www.roanoke.com

How lucky we were that Dad landed here

Tom Gasparoli
Gasparoli is a former journalist who is now in media relations for the state of Virginia. He lives in Richmond.

My picture of the Roanoke Valley has become so much clearer over the last month, 30 years after I graduated from Andrew Lewis Middle School, got some more education and then moved away to live and work in many other cities as a reporter. I compared them all to Roanoke, of course, because Roanoke was all I knew. When people asked, I would say the valley was "noncontroversial," but I realized later that was probably because nearly everything I did as a journalist was controversial in one way or the other. I didn't pay much attention to the news while growing up here.
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Read Saturday's letters to the editor here.

Don't pander to me, kid. One tiny crack in the hull and our blood boils in thirteen seconds. Solar flare might crop up, cook us in our seats. And wait till you're sitting pretty with a case of Andorian shingles, see if you're so relaxed when your eyeballs are bleeding. Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.

What are you wrapped in today?

That's the question I'm left after reading House Minority Leader John Boehner's latest ludicrous complaint about health care reform. The Senate bill, he says, will institute "a monthly abortion premium will be charged of all enrollees in the government-run health plan."

Boehner writes: "It’s right there beginning on line 11, page 122, section 1303, under 'Actuarial Value of Optional Service Coverage.'  The premium will be paid into a U.S. Treasury account – and these federal funds will be used to pay for the abortion services."

Let's nail the coffin lid shut on this nonsense right away. The law does not do that, and even a cursory reading of the cited language (you can read the entire bill here) makes it clear that the purpose of the section is to instruct insurance providers that do cover abortion services to segregate those costs from policy holders requesting such coverage into a separate account to ensure that federal subsidies are not used to cover abortion services.

Boehner is the House Minority Leader of the Republican Party. He should know how to read legislation. Yet he got this one absolutely, monumentally wrong.

So, either he's being intellectually dishonest, attempting to ramp up more uninformed hysteria about health care reform, or he's too stupid to be in such a position of responsibility.

In either case, Republicans should be ashamed to call this man a leader in their party.

(Hat tip: Talking Points Memo)

Update: More reprehensible scaremongering and lies from the Republicans on this bill. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, is claiming that the Senate health care bill adds a tax for breast reconstruction following a mastectomy. The claim is absolutely, 100 percent false. The bill does add a tax for elective plastic surgery, but specifically exempts surgery "necessary to ameliorate a deformity arising from, or directly related to, a congenital abnormality, a personal injury resulting from an accident or trauma, or disfiguring disease."

It's a sad state of affairs. Apparently, Republicans cannot debate this legislation on the merits, and are thus forced, as they have been from the beginning with the "death panel" nonsense, to resort to easily debunked lies. It's pathetic.

Gov. Tim Kaine is inviting an unnecessary argument with the General Assembly with his vow to appoint a replacement for Virginia Supreme Court Justice Barbara Keenan if she is confirmed to the federal bench before he leaves office.

As reported in the Virginia Politics Blog on The Washington Post Web site, House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, didn’t take kindly to Kaine’s pledge, noting that it is the General Assembly’s responsibility to appoint judges.

In an editorial for next week, we'll tell Kaine that he would be wasting time to make this appointment on his way out the door.

There's a new slogan being spread around the Internet by conservatives: "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8."

Isn't that compassionate and patriotic? Conservatives suggesting people pray for America's leader, even though he's pushing policies they abhor. It's like a return to more civil days of yor.

Or not.

Read Psalm 109.8:

May his days be few;
may another take his place of leadership.

Well, ok. So it's just more of the same, conservatives hoping for a quick end to Obama's presidency. Or is it worse than that? The psalm continues:

May his children be fatherless
and his wife a widow.

Yep. That's right. Some conservatives out there are using a Bible verse to urge people to pray for Obama's death.

It's wrong, and it's shameful - a new low in American politics.

Monday, we'll write that there is one real and immediate threat to Medicare patients that is part of the health care debate: Republicans and some fiscal hawks among Senate Democrats are balking at a measure to avert a 21 percent cut in payments to doctors starting in January. Such a drastic reduction in reimbursement rates could cause doctors to quit seeing patients on Medicare.

Filibuster follies

Republicans use a tactic to block judicial nominees that they decried as unconstitutional a few years ago.

Just one more school to go

Roanoke schools have come a long way in a short time.

Health education key to prevention

George Smith Jr.
Smith, of Shawsville, is a retired family physician.

The national debate on health care reform might be good for our country. In spite of the fact that it has become so politicized, it is causing some of us to examine the status and quality of health care in America. Several recent articles in this newspaper have pointed out the fact that our health care system is not the best in the world in spite of the exorbitant cost. The system should not be blamed. The basic problem lies with individual Americans who are making unhealthy lifestyle decisions.
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