Take that you Libby-haters!

Bernice wrote:

"Single-payer is not "government-run" health care. To say so is to repeat right-wing propaganda."

This is absolutely correct. However, I would add that it's also incorrect to say that there are any truly private players in the US health care non-system. Quite apart from Medicare and Medicaid and the VA and various other obviously government-funded entities, medical education, research, infrastructure grants and much more are funded primarily or substantially, directly or indirectly, by every American who pays taxes. Which makes it all the more scandalous that access is restricted by insurance companies whose only function is to keep people who can't afford an extortionist surcharge that doesn't enhance care one bit from realising any return on their investment at all.

Citizen legislators is a good idea. For example, healthcare industry workers whos labor is currently misallocated by capitalists toward redundant, wasteful tasks should be assigned as citizen legislators to control the allocation of their own labor toward tasks that are truly beneficial to the society.

Evelyn Smith--thanks for providing some adult supervision--by the way your own thoughts are also interesting on a wide variety of issues.

Well Poet, I'll graciously accept that compliment from one whom I respect. I just happen to enjoy your opinions also, you have helped me to think, as have many others here at Common Dreams.

My pet peeve is our military use of enriched uranium in weaponry. I wish everyone would get on a website and ask for "depleted uranium". It is the most serious problem humanity is presently facing. Even worse than global warming and or Cheeney and Bush. Really!

Thank you again and have as much enjoyment in your life as possible.
Take Care, Kem Patrick, alias Evelyn Smith

"After all, if CNN can devote an hour this Wednesday evening to Larry King's interview with Paris Hilton, shouldn't it be able to give over a few minutes to coverage of single-payer healthcare? After all, according to a March New York Times poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans believe government should guarantee healthcare to every American,"

Beyond the rudimentary acedemic skills of readin',writin','rithmetic all children who plan to be civicly-minded , civicly-active and thinking American citizens should be required in every grade to master the skills of connecting-the-dots.

If the same two-thirds of Americans who believe government should guarantee healthcare to every American,boycotted CNN's Larry/Paris fluff then and only then would Larry invite Dennis Kucinich to talk about socialized healthcare.

IF AMERICANS WANTED TO,they could squash MSM like a bug.It appears that they can't seem to connect-the-dots but they sure can whine to the pollsters.

yeah well thanks poet for the dylan post..
'n like its 64
'n i'm on bended knees
scrubbing tile with
such a pretty nice
old tooth brush
to
if possible
please the man
'n a voice says
heard of dylan
or bias

long journey

was gonna ask
who is Howard Kurtz
think well
does not matter

thanks
ken

When you absolutely have to go to the internet to find real news, then we know our msn is helping the corporate world take our democracy from us. We the people must pay attention and vote for someone who has the guts to do the right thing for THE PEOPLE. VOTE KUCINICH