The Republican lies on Graeme Frost

Graeme Frost is the kid who, along with his sister, was in a car accident and badly injured. Fortunately, he was medically insured under the Maryland CHIP program. But he dared to appear in support of Democrats trying to generate enough pressure to override pResident Bush’s veto of increased funding. And so his family has been subjected to a barrage of abuse by right-wingers claiming that the Frosts were so wealthy that they didn’t deserve to have medical insurance. Some of their hate spam landed in comments on this site.

Fortunately, ThinkProgress is on the case:

1) Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year.

2) His sister Gemma attends another private school to help her with the brain injuries that occurred due to her accident. The school costs $23,000 a year, but the state pays the entire cost.

3) They bought their “lavish house” sixteen years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less than safe.

4) Last year, the Frost’s made $45,000 combined. Over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined.

5) The state of Maryland has found them eligible to participate in the CHIP program.

Thanks to Atrios, John Aravosis, and Thers for getting the word out.

And you Republicans– you can leave your membership in the human race in the bin by the door, since you’re not using it.

[edited to correct spelling, 10/8/07]

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Chaos is the plan, northern front

Ian Traynor, The Guardian:

Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, came under intense pressure last night to order an invasion of northern Iraq following the deadliest attacks for over a decade on the Turkish military and civilians by separatist Kurdish guerrillas.

As Traynor says, without apparent irony, Bushco is opposed to this because it would “destabilise the only part of Iraq that functions.” It’s a critical part of Iraq because

While Turkish public opinion has been strongly anti-American since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, much of the logistical support for the US troops goes to Iraq via Turkey.  

And yet the US protects Kurdish terrorists operating out of Kurdistan because sometimes they attack Iran.

Why the Democrats Will Take Back the White House

Historian Allan Lichtman says history shows the Democrats will win the White House in 2008. Or rather, the Republicans will lose it.

This good news for Democrats and grim news for Republicans comes from the “Keys to the White House,” a historically based prediction system that I developed in 1981, in collaboration with Volodia Keilis-Borok, an authority on the mathematics of prediction models.
 

The Keys retrospectively accurately account for the popular vote winners of every presidential election from 1860 through 1980 and prospectively forecast the winners of every presidential election from 1984 through 2004.
 

[…]
 

The Keys include 13 diagnostic questions that are stated as propositions that favor reelection of the incumbent party. When five or fewer of these propositions are false or turned against the party holding the White House, that party wins another term in office. When six or more are false, the challenging party wins.
 

Even without counting a single economic key against the incumbent Republicans, they currently have a seven key deficit, one more than necessary to predict their defeat in 2008.

Mind you, Lichtman’s model doesn’t take programmable voting machines into account.

The First Law Of Holes…

… is as follows:

“When you realize you are in a hole, stop digging.”

Somebody needs to explain that to local paid GOP operative Michael Brodkorb.  Geez Louise, what a doofus.