If any of the following were in the Bible, I might just believe...

  

Fundamentalists allege that the Bible represents the "inerrant word of God" as Jerry Falwell among others put it: 

 The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.

The god described in this inerrant text is omniscient, meaning all-knowing, not just of things that were but of things that will be.  As our understanding of the universe's creation unfolds, Genesis, the bible's creation stories (there are actually two mutually exclusive ones in the same text) appear not just inerrant, but wildly off the mark.  Claiming our planet is only a few thousand years old is as big an error as claiming Los Angeles is only 17 feet from New York City, for example. 

Thanks to the poetic nature of the bible, it is sometimes possible for fundamentalists to wriggle out of embarrassing omissions.   The absence of dinosaurs, for example, can be explained by a single reference to "giants" roaming the land, never mind that this interpretation would incorrectly make dinosaurs coexist with us rather than precede us by hundreds of millions of years.  

Trying to force this deeply superstitious, misogynistic, scientifically- and geographically-challenged text to fit unfolding reality is increasingly difficult.   This even side-steps why this book of all possible holy books was chosen (have fundamentalist Christians read the Rig Veda - in English or Sanskrit - considered holy to 900 million Hindus, for example, before rejecting it?).

Since it has become almost unsportsmanlike to continue to point out the gaping logical and scientific lapses in the bible, a work clearly not ready for prime time (or our time at least), why not instead work backwards?  Using the same poetic license of the bible's authors and editors, imagine what a truly omniscient god might have told his scribes to scribble, particularly if he really wanted to wow them.  

Mention of any of these natural wonders in a book meant to explain all things would have attracted converts and settled pointless internecine bloodshed and persecution.  Yahweh speaks frequently and often of other, competing gods of whom he is jealous, indicating he was not so much denying their existence as competing with them.  

So why would he not not mention quarks or protons or anti-matter, or the incredible depth of time?  Why did he not let people know how small they were relative to their own planet, the population of cultures of which they were completely ignorant, to Jupiter, to the sun, or to their own galaxy, not to mention their expanding universe?   Wouldn't this humble them more than telling an elaborate story of a great flood, a story that would make no sense to anyone who understands that 90% of biomass lives in water?  

Had someone been able to foresee quantum mechanics, nuclear fusion, and evolution thousands of years before these things were understood, THAT would be impressive, even miraculous.  It might have even settled the question of the existence of god.  

And so ... were something like this in the Bible, I might just believe: 

