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.

Monday, July 13, 2009

"WE are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love ... and then we return home.”
— Australian Aboriginal Proverb (as posted by Gary Reef at Art From the Heart)

IN his Sunday NYT column, Frank Rich discusses the politics of resentment that give Sarah Palin a certain legitimacy. We can see, in several recent local political occurrences, that same politics of resentment at work. A quotation:

In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era.

That’s why Palin won’t go gently into the good night, much as some Republicans in Washington might wish. She is not just the party’s biggest star and most charismatic television performer; she is its only star and charismatic performer. Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white non-urban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind. Palin gives this movement a major party brand and political plausibility that its open-throated media auxiliary, exemplified by Glenn Beck, cannot. She loves the spotlight, can raise millions of dollars and has no discernible reason to go fishing now except for self-promotional photo ops.

"exercise 2," (2007) monotype