Gravel: Bush should be jailed, all drugs legalized

Gravel: Bush should be jailed, all drugs legalized

RAW STORY Published: Wednesday May 16, 2007
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Former Sen. Mike Gravel, the longshot presidential candidate who has generated buzz in the liberal blogosphere following a dramatic and heated performance during the first Democratic presidential debate, reaffirmed his belief that President Bush should be jailed for going to war in Iraq and that all drugs should be legalized during an interview with the Iowa Independent blog.

Responding to why he seemed to display anger at the debate, Gravel asserted it was the growing casualty list in Iraq that fueled his passion.

"How would you feel if you were over there (Iraq) getting shot at, getting crippled, because your leaders didn’t exercise proper judgment?" said Gravel. "What about the people who are going to die between now and Christmas because we don’t end the war? That's a reason to get angry."

Gravel went on to reaffirm his support for his signature campaign issue, a national initiative process, as well his support for a national sales tax, a traditionally conservative position.

When asked whether he believed marijuana should be available next to beer in liquor stores, Gravel replied, "Go get yourself a fifth of scotch or a fifth of gin and chug-a-lug it down and you'll find you lose your senses a lot faster than you would smoking some marijuana."

He asserted that all drugs should legalized and regulated. "The drug problem is a public health problem. It's not a criminal problem. We make it a criminal problem because we treat people like criminals."

Gravel continued, "You take a drug addict, you throw him in jail, you leave him there, and he learns the criminal trade so that when he gets out you have recidivism."

When pressed on his earlier statement that President Bush should be jailed for his manipulation of pre-war information, Gravel reaffirmed that belief.

"If you had an FBI agent knock at your door today and you lie to that agent, you commit a felony and you go to jail," Gravel said.

"If that's the way it is for ordinary citizens, what about the president of the United States who lies to the American people, fraudulently sells them on a war that 50 million Americans don't want and over 3,000 Americans get killed as a result of that, and thousands and thousands of Iraqis gets killed... do you not think that's a felony? It's criminal."

LINK TO FULL INTERVIEW

The "SICKO" Man Bush

HEALTHCARE & THE WAR ARE "SICKO"

HEALTHCARE & THE WAR ARE “SiCKO”

Did you know?

One fourth of the Iraq war budget alone could fund healthcare for every uninsured person in this country.

Think what the trillions of dollars wasted on war, occupation and destruction could do for the people:

• Provide free medicine for all of our seniors and chronically ill.

• Change the dismal statistics of infant mortality in major cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Washington D.C. where the mortality rates for African American and poor children rival impoverished countries abroad;

• Stop the epidemic of hospital closings;

• It could provide healthcare and treatment for the physical and psychological trauma that the survivors of Katrina and Rita are still suffering from;

• Make healthcare for low wage workers and immigrant families a priority.

While the war is bleeding us at home it is miniscule in comparison to the bloodshed, misery and pain that is being inflicted on the Iraqi people. The Lancet medical journal documented that 655,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed during the war (Oct, 2006). The health of the Iraqi people and the entire region has been destroyed. Solidarity demands that we act now to stop the war, end the occupation and bring the troops home now!

GET INVOLVED:

1) Endorse

2) Become a volunteer organizer

3) Donate

4) Download "Healthcare and the War are Sicko" leaflets at: http://troopsoutnow.org/HWN.pdf - and get them out to your school, workplace, hospital, union hall, etc.

Become a volunteer organizer - sign up online or call or write us at:

Campaign for Healthcare, Not Warfare,
c/o TONC,
55 W. 17th St. 5C,
New York, NY 10011
212-633-6646.

Plea for Help from 9/11 Rescue Workers to Rudolph Giuliani Went Unanswered !!!

jbcard's Xanga Site

Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Plea for Help from 9/11 Rescue Workers to Rudolph Giuliani Went Unanswered

[The following letter was e-mailed to Rudolph Giuliani on May 29th, 2007 by September 11th rescue workers left to fend for themselves after suffering illnesses caused by their work at ground zero in the days after the attacks. They never received a response.]

