New Year's Eve 2009

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

HERE'S something from the "Parisian Dutchman": Lots of Christmas kisses!

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

NOW what was it someone was saying the other day, something like, well, that Obama is a fraud?

Monday, December 28, 2009

YOU'RE right on, Paul Krugman, it was the decade of the Big Zero, as you say — a decade of seemingly perpetual ignorance.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

SOME cleansing reading for the day after Christmas at GlobalPost.

Merry Christmas!

Yes, Bambi and Thumper do exist ...

Photograph by Tanja Askani

Sunday, December 20, 2009

THE Times' Frank Rich explains why Tiger Woods is the real "person of the year." A quotation:

If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us ... have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy). ...

As cons go, Woods’s fraudulent image as an immaculate exemplar of superhuman steeliness is benign. His fall will damage his family, closest friends, Accenture and the golf industry much more than the rest of us. But the syndrome it epitomizes is not harmless. We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over. A decade that began with the “reality” television craze exemplified by “American Idol” and “Survivor” — both blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

AH, yes, this is the alleged free-market China — and the "national security and social stability" buzzwords — that the right wing so dearly loves. And just think, we've sold our soul (and our debt) to these guys.

Addendum ...

IN case you asked, I agree with Ron Reagan, although I would use plainer language: Lieberman is a lying, thieving scumbag. He is the best representative yet of the reality that we have the best Congress money can buy.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

IT'S interesting how the NYT's conservative pundit, David Brooks, sheds light on why hard-core right-wing populist Republicans so hate Barack Obama. Simply put, Obama isn't totalitarian enough.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

AN interesting post at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen about "conservatives as self-parodies." [Thanks, Andrew.]

Addendum ...

WELL, what do you know? The Norwegian press liked Obama's Nobel speech.

Quoting ...

FROM a speech given by Robert F. Kennedy at the University of Kansas on March 18, 1968:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product — if we judge the United States of America by that — that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts ... the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

THERE has been some notice lately of a commentary written by then-Vice President Henry Wallace at the request of the New York Times. The subject was American fascism and the essay was published in April 1944. A quotation:

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

THE Times' Frank Rich is in good form this morning. A quotation:

If the enemy in Afghanistan today threatens the American homeland as the Viet Cong never did, we should be all in, according to Obama’s logic. So why aren’t we? The answer is not merely that Afghans don’t want us as occupiers. It’s that such a mission would require a commensurate national sacrifice. One big difference between the war in Vietnam and the war in Afghanistan that the president conspicuously left unmentioned on Tuesday is the draft. Given that conscription is not about to be revived, we’d have to spend money, lots more money, to recruit the troops needed for the full effort Obama’s own argument calls for.

Which again leads us back to the ghosts of Vietnam. As L.B.J. learned the hard way, we can’t have both guns and the butter of big domestic projects, from health care to desperately needed jobs programs. We have to make choices. Obama paid lip service to that point, but the only sacrifice he cited in the entire speech was addressed to his audience at West Point, not the general public — the burden borne by the military and military families. While the president didn’t tell American civilians to revel in tax cuts and go shopping, as his predecessor did after 9/11, that may be a distinction without a difference. Obama’s promises to accomplish his ambitious plans for nation building at home while pursuing an expanded war sounded just as empty.

Friday, December 4, 2009

AT the end of the first decade of the 21st century, any American who encourages or abets genocide in a foreign country because of who some people are as human beings is vilely evil, indeed, a maggot in the filthiest of human excrement.

Andrew Sullivan is too kind.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

IT was interesting that Bob Herbert's column on Obama and Afghanistan in yesterday's New York Times was a more popular e-mail that David Brooks' essay on the same subject. May be some sort of comment of the NYT's online readership.

It's Friday ...

HERE is a thoughtful essay on the "slow, sad death" of journalism by Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, former policy adviser and speech writer for George W. Bush.

Thanksgiving Day

OVER at UMRBlog recently, there was a discussion about "communion and the fallibility of man." By coincidence, my favorite gay conservative blogger, Andrew Sullivan, has something to say on a topic of somewhat similar nature, "Cafeteria Theocracy In America." A quotation:

... One critical thing Jesus taught was that controlling the world is not just impossible but inherently sinful. Our task as Christians is to control no one but ourselves and to love all. Our main weapon must always be example, not control.

Moreover, Christianists cannot both assert a fundamental right to economic and personal freedom and yet also oppose that freedom when it means that women can choose if and when to have children, when it means that gay couples can choose to form build strong and admirable relationships and have children, when it means that straight couples can buy and use contraception, etc. The Christianists are engaging in cafeteria theocracy here. Which is why their obsession with gays and avoidance of so much else does indeed bespeak a form of prejudice against a group of people they barely know or understand but nonetheless scapegoat for much broader social ills.

From the old photos file:


Son Rob, stage crew assistant carpenter, with Joan Collins, actress, on the road with "Legends" in 2006.

Quoting ...

FROM "Seeing," a novel by the Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, José Saramago:

... as it is always wise to remember, while it is true that man proposes, it is god who disposes, and there have been very few occasions, almost all of them tragic, when both man and god were in agreement and did all the disposing together.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

AH, yes, once again: The wonderous ways of U.S. health care.

Monday, November 23, 2009

ARE you interested in what's happening out in the rest of the world — and can't find out because U.S. media have decided they can't afford foreign news coverage? Try globalpost, a Web site created by a former cable news manager and a former Boston Globe journalist.

I heard an Associated Press honcho on NPR this morning cast doubt, but this site may well be a sign of the future.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

IT is comforting to find a rational, sensible comment about the decision to try the 9/11 criminals in New York federal court.

Along the highway to the Rila Monastery, Bulgaria, June 2005

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

BUT Herb, you just don't understand: After 1980, this became the age of "I've got mine, Jack, so f--k you!" And conservative pundit David Brooks actually agrees, in his own way, that this mindset is the problem.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

THANKS to Andrew for pointing to this informative piece about British jihadists who recanted.

Addendum ...

