Know
Your Scumbag, Numero 9-O
 This
is Cleve Killingsworth, CEO of Blue Cross/Blue
Shield. His salary jumped 25% to $3.5 million
last year, even though the company's net income
slid 49%.
Mr. Killingsworth's company is similar to several
insurance company's at the moment in that they
are denying coverage if a woman has been raped.
As an example, a 28-year-old woman was recently
raped and while at the hospital revealed she'd
also been assaulted when she was 17. Blue Cross
summarily denied payment for her treatment
and would not pay for medication or trauma because "she had been raped before".
Another example, though not a client of Blue Cross, was drugged and raped by
two men she met at a bar. After taking anti-AIDS medicine she can no longer get
health insurance. The irony? She was a former health insurance underwriter.
For more details on these stories, go here.
Punishing women for sexual trauma is disgusting. This would not happen under
a single-payer plan. Contact your congressman today.
Addendum: Blue Cross
is sending out the following postage-paid card encouraging
people to oppose the public option. Don't throw it away. Just...
modify it a little:
----------
Picture Perfect
 Over
the decades I have really enjoyed cartoonist
Robert Crumb's works. Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural,
that guy that says "Keep on truckin'!"
I've got the entire collection of The Complete
Crumb Comics (softcover, not hardback, wahhhhh!)
plus a zillion underground comics all featuring
his
demented creations. It's not only his beautiful
penmanship that I admire but his outrageously
unselfconscious and uncensored stories. He may
look like a little
nerd but it takes a real man
to expose one's psyche so nakedly.
For the past few years he's been out of the artistic
loop and the reason is that he's taken four years
to illustrate Genesis,
the first book of the Bible. It
went on sale in September and I've already received
my copies. Yes, "copies". Winter Solstice
is coming and I have lots of friends to apall.
So here's my first impression of the book: The pictures help
reveal what a bizarre load of bat-shit crazy nonsense the
Bible truly is. It's astonishing to see God create mortals
in his own image and then almost immediately drown them all,
save for a handful of lucky souls. It's a portait of a petty,
all-powerful personae that can't do things right. It's hilarious.
Of course, the devout wont see it that way, mainly because
they won't be reading the book. It's got nudity in it, you
see. And you can't have nudity even if God made us all nede
in the
first place. More unintentional hilarity.
What astonishes me almost as much as the artwork is the fact
that he's hand-lettered all of Genesis. That in itself is
a remarkable feat. Just consider how much effort that requires
and then think about illustrating what you've just
written. Mr. Crumb deserves
some sort of medal for this achievement and I hope he gets
a bunch of them.
If you'd like a copy for yourself you can find them at amazon.com.
You can view the first few chapters here though
it appears the art has been distorted a bit for reasons
of reproduction.
PS, for a much more reasoned and learned dissection of
this book allow me to recommend Kelpy
Wilson's article to be found on truthout.org.
=Lefty=
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