May 29, 2007

Dear Mr. Giuliani,

As you know, tens of thousands of New Yorkers like ourselves came together on September 11 to help search for survivors, rescue victims, and begin to clean-up after the attacks on our great city. Many of those first responders including James Zadroga, Cesar Borja, and Debbie Reeve developed debilitating health problems after breathing the toxic dust from the collapsed World Trade Center towers. Thousands of 9/11 responders, whose heroic efforts helped our city and country get back on its feet quickly, have attempted to get much-needed medical attention to help recover from their illnesses. For six years, we have pleaded with the Federal government for help, but have received nothing, but even worse, we haven't received straight answers from our own government.

Mr. Giuliani, in your speech at a Hoover Institution meeting in Washington, D.C. on February 26, 2007, you stated that you have never heard anyone tell you that they want to leave the country to get care because the U.S. has the "best healthcare system in the world." The two of us, along with our friend and 9/11 responder, John Graham, actually did leave the country to receive free healthcare that we couldn't get here in the United States.

For the last several weeks, we have been publicly attacked by your Republican party for traveling with filmmaker Michael Moore to Cuba, where we received free healthcare from doctors. Michael Moore, who took us to Cuba for his new documentary on the U.S. healthcare system called “SiCKO,” is now being investigated by the Bush Administration for taking us to Cuba, a trip we decided to take only after the U.S. government and healthcare system failed for the last six years to provide the support for medical treatment we needed. Our health needs have been ignored and forgotten by the very government that celebrated our sacrifice in the days after that tragedy. And now, the Bush Administration and other conservatives seem more interested in investigating our trip to Cuba than in helping us get the health care we deserve.

Mr. Giuliani, the key message you continue to convey to the American people in your run for the Republican nomination for President is your leadership on September 11. You talk about what it was like to be making critical decisions on September 11. There is no doubt that you were on the ground and witnessed the heroic work of the first responders that day. If there is anyone who should know and understand what the 9/11 responders are going through, it is you. Given the fact that you are running for President, we would like to meet with you to discuss what your plans are for helping the health care needs of 9/11 responders if you become President. We want to share our experiences with you so that if elected, you will understand why many Americans are leaving the country to get healthcare elsewhere because they cannot get it here.

Just last week, the city of New York agreed to include on the official list of September 11 victims a woman who died as a result of dust from the twin towers' collapse. We have watched our friends suffer and die from medical conditions as a direct result of working on Ground Zero. We have health conditions that have cost us employment and put us in very difficult financial situations. Our lives have been changed forever. Our government likes to talk about the fact that we are heroes, yet we continue to be ignored. We deserve the opportunity to sit down with you, someone who watched thousands of first responders in action after September 11, to discuss the issues thousands of us are facing today. Show us that our voices will not be ignored if you are elected President.

Sincerely,

Reggie Cervantes
Bill Maher

White House preparing to stage new September 11 !!!

White House preparing to stage new September 11 - Reagan official

13:58 | 20/ 07/ 2007

WASHINGTON, July 20 (RIA Novosti) - A former Reagan official has issued a public warning that the Bush administration is preparing to orchestrate a staged terrorist attack in the United States, transform the country into a dictatorship and launch a war with Iran within a year.

Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, blasted Thursday a new Executive Order, released July 17, allowing the White House to seize the assets of anyone who interferes with its Iraq policies and giving the government expanded police powers to exercise control in the country.

Roberts, who spoke on the Thom Hartmann radio program, said: "When Bush exercises this authority [under the new Executive Order], there's no check to it. So it really is a form of total, absolute, one-man rule."

"The American people don't really understand the danger that they face," Roberts said, adding that the so-called neoconservatives intended to use a renewal of the fight against terrorism to rally the American people around the fading Republican Party.

Old-line Republicans like Roberts have become increasingly disenchanted with the neoconservative politics of the Bush administration, which they see as a betrayal of fundamental conservative values.

According to a July 9-11 survey by Ipsos, an international public opinion research company, President Bush and the Republicans can claim a mere 31 percent approval rating for their handling of the Iraq war and 38 percent for their foreign policy in general, including terrorism.

"The administration figures themselves and prominent Republican propagandists ... are preparing us for another 9/11 event or series of events," he said. "You have to count on the fact that if al Qaeda is not going to do it, it is going to be orchestrated."

Roberts suggested that in the absence of a massive popular outcry, only the federal bureaucracy and perhaps the military could put constraints on Bush's current drive for a fully-fledged dictatorship.