FROM the comments to Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times:

Aredee
Madison, WI
November 15th, 2009
9:22 am

Fort Hood is an example of how religious doctrine can be used as an excuse for mentally unbalanced people to assume the role of the God they claim to worship. It's not only Muslims who fall in this category, but Christians who blow up Federal buildings and murder abortion doctors. It also applies to ultra-Orthodox Jews who assassinate Israeli prime ministers.

There are hotheads of all types and sizes looking for a holy war. Cooler heads should prevail.

Afghanistan is the latest chapter in America's attempt to play God in another fashion, by recreating the world in our own image. It's time to quit wasting our soldiers' lives and our resources and focus on what it will take to finally bring the U.S. infrastructure, education, and social safety net into the 21st century.

OR:

Phil in the mountains of Kyushu
Japan
November 15th, 2009
9:22 am

... Please consider, however, one certainty: that the machinery of Corporate America relentlessly moves on — that it inspired the original 9-11 attacks, and that it yet rules in all its madness, leaving all helpless to it as to the wars it also causes.

To see the real dynamics, of which we may be certain, look back to last week when on same day this online NYT posted an odd pair of stories. One described the large numbers of Pakistani youth who now take their rock music in their rapping, angry versions more favorable to the Taliban than to anything in the West. The other chronicled a 100-million-dollar boon for himself in Kurdistan by one Peter Galbraith. As a former ambassador, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and writer for the “New York Review of Books,” Galbraith had all the cred he needed to help in reconstructing Kurdistan — but he also parlayed that into his own sweet carpetbagger $100m.

What can we say about American culture now, when corporate “ethics” so rule that one as otherwise decent as Galbraith shows the same underside we all know across Wall St., D.C. lobbyists, CEOs, infotainment media, arms dealers, higher ed admin, and the Ivy cordon insulating Barack?

The world can see through Corporate America. Afghan and Pakistani youth can see through it. Palestinians can. All global versions of the Iroquois, Cherokee, and Sioux can see what’s happening to them now in their turn, too.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

AS if we didn't know already who's really running the federal government — and it's thoroughly bipartisan.

Friday, November 13, 2009

AN interesting rant by Tim Egan in the Times — and interesting comments that follow.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

LO, Paul Krugman poses an accurate though too gentle phrase: the "irrational right."

SPEAKING of California, consider an intellectual right-wing comparison of California and Texas, from the conservative Manhattan Institute's online magazine, City Journal. But there is, as one might suspect, a major oversight in this analysis. Can anyone spot it?

Monday, November 9, 2009

CAME across this article on The Onion, "America's Finest News Source" (I believe it): "If God had wanted me to be accepting of gays, he would have given me the warmth and compassion to do so."

This is the way we celebrated my birthday Saturday at Dick and Ruth Spohr's home near Carlinville (my sister and brother-in-law). These are homemade raised potato donuts, our mother's recipe.

Friday, November 6, 2009

HAS any hospital official or physician in this region taken the Brent James course? If not, why not?

... leaving Eden, 8.75" x 10.75", 2009 (encaustic, oil, wet transfer)

Addendum ...

NO, by almost any measure, it seems, the United States does NOT have "the best health care system the world has ever known.” What was it someone in the Bush White House said, that we create our own reality?

Thursday, November 5, 2009

urban linear (encaustic, 25" x 29") 2009

A quotation ...

“When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.”

— one of the more well known comments by Dom Helder Camara, the late liberationist Roman Catholic archbishop of Recife, Brazil.

Monday, November 2, 2009

AN interesting piece in Scientific American on the possibility of a "fourth" sexual orientation.

AND another interesting discussion, this one about dependent adults. Read the reader comments, too.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

MR. Herbert, didn't the Times have a story some time ago about Americans going to Communist (yes, it still is) China to look for work?

Or, if not China, it seems there's India, Brazil, Taiwan, Poland and even Canada and some other places. Interesting. Well, if that's where the jobs are ...

LOVE it when Frank Rich goes after our 21st century American version of, well, let's call them the Stalinist anarchists, if there can be such. (Rich likens them to 'the barflies in “Star Wars.” ')

THE Sun magazine has an interview with a doctor, Pamela Wible of Eugene, Oregon, who has her own vision of healthcare reform. This online version is not as complete as the print version, but here's a quotation anyway:

I trace the industrialization of medicine back to two programs: employer-sponsored healthcare, which started just after World War II; and Medicare, which started in 1965. Before those programs, doctor-patient relationships were more transparent and more personal.

Then major employers started going with complex insurance programs, such as health-maintenance organizations [hmos] and preferred-provider organizations [ppos]. The physician was put in a position of either signing on to work in a big group or else losing any patients who worked for, say, Ford Motor Company. The preferred-provider system was also sold to doctors with a promise of more money for less work, because of less overhead. Doctors wouldn’t have to worry about staff and business and paperwork. There were slick brochures and free trips to Hawaii when you signed up. You can see how doctors got seduced.

There’s an element of prestige when one belongs to a big group and can say, “I’m a preferred provider.” We doctors basically want the American dream like everyone else. After all the effort and expense of our education, we generally feel we deserve some comfort in life. So when these third parties promised us the world, it was pretty easy for us to fall for it. But then some administrator on the fourth floor turned up the speed on the assembly line, and before we knew it, we were churning patients through and skipping bathroom breaks.

And with the big providers came an increasing complexity that, it seems to me, was created by bureaucrats to justify their own existence. At a certain point you had more complexity and headache than service being rendered.

Now, instead of walking or biking to see your neighborhood doctor, you have to drive across town to a big clinic, park in a parking garage, and sit in a cafeteria-sized waiting room. This isn’t what people want. People want home visits. They want it to be the way it used to be. And there’s no reason why we can’t have that now.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

I'M sure with Andrew Sullivan on this one: Where were the tea-partiers when they could have done some good; that is, during the eight years the right wing was in power? A quotation:

My point is that this (netroots activism) is a practical way to push for real change, especially since the Obama campaign explicitly embraced this model of citizen input. Ditto the protests for ending the military ban or repealing DOMA. These are tangible goals, already supported by the Democratic leadership, in which base pressure can work — to force the Dems to do what they have promised to do when they can actually deliver. And the activists can claim some measure of integrity: they're willing to tackle a president they supported. How many conservatives were tackling Bush in his first year even as his betrayal of core conservative values was evident from 2001 onwards. Or his second year? (There were, I think, two of us in Washington. And Bartlett and I were excommunicated for disloyalty).

