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BACK IN TIME TO SAY GOODBYE TO 2009

First the bad news. I did not win the Illinois or any other kind of lottery. That is not the reason for my absence from the blogosphere. There are reasons but I won’t take the time to go into them now because I need to get something posted here before I create a new record of a month without a single comment. That hasn’t happened since I started this blog in April, 2003 and I certainly don’t want to stagger into 2010 or 5700 or whatever year you’re celebrating, looking back at a blank page.

There are too many things that have happened since I last wrote to try to play "catch up" - so perhaps I should look past all of those things and look back to this time last year to see how things have changed since December 31, 2008 - or maybe to see how things have stayed the same - which is more likely to be the case.

Looking back at this blog, I see that one thing certainly hasn’t changed. My posts were becoming already becoming infrequent. The last post of 2008 was on December 22 and back then I was catching up on several topics - among them the anticipated inauguration of Barack Obama and the Fed interest rate cut down to a quarter point. I’ll have a comment on that last item for sure - but how about the state of the world? Has it - we - changed to the point where "they" - intelligent beings from some other planet - might finally be willing to pay is a visit? The answer is clearly no. In fact the chances of that momentous event occurring seem to be getting smaller from year to year.

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict remains a conflict after more 60 years. There’s still talk of a "peace process" but no movement towards peace. Most of the world tends to blame Israel for the lack of progress - so no change there. For a few days this month, Egypt of all countries, appeared to be supportive of Israel in preventing a crowd of Palestinian sympathizers from around the world from crossing from that country into Gaza to demonstrate support for the poor Gazans on the anniversary of Israel’s military response last year to years of rocket attacks. But this morning it allowed a few dozen to cross over to demonstrate. Is there a lesson for Israel here? Maybe the world will love her if she just absorbed rocket barrages and other attacks and did nothing? But then Dick Cheney would accuse the Jewish state of being soft on terror.

I don’t know what he’d say about England which has had plenty of trouble from home grown Islamic terrorists but has also become a danger zone for Israeli politicians. 2009 was a year in which any Israeli political leader was in danger of being arrested for "war crimes" if he or she tried to visit the U.K. That Gaza thing again. Israel should know better than to try to defend itself.

The U.S. is still involved in armed conflict around the world. And whether or not we’re involved in actual battle, our military is literally everywhere in the world. Just watching those televised Christmas greetings from military personnel serving overseas can leave you shaking you head. What are we doing in Germany - or in England? Didn’t the war end in 1945?? When you look at where we are and what we do militarily from other nation’s perspectives, you get some idea of why we are often looked upon as the bad guys even when we’re trying to do good things.

Freedom wasn’t a big winner in 2009. Comparing last year’s dictators, theocracies and mass killings of citizens by their "governments" with this year showed little change and the nations that we considered a danger to the rest of the world remain a danger. Maybe even more so. The same can be said of poverty and despair. While we anguish over poverty and unemployment and homelessness in the U.S., it is nothing compared to the millions of people who live on a daily income of less than the cost of a bus ride in Chicago - people who live without running water, electricity or sewage. If there was any change for the better from 2008 to 2009, it is imperceptible. It’s no wonder that "they" don’t come - but the need for them to show up and help us unite this fragmented world grows in urgency from year to year.

For us of course it’s been the year of recession and dodging a depression by the skin of our teeth. Ben Bernanke is Time’s man of the year. Supposedly, he saved us from disaster with his money management skills and his magical disappearing interest rate. The latter is supposed to make money so easy and cheap to borrow, that businesses would be standing in line to collect barrels full to expand or start up businesses and kick unemployment down to next to nothing. It didn’t do that of course but what it did do was harm millions of Americans - many of them seniors - who relied on interest bearing investments as their main source of income. Not an issue for financial chess players of course. They don’t deal with flesh and blood - just number crunching. Flesh and blood doesn’t get you on the cover of Time.