"They may have had enough. They may not go along with it," he said.

The radio interview was a follow-up to Robert's latest column, in which he warned that "unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the U.S. could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran."

Roberts, who has been dubbed the "Father of Reaganomics" and has recently gained popularity for his strong opposition to the Bush administration and the Iraq War, regularly contributes articles to Creators Syndicate, an independent distributor of comic strips and syndicated columns for daily newspapers.

Throw the HMO's overboard!!!

jbcard's Xanga Site

une 29th, 2007 11:25 pm

A fiercely effective call to arms

By Amy Biancolli / Houston Chronicle

Judging by its title, Sicko might be mistaken for a slasher flick, and the assumption is not far off the mark. Not because of violence. Not because of gore. But because it is, in some ways, a horror film.

Among its victims:

Rick, who sawed off two fingertips but could only afford to reattach one — for $12,000. Carole, who couldn't pay her hospital bills and was dumped at a homeless shelter in her flapping white gown. Tracy, who was denied coverage for a bone-marrow transplant and died, weeks later, of kidney cancer.

Michael Moore's latest documentary-as-soapbox-vituperation is a damning, touching, darkly comical exposé on the United States health-care system. It is also a deeply impassioned appeal for change. Moore haters like to dismiss the man as a whack job and a lying partisan crank, but he's really an idealist.

Look past the omnipresent ball cap and slumping gait, and you'll find a patriot — a true believer in the American dream. When he says, "We live in a world of 'We,' not 'Me,' " he's not being the least bit campy. He has, for a moment, no sense of irony whatsoever. He believes this stuff.

As he did to the American gun culture in Bowling for Columbine and the Bush administration in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore uses Sicko to assail the insurance industry and pharmaceutical companies and the politicians who accept their contributions. Bush gets slapped around some, but so do Hillary Rodham Clinton — once reviled by the industry for trying to establish universal health care — and former Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin, who pushed for the Medicare prescription bill before leaving to head the drug-company trade group PhRMA.

As usual, Moore assembles his argument from poignant anecdotes and factoid-driven diatribes that use graphics, music and archival material to make his point. Just listen to that fuzzy audio of Nixon and Ehrlichman discussing Kaiser Permanente. But we also get lots of winking video footage (I especially liked the old Soviet agitprop) and choice music clips that run from the Khachaturian Saber Dance to a French rendition of Feelin' Groovy.

With Sicko, Moore himself doesn't pop on-screen until some 40 minutes in, a shrewd move for a filmmaker who understands his role as cultural irritant. People who hate him might continue to hate him. They might call Sicko an overly theatrical, sucker-punching screed that paints France as paradise, Canadians as smiling (but we knew that), Britain as maddeningly reasonable and Cuba as a cure for what ails us.

But it's a fiercely effective call to arms — a film that persuades and shames and chills. And he asks why a group of ill 9/11 emergency workers, volunteers not on the New York City payroll, couldn't find affordable health care until he took them to Havana.

You could dismiss it as a stunt, this trip to Cuba. You could point out the country's problems or the movie's cherry-picked health statistics. But nothing so illustrates Moore's rumpled brand of optimism as those few minutes near the end of Sicko when Cuban firefighters stand at attention to honor their ailing American brethren. It's as uplifting and heart-rending a thing as you will see at the movies all year. And it speaks of Moore's enduring faith — his angry, nettled, exasperated belief that "despite all our differences, we sink or swim together."

Blue Cross/Blue Shield is no good !!!

As seen in Michael Moore's SICKO, that the insurance companies who run the American Heathcare system must be eliminated from the system. My experience with Blue Cross/Blue Shield is terrible too.

I saw my doc two weeks ago about fungus in my foot and hand. My doctor prescribed a medicine to kill the "fungus" (medicine cost $10 a pill). My doc asked Blue Cross/Blue Shield for approval and they denied.

Blue Shield said that only if the fungus was causing my finger not to function properly !!!

This practice in America has to stop. The insurance companies must be eliminated from approving/denying the doctor's prescription.

Cut the middle-man (Insurance Companies) in the Healthcare Sector.

"Healthcare is not for profit".

The Republicans are responsible for this HMO practice (Nixon).