My worry about the tea-partiers is not that just they are Johnny-Come-Latelies (even though most are). It is not that they are partisans (some of them clearly aren't). It is that they are motivated by an amorphous distrust and loathing of of government that never seems to get translated into actual policies (and that is itself more populist than conservative). And they are pushing the GOP leadership to take talk-radio abstract positions, rather than tangible proposals. They are deeply unserious.

Deeply unserious is being kind. (I do wonder if the local tea-partiers got talent fees from Newscorp.)

Monday, October 26, 2009

CATHY Ison captured this image of Duke, my husky/shepherd mix, at rest in his lodging on the patio:

Sunday, October 25, 2009

IT'S been a busy week. So, to catch up some, here's Jerome Groopman, author and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, with some thoughts about wisdom and medicine.

WHAT? There's going to be "rules" for bloggers?

OK, so we're staying put more ... not moving around the country as much. Good thing, right? Newsweek seems to think so.

WHAT is Frank Rich trying to say here? That there's no such thing as "news" on any of the so-called national broadcast media? If so, he's pretty much right. A quotation:

Richard Heene (the "balloon boy" dad) is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.” This climate, he argued, “all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are — even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax — entitled to their 15 minutes.”

MEANWHILE, I need to photograph some more art to post.

Monday, October 19, 2009

WHY look to Canada or Europe for an example of health-care/insurance efficiency when we have the Hawaiian example? But is either Congress or the White House interested?

Sunday, October 18, 2009

INDEED, Mr. Blow, there's only one conclusion to be drawn from your analysis: Barack "Change" Obama is a fraud.

Yep, there are those who can say (and do say) from the left and then from the right: Well, we told you so.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

SO Nicholas Kristof, writing in the NYT, wonders if the Democrats in Congress can fend off the teachers' unions in doing the Obama-Duncan educational reforms — like making it easier to fire incompetent teachers. The comments to this column are interesting, too, such as this one:

Jennifer
San Francisco, CA
October 15th, 2009
6:38 am

Why is it that the focus of our failed education system is always the terrible, terrible teachers and our terrible, terrible unions?

I am a good teacher myself, with a long and well-documented history of student success and numerous accolades from private and public institutions. I have always taught in poor communities in public schools. Over the years, my work conditions have included asbestos, cockroach infestations, mice and rats, catastrophic plumbing failures, mold, unheated classrooms...shall I go on? We show children how little we care by the schools to which we send them and their great disrepair.

Each and every year, I spend at least one thousand dollars of my own, not terribly generous salary to provide what my school's budget will not: field trips, healthy snacks, manipulatives, paint, carpets, bug spray and so on. I have advanced degrees from prestigious universities. By providing a strong education, I help to ensure a strong and stable community of critical thinkers and innovators to support our society.

In exchange, I get to hear how we teachers are ruining the schools. I can't speak for all my colleagues, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the one letting students go to schools with no working bathrooms, or that are over twice as full as they should be. I feel certain that we are not the ones cutting school budgets instead of considering equitable and progressive taxation. And I know that Mr. Kristof boasts less than half my brain power and could never, ever do my job as well as I do.

So really, find someone else to blame. Or get a teaching credential yourself and join us in the work. Or donate a significant portion of your salary to projects on Donors Choose. Give up on the teacher-blaming, though.

Recommended by 230 Readers

Addendum ...

IT'S not a surprise that Andrew Sullivan was not impressed: the Obama speech to the HRC was"highfalutin bullshit."

Sunday, October 11, 2009

SEEMS to me Frank Rich is trying too hard to avoid stating the obvious: that the reason McCain and the war crowd want to juice up things in Afghanistan is really to feed The Beast that President Ike warned us about lo those many years ago.

(Yes, I've said this before. But it's worthwhile reading this speech every so often because it's by a man who knows what he's talking about, unlike the draft-dodgers and other neocon rabble.)

MEANHILE, the younger son, one of the outside props crew for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, bought and then chopped up all of the black olives and all of the green olives for this gig:

Saturday, October 10, 2009

IT'S a relief to have a sensible view of the Nobel Peace Prize fuss from conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan.

Addendum ...

BUT, be real, Paul. If you can handle a remote control, understand "Survivor," and use a debit card at Wal-mart, who needs a real education anymore?

Friday, October 9, 2009

NOW here's a report that ought to make all of us feel real good.

WHY, Mr. Kristoff, leave only 23 percent of Congress with inadequate health insurance or none at all? Let them all do without. Perhaps it will help them discern the morality (Christian or otherwise) of profiting — and profiteering — from the involuntary maladies of the ill and the elderly.

HERE'S Keith Olberman's take on our death, er, I mean, health insurance system:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

AND an interesting comment — on a much different subject — from a reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog.

Monday, October 5, 2009

AS he often does, Paul Krugman gets one right:

The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.

Ah, the irony. The very people who think government shouldn't exist believe only they should govern. We did have eight years of something like that. So be very, very afraid because these "ideologues and/or apparatchiks" are at their core totalitarians, convinced, unlike true conservatives, of their infallibility. They are, at best, Hitlerian Stalinists.

THAT said, here's a pointed counter comment from an NYT reader, responding to Krugman:

j. merritt
nv
October 5th, 2009
7:16 am

What are the Democrats doing that is good for America? The Republicans are in the minority, didn't you know? The Democrats have a majority in the House, a 60 vote filbuster-proof majority in the Senate; and The Presidency.

I am one of those center-minded independents who became sick of the Republicans and voted for the Democrats, including President Obama.

What have they done? What has President Obama done? The rich are getting richer. There are more lobbysits than ever. The wars are still raging. What has President Obama or this Congress done?

I will tell you what they have done. They have taken all of the worst habits and attributes of the worst part of the Republican Party and decided to surpass them in corruption and arrogance.

Is Charlie Rangel a Republican? Is Tom Daschle a Republican? Did Goldman Sachs and JP Morgn support Republicans? The answer to all three is "no ".