The unemployment figures were disastrous of course, but you could look at them in another, disturbing way. With millions out of work, the country didn’t grind to a halt - or even slow down that much. There was no lack of goods and services. As long as you had money, you didn’t notice the effect, if any, of mass unemployment. Which could be interpreted as meaning that we don’t need to have that many people employed for the country to run smoothly. We don’t need as many retail stores as we have. We don’t need to have as much of anything for the country to provide as many goods and services as the population needs. Which means that full employment can only be achieved through excess production and excess services. Which is a hell of a way to run an economy.

Has anything really changed in the field of health care from last year to this? A bill is pending, the major portions of which will take effect years down the road. Meanwhile, what has changed from last year to this is that health insurance premiums have gone up - as have CO-pays and the price of most medications. I predict that they will continue to go up, no matter what remains in the health care bill when the president signs it. And if mandated insurance purchase and "children" staying on their parents policies until they are pushing 30 stays in the bill, it’s possible that this may be the issue that will persuade "them" to visit our primitive planet to conduct mental health tests on our political leaders.

I think perhaps the major change from 2008 to 2009 has been the emergence and increased influence of a far too large a number of nut jobs in politics and broadcasting. If 2009 is to be remembered as the "year of" anything at all, it will have to be the year of the crazies I was listening to someone filling in for Bill Press this morning and he played a "top dozen’ crazy things said by right wing radio nut jobs. I wish I could have recorded them. Some were by people I’d never heard of - but all of the comments qualified as being in the crazy category. Some radio nut who I’ve never herd of, maintained that Obama had plans for Jews that mirrored those of Adolph Hitler. Michael Savage was quoted as insisting that autism was no more than bratty behavior by bratty kids. And on and on. Twelve bizarre statements that once went out over the public airways. There was a time when you could dismiss such nonsense as unworthy of response from serious people. But that was before 2008 and 2009. Today, these nut cases have become heroes to millions because they are voicing the dark and sick beliefs of many of those millions. I used to wonder how the people in Minnesota’s sixth district could elect someone as crazy as Michelle Bachman. Than I saw the so called tea baggers and their signs on news reports and it became clear to me. The ignorance and bigotry that we always knew was lurking just below America’s thin veneer of civility had found its voice in people like her and broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck. And while it may be a minority of the voting population, it’s a substantial minority, proud of and not afraid to reveal its extremist views. Scary stuff - reminiscent of pre Civil Rights law times .

If, a year from now, the Limbaughs and the Becks of the world still dominate the radio airwaves and cable television and more Bachman types have been elected to Congress, there will be no question about whether things have gotten better or worse from 2010 to 2011.

Happy New Year to one and all.
posted by Jeff Smith at 12/31/2009 08:52:00 PM

 
THOUGHTS ON FORT HOOD AND RELIGIOUS MADNESS

So this crazy man kills thirteen American servicemen in a murderous rampage and the two extremes of left and right wing punditry seem to want to spend more time arguing about what to call the event than the event itself. It certainly wasn’t surprising to learn of the knee jerk right wing reaction - of course concentrating on the man’s religion and leaping to the conclusion that this was an Islamist terrorist attack. I was more surprised - or perhaps I should say disappointed - at the left’s caution not to jump to conclusions - a reasonable reaction but sounding a little too much like a defense of this traitorous madman.

Although I don’t particularly want to join the chorus from the right, I think it’s pretty clear what happened here. Just as the bombing of London buses and trains in 2005 was the work of British born punks who believed that their country was at war with their co-religionists and whose loyalty to their religion was greater than that to the country of their birth - so did American citizen Major Nidal Hassan consider the United States his enemy.

