President Obama, Listen to Bill Moyers.

Photo of Billionaires for Wealth Care.

Billionaires for Wealthcare is a grassroots network of health insurance CEOs, industry lobbyists, talk-show hosts, and others profiting off of our broken health care system.

We are not a political, religious or even particularly well-organized group. We're simple folk, thrilled profiteers pouring out of our corner offices to dance on the grave of "Change."

We'll do whatever it takes to ensure another decade where your pain is our gain. After all, when it comes to healthcare, if we ain't broke, why fix it?

On Friday, September 4, the veteran journalist and former press secretary (to Lyndon Johnson) tried to the President some advice in an essay at the end of his PBS program, Bill Moyers Journal. Referring to the editors of The Economist saying the health care debate had become delirious, he found that charitable and preferred the term "deranged."

Only in a fantasy capital like Washington could Sunday morning talk shows become the high church of conventional wisdom, with partisan shills treated as holy men whose gospel of prosperity always seems to boil down to lower taxes for the rich. Poor Obama. He came to town preaching the religion of nice. But every time he bows politely, the harder the Republicans kick him. No one's ever conquered Washington politics by constantly saying "pretty please" to the guys trying to cut your throat. Let's get on with it, Mr. President. We're up the proverbial creek with spaghetti as our paddle. This health care thing could have been the crossing of the Delaware, the turning point in the next American Revolution — the moment we put the mercenaries to rout, as General Washington did the Hessians at Trenton. We could have stamped our victory "Made in the USA." We could have said to the world, "Look what we did!" And we could have turned to each other and said, "thank you." As it is, we're about to get health care reform that measures human beings only in corporate terms of a cost-benefit analysis. I mean this is topsy-turvy — we should be treating health as a condition, not a commodity. ...

Come on, Mr. President. Show us America is more than a circus or a market. Remind us of our greatness as a democracy. When you speak to Congress next week, just come out and say it. We thought we heard you say during the campaign last year that you want a government run insurance plan alongside private insurance — mostly premium-based, with subsidies for low-and-moderate income people. Open to all individuals and employees who want to join and with everyone free to choose the doctors we want. We thought you said Uncle Sam would sign on as our tough, cost-minded negotiator standing up to the cartel of drug and insurance companies and Wall Street investors whose only interest is a company's share price and profits.

Here's a suggestion, Mr. President: ask Josh Marshall to draft your speech. Josh is the founder of the website talkingpointsmemo.com. He's a journalist and historian, not a politician. He doesn't split things down the middle and call it a victory for the masses. He's offered the simplest and most accurate description yet of a public insurance plan; one that essentially asks people: would you like the option — the voluntary option — of buying into Medicare before you're 65? Check it out, Mr. President.

This health care thing is make or break for your leadership, but for us, it's life and death. No more Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. President. We need a fighter.

Richard Trumka (WaPo profile by Alec MacGillis--email) will be taking over as President of the AFL-CIO. In a speech August 31 at the Center for American Progress he issued a call to arms.

Today, more than ever, we need to be a labor movement that stands by our friends, punishes its enemies, and challenges those who, well, can’t seem to decide which side they’re on.

I’m talking about the politicians who always want us to turn out our members to vote for them, but who somehow, always seem to forget workers after the votes are counted.

For example, legislators who don’t understand that their job isn’t to make insurance companies happy; it’s to keep Americans healthy!

Legislators who say they’re are all for health care reform, but refuse to stand up for a public system that puts people before profits!

You know, to hear some of them, you’d think the objective isn’t to come up with a health care plan that works; it’s to write a bill Republicans will vote for.

I think they need to understand that that you can have a bill that guarantees quality, affordable health care for every American – or you can have a bill the Republicans will vote for.

But you can’t have both!

"One Last Party for Molly"

The Melancholy Ramblers and others played at the Scholz Garten while friends shared beer and barbecue on February 4, after Molly Ivins's funeral in a photo by the Austin American-Statesman's Larry Kolvoord which accompanied Patrick George's February 5 article, "One Last Party for Molly."

Back on September 15, 2006, Alternet published Ivins's "Remembering Ann Richards" about a long-ago political do at the Garten:

everybody who was anybody was there meetin' and greetin' at a furious pace. A group of us got the tired feet and went to lean our butts against a table at the back wall of the bar. Perched like birds in a row were Bob Bullock, then state comptroller, moi, Charles Miles, the head of Bullock's personnel department, and Ms. Ann Richards. Bullock, 20 years in Texas politics, knew every sorry, no good sumbitch in the entire state. Some old racist judge from East Texas came up to him, "Bob, my boy, how are you?"