The Republicans don't matter right now. The corrupt Democrats are what matters. If you are going to write about something other than economics, you need to know what is going on outside of your insular academic world.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

YES, it is going to be a while before we become a truly civilized society.

Addendum ...

AS as matter of common sense, we can't treat foreign visitors trying to enter this country as if they're all would-be terrorists and then expect to readily host an international event of the magnitude of the Olympic Games. I think the U.S. Travel Association is more right than wrong.

Friday, October 2, 2009

OHMYGOSH, now I know for sure that someone is praying for me. Why am I not feeling blessed?

MEANWHILE, here's how the Swiss do health care — it's not government-run — but U.S. doctors probably wouldn't like it much because it's regulator/insurer run.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

SLOWLY, too slowly, intelligence can prevail over ignorance. Thus, this essay by Air Force Col. Om Prakash, winner of the 2009 Secretary of Defense National Security Essay competition.

The essay was published in the Joint Force Quarterly, the official publication of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It's title: "The Efficacy of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.' " Efficacy? Nope, there isn't any.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

YES, young lady, too many people think it's cool to be stupid. Tell us about it.

Sunday, September 27,2009

"BEING young and gay is no longer an automatic prescription for a traumatic childhood," writes Benoit Denizet-Lewis in the New York Times Magazine. It's a hopeful sign when, even gradually, knowledge and intelligence overcome ignorance.

the tin ceiling in a friend's building

Friday, September 25, 2009

THERE'S an English prof at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who offers "a defense of the digital revolution and a keen examination of how technology both improves and complicates our lives." It's a book titled "A Better Pencil" and it's reviewed at salon.com

Thursday, September 24, 2009

HERE'S one of those e-mail things that gets passed around:

HOW TO CALL THE POLICE WHEN YOU'RE OLD AND DON'T MOVE FAST ANYMORE.

George Phillips, an elderly man in Meridian, Mississippi, was going up to bed, when his wife told him that he'd left the light on in the garden shed, which she could see from the bedroom window.

George opened the back door to go turn off the light, but saw that there were people in the shed stealing things.

He phoned the police, who asked, "Is someone in your house?"

"No," he said, "but some people are breaking into my garden shed and stealing from me."

The police dispatcher replied, "All patrols are busy. You should lock your doors and an officer will be along when one is available."

George said, "Okay."

He hung up the phone and counted to 30.

Then he phoned the police again.

"Hello, I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people stealing things from my shed. Well, you don't have to worry about them now because I just shot them." Then he hung up.

Within five minutes, six police cars, a SWAT team, a helicopter, two fire trucks, a paramedic, and an ambulance showed up at the Phillips' residence, and caught the burglars red-handed.

One of the policemen said to George, "I thought you said that you'd shot them!"

George said, "I thought you said there was nobody available!"

(True Story) I LOVE IT!

Don't mess with old people.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

THE scholarly Stanley Fish offers an insight into "The Obama Show."

"moons" (2009) mixed media

Monday, September 21, 2009

NOW here's a story that gives colleges and universities something to worry about: "College for $99 a Month."

Saturday, September 19, 2009

WHAT'S this? You try to ask your health insurance office a question and you get arrested — while on your cell phone to their customer service? Only in America? Or maybe also in Communist China, the right wing's favorite "market economy"?

Friday, September 18, 2009

THE first decade of the new century was the decade of the plutocrat, writes Timothy Egan at his Outposts blog. A quotation:

Now consider the people who showed up in a state of generalized rage in Washington over the weekend. They have no leaders, save a self-described rodeo clown — Glenn Beck of Fox News — and some well-funded Astroturf outfits from the permanent lobbying class inside the Beltway. They are loosely organized under a Tea Party movement, but these people are closer to British Tories than 18th century patriots with a love of equality.

And they have the wrong target. ...

Where was the Tea Party movement when the tax burden was shifted from the high end to the middle? Where were the patriots when Wall Street, backed in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, rewrote securities laws so that the wonder boys of Lehman and A.I.G. could reduce home mortgages to poker chips at a trillion-dollar table?

Where were the angry “stiffs” when the banking industry rolled the last Congress — majority Democrat, by the way — into rewriting bankruptcy law, making it easier to keep people in permanent credit card hock?

Where were they when President Bush started the bailouts, with $700 billion that had to be paid on a few days’ notice — with no debate — to save global capitalism?

They were nowhere, because they were clueless, just as most journalists were.

Addendum ...

Ah, listen: Susan Boyle singing "Wild Horses":

Thursday, September 17, 2009

ADDED an interesting blog down in "Favorite Places." It's called little green footballs and it takes on some of the craziest of the crazies.

And Gail Collins and David Brooks want to argue about whether West and Swift mean we're a country in decline.

Addendum ...

AH, yes, of course, to quote Tom Friedman: "...if you like importing oil from Saudi Arabia, you’re going to love importing solar panels from China." Is it possible any longer to wonder how dumb we can be?

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

THE New England Journal of Medicine recently published an interesting survey of doctors and how they view a public health insurance option and an expansion of Medicare. I know which doctors I would want to see or have see my family members.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

ANDREW writes about the U.S. health care debate for British readers of the Times.

PERHAPS I've mentioned this, but it took Western Europe (which doesn't include Britain) about 2,000 years to become more or less civilized and it may take this country about the same number of years.

an untitled monotype

Addendum ...

"YOU lie, boy!" Maureen Dowd does have a way with words. And she let's South Carolina's Rep. Jim Clyburn enlighten us.

Monday, September 14, 2009

FRANK Rich says that President Obama wasted the summer by staying out of the fray while the inmates took over the asylum. A quotation:

...when we gain some perspective on the summer of 2009, the health care debate, like the crazed town-hall sideshows surrounding it, may seem very small in the history of this presidency — ... .

The reason is that health care reform, while an overdue imperative, still is overshadowed in existential urgency by the legacies of the two devastating cataclysms of the Bush years, 9/11 and 9/15, both of whose anniversaries we now mark. The crucial matters left unresolved in the wake of New York’s two demolished capitalist icons, the World Trade Center and Lehman Brothers, are most likely to determine both this president’s and our country’s fate in the next few years. Both have been left to smolder in the silly summer of ’09.