I would suspect that our friends in Israel were not at all surprised at what happened at Fort Hood. . The large Arab and Muslim population of Israel is not expected nor compelled to be part of the Israel Defense Force and to fight against the country’s Muslim enemies. They are fully aware of the divided loyalty of Israeli Arabs - in may cases not really divided at all - more supportive if their Muslim brethren than of their country. It really isn’t that surprising that the influence of religion - in my view a totally irrational influence - is greater than the influence of national loyalty. Think about it for a minute. How do you think American Jews would react if for some reason the United States went to war against Israel? Of course that’s about as likely as a 90 degree temperature in Chicago on Christmas day - but I put it forth as an illustration of how citizens can be torn between loyalty to faith and to country and can sometimes be so torn as to make irrational choices,

I am no expert when it comes to the Muslim fait, but I would venture to guess that adherents fall into three broad categories. There are those who are truly religious - who believe in God - or their version of a God - but who aren’t influenced by their religion to the point of acting against their own best interests. Think of the millions of American Christians who go to church on Sunday - or on most Sundays. Believers - but not crazy believers. Most Muslims probably fall into this category of deists.

Then I would suspect there is a large group who acknowledge their religious heritage and who are comfortable with and participate in ritual but who really don’t believe in an all powerful deity or in a "prophet" of that deity or in an "after life." Not unlike, I would suspect - a good many people who call themselves Christians or Jews because that is their heritage - not because of any decisions they have made about whether or not the religion that has been passed on to them makes any sense.

And then we have the third group of which Major Hassan is a member. I’m not sure that anyone knows how large this group is - but there is more than ample evidence of what they believe and what they want to accomplish. They are the Islamic crazies who believe that non Muslims are infidels and killing them is "God’s work." They can be found all over the world, in theocracies and democracies and they don’t seem to be too hard to identify. In England and in Europe, their denunciations of everything that the British and the Europeans have held sacred for centuries, rings out daily from the pulpits of their mosques. Or may it’s called something else. Do mosques have pulpits? Whatever. It’s taken a long time but the Brits and Europeans are beginning to wake up to the danger in their midst.

For years , hatred of "infidels" was preached from London’s Finsbury Park Mosque before Abu Hamza al-Masri was arrested. Supposedly it’s a more "peaceful" place today. But I wouldn’t want to live next door. In Europe there is the warning voice of Dutch politician Geert Wilders whose views on the dangers of Islamic extremism can be read here.

The problem may not be as great in the United States, but it is beyond "political correctness" to assert that it doesn’t exist - just as it is irrational to assert that all Muslims represent a danger to the body politic. There are nut cases in other major religions but while the rhetoric may be frightening, particularly of some evangelical Christians, it is less likely to express itself in acts of mass murder. There has been the occasional Israeli orthodox Jew opening fire on groups of Palestinians just because they are Palestinians - and the occasional Christian nut case who thinks he is doing God’s work by killing people who he perceives to be breaking his version of Christian law - but he Muslim nuts are in a class by themselves and we have to be prepared to deal with the madmen in our midst who look upon the rest of us as infidels.

Of course Muslims are not automatically a threat to the nation just because of their religion and we need to be careful not to listen to right wing extremists who try to tell us otherwise, But we have been presented with more than ample evidence that belief in some aspects of that religion can precipitate acts of madness. I’m not sure what action can be taken to protect ourselves from Major Hassan types that may be lurking out there that wouldn’t violate the rights of American citizens - but doing nothing is also not an option. At the very least we would do well to look at what has been happening in England and in Europe and heed the actions of the British and the words of Geert Wilders if we ever hope to prevent future occurrences of this kind of horrendous act.

As to whether or not Fort Hood was a terrorist act - it would seem to me that acts of terror are designed to instill fear in the general public. Major Hassan’s act was more of the ritual suicide of a self perceived warrior in a war being conducted by his fellow nationals against his co-religionists.

The Major had apparently made it clear that he loved death more than "we" love life. If that is the case, I would hope that every effort is made to keep him alive and that people like me be allowed to visit him in his hospital bed or jail cell every day of every year he’s incarcerated and yell into his ear "You ignorant twit. There is no "Allah." He is a figment of your Muslim imagination. There is no paradise with dozens of virgins waiting for your arrival. There is just death and oblivion.