And in that time there appeared among them a great teacher who traveled from the east and spoke in a strange manner of an advanced civilization that had invented paper, the compass, and ships many times larger than Noah's ark. 
This teacher spoke of a vision he had of a time to come that was even more amazing than this Kingdom of which he spoke, which he called the Middle Kingdom, but all suspected to be fantastic, since everyone then knew the World to only be as large as the One Great Empire of Rome which occupied the land inhabited by the monotheists who believed in One Great God they called Yahweh but who seemed powerless to help them against the Romans of many gods who regularly suppressed their uprisings with great bloodshed and many crucifixions. Yet the people were still restive and wanted the Romans to leave so they could go back to their ways, but this man spoke of a land even better than the land of milk and honey the One Great God had promised to Abraham. The teacher's vision caused multitudes to leave their tent to hear him, but this worried the religious elders greatly who gathered to ask what should be done with this Gentile from the East. A decision was made but before they could act, the great teacher gathered together his students and told them this story that was passed secretly by one who was there:
In the beginning there was a tremendous concentration of matter, of everything that now exists and much, much more. In a fraction of a fraction of a second everything expanded across an unimaginable expanse met with anti-matter and 99% of it was destroyed immediately. What was left expanded, stabilized, and electrons found protons and the first hydrogen atoms began to coalesce. Hydrogen gas collected under incredible pressure over vast periods of time and heated to a degree where the repulsion of the positively charged nuclei was overcome and a great unleashing of energy created entirely new matter. The light that reaches our face from the morning sun is nothing more or less wonderful than the energy emitted from this process, carried to us across a distance so vast it takes several minutes to reach us. We see and feel the sun not as it is but as it was several minutes ago. Wrap your minds around that.
And while you do, consider that our sun was not formed first; no my brothers and sisters, other stars collapsed, died, exploded, spewing the newly created heavy elements resulting from the fusion of all these nuclei that eventually ended up as the stuff that makes up our bodies and our world. For truly I say unto you that our bodies are made of star dust. We, my children, are what is left of that grand and mysterious process the evidence of which will be detected one day by future men and women (yes, I tell you my brothers, women will one day not be despised and shut in their tents and told to remain silent in the presence of their husbands - some will not even take husbands but live independent and happy lives, and will be able to time the number and frequency of their children) all these things will come to pass and so many more, for if I were powerless to predict these things, the things of men, how could I possibly be believed when I claim to speak of metaphysical things beyond the realm of men? 
But I do not speak of these things for I have no way of knowing them one way or another. I can only know what I can see and sense and this vision that came to me was as real as any. Are you not tired of the old, small, jealous gods, always plotting and scheming and fighting over a world that is so small? I bring you the universe entire, expanding and so much larger and vaster than we could ever imagine it. I bring you pulsars and quarks and neutrons and protons and strong and weak forces. Let me tell you about the universality of gravity, that elegant force that always and everywhere seems to obey certain laws that can be reduced to the simplest of variables - tell me, my brothers, the weight of an object and its distance from another object, and I can tell you its gravitational attraction to that other object. And all objects, even the tiniest mustard seed, imperceptibly exert this universal force. And let me tell you that anywhere you stand on this planet, if you drop a stone it will be accelerated toward the center of the earth at 9.8 meters per second-squared, terms that may mean nothing to you since until the French Revolution which is a great upheaval in the Roman territory now called Gaul, there was no such thing as the meter, developed to liberate ourselves from measuring things by the feet of kings, and until a man named Galileo who will live not far from the center of the great empire now occupying our land and oppressing our people, but long after this empire has collapsed - yes, this too shall come to pass - developed a water chronometer, there was no accurate way of measuring time, certainly not in small units. 
But if your scribes can tell you of lakes of fires and 700-year-old men and you take it on faith, can you not also open your minds to far more amazing ideas that happen to be true? It shall come to pass that this 9.8 meters per second-squared will be a constant gravitational force on the surface of the Earth, but that since mass and gravitational force are inversely proportional, the moon, which men will visit in great vessels propelled by fire and walk upon its surface, has only one-sixth the gravitational force of the Earth, so that those men can bounce upon it and lift heavy objects with ease. In space whose vastness and coldness will terrify future thinkers once it is understood, there is no gravity at all, and water floats in giant spheres as will your body when you travel there, as your greatest of great grandchildren someday will. 
Oh, there are so many wonders to share with you, wonders far more mind-expanding than the silly stories of floods and houseboats and women created from ribs. Let me tell you about evolution and the vast expanse of time, and of our kinship with all living creatures, even the lowly earthworm which, brothers and sisters shares 40% of our genetic code as we do. 
What is a genetic code? It is something even more amazing, a set of instructions handed down from parent to child, from generation to generation, present in every cell that has all of the information needed to make each of us. All of this information is stored in a pattern of 4 different chemicals, the order of which determines how every part of every cell is to be made, how much, and when it should be shut down or sped up.
Think of that, my children - each of you has half of your genes from your father and half from your mother - despite your persecution of women, they are as important to making you you as your fathers and your father's fathers. And in fact, all of us are conceived female but to become male a gene turns on which makes us insensitive to a chemical called testosterone and that tiny difference makes all the difference - all the wonderful and sensual differences - that distinguish men from women.
I call you my brothers and sisters and children even though I do not look exactly as you and my tongue stumbles on the sounds you use so freely because these differences are truly as of nothing. We are all brothers and sisters and share common ancestors who looked very little like us and might even consider as food if they met us today. But all tribes of Israel and all people everywhere belong to the same species and share almost all the same genes with very few differences, minor ones really, that make us appear to be a bit different than we really are. 
And did you know, my children, that you need not fear or be repulsed by your bodies and its excretions anymore than you should be repulsed by the husks remaining after the grain has been harvested? Did you know that men have seeds not unlike the pollen of plants and like plants, many more seeds will be cast than can ever fertilize the ovum of women, and many more conceptions will occur than will ever survive to term, and that many more babies will be born than can ever survive to have children themselves, but that a time will come when people will find ways to keep babies alive, almost all babies, not fewer than half as is now the case, their first year of life, and that they will develop technologies that will allow a man or woman at birth to expect to live and reproduce with a success rate we cannot even begin to imagine. Wo unto him today who has fewer than a dozen children or his name and his genetic material will not be passed onto the next generation. But once these wonders of the new age come to pass, clean running water that you can drink without sickening, pipes to carry your waste into a central place so it does not contaminate your drinking water, vaccines to make illnesses that have plagued us for eternity bad memories, and wondrous medicines that really work, for those with or without faith, because in those times to come men and women will understand that your immune system made up of countless white cells floating in your blood stream are what fight infection, and that many illnesses thought to be demonic possession now because they frighten us and we are powerless to do anything so we make up stories to explain what we do not know will be understood to be nothing more than chemical imbalances that a pill taken once or twice a day can cure or treat forever. 
No longer will those who hear voices telling them to murder their children be treated as prophets or allowed to carry out their plans. Instead, they will be treated with compassion and the voices will leave them and there will be peace in their families who will understand that diseases of the mind, like diseases of the kidney or the lungs, have nothing to do with the moral goodness or badness of the sufferer. Such knowledge may throw all religious experiences into question, especially by those who are doctors specializing in these illnesses and who see firsthand how the words of a sick man and the words of a charismatic would-be prophet are indistinguishable but both respond to treatment. 
Our entire sense of reality will be threatened by this new awareness that so much of what we see and seem is a function of chemical reactions, understandable and in many cases changeable for better or worse. Other scientific fields will challenge our sense of stability and fill us with humility. We will learn the age of the earth is not in the thousands of years but in the thousands of thousands of thousands of thousands of years. Most of the earth's history did not involve us because people did not evolve until the last fraction of a second of earth's hour. We are close relatives of the chimpanzee and slightly less close relatives of the gorilla. The chimpanzees have 99.8% of the same genes as we do, my brothers and sisters, and at this awareness, some men will cringe and like the fable of Adam and Even want to seek refuge in their ignorant innocence, but once these things are learned, they cannot be un-learned. 
There will be creatures discovered many, many times more massive than the greatest land animal, the elephant, living in the ocean right now, unknown to our scribes because they never bothered to travel to those great oceans. These enormous whales as they will be called (not the large fish in that silly story of Jonah) are mammals like us and actually dwelled on land for a time before deciding to return to the sea. But they did not evolve gills again so were forced to hold their breath under water and blow it out of a great hole in their heads when they surface. 
And did you know that all life began in water and that even today most life remains in water. If all living creatures were piled up and weighed, it will be discovered that over 9 parts of every 10 of that mass will live in the water. This will make that silly story of Noah and his house boat doubly absurd since a flood that threatens land creatures will be welcome to the 90% of life that has not evolved to live on land. 
I do not mean to shock you, my children, but look carefully at your bodies. Did you know that you are all of you farms, cultivating tiny forms of life that the men and women of future generations will call microbes? Some of these microbes make you ill, but most of them live in peace and are essential to digesting your food and eliminating your waste. You have more of these microbes than you have of cells. And each cell, remember, has a complete set of instructions to make you you. There will come a time where if a man struggles with another man or with a woman (for in those future times, women will be considered as people too, and slaves also, since slavery will be ended and all laborers paid for their wages and free to work for another master or not at all) and commits murder but no one witnesses the crime, did you know that people in that time will be able to use as little as a hair or a tiny piece of skin and find within it the set of genes that is unique to that one person (unless he has a monozygotic twin, but I digress)? The science of crime will surpass the science of the courts of that time, and juries will be swayed not to understand what this means, but many innocent men will be set free when it is clear that the hair or the skin or the blood at the scene of the great struggle was not theirs? One piece of hair!
Now look again at your hands and tell me if they are mostly space or of matter? I tell you this: most of the universe including most of you is empty space. Even the densest bone or rock or piece of metal is mostly space. The mass of everything is contained in the nucleus, which is as tiny relative to the electrons swirling around as the tiniest mouse is to the largest of our temples, but imagine if all the weight of the temple were in that mouse and the rest was empty space. Each atom is like this and your body is made up of billions and billions of atoms, all attracted to each other by a complex array of forces, but none actually touching. 
And as the Greeks once knew but our scribes have forgotten, we stand not on a plane but a sphere and we revolve about the sun once every 365 and a quarter days and our sun is but one of billions upon billions of other suns that appear to us as stars not because they are smaller - many aren't - but because they are so distant. Wow unto him among us who does not understand the incredible scale of forces not known no but one day to be tapped by scientists in a country on a continent our people do not know exists, forces that exist in the tiniest center of an atom, where protons and neutrons are clustered together and can be unleashed by splitting that atom and destroying a city and all of its women and children and oxen and cats and dogs, dropped from a machine made not of wood but of metal, a light metal alloy yet to be developed, powered not by a sail but by a series of tiny explosions of a purified liquid extracted from the fossil remains of great creatures that our scribes do not even know died hundreds of millions of years before our species appeared. Yes, I tell you that men will untap these forces then regret the terrible destruction they have wrought, because in those days to come people will not accept the divinity of total war, of genocide of entire peoples, the way King David at the Battle of Jericho commanded his men to slaughter not just all women, children, and babies, but all animals too. In those days to come there will be great and prodigious slaughter but there will also be a great outcry against that slaughter and this outcry will come loudest from those who do not follow our Yahweh or any god at all. Yes, I tell you, that this and so much more will unfold.
These modern people will speak of rights and war crimes and trials not of religious authorities or kings but of men and women - for in those days there will be judges like Judy - common men and women like them. Even kings can be tried for trying to violate a housemaid but even in that day, the king will be able to afford a much better attorney so may go free.
They will introduce words alien to our ear but well known to our Greek predecessors such as democracy and republics. They will give all of their citizens, not only men of noble birth, the right to vote, although not all will use that right. 
They will have amazing talking boxes that will transmit talking images of men and women talking 24 hours a day, not needing candles because electrons stripped from the nucleus of certain chemicals will give off an energy - created when an current of those electrons passes through a resistor - that causes a filament in a glass bulb to glow and turn night into day. These talking boxes will carry not just images of talking heads but also of ladies wrestling each other in enormous vats of mud and dogs balancing themselves on wheeled wood devices they will call Skateboards. This great talking box will amaze but also distract and even though children at that time can be amazed with the fact that a beam of electrons traveling at the speed of light is hurtling into space and then coming back down again to form those pictures, images, and sounds, they will find this less interesting than watching cats jumping into and out of a cesspool. 
There is so much more, my children, but I see that the religious authorities are coming now and do not like the commotion I have created with my teachings. They are asking if I have been given a permit to speak and if I am of the right sect and I have traveled so far I honestly can't remember who is considered the right sect here - have I passed from the land of the Pharisees or am I still in the land of the Samaritans? 
They are taking me away and perhaps will break my body on the rack or burn me alive as all are commanded to do who follow the jealous and angry Yahweh, but these visions I have of the future are true and I hope that one of you who has ears has heard and will write down the truth so that when false prophets come, theirs are not the only fables who are propagated through the ages. 
Think for yourself my children. If you hear my screams from the Temple basement, it is only the elders doing what they feel they must do to maintain order and keep women and Gentiles and all of you in their place. Forgive them for they know not what they do. But explore, be truthful, and follow the truth wherever it takes you. Many are called to this path of painful exploration, but few will follow. It is a lonely path and expect to be mocked and derided by those who have not studied and do not know. No one is blinder than he who will not see. I cannot lie and say I have seen a god I have not, but I can imagine a future without this god and it is a good and prosperous future, free from the petty superstitions and prejudices of our people, divided like all agrarian people into warring tribes and factions that hate each other more than they hate the Romans. 
But even the Romans are farther along the path than we are and do not fear scholarship and science as we have been taught to do. Yes, they have their augurs and their high priests but they also have so many gods they don't take any one of them too seriously and leave each other alone to make their own choice. 
Well, I must go now because I live in a time and place where we have no choice; our god is chosen for us by who our father happens to be and what piece of dirt we happen to be born on, but I tell you that in the time to come, the universality of all things will make the pettiness and silliness of our world view shrink to insignificance. 
Peace be with all of you. What need I fear if the world and the elders are against me as long as the truth is on my side?