As we approach the eighth anniversary of the war that 9/11 bequeathed us in Afghanistan, the endgame is still unknown and more troops are on their way. Though the rate of American casualties reached an all-time high last month, the war ranks at or near the bottom of polls tracking the issues important to the American public. Most of those who do have an opinion about the war oppose it (57 percent in the latest CNN poll released on Sept. 1) and oppose sending more combat troops (56 percent in the McClatchy-Ipsos survey, also released on Sept. 1). But the essential national debate about whether we really want to double down in Afghanistan — and make the heavy sacrifices that would be required — or look for a Plan B was punted by the White House this summer even as the situation drastically deteriorated.

No less unsettling is the first-anniversary snapshot of 9/15: a rebound for Wall Street but not for the 26-million-plus Americans who are unemployed, no longer looking for jobs, or forced to settle for part-time work. Some 40 million Americans are living in poverty. While these economic body counts keep rising, tough regulatory reform for reckless financial institutions, too-big-to-fail and otherwise, seems more remote by the day. Last Sunday, Jenny Anderson of The Times exposed an example of Wall Street’s unashamed recidivism that takes gallows humor to a new high — or would were it in The Onion, not The Times. Some of the same banks that gambled their (and our) way to ruin by concocting exotic mortgage-backed securities now hope to bundle individual Americans’ life insurance policies into a new high-risk financial product built on this sure-fire algorithm: “The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return.”

MEANWHILE, the ignorant seem to be getting dumber by the minute. Yes, we are the "empire of illusion," as Chris Hedges termed it.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

PERHAPS Gail Collins is the only pundit who so thoroughly understands the gleeful stupidity of our politics as theater of the absurd.


"woman with blue hair" (2009) monotype with pen and ink

Quoting ...

FROM Chapter III, "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chris Hedges:

The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredding of Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the door of institutions that produce and sustain our educated elite. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Toronto, and the Paris Institute of Political Studies, along with most elite schools, do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, AP classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools, entrance exams, and blind deference to authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. Responsibility for the collapse of the global economy runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and academic halls in Cambridge, New Haven, Toronto and Paris to the financial and political centers of power.

The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers, and rigid structures designed to produce such answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service — economic, political, and social — come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market, and also with a highly specialized vocabulary. This vocabulary, a sign of the "specialist" and, of course, the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students, and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political, and cultural questions. Those who critique the system itself — people such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Dennis Kucinich, or Ralph Nader — are marginalized and shut out of the mainstream debate. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter. ...

... If we do not grasp the "societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms," we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society, and wields power through naked repression. ...

... Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. The elite as well as those equipped with narrow, specialized vocational skills, know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don't expect them to save us. They don't know how. They do not even know how to ask the questions. And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as self-deluded, as the rest of us.

Friday, September 11,2009

"distracted" (2009), an etching

LIKED this comment on a NYT blog:

You want to get Health Care insurance reform passed?

Simple.

Terminate government paid group medical insurance for any and all elected officials — federal, state, county, municipal — and require them all to buy their own individual policies on the open market until universal health care insurance is signed into law.

Once it’s passed, all elected officials names would be entitled to the equivalent of Medicare coverage (or its equivalent public option plan) at government expense. Anything beyond that, they pay for out of their own pockets.

I guarantee you we’ll get meaningful medical insurance reform passed before the year is out. Oh, and I suspect the public option won’t have any trouble passing …
— Menno van Wyk

Indeed. I assume all Republican members of Congress, so fearful of "government-run" health insurance, have already declined to participate in the government-run insurance cooperative open to all elected members and instead are buying individual insurance on the open market.

Surely they've done this as a matter of principle and to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy.

Quoting ...

FROM Tom Friedman:

The G.O.P. used to be the party of business. Well, to compete and win in a globalized world, no one needs the burden of health insurance shifted from business to government more than American business. No one needs immigration reform — so the world’s best brainpower can come here without restrictions — more than American business. No one needs a push for clean-tech — the world’s next great global manufacturing industry — more than American business. Yet the G.O.P. today resists national health care, immigration reform and wants to just drill, baby, drill.

“Globalization has neutered the Republican Party, leaving it to represent not the have-nots of the recession but the have-nots of globalized America, the people who have been left behind either in reality or in their fears,” said Edward Goldberg, a global trade consultant who teaches at Baruch College. “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

Addendum ...

THE conservative blogger, Andrew Sullivan, expounds on the lunacy of thinking that Republicans are fiscal conservatives. And be sure to check out the Bruce Bartlett link, too.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

HERE'S a poignant comment on Bob Herbert's column in Tuesday's New York Times, from Cdr. John Newlin, USN (Ret.) of Vista Calif.:

The Republic is being beleaguered by two potent forces. Together they just might send this country of ours permanently over the cliff. One is racism. Stop and think about it. About 95% of the angry shouters at the town meetings and "tea parties" are old. 50+ or more. You don't see many young people raising their voices in protest. There is a much deeper current of racism that courses through the older generation of Americans than anyone realizes. The Republicans know that and have tapped into it in a way that has everyone circling the wagons. A black president just won't do, don't you know? They have managed to translate the fear and uncertainty that attends the economic hardships brought on by the recession into fear and mistrust of a black President. It's sad, but as Edith Ann was wont to say, "It's the truth."

The second is money. The health insurance and pharmaceutical industries are hitting the Senate and Congressional Wal-Marts buying Senators like Baucus and Conrad like candy kisses. Until the money is eliminated from American politics, there is little hope of the kind of civil and sane political "log rolling" needed to solve our enormous problems.

Yes, we need help, Mr. Herbert. But from where? From whom? The older generations are too permeated with racism to put aside their fears and the 20-somethings that were a major force in electing President Obama are too concerned with avoiding the N1H1 virus at their colleges and worried to distraction about getting and holding a job when they graduate.

Where indeed, Mr. Herbert, do we seek the help we so desperately need?

Where's the artwork, someone asked? Gotta take some more photos, when I get a chance. In the throes of organizing stuff and working on a tedious encaustic piece.

Monday, September 7, 2009

YES, good question, Dr. Krugman, how did the economists get it so wrong? An interesting essay.