"Paradise" is the world of worms and maggots that will consume your putrid flesh. I wish them bon appetit.
posted by Jeff Smith at 11/21/2009 03:07:00 PM

 
COMMENTS FROM MIDEAST ON TARGET…
While I am temporarily absent from my own blog…..

No, I have not expired and I have not resigned from the blogosphere. My prolonged absence has been due to logistical and physical problems. The logistical problems will be solved in the near future with the installation of a home network - but the physical problems will have to run their course. Of interest is the most recent physical problem - that of a lens inserted in my right eye following cataract removal more than 20 years ago that slipped out of place a few weeks ago. Surgery to move it back into place was unsuccessful, so a new lens was inserted, requiring major manipulation of the eye and deeply embedded stitches, resulting in temporary legal blindness in that eye which, combined with 20/50 vision in my left eye, has made reading, writing and using the computer extremely difficult to say the least.

The eye is slowly healing and when full vision returns I will try to catch up on a whole heap of commentary rattling around in my head. Meanwhile, here is a commentary received from MIDEAST ON TARGET that I think you will find interesting in the light of the Fort Hood massacre - one of the topics on which I will make comment when I return. The author is Yisrael Ne'eman and he calls the commentary HUDNA AND THE CEASE-FIRE


"Time and again we hear of the lessening of hostilities in Afghanistan , Pakistan or wherever and the possibilities of a cease-fire when battling radical Islam. The Islamists break down into two types, the non-state actor Islamic fundamentalist groups such as al-Qaeda, the Moslem Brotherhood and its Palestinian wing Hamas and the fundamentalist regimes such as Iran . The dominant Western policy towards all is one of engagement and conciliation or conflict resolution. Liberal democracies as a rule believe in compromise and mutual understandings with the enemy, especially when the price of victory appears costly. Hence there are constant efforts at attaining cease-fires as the first step towards conflict resolution and engaging in one form or another of a peace process.

Westerners, whether liberal/conservative, left or right, project their own humanistic values on their adversaries, believing that "reasonable" people will accept peace with mutual recognition and respect. The first step in doing so is in arranging a cease-fire, this coming about when the Islamists are losing badly enough to agree to such an arrangement. Technically accepting the halt to hostilities is where the supposed "confluence of interests" ends as the West looks forward to resolving "outstanding differences" and the acceptance of the rights of all sides to exist side by side while the totalitarian Islamic fundamentalist adversary sees the cease-fire in the understanding of a "hudna".

Islamists arrange hudnas when holding the short end of the stick and certainly when facing defeat. The hudna allows time for rearming, retraining, reloading and finally reigniting the conflict at the time and choosing of the Islamic side despite any previous agreements concluded with the enemy. A hudna is only a short term tactical move in the military strategy leading to the ultimate victory of Islamic hegemony world-wide. Hudna or an Islamic cease-fire is not part of any "peace process" but rather an integral, indivisible part of a "war process".

There are Western policy makers who are aware of all the above but find a way out by insisting on what is known as "deterrence" whereby the Islamist side will accept a status quo cease-fire (and even possible negotiations) because they fear the consequences of continued military actions. The gap in thinking between the West and the Islamists comes about when the latter pours virtually all their efforts into rebuilding its military strength to the detriment of everything else. To the Westerner this appears "insane", certainly if one thinks like him and prefers to arrange an end to the conflict.

Sanity is often subjective and dependent on societal values and understandings. An Islamic agreement to a hudna does not imply the Islamic side is deterred, the new offensive is only delayed. In the Islamic fundamentalist world of the Moslem Brotherhood and the Khomeinist Iranians (Pres. Ahmedinejad & Co.) any hudna is "delayence" (a term developed by