I have basic cable. If I had money, I would still have basic cable. It is on as background 'music' most of the time. A lot of people at Café just say to hell with TV all together. Of course, they cheat and pick up news and a drama once in awhile on the net. So it is not like they are purists or anything.

On basic cable the menu includes the same entrees day after day, month after month. Oh there are specials of course. The last three months for instance, one could watch the Matrix series every single week at least a couple of times; or the Bourne series.  Soon 10 hours of the Ring will be on again.

There are basically three or four new movies or at least dramas on regular cable in a month. And of course there is CSPAN along with what passes for 24hour news--which usually amounts to an hour of news news a day.

This is Sunday of course, so there are the four Meet the Presses on the air; about five hours (less an hour and a half of insurance/brokerage advertisements) if you include a rerun of Matthews' show and the half hour with the ancient one on CBS.

Today they had one hell of a panel on Shrekendopoloous. Bawbawa Wawa hosted, which made it more comedic than usual. The panel was composed of Arianna in a Huffington, Paul Krugman, George the Federal Papers Will and...it is hard to relive this...Roger Ailes.

I turned it off at the point where monstrous Ailes in his ten thousand dollar suit said:

There are three hundred million people in this country who are extremely happy with their health insurance coverage and about thirty million who are having some troubles with theirs. Now if you are a businessman and you are reviewing your accounts and only ten percent of..........

This was after he had remarked that Glenn Beck was more civil than the bloggers on Arianna's site.

Well, that was all I could take this morning. I mean I am a little short on tobacco till tomorrow morning and I find myself a little short on temper. Besides, I made a vow that I would only clean coffee off of my TV screen once a day. It is important to keep one's vows.

So I surf the cable and find AS GOOD AS IT GETS.  I love this movie and it looks like I will be able to tune it in ten or twenty times over the next two months.

There are a number of facets to this drama. I mean there is Jack Nicholson in a reprise of his role as The Joker in Batman.

The plot behind it all involves health care in this country; the human side to health insurance; the pain, the anguish of the people who become subject to a need for catastrophic health care through no fault of themselves.

Hunt plays a single mother who lives in Brooklyn and travels to Manhattan in order to wait on tables; she lives with her mums who helps with parenting of the small boy and rent of their apartment. And with the help of mumsy and the tips she receives in Manhattan, Helen has found a way to survive.

Her son has asthma and four or five times a month he cannot breathe properly and he has to be rushed to the ER for ad hoc treatment.  His mom has inadequate health insurance or no health insurance and the ER is the only place she can take the boy.  These asthma attacks are near death experiences for Helen and she has become seriously neurotic. 

Shirley Knight plays the mother and is just wonderful in that role. Just a gem.

Jack plays an obsessive/compulsive writer who does not really like people. Kind of like me. He goes OUT THERE; into the real world outside of his comfortable apartment, once a day to have brunch. He has to go to the same bistro and sit at the same table or THINGS ARE JUST NOT RIGHT. And he must be served by the same waitress--Helen.

So when Helen is not there, Jack cannot eat and he is upset because THE WORLD IS NOT WORKING CORRECTLY. So he does some investigation and finds out about the asthmatic son and prevails upon his publisher to send her husband the doctor to visit Helen's abode and get the boy on a regimen that prevents these near death experiences.

Now down the hall from his apartment is a gay artist whom Jack despises. Jack has to make homo jokes whenever he sees Greg Kinnear with his latest flame. And Jack hates the gay caballero's dog.

Greg ends up being mugged and badly beaten to the point where he ends up in the hospital looking like an extra in Young Frankenstein. He is so badly broken that he is hospitalized for weeks. When he is released he has to maneuver in a wheel chair. He cannot work and he is billed some sixty thousand dollars by the hospital.  He faces the loss of his apartment. He loses his clientele. All appears lost.

There is the issue of Greg's dog. There is the continual issue concerning Jack's inability to cope with other human beings. There is the continual issue of Helen's emotional inability to accept help and comfort from 'the enemy' which is any man who takes notice of her.  There is the multitude of issues surrounding the complete breakdown of Greg's life.