You Cannot be Pro-Life but Oppose the Environmental Protection Agency

Tuesday September 6, 2011

Either President Obama is playing a much deeper game than I appreciate (always a possibility) or he has completely caved to the Republicans when he recently over-ruled the EPA. 

Let's face it:  the Far Right will never give President Obama credit for what he does, so he should stick to first principles.  Most Americans do not realize, for example, that President Obama in effect lowered taxes, by preventing the Bush tax cuts from expiring on schedule, and proposed a deeper set of budget-balancing cuts (with no new taxes) than the measure ultimately adopted.  He doesn't get  credit for playing nice with the schoolyard bullies who still call him a socialist, Muslim, Kenyan-born, black-power-advancing, government-growing, tax-and-spend liberal (not that those are all bad things, but the maddening thing is that none are true).  

President Obama is a milquetoast right of centrist who is drifting further to the right in an attempt to appease people who will never invite him to play their reindeer games.  He did not get the memo but the all-white Tea Party did not take to the streets 28 days into his administration mad, mad, mad and wanting to "take their country back" because of anything he did or proposed to do.  They are simply furious about who he is, a black man with a D after his name, even though the daylight between his policies and the white guy who handed him two wars, a recession, and a set of disastrous, budget-busting, non-economy-growing tax cuts on his way out of the White House is at times indistinguishable.  

Obama risks losing his base in a calculated move to pre-empt Texas commercials about all the Texas coal-burning plants that would have to close (or so they claim) to comply with stricter EPA rules they knew were coming but somehow never bothered to make the necessary changes.  As with the budget, it was a game of chicken and Obama blinked.  

The spectacle of a few thousand Texans unemployed, rolling blackouts (during record heat waves and out-of-control forest fires) is probably a gift Obama would rather not give to Perry and the Texas fossil fuel industry.   Rolling back the regulations' implementation until at least after the election was a wise move politically but a stunningly retro move environmentally.  The EPA estimated that the regulations due to go into effect in 2012 would have prevented 34,000 premature deaths a year.  As long as those bodies are not seen falling from towers in lower Manhattan, it's almost impossible to get a television-addicted American audience to be moved into action.   Why save a life when your power bill might go up a nickel a day, or you might be forced to turn your thermostat up 2 degrees in summer and down a couple in winter?  Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for suggesting such a thing a few decades ago.  He wasn't wrong, just early.  

I wish President Obama would get out ahead of these fossil fuel apologists and pre-empt their arguments.  He should be making any or all of the following points:

• The EPA is a pro-life agency.    Sensible regulations of the emissions of pollutants and carcinogens saves far more lives than futile attempts to prohibit abortion.  (Why futile? Consider the experience in Latin America where abortion rates are higher despite almost universal prohibition, and of Western Europe where rates are lower despite far fewer restrictions than in the United States.)  Put bluntly, you cannot be pro-life and anti-climate.
• Protecting the environment and energy independence are national security issues.   It makes no sense to send young men and women halfway across the world to protect our access to our energy drug of choice when we could enter a program of recovery and declare our energy independence both by decreasing demand and diversifying supply away from non-renewable sources. 
• Protection of the environment and sustainability are religious mandates.  Sustainability should resonate with evangelical Christians (as it is beginning to among some such as Jim Wallis), Obama should remind Americans of faith.  It is a strange and narrow belief system that respects only fetal life, but has such scant regard for the health and safety of post-natal life, or of life in rivers, streams, and oceans, god's creation (according to every major religion) toward which we must show responsible stewardship, not mercenary disdain.  Not a word in the Bible commands us only to do what is right if it does not threaten job creation, or asks us to balance the life of a child against another shekel of potential profit.  There is nothing wrong per se with making a materialistic argument, but let's not cloak it in Judeo-Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist clothing.   I cannot speak with authority for those adhering to  Baha'i, Jainism, Shinto, Cao Dai, Zoroastrianism, or any of a few thousand indigenous belief systems, but I do know that those of us who are the spiritual equivalent of independent voters find the utilitarian calculus life versus profits to be deeply troubling and morally offensive.  If human life really is sacred, then it cannot and should not be pitted against the marginal inconvenience of tuning down a thermostat or putting on a sweater.  
• Government should not be protecting one industry (fossil fuel corporations and their lobbyists) over another (millions of green jobs we can not even imagine yet).  When the government forces companies to pay the true cost of the air they pollute, then yes, all things being equal, the price of each unit of energy using fossil fuel technology will rise from where it had been when the companies were using our rivers, oceans, and atmosphere as a free dumping ground.   The fossil fuel industry, which last time I checked was plenty profitable, chooses to pass that cost onto consumers or to fire workers or close plants, so be it, but if their model is not economically viable once externalities are eliminated, then that is the free market talking.  They also have another option:  pay their top executives less or return less money to shareholders, or some combination of the above.  The fossil fuel industry is presenting us with a false dichotomy anyway, threatening massive job layoffs and rolling blackouts unless they can continue to use our resources without paying for them.  Many rice plantations in the South collapsed and the cultivation of cotton became less profitable after plantation owners were forced to pay their workers but this does not mean that the government should have refused to end slavery simply because the cost of this new regulation would have economic consequences.  Many candlestick-makers went out of business when the light bulb was invented but does this mean the government should have manipulated the market to protect the candlestick industry as the coal industry wants the government to do now (failing to price something like air or water that has definite value but cannot be efficiently priced without a referee in the game is just as manipulative as artificially increasing the price of something the government does not want you to buy, such as imported goods hit with tariffs or light bulbs slapped with fines).   I don't know what percentage of the economy should be oil, natural gas, coal, solar, wind power, geothermal, or pure research, but let the marketplace decide.  Ironically, the marketplace cannot decide if we continue to act as if water and air are free, in effect subsidizing the fossil fuel industry which gobbles up or pollutes these things over competition that does not.  
• Those who think we should not innovate, adapt, and grow are Luddites and defeatists. The status quo fossil fuel shills are convinced that America must fail where the Japanese, Europeans, and even the Chinese (finally) are making major breakthroughs.   Why do Republicans think Germans are so much smarter than Americans?  Why have they already declared defeat before even entering the arena?  The rest of the world is not waiting.  If we hesitate, they will eat our lunch. 

I hope President Obama can come out swinging.  Part of me is thinking he is getting all the ugly stuff out of the way early before his campaign really kicks off, but when he goes on the attack against those who have said so many untruths about him, I hope he can choose not just to engage but to frame the debate. 

Vermont's Single Payer System, Reflections on Massachusetts, and Examples of Government Success

Vermont's Single Payer System 
Some wonderful news (Single payer healthcare: Vermont's gentle revolution | Amy Goodman) out of Vermont, the first state to ban slavery, in 1777, stimulated an online discussion about the role of government.   Someone sent me an article about increased wait times in Massachusetts, which although not a single payer system, was the most vigorous, and by most accounts successful, attempt to get universal healthcare done, as well as an editorial by anti-universal healthcare activist Sally Pipes in Investors Business Daily, a fantastic paper for financial raw data, but its editorial page makes the WSJ look like a leftist rag. Usually, the editorials are not just extreme in point of view but factually incorrect and poorly written (the writer of the article uses the term "Obamacare" without quotation marks or explanation as to why she is using a Tea Party epithet). 

This Pipes editorial is more of the same. The article is deeply flawed for a number of reasons. 

First, emergency room care and uncompensated care have risen everywhere as a result of the financial crisis and the fact that millions of Americans everywhere lack health insurance. Without comparable data from other states, 9% is meaningless. What is it in New York or California or Idaho? If ER visits - a proxy for a high number of uninsured - is up 33% in those states but only 9% in Massachusetts, this might be a good thing. 

Second, what is the state of residence of those seeking care in Massachusetts ER's? If someone is in a car accident while driving through the state to get home to New Jersey, how is this an indictment of Massachusetts' plan per se? What was the reason for the visit? In an aging population, all things being equal, you will get more ER visits; have there been demographic shifts that would better account for this increase than lack of health insurance per se? The author does not address any of these questions because she is trying to argue against universal healthcare. I am assuming she has healthcare herself, but does not wish to pay for the healthcare of those less fortunate or more chronically ill than herself. This is America, and we have the right to be materialistic and selfish, but we do not have the right to make bogus arguments based on incomplete or misleading data.

Ms. Pipes is a paid lobbyist against universal healthcare who makes her living writing editorials and books about the evils of the Canadian system and why we should not try anything so foolish here.  Her work recently led a Senator to make an embarrassing gaffe.  According to Factcheck.org, 

"A spokeswoman said Barrasso made a mistake by referring to an April Forbes opinion piece about the Massachusetts health care law written by Sally Pipes, president of the Pacific Research Institute, a conservative think tank. That article referred only to one state — and had nothing to do with Medicare. It referred to Massachusetts doctors who are refusing to take any new patients, regardless of age. The author cited a statistic from Massachusetts Medical Society surveys that found "56% of physicians [not 57 percent] are not taking on new patients" in that state. But that’s not right. The 56 percent figure refers only to internal medicine doctors, in a 2009 survey."  

    - Factcheck.org

She also failed to cite the $400 million figure for uncompensated care is down from $700 million prior to the implementation of Romney's plan and - most notably - long prior to the current economic crisis.    There are problems with this solution, as will be true with all solutions, but that does not mean we should just give up.  The status quo is simply not acceptable.  We cannot and should not let perfection be the enemy of good enough.

However, the articles presented were not fairly represented.  A quotation from the first one undermined an earlier point about the Massachusetts plan being a "failure:"

The medical society on Monday issued its annual Physician Workforce survey, which was conducted in February and March. More than 23,000 doctors and students are members of MMS, which publishes the New England Journal of Medicine.

Coombs said that despite its problems, Massachusetts has done "an incredible job" with healthcare. Issues such as a shortage of doctors in poorer communities are not unique to the state, she noted.

"It's a success in terms of the number of patients who have seen a doctor in the past few years, but the physician workforce has been strained," Coombs said.

Massachusetts, like much of the nation, has a severe shortage of doctors in primary care - internists and family physicians - because those fields are less lucrative.

"We need more doctors in primary care. There's no getting around that fact," said Coombs."

        - source

So the first article describes the plan as a "success" and attributes problems to a shortage of primary care physicians, a problem that will continue as long as a dermatologist doing "free market" botox injections can make $750,000 a year but a busy primary care physician actually taking care of sick people, many poor, is struggling to make a living and pay her staff.
Also, the headline of the Reuters article refers to one particular of the plan, that for the indigent; please keep in mind that many of these would not have been insured anyway, so their wait times would have been infinite before this plan, which, as I mentioned is not a single player plan (which by definition would not suffer from this problem since all physicians and healthcare providers would have to take it).