Friday, September 4, 2009

OH boy, conservative columnist David Brooks today sure gets it right on health care reform.

Here's the link to "How American Health Care Killed My Father", the Atlantic article to which Brooks refers. And go here to read the Brookings report to which he also refers.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

MIKE Lawrence, an old Springfield newsman and former aide to Gov. Jim Edgar has some sound comments on Illinois taxes and taxing bodies and notes that voters themselves created much of "the problem." Call it the "fiefdom syndrome."

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

WELL, looks as if the Chinese are starting to figure it out, even if we aren't.

Sunday, August 30,2009

A quotation from Nick Kristof's Sunday column describing how the current U.S. health care system "takes lives and breaks apart families":

The existing system doesn’t just break up families, it also costs lives. A 2004 study by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, found that lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. That’s one person slipping through the cracks and dying every half an hour.

In short, it’s a good bet that our existing dysfunctional health system knocks off far more people than an army of “death panels” could — even if they existed, worked 24/7 and got around in a fleet of black helicopters.

It's Friday ...

AND Paul Krugman is in articulate good form today: It's politics, stupid!

Addendum ...

YEP, health care delivered in livestock pens. As the former Cigna guy can tell you, that's the American way.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

GOOD Lordy me, we sure wouldn't want to do anything to keep anyone from profiteering on the backs of the sick and the elderly, would we? From an analysis by NYT economics writer David Leonhardt:

Real choice is not part of the bills moving through the Democratic-led Congress; even if the much-debated government-run insurance plan was created, it would not be available to most people who already have coverage. Republicans, meanwhile, have shown no interest in making insurance choice part of a compromise they could accept. Both parties are protecting the insurers.

Interesting questions ...

AT Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog.

Monday, August 24, 2009

REALLY, Joseph Epstein is correct: Writing doesn't require all that much true grit.

A famous corner in New York City's Greenwich Village, March 2009. Some writing has taken place in the Riviera.

Friday, August 21, 2009

SCOTT Horton writing in Harper's is too kind: In a word, they are murderers. But then, so is anyone who lies about the reasons for an invasion of a sovereign country that leaves more than 4,000 Americans and thousands of others dead.

Addendum ...

AH, common sense from a commentator at the NYT's The Opinionator blog today:

1. August 19, 2009
1:47 pm

MEDICARE FROM BIRTH TO DEATH
There is no need to establish a new government authority to handle health insurance,
nor should any new agency be developed. MEDICARE is already the National Health Insurance and should be issued at birth with SS#’s. To pay for this:

All 10 million+ government employees have their taxpayer funded health benefits transferred to MEDICARE, which becomes the National Health Insurance Carrier. An average payment of $12,000. - $30,000. is now being paid per year per person to insure government employees at all levels with taxpayer money going to private carriers.

This should be illegal. We already have a National Health Plan. Why are we allowing all that money to be paid to private health insurance companies? We are talking about $20,000,000,000 ( 20 Billion) would be injected immediately into our MEDICARE system, paying for all uninsured citizens to be on MEDICARE as well. The only administrative thing that needs to be done is to change the current age restriction backward to birth. That can be effected with a stroke of a legislative pen. Existing commercial insurance companies can continue to insure all the major corporations. Employees who receive health benefits in the private sector may use either their MEDICARE or the plan purchased by their employer.

— Richard E. Schiff

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

THE Republicans will also lie about the health care co-op model, writes Timothy Egan, and Orrin Hatch, of all people, should know better.

Addendum ...

BOB Herbert explains what "reform" its critics call Obamacare really amounts to.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

WE'VE all heard, by now, those horror stories about how awful "socialized" medicine is in Canada, France or wherever. In the interest of being fair and balanced, the conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan offers a collection of horror stories involving the U.S. system. Read a roundup of Views From Your Sickbed — read 'em and weep.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

BRUCE Bartlett, the respected conservative economist, understands reality: the economic collapse was indeed a product of the Bush years. A quotation:

... the extremely poor economic performance of the Bush years really set the stage for the current recession. This is apparent when we compare Bush’s two terms to Bill Clinton’s eight years. Since both took office close to a business cycle trough and left office close to a cyclical peak, this is a reasonable comparison.

Throughout the Bush years, many conservative economists, including CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, extravagantly extolled Bush’s economic policies. As late as December 21, 2007, after the recession already began, he wrote in National Review: “the Goldilocks economy is outperforming all expectations.” In a column on May 2, 2008, almost six months into the recession, Kudlow praised Bush for having prevented a recession.

But the truth was always that the economy performed very, very badly under Bush, and the best efforts of his cheerleaders cannot change that fact because the data don’t lie.

BUT, nevermind, as Paul Krugman properly notes, even so-called centrist Republicans can fall prey to not just the usual liars like Limbaugh, Gingrich and Palin but other right wing purveyors of nonsense such as the Washington Times and the American Spectator.

Friday, August 14, 2009

THE World Health Organization (WHO) country-by-country comparison of health statistics — that show, for example, Cuba with a better infant mortality rate than the U.S. — can be challenged on a variety of grounds, and of course are. But Consumer Reports is a different beast. So a quotation from its Health blog:

Enter the concept of "amenable mortality." Invented years ago in the United States and used worldwide by researchers ever since, it’s basically a body count of people who die for want of "timely and effective health care." A higher rate is bad, because it means the country’s health care system is falling down on its one and only job, which is to keep people healthy and do the best job possible of treating them if they get sick.

So where does the United States stand among 19 countries assessed by the "amenable mortality" measurement? As of 2002-2003, dead last. (France and Japan are first and second.) Be sure to go to the link with the summary — or just click here.

This is the kind of data we should be discussing in the health care reform debate. Right? Nah. We Americans know we have the best health care system in the world. To understand how we know that, check out Gail Collins, referenced below.

THE 300-plus comments to Gail Collins' recent column about guns at town hall meetings are, frankly, more interesting, and instructive, than the column itself, although you can clink on "Back to Article" and read it, too.

OR consider how health care is sometimes dispensed outside our comfortably remote part of the country. Ah, yes, the very best ... .

Thursday, August 13, 2009

PRESIDENT Obama sometimes refers to his late mother, most recently during the health care debate. A friend and former colleague writes about her work as an anthropologist.