For some reason I cry a little every time I see this film. It is wonderful. It is sweet. It is everything I usually despise about a film.

The film ends kind of like Michael.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqtAkvVCI-8&feature=related

Ailes and Fox and other conservatives pull this crap all the time you know. They will report that there are ONLY 30 million people without health insurance. I have also heard some repubs lie like this. Of course if you are going to ignore 30 million people, why not ignore 47 million. I mean what the fuck is the difference anyway?

But there are other considerations here.  Let us assume 320 million people as a figure for our population. Assume 47 million of those people are without health insurance.

Does that mean that 273 million people are fully insured and content with the coverage they have?

I found this little tidbit from 2004 in something called The Medical News:

New data indicate 36 million Americans do not have access to health practitioners and therefore do not receive adequate health care, regardless of the fact that many are insured or are eligible for Medicare or Medicaid.

While most reports on health care focus on the 43 million Americans who are uninsured, a new report by the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) found that approximately 12 percent of the nations population, or one person out of every eight, are medically unserved and simply do not have access to basic care.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/2004/03/29/185.aspx

Now the uninsured have increased over six years and I am sure those with wholly inadequate coverage has increased. This still is not the entire story. But even six years ago there were 80 million people who did not have access to basic health care. 

I think we have to add at least another 40 or 50 million people to this total because of things like affordability, co-pays and other factors related to health care. 

We simply cannot let repubs get away with minimalization the way they seem to get away with it every goddamnable day on MSM. Do you know that even Arianna the Huff let Ailes get away with this lie while Bawbwa just changed subjects?

That is what a good repub does. He hides two or ten lies within one lie. He thinks about it, he throws the lie out there and then he walks away.

What Ailes is saying is that we as a country cannot help every Tom, Dick & Harry with all their problems.  ARE THERE NOT ENOUGH WORK HOUSES, ARE THERE NOT ENOUGH PRISONS, AND ARE THERE NOT ENOUGH ER's?

Make the people feel better about the pain and suffering of other folks. Make the people feel better about themselves.

Well these are tough times and we can only do what we can do and still keep the country afloat during bad times.

See. A monkey could see the aim and purpose of this propaganda.

Of course, you must be suppliant. I mean you must be open to such an excuse.

It is like that quote from Sessions I cited yesterday. Well if you have a good judicial system, some people will fall through the cracks. Innocent people will be imprisoned unfairly sometimes. People are wrongly executed. That's life. Get used to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIiUqfxFttM

Forget the fact that only Stalin had more people imprisoned than we do now until Kruschev came along and changed all that.  And of course, just keep passing more laws to put more and more poor people in prison. And state it proudly with élan that you intend to keep producing more and more of this type of legislation. Kind of like John C. Calhoun orating proudly about his being a slave owner like his other cohorts in the Senate.

There are not 273 Million Americans who are happy with their Medical Insurance. This is the greatest lie of all. 

The repubs want you to worry about losing your job and thus losing your insurance coverage. The more fear the work force has, the more that work force will be compliant with the demands of their employers and the higher the workers' production rate.

It is that simple for repubs.

There are probably 150 million people in this country without adequate health care and health care insurance. Members of this segment of our population would be devastated, financially, from any catastrophic illness or injury. The co-pays alone are too much to bear for the worker who suffers from any of a number of maladies including diabetes and allergies.  And as so many studies and articles and television presentations have demonstrated; the problem is getting worse. The cost has doubled in eight years and will double within the next decade.

But Ailes and Sessions and Boehner and McConnell and Cornyn and a host of other repubs will continue to use Ailes talking points with regard to health care in this country.

So tell me. What have the repubs to offer with regard to health care reform in this country?

And every time you become angry at the dems for arguing too fiercely while they work to get something on the President' signing table, just remember that the devil is just looking on and laughing in his ten thousand dollar suit.