Tort Reform Will Not Bring Down Healthcare Costs or Lead to Universal Coverage

Re the tort reform, I support it, but the Bush administration looked long and hard into this issue with an eye toward finding massive potential savings and the most they could find was that about 1% of medical costs might be reduced with meaningful tort reform. 1% of a big number is still a big number and I support tort reform for other reasons but massive cost savings is not one of them. And by the way, universal health insurance would go a long way toward getting rid of most law suits between individuals (the vast majority of lawsuits are between corporations) since the most common reason someone sues someone else is for medical care reimbursement, something that would go away in a universal healthcare access system.

At any rate, making it harder for doctors to be sued will do nothing, absolutely nothing, to pay for a poor child's chemotherapy.

The counterargument was that ER usage, uncompensated costs, and doctor wait times had all increased in Massachusetts, and that on most counts the plan was a failure. 

I pointed out that it sounded as though the person making this argument was relatively young, healthy, and employed. 

Healthcare is not designed for healthy people, but for the sick (it really should be sick care). You have no idea how good your plan is until you get older and need more medical care, or have a family member who is ill or in an accident. The problem with deciding something like healthcare based on anecdotal experiences or popularity (such as your "friends in Canada" who come to the United States for healthcare) is that most of us most of the time and most of our lives do not need much healthcare. For us, we will judge a plan based on hassle factors - can we see our doctor quickly if we get the sniffles, are our copayments and premiums low, and do we have to call a 1-800 number to pre-authorize every doctor's visit. 

All of those are important, to some extent, but pail in comparison to the questions that really count: 

Will your insurance find some technical reason to drop your coverage if you develop colon cancer or a family member has a stroke and requires extensive rehab? 

Will your lifetime cap get burned through faster than you can keep up with your doctor's bills? 

Will you be left scrambling looking for a new policy with a pre-existing condition in the middle of your chemotherapy, which you put on hold because your insurance cut you off? 

These are not theoretical events; I saw them every day in private practice, often several times a day. 

You may have an outstanding plan. Then again, you may not; under our current roulette system, you just won't know until it's too late.

Massachusetts Plan is Not a Failure

Those who criticize Massachusetts for covering 97% of its citizens sound like someone who, when confronted with the fact that lifeboats plucked 97% of the victims of a shipwreck from the water, is arguing about the inconvenience and cost of forcing the ship to clutter its decks with those lifeboats in the first place (an argument, by the way, that led to the fatal decision to decrease the number of lifeboats the Titanic carried).
Those who criticize government-run or refereed solutions as unworkable or imperfect seem incapable of naming a single free market system anywhere in the world that has successfully covered all of its citizens.  They can't because there is no such entity.  

Walmart May Make Some Drugs Cheap but Cannot Replace Concerted Public Action

You may get many commonly prescribed medications for $4 from Walmart, but try getting a rare but life-saving chemotherapeutic agent there. Try getting dialysis for $4. Or the latest drug for multiple sclerosis. Can Walmart get you a $4 liver transplant? If Walmart was such a vanguard of healthcare solutions, as you allege, why does it not provide its workforce with health insurance?

And even insisting that such a low cost drug plan could not be invented by or successfully implemented by a government bureaucrat is completely unsupported by those pesky things called facts. Decades before Walmart, our government introduced flat or low rate copayments at least in the VA system for certain veterans mail ordering medications and championed mail order pharmacies and the tremendous economies of scale they offered long before private industry hopped on board. They were leaders in electronic record-keeping and still are, with the VA Medical System now the world's largest integrated electronic medical system (whose potential for research is just starting to be tapped into). 

Oh, and long before Walmart and the VA, the Canadians and the Brits had us beat: is $4 a low price? How about free? Canadians and Brits pay nothing for their medications and for most medical services and their system was invented, developed, and implemented 100% by government bureaucrats.

‎"NO Govt bureaucrat would have created either of those solutions!" 

That is a very interesting observation considering that the majority of medications on the market today (including most of those Walmart offers for $4) were developed thanks to government bureaucrats either directly (through research done at the NIH and other places) or indirectly (by writing grants to fund university research that led to countless medical breakthrough). There is not a single medication on the market today that is not there thanks to a whole chain of government bureaucrats from the folks at the FDA who initially reviewed and granted approval to the medications in the question, the inspectors who make sure they continue to be safe and safely manufactured, to the federal bureaucrats in our court system who make sure that intellectual property rights (where applicable) are not infringed upon.
Federal employees have developed many of the medications and technological advances on the market today. The tired argument (I was guilty of making myself not too many years ago) that greed is good and more greed is better simply does not fly. 

Switzerland generates far more medical patents and has won far more Nobel Prizes for medicine than the United States (adjusted for population) but has universal healthcare. Ditto for the United Kingdom.  Glaxo is not going bankrupt or not innovating simply because all British citizens are covered.

Government Workers are Not All Slugs

Dr. Walter Reed was a government bureaucrat who proved Yellow Fever was transmitted by a mosquito and saved countless lives (and allowed work to proceed on the Panama Canal, lowering transportation costs and improving corporate profitability). His innovative, ground-breaking work was done while an employee of the federal government.
Government bureaucrat George Miller Sternberg was not just a scientists and innovator in his own right; he actually is credited with founding the entire field of bacteriology in the United States. 

Brigadier General George Miller Sternberg (June 8, 1838 – November 3, 1915) was a U.S. Army physician who is considered the first U.S. bacteriologist, having written Manual of Bacteriology (1892). After he survived typhoid and yellow fever, Sternberg documented the cause of malaria (1881), discovered the cause of lobar pneumonia (1881), and confirmed the roles of the bacilli of tuberculosis and typhoid fever (1886).

Not bad for a government slug. Every antibiotic created today, including the minority developed by private industry, owes its existence to this federal government bureaucrat. Perhaps a private corporation would have done this too had they enough time or felt it was profitable, but the fact is that they didn't.

Small pox was of course eradicated by those bumbling government bureaucrats you feel could not accomplish anything, although not just American but internationally through the World Health Organization. There was no massive profit motive in doing so; it was simply felt to be the right thing to do. The vaccine used had been developed not by a corporate executive trying to enrich himself, but by a physician,Edward Jenner, who published his work not for personal gain but to advance scientific knowledge and reduce suffering. His work was eventually supported by the British equivalent of a federal government grant (two relatively modest infusions of cash by the king) The work of this non-corporate, government-supported philanthropist researcher transcended the disease in question, launching an entirely new field, immunology: 

The importance of his work does not stop there. His vaccine also laid the groundwork for modern-day discoveries in immunology, and the field he began may someday lead to cures for arthritis, AIDS, and many other diseases of the time.

The polio vaccine was developed by Dr. Jonas Salk who famously made no effort to profit from his life-saving invention. 

His sole focus had been to develop a safe and effective vaccine as rapidly as possible, with no interest in personal profit. When he was asked in a televised interview who owned the patent to the vaccine, Salk replied: "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" 

He was not a direct government employee, but an employee of a university that received massive federal government research support and a philanthropic organization that was non-profit.