STARTING with Jimmy Carter's deregulation of the airlines, we've spent nearly 40 years shipping head-of-household jobs out of this country, so why shouldn't current U.S. grads go to China job-hunting?

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

"Detritus," mixed media (shredded paper, spray paint, acrylic paint, plaster of paris), 2009

THE debate over health care/insurance reform is likely to get sillier before it's over, so here's some basic background on the U.S. system from Wikipedia. The U.S. system doesn't come close to being the best in the world — it's the best only if you have the money to pay for it — but it is the most expensive. For a comparison article, read about the French system at Medical News Today, an independent outfit in Britain.

No health care system can be perfect. My wife and I experienced the French system during a month in Paris in 1997. Went to a pharmacist, saw a private doctor on the Boulevard St. Germain, took a bus to a hospital in the near suburbs. Good service, and health issue resolved. But there different economic incentives. In Europe, the incentive is to work to keep people well because that is what reduces the cost. Here the incentive is to avoid preventive care because treating sick people is where the profit is. So I guess it all depends on your perspective.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

WHEN I lived in Tokyo in the early 1960s, there were any number of U.S. business people there awaiting the day when they could have access to the Chinese market. Richard Nixon eventually gave us that access and now we're all in hock to China's government-run "market" economy, a kind of state capitalism. But in this story is one good reason to never, ever buy anything made in China. No, the free market does not make you free.

Meanwhile, author and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich tells us that, more and more, it is a crime in America to be poor.

Speaking of things that probably originated in China:

"rankaku triptych" (eggshell inlay in encasutic) 2009

Monday, August 10, 2009

OPPONENTS of nationl health insurance reform claim Massachusetts is going broke with its universal care system. Not so, says the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation:

Despite a public perception that the state's landmark health care reform law has turned out to be unaffordable, a new analysis by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation finds that the cost to taxpayers of achieving near universal coverage has been relatively modest and well within initial projections of how much the state would have to spend to implement reform, in part because many of the newly insured have enrolled in employer-sponsored plans at no public expense.

Click on the link above to get the full report in a pdf file. I doubt you will hear much about this analysis in our "mainstream" media.

MEANWHILE, there's always somebody out there ready to make a buck off the ill and elderly. It's the all-American way, of course.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

THERE was a letter to the editor in last evening's local newspaper that cites page and paragraph numbers of an unspecified document that, it alleges, will cause President Obama will do terrible things to people. Of course, this letter is one of the more gross falsehoods being passed around the country by Republican Party operatives and/or their surrogates. There is no single health care bill yet, but rather several, and none agreed to, so just what document the writer is referring to can't be known — perhaps pages in "Alice in Wonderland"?

It was not a legitimate letter. The editor who decides what letters to print should know better. Let Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, weigh in on the moral virtues of truth-telling.

To check out the latest claims being perpetuated by the proponents of the status quo (as well as claims by proponents of "reform), go to Politifact.com, a fact-checking site operated by the St. Petersburg (FL) Times.

Or to get the skinny on the "protesters" disrupting town hall meetings on health care reform, read Paul Krugman's Friday column in the NYT. A quotation:

Yes, well-heeled interest groups are helping to organize the town hall mobs. Key organizers include two Astroturf (fake grass-roots) organizations: FreedomWorks, run by the former House majority leader Dick Armey, and a new organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.

The latter group, by the way, is run by Rick Scott, the former head of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital chain. Mr. Scott was forced out of that job amid a fraud investigation; the company eventually pleaded guilty to charges of overbilling state and federal health plans, paying $1.7 billion — yes, that’s “billion” — in fines. You can’t make this stuff up.

You can't? Wanna bet?

Meanwhile ...

AS Charles Blow so ably points out, wishy-washy Democrats are letting the health care debate be "hijacked by hooligans." A quotation:

... Belligerence is the currency of the intellectually bankrupt.

Trapped in their vacuum of ideas, too many Republicans continue to display an astounding ability to believe utter nonsense, even when faced with facts that contradict it.

Friday, August 7, 2009

"landscapes" (2009) mixed media/acrylic glazes

Thursday, August 6, 2009

TIMOTHY Egan, blogging at NYT, gets it exactly right:

They hate it (cash for clunkers), many of these Republicans, because it’s a huge hit. It’s working as planned, and this cannot stand. America must fail in order for President Obama to fail. Don’t be surprised if the tea party goons now being dispatched to shout down town hall forums on health care start showing up at your car dealers, megaphones in hand.

Addendum ...

HOW about a little counter-spin here by a former health insurance PR guy?

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

YEP, we'd better start ramping up some new nuclear power generators — and the reprocessing plants to deal with spent fuel — or the alternative energy folks will indeed have the last laugh (if anybody is left laughing).

Sunday, August 2, 2009

FRANK Rich explains the realities behind the "teachable moment" that wasn't, post-battle of Cambridge:

If there was a teachable moment in this incident, it could be found in how some powerful white people well beyond Cambridge responded to it. That reaction is merely the latest example of how the inexorable transformation of America into a white-minority country in some 30 years — by 2042 in the latest Census Bureau estimate — is causing serious jitters, if not panic, in some white establishments.

Addendum ...

PAUL Krugman explains why "government involvement is the only reason our (health care) system works at all."

Thursday, July 30, 2009

TWO revealing comments posted to the "conversation" between NYT columnists Gail Collins and David Brooks on the merits or lack thereof of a single-payer health care system:

I’m a 65+ Canadian (with a bunch of US relatives) still working full time by choice (self-employed) and paid into the Canadian health care bureaucracy for 47 years with minimal useage. The fact that there are almost as many Americans +/- without the financial means to access anything but limited health care in the US as there are Canadians in all of Canada (33 million), has always amazed me.

Now I pay very little but I get access to the same medical fraternity & facilities & treatments as the wealthiest Canadians.

Obviously, Americans will decide what health care outcome they prefer and probably don’t want or need to hear the opinions of Canucks on the matter. But those Americans hearing anecdotes on the “outright failure” of the single payer, all-inclusive, Canadian system need to know the truth in terms of universal accessibility, cost per capita, medical outcome statistics, wait times, etc. As ham-fisted as the Cdn system might be, the health care outcomes for Canadians rank near the top, worldwide and cost less per capita.