Bullock said, "Judge, I'd like you to meet my friends: This is Molly Ivins with the Texas Observer."

The judge peered up at me and said, "How yew, little lady?"

Bullock, "And this is Charles Miles, the head of my personnel department." Miles, who is black, stuck out his hand, and the judge got an expression on his face as though he had just stepped into a fresh cowpie. He reached out and touched Charlie's palm with one finger, while turning eagerly to the pretty, blonde, blue-eyed Ann Richards. "And who is this lovely lady?"

Ann beamed and replied, "I am Mrs. Miles."

On September 26, 2006, when Howard Dean arrived at the Garten to campaign for Democrats in his 50 state strategy for the Novemer Election, Democratic Party politics sure had changed.

At the Statesman, you can find a photo gallery with additional shots by Rodolpho Gonzalez (who took the photo from yesterday's entry) and Kolvoord. You can also find audio files of tributes by :

• Ivin's brother Andy
• her sister Sara
• co-author, Lou Dubose
• Courtney Anderson
• Sarah Speights
  

Sheila Lennon, who is features and interactive producer of projo.com, the Web site of

The Providence [RI] Journal has compiled reports on the memorial from Austin bloggers at her blog, Subterranean homepage news, which she started in 2002.

Kinky Friedman, who graciously admits that he didn't always agree with Ivins had eulogized her February 4 in the Los Angeles Times as essay as

a truth-seeking missile.

Meanwhile Theresa Alexander had this tale to offer about Ivins at the public memorial at the Texas Observer:

Everyone who knew her has a favorite “Molly” anecdote. For me it was the one she described to a group of her friends in Dallas about the endless summer of tracking and reporting legislative elections in South and West Texas (late seventies, early eighties?). Almost every meal was in some diner or other served by waitresses with teased peroxide up-dos and huge starched, folded handkerchiefs hanging out of their pockets or cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. Once when she feeling very tired and hungry she ordered the usual fare - meat and potatoes - thinking that she hadn’t eaten a non-fried vegetable in weeks. There was, however, a healthy-sized portion of parsley garnishing the plate. Out of desperation she popped it in her mouth — at which point the gum-chewing waitress admonished her: “Why, hon, if I’d a-knowed you was gonna eat that I’da washed it.”

Joseph Burgess wrote in:

I live in Kentucky, where the bottom-of-the-deck political climate rivals that of Texas, where many folks can trace their family trees back to some ancestor getting run out of the Bluegrass state for various crimes and misdemeanors. What Molly Ivins wrote and said showed that she and I — born four years before she was — shared pretty much the same political and social outlooks. For much more than a decade I have read her columns and exclaimed — “damned right!”

In trying to sum up Ivins, whom he knew only through he writings, he called her

the lately late progressive and idealistic champion of little folks, of poor folks, of set-upon-by-the-rich-and-powerful folks, of forgotten folks, of ordinary folks, of shortchanged folks, of Constitutional rights and guarantees, of justice and fairness, and more — . . . the lampooner and harpooner of the five-percenters, the fixers, the neo-John Birchers, the neo-Gilded Agers, the neo-Robber Barons, the grifters and grafters, the chicken-hawks, the political humbugs, the anti-Constitutionalists and pro-corporatists, the new-world-order ideologues, the self-servers, the power-grabbers, and worse who have gained so much ascendancy in recent years.

Gary Hart (yes, the former Senator) even signed in on the page, rather than with the celebrities here. There's also a collection of Ivin's work. When I look at Ivin's August 21, 1970 essay for the Observer, "South towards home" and realize that she had been a news reporter in Minneapolis and just three years out of school, prior to returning to Texas, I'm amazed at just how good a columnist she was from get-go.

*

One fan on the tribute page talks about how he would email Ivins with his reactions to her columns and she would always write him back. I have been reading her essays since the eighties and I never wrote her, not once, not even after I had been lucky enough to hear her lecture at Radford University March 21, 2001.

So, Molly Ivins, this post is truly for you. Your words continue to bring your voice alive from the page and we write back to you, even though you vanished from our realm. You live on in your effect on us as we struggle to continue your work.

And if there is an afterlife, as Bill Moyers describes it as "that great Purgatory of Journalists in the Sky," I picture so much potential contained in our thoughts and our love for you that our energy travels out to whereever you may be.

As invisible as electrons, our energy travels out, even as tangible contact is never again possible.