And of course outside of medicine, there was the Apollo moon shot program developed, designed, and inspired by federal bureaucrats piloted by federal employees flying government vehicles hurtling into space. Other signs of federal government incompetence was the defeat of Hitler and the ending of the Thousand Year Reich almost 2,000 years ahead of schedule. There was that taxpayer bailout of Germany proposed by and executed by government employee George Marshall that not only helped jump start an unprecedented economic revival in a country devastated by war but perhaps changed the course of history by preventing a Western economic collapse and expansion of Soviet influence and power. And speaking of cars and commerce, let's not forget that both the German autobahn system and our interstate highway system were both government-sponsored and financed deals that were stunningly successful in terms of opening up and connecting markets and increasing freedom for all of us to travel safely and rapidly across this great country of ours (and Germany too, if we choose). 

Maybe private industry could have developed a means of preventing Yellow Fever, built the Panama Canal, both defeated and rehabilitated Germany, developed vaccines for small pox and polio, eradicated small pox, put several men on the moon (and brought them all back too), and built the interstate highway system, but for whatever reason, they didn't. At any rate, if these achievements represent government incompetence, then give me more of it!
After these examples, the point was yielded that government "serves a purpose. But it is not our savior. It is not my mother or father. It is my servant."

Two things. First, these examples all refute your point made earlier in this post (and repeated elsewhere in others) that, as you worded it here, "NO Govt bureaucrat would have created either of those solutions!" You did not say that few government bureaucrats have innovated, you said "NO" government bureaucrats. A single counter-example can serve to shoot down this statement; I offered several.
Second, if you consider your freedom, both from fascism and from certain public health menaces such as polio or small pox, then the government is indeed, in these respects, your savior.
My point is not to lionize government servants, but simply to make mince meat of the arguments of those who feel compelled to disparage all government service all the time. I have worked for the federal government and I have worked for private industry and I have worked for myself and in all cases I have seen inefficiencies. There is yin and yang. I think it is silly and frankly insulting to millions of hard-working Americans, many in harm's way, to keep telling them how stupid and incompetent they are. The historical track record does not support such a blanket statement.
There is one dead Saudi right now whose body is fish food who also chose every opportunity to disparage the United States government until some of highly trained government employees put a bullet through his eye.
‎"Greed is a basic fact of the world. Money motivates us all. You don't want your life centered around it...but if I could make $150000 in Vermont or move a few miles down the road and make $300000...I would move immediately. 98% of Humans would do that. "Greed is one of many motivators of human behavior. I am not arguing it be abolished (indeed, that would be impossible), only that it not be held up for worship. Few successful entrepreneurs are motivated primarily by greed, and those who are often drop out in frustration during the inevitable lean years. Most do it because they love it, because they are obsessed with whatever product or service they are providing, whatever problem they are solving. For most, the money is secondary, a byproduct of doing the right thing in the right place and time. Most would do it for free if they could.
Re your $300k v. $150k example, you clearly have no idea the difference in compensation between various plans, but it's not THAT dramatic. Changing specialties could lead to that sort of difference in compensation; changing plans accepted would not. It's a straw man argument, and as I've said, most of the time I have dropped plans it's not because of money but the hassle factor. In a single payer system (such as Medicare for those over 65) we can sigh in relief, knowing that if they are a legal citizen, their bills will be paid, and there will be a uniform process of bill submission and uniform standards, etc. This exodus of physicians from Massachusetts is news to me, though, especially when you consider that Massachusetts is home to Harvard Medical School and Boston General, where many physicians gladly work at a discount to what they could earn elsewhere for the opportunity to be in an intellectually stimulating environment where exciting work can be done.

The Best and the Brightest Do Not Always Leave Government Service

I disagree with the idea that the "best and brightest" move out of government service; if you are alleging that those working for the NIH or CDC or various and sundry government organizations are there because they are less competent or not as smart as their colleagues who take jobs offering potentially higher compensation in private industry, I would have to strongly disagree (and ask for some data to support this oft-cited urban legend). There are many reasons people choose one setting over another. If, for example, one had a strong interest in public health, the government is the only game in town. If you want to treat the poor or certain under-served populations, such as Native Americans or the prison population, the government is the route to do it . If you want to treat the elderly or the disabled, you will be working either directly or indirectly for the government, since Medicare will be reimbursing your services. If you want to serve in the military or the Coast Guard or the State Department, if you want to travel, if you don't want to worry about all the administrative details of running a practice or the risk of a lawsuit, you might feel far more at home in government service than private practice. I am aware that you have much criticism of government plans' imperfections, but if you presented evidence of a "free market solution" in healthcare, I must have blinked. The United States is alone among industrialized countries in having any of its citizens without access to healthcare. We outspend every other country on the planet, yet 59 million are uninsured. How is this a "solution"? Since none of the options in any country that does successfully provide universal health insurance at a lower cost is entirely free market, what country are you referring to?

There was no response to this question, but I was asked if I had ever seen the film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Yes, I saw the film, whose lead was played by a man who later proudly served as a federal employee in World War II (unlike Ronald Reagan and John Wayne who made up for it by playing soldiers on the silver screen instead). In today's world, Mr. Smith would not get very far unless he could find a deep-pocketed corporate backer like the Koch brothers to pay for his deceptive attack ads. A far better movie starring James Stewart was It's a Wonderful Life, one of the most poignant indictments of corporate greed I have ever seen. I guess we have to ask ourselves if we want to live in Pottersville or if we want to have a community where we are all invested in each other's future and actually know and care about each other.

Rapture Prophets Do Not Know Their Own History (Or Some Fundamental Math)