My personal, 6 year battle with cancer is destined to go on for another 10+ years and never have I been adversely affected in any way (including wait times) by the Canadian system. Beware the extreme, anecdotal “case studies” pillorying the Cdn. Health Care System that I’ve seen on US TV ads. In your own best interests, dig deeper for the truth.

— Bruce Warren

I’ve lived in Canada most of my life, and I see the doctor I want to see. When he doesn’t know what the problem is, he refers me to a specialist. No one has to be asked to see “if it’s covered”. If there’s no need to refer me, he doesn’t. Period.

I’ve never had to wait for treatment that I’ve needed. My sister has had cancer, and was seen and operated on within the week. My father has heart disease, and has always been treated in a timely manner.

The woman in the TV commercial who stated that she had to pay to go to the US to be treated for a “brain tumor” apparently didn’t have cancer — she had a cyst in her brain. That’s likely the reason why she didn’t receive an immediate operation — there were other people who actually had brain tumors who needed to be operated on, and her situation wasn’t life threatening.

We have a single payer — the province. The province is a “not-for-profit” entity — they don’t pad the cost of health care to make money. This is one way that a single-payer system saves money. Comments from other readers discuss some of the other ways:
- Purchasing in large quantities mean that better prices can be negotiated
- A single payer system eliminates the majority of the paperwork associated with a for-profit health care system
- “Limits on what is covered” have always been in place; right now in the US, the limits are determined by what is profitable to an insurance company. A single payer system means that they are determined according to what is the best allocation of dollars for the health care system.

I guess the best way to put it is that, if the workforce is healthy, then it is better able to generate income tax dollars. The fact that a single-payer system costs less than a for-profit system on a per capita basis is just a bonus.

— D Simpson

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

YESTERDAY, David Brooks wrote a column in which he mostly said that we do stuff for our posterity and that if we didn't we wouldn't do much of anything. He cites a blog written by two economists, Marginal Revolution: small steps toward a better world. It is refreshing to read something intelligent.

REMEMBER Bush II's comment that nobody is denied health care because they can just go to the emergency room? Andrew Sullivan correctly notes that this, too, is socialized medicine.

YES, there is a reason Professor Gates should sue the Cambridge, MA, Police Department: to defend the Fourth Amendment and a fundamental constitutional principle.

Monday, July 27, 2009

FRANK Rich does a pretty good job of explaining why much of what you read, these days, on the front pages of national newspapers and most of what you see, these days, on television "news" programs is unadultered garbage.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

THE eminent Stanley Fish, dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, provides some useful background related to the Henry Louis Gates imbroglio. The comments are instructive, too.

Friday, July 24, 2009

IF you missed the PBS broadcast on WQEC of Time Team America's visit to New Philadelphia, site of the town founded in Pike County by Free Frank McWorter in 1836, click on this link.

AND no matter the positive side of this piece of our history, internalized, institutional racism is still alive in America.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

ADDED this tell-it-like-it-really-is blog (Who Hijacked Our Country) to my Some Favorite Places list, lower right. To get a feel for it, here's Sunday's post:

According to these two articles (here and here), Americans aren’t sufficiently fired up over health insurance reform because there’s no villain. The public won’t be galvanized until there’s someone to crystallize all of this fury and frustration. We need an Osama bin Laden; a Communist infiltrator; a drug pusher selling heroin to YOUR fourth grade child.

OK then — imagine a 9/11-type terrorist attack occurring in America six times a year, every year. THAT’S how many Americans die every year because they don’t have health insurance. Even knowing that number — 18,000 deaths each year — the public isn’t mobilized because their fear and anger aren’t channeled and directed. These emotions just flare up and then diffuse into the ozone.

And that’s probably because of the bland neutral sterile presentation of these stories. “The patient didn’t have insurance.” “Coverage was denied because of a pre-existing condition.” “The insurance policy didn’t cover the required procedure.” WHOA!!! Doesn’t that just send your blood pressure skyrocketing? Careful, your hands are shaking.

Let’s call it what it is: Murder! This isn’t something that just “happened” because of some faceless anonymous insurance company. These murders were the result of somebody’s conscious decision. An actual flesh-and-blood person was calculating how much more money he/she could make by killing X number of sick people.

Instead of “after further study, the HMO concluded that the policy…” — how about “this motherfuckin’ shitbag killed hundreds of sick people so he could afford another yacht!” And now it’s time to put names and faces to these murdering douchebags.

Monday, July 20, 2009

A. E. Hotchner provides more than adequate reason to NOT buy the new edition of Ernest Hemingway's book about Paris, "A Moveable Feast."

Sunday, July 19, 2009

CHARLES Blow provides an interesting analysis of the impact, past and potential, of the Hispanic vote.

NOW and then, Maureen Dowd is a good read, especially if her topic is Republican hypocrisy of which there seems to be no end. And Frank Rich this morning is even more scathing.

The Statue of Liberty taken in 2008 from a boat in New York Harbor as the sun sets over New Jersey.

Friday, July 17, 2009

PETER Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, explains why we must ration health care — and, unlike the way we ration it already, be honest about it. A quotation:

Remember the joke about the man who asks a woman if she would have sex with him for a million dollars? She reflects for a few moments and then answers that she would. “So,” he says, “would you have sex with me for $50?” Indignantly, she exclaims, “What kind of a woman do you think I am?” He replies: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling about the price.” The man’s response implies that if a woman will sell herself at any price, she is a prostitute. The way we regard rationing in health care seems to rest on a similar assumption, that it’s immoral to apply monetary considerations to saving lives — but is that stance tenable?

Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another. In the United States, most health care is privately financed, and so most rationing is by price: you get what you, or your employer, can afford to insure you for. But our current system of employer-financed health insurance exists only because the federal government encouraged it by making the premiums tax deductible. That is, in effect, a more than $200 billion government subsidy for health care. In the public sector, primarily Medicare, Medicaid and hospital emergency rooms, health care is rationed by long waits, high patient copayment requirements, low payments to doctors that discourage some from serving public patients and limits on payments to hospitals.