May 20, 2011:   You know this rapture nonsense is getting out of hand when the New York Times (versus the Post) covers it with some seriousness (Rapture Prophecy Tests Family Split on Belief).
But these guys have no idea how old and tiresome this end of the world prediction business is. It's embarrassing and useless, sort of like predicting exactly at which point ocean your  plane will crash into a mountain.  
Most fundamentalists have probably never heard of  Sabbatai Zevi (-1676) but should get to know him.  He claimed to be the Jewish Messiah and had a huge international following.   But at the age of forty, he was forced by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV to convert to Islam or die.  He chose the first option and by all accounts lived the rest of his life in relative peace and comfort. 
This created a scandal and international embarrassment among his followers so deep most of us, including those who have studied religious history, may not have heard of him.  Karen Armstrong goes into this episode in some detail in her wonderful history of fundamentalism, The Battle for God.   Religions tend not to focus or dwell on their many false trials or predictions, giving us the illusion of a single, unbroken chain of authority.
Those who believed in Zevi were sincere, god-fearing people.  They probably could have passed a polygraph test had one existed at the time.  No doubt they were filled with joy at the fact that Yahweh had been so kind as to choose the .0000008% of the Earth's existence (see below) they happened to live in to bless them with his one and only messenger, but they, alas, were wrong.
I have lost count of the number of people who have predicted the end of the earth in my lifetime alone.  Some have been correct in a very narrow sense of the world (their world ended when they killed themselves) but predicting your own suicide is not my definition of clairvoyance. 
But forget all the biblical numerology no doubt someone used to predict that Saturday will be the mother of all weekends.  We need not know anything about the contents of the black box used to make a prediction if the output is so absurdly low as to be, for all practical purposes, impossible. 
Let me explain.  As someone unlucky enough to have been in an earthquake, I like to compute the odds of being in another one anytime I visit somewhere seismically active.  If I find that the last major earthquake in a region was 900 years ago, and that only 3 were recorded over 3,000 years of history, let's say, I will be much less anxious than if I find that over those same 3,000 years, a powerful earthquake occurred every century.  If you are visiting this area for 1 week, then, all things being equal, your probability of being in a devastating earthquake during your visit will be equal to 1 in 5,200, arrived at by reducing the 1/100 risk of an earthquake per year by 52 (the number of weeks in a year).  
We can use similar logic to determine the odds of the earth ending during our lifetime.  Without knowing anything about metaphysics or scrutinizing ancient texts, by using 4.54 billion years as the best guess of the age of the earth, and the observation that it has not ended yet (but will one day), we can then ask the odds of it ending during our lifetime.  Let's be optimists and put our lifespan at 80 years, the rough life expectancy at birth of someone living in the West, so we can divide 80 by 4.6 billion to determine the probability of the earth ending during any individual's life span.  
As you can imagine, this is a very, very small number, about 0.0000017621145%, or 1 in 56.75 million.    To put this in perspective, the odds of winning a single state lottery are 1 in 18 million (or over 3 times as great).  Someone claiming that the world will end in his lifetime is 3 times as stupid as someone announcing that he will win the lottery.  
But the mathematical case against fundamentalism has only just begun.  Most of those predicting the end of the world are already adults, not newborns with 80 years of life ahead of them.  A reasonable assumption would be that on average, those holding this belief are halfway through their lifespan, reducing the window of prediction to 40 years.  They are not predicting that the earth may end in anyone's lifetime but in theirs, which is half over.  This increases the odds against them to 113.5 million to 1.  Now the person predicting he will win the lottery looks 6 times smarter than our rapture-anticipating fundamentalist.  
But there's more.   Fundamentalists are not predicting a range but a specific day for the earth's demise.  Let's assume for the sake of kindness that they beat the 113.5 million to 1 odds and get the lifetime part right.  What are the odds then that the earth will end on any given day of their lifespan?  1 in the number of days in 40 years, or 1 in 14,600 (40 x 365). 
But since there are 113.5 million 40-year time windows in the earth's history, we must multiply 14,600 times 113.5 million...  drum roll, please.
The odds of the earth ending on any given day equals 1 in 1.675 trillion.   To put this in perspective, this is the number of seconds in 53,077 years.    
So to state that the odds against fundamentalists are astronomical is beyond an understatement.  And when you consider that these are the same people using the same document that led them to date the creation of the earth to about 4,000 BCE, an error of proportional magnitude as claiming Los Angeles is only 17 feet from New York.
Of course, even educated people agree with fundamentalists that the world will end.  But this remote future astronomical event is not what the Rapture crowd is predicting (nor is any sane astrophysicist predicting that the earth will end on July 2 of the year 788,1974,994).  
There are certain events so unlikely and sources so unreliable that those predicting the end of the world on Saturday - or any day - are as wrong today as followers of Zevi were in the 17th Century.  

If This Were Fiction, No One Would Believe It...

If events in Washington were fictional (sometimes we all wish they were), and we were all part of some screenplay, the first thing a good editor would tell us is to rewrite the whole damn thing, starting with the names.  The conversation might run something like this...


Now you've got to change the names here. You can't have a president who has the middle name Hussein and use that name for your villain in Iraq. And what are the odds that his last name - Obama - shares every letter but one with the other bad guy's first name - Osama? It's weird. 
You're already asking the reader to buy the idea that Americans would vote for a black man after a century of owning them and another century fighting like hell to keep them from voting.   IF that would ever happen, you've got to make it believable, starting with the name.  Only in a novel would more Americans vote for a guy with a name like Barack Hussein Obama than for any presidential candidate ever. Right.  
And it just doesn't seem plausible that this pointy-headed academic Constitutional law professor named Obama would nail Osama in only 2 years when his predecessor - the one with the custom-made flight suit and the Mission Accomplished banner who kept falling off the bike - couldn't do it in 8.   Why build this Bush character up to be a man's man, a brush-clearing, smoke-'em-out, dead-or-alive sort of tough guy only to make him look so ineffective by comparison?    
But that's just the beginning.  Who is this guy Boehner. Really?  Don't tell me how it's SUPPOSED to be pronounced; readers are going to pronounce it as they see it and they will think of what it sounds like.  And this after an administration run by two guys named Dick and Bush?   Right.  
Then you have these shadowy billionaires financing the Tea Party and you just had to call them Koch... no, no, stop telling me how it's SUPPOSED to be pronounced; no reader will look at that name and think of COKE.   And he has to start a party of mostly white guys running around getting all excited and calling each other tea-baggers?   You've managed to take an explicit gay sexual act and turn it into something disgusting. 
And what's the name of this minor character from the Dick and Bush era who gets convicted of obstruction of justice but pardoned by the guy he lied for? Scooter?  You're pulling my leg, right?  I have never met an adult named Scooter.  I don't care if it's a nickname, it's weird.  Next you'll be saying there's a Newt in there... 
Oh, you've got to be kidding me! And this Newt fellow goes after a president for adultery in Act 1, Scene 1, impeaches the guy, but we learn in Act 2 that Newt was committing adultery during the impeachment process?  
And at the end of the book, the guy he went after is more popular than god, touring the world wiping out hunger with a rock star named... Bono; and this same rock star was giving advice to a Republican Treasury secretary about alleviating poverty in Africa and this Republican guy listened?   C'mon.  It's just not believable. 
OK, so Newt gets voted out of office, but makes a come back after writing a series of books on Saving America from - is this right? - a "Right Wing Secular Liberal Machine"?  Those are really his words?   So he's not just a hypocrite, but a nut job.  Readers will feel insulted, especially Republican readers.   The Party of Lincoln, even in a novel, would not stoop that low.  You have to make him likable at some level. 
And you' can't have a bad guy who made off with everyone's money named Madoff, and if you do, you can't have it pronounced that way. It's just way too heavy-handed. And if you're going to have another bad guy caught up in another massive scandal, do you have to call him Abramoff. What is this, Dr. Seuss?
And this Palin lady - at least her name doesn't sound like a body part - but you're seriously going to have her quit halfway through her term in Alaska, sign a multi-million dollar book deal, then claim to be a moose-hunting hockey mom?  She can't have her employer build a sophisticated sound studio in the basement of her house then claim that the "lamestream media" is trying to shut her up because she is conservative.  And lose the "lamestream" part - there is no way a woman with a disabled child would use a word like "lame" in that way.  If we want to like her, she has to have some sensitivity or compassion.
It's way too ironic having her teenage daughter get pregnant after she advocated  abstinence-only education while governor of Alaska. It's like you're making fun of these guys.  Do you think the Republicans would be so dumb as to run her if they knew what a mess her family was.  And no kids - none - are ever REALLY called Track, Trig, Willow, or Piper.  Bristol, fine, that's cute, but then you get her knocked up.  

You just can't make her so dumb.  What person with a pulse, much less one who wants to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, couldn't name a single supreme court decision or newspaper she reads, or thinks Africa is a country?   If you're going to have her talk about death panels why immediately alert the reader to the fact that they don't exist?   It kills the plot; once again we have a bunch of crazy people talking about things that they should know aren't real and why? 

Why not tease the reader along, or write some actual death panels into the plot.  This Obama fellow seems a bit too perfect, too polished, too likable.  If he had some sort of dark secret, this could be it.  But then you have to ask why he would be so stupid as to sneak something into a bill that he himself is signing, not writing. 

Oh, and don't have Palin put cross hairs over a likable Congresswoman whose husband is an ASTRONAUT no less (who just happens to have an identical astronaut twin (right!) who is in charge of the space station) then have this lady get shot.  It's too ironic and heavy-handed.   If you do carry out this ridiculous subplot, at least give Palin some capacity for introspection or remorse.  She can't go comparing herself to victims of the Holocaust or pogroms against Jews.  She sounds not just dumb and irony-challenged, but whiny.  I don't like her and I'll bet most readers won't either.  At least most readers have to be given some reason as to why intelligent voters would ever find such a person appealing. 

And if you're going to have an Axis of Evil introduced in Chapter 2, follow up.  You can't have one country invaded and the other two sort of fizzle out.  I like that phrase, by the way, it's got a nice zing to it, but do two of the countries have to share 3 out of 4 letters - you're asking a lot of American readers not to confuse  Iraq and Iran.  Why not fictionalize one, call it Iraqistan or something, or make the other one Canada?  

And this Birther subplot sounds bizarre.  Why are all these Tea Party guys so convinced the president, the first African American president, is really only African?  And everyone who obsesses over this mysterious birth certificate that you tell the reader in Chapter Three was never in doubt and in fact had been released just happens to be white?  Come on.   Readers do not like racist characters, even crafty villain types and these guys aren't even crafty.  
Readers are going to lose patience with these guys.  I know I did.  Move on already. 
And you can't have these Republicans threatening to go after Medicare, Social Security, Head Start, healthcare for poor children - poor children! - AND help for 9-11 volunteers.  We're talking VOLUNTEERS!  On 9-11!   People would be on the streets if this really happened.  And why?  You're trying to make the case that this party is smart but crafty, but here they just seem dumb, trying to plug a trillion dollar hole with a few pennies.  
I like this Rose character who goes into women's healthcare clinics with a hidden camera to nail workers saying stupid things; you have the beginnings of a likable anti-hero, a single issue woman out to single handedly take on this evil organization, but there has to be more.   The organization has to be evil, or she just looks like another nut.   You can't have her going after a group that mostly provides cancer screening and medical care to poor women and girls.   Again, it sounds mean-spirited.  Why not have her infiltrate a hedge fund or oil company?  
You have all these random characters running around with their pet issues and none of them make any sense at the end of the day.  But you could work with her.  I would make her a former porn star or stripper, someone who maybe felt pressured to have an abortion when she was working her way through college, doing tricks on the side, that sort of thing.  Gets real mad, maybe work in a feminist angle.  Abortion as the subjugation of women or something.  It would be unexpected, counter-stereotypical, and might just work. 
But she has to really find a real scandal, otherwise she just looks like another nutty character pursuing her pet issue.   How about something along the lines of higher ups in this evil organization selling fetal body parts on ebay to a diabolical Chinese manufacturer of puppy dog chow?  Now THAT would be a scandal.   This stuff about a bonehead employee counseling fake pimps about dodging reporting requirements does nothing for me.  It's not the sort of stuff Republican lawmakers would present as evidence on the floor of Congress.  
And lose this white loser side kick who dresses up as the world's most unconvincing pimp and goes after all these black organizations like Acorn and what not.  He's too overtly racist, too much of a scumbag.   I'm telling you, most readers are going to feel that you're mocking them and some do care about these issues.  
That Trump character - Trump is the best you could do? - comes across as an evil megalomaniac with an obsession for birth certificates everyone in the book has seen but him.  How can a guy have a helicopter but not an internet connection?  He looks thoroughly moronic sending his "people" off to Hawaii to look for a birth certificate while the president is busy producing Osama's death certificate.  Readers don't like stupid characters, even villains.  And all this stuff about his hair is gratuitous.  Give him some off-setting virtue, maybe make him a really good juggler or something.  
And I guess that's my biggest problem with the book:  why do all these white people think this Obama guy is so bad?   You've got to make the economy heading toward a depression, not on the mend.  The stock market should be crashing, not double what it was 2 months after he took office.  If he lowered taxes for the very rich and everyone else, but they keep calling him a socialist, after awhile these white guys just look angry and kind of dumb.  It makes no sense.  
Where's the catastrophe?   Where is the deep, dark secret that he is desperately trying to hide?  Look, if you want to make this guy into a disaster, bring some of that bad stuff the Bush and Dick people did, like have Obama be the one deregulate the financial industry, watch it blow up as a result, then turn around and hit up the tax payers for $700 billion to fix his mess.    Can't you move this Hurricane Katrina - the only name I like in the book - to Obama's watch?   Having all these poor black people abandoned by a black president would be a twist; having a rich white guy do it is a stereotype.  Too much.  
I like the oil spill, thought you were going somewhere with that, but it sort of made all those Republicans chanting "Drill, baby, drill!" or whatever sound massively discredited.  Again.  C'mon, they have to do something right. 
Have Bush and Dick find something in Iraq, some suspicious powder, a suicide goat stuffed with plutonium, a diabolical anthrax lab.  They can't go charging in and find nothing; hell, at least have them plant something.  
You can't have all this bad stuff happening on his predecessor's watch, then have him look so good by comparison.
And I've got problems with these other names.  
Like Huckabee. Why not just call him Aw-Shucks-abee? When I hear Huckabee, I think of a barefoot guy on a raft drifting down the Mississippi River with a straw hat and a runaway slave.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not very presidential.
Mitt Romney - is a name maybe we can work with but why not give him a real name like Mitchel or Michael or something. Mitt is something you use in baseball to catch balls.  And frankly, we don't need any images that can be worked into a crude joke, even indirectly.
And you can't have Mitt running against his own healthcare reform plan.  It's just too sloppy, too ironic, plot-wise. 
I guess you have to ask if you're writing farce or fiction.  If it's fiction, it's got to be believable.  Even a farce has to give the Mitts and Newts and Kochs and Boehners some redeeming qualities, starting with their names.  You can't have all these angry white guys with bad names reflexively hating the first African American president for the flimsiest and weirdest of reasons.  There is no way the press in a free country would let them get away with that sort of crap.  No one would ever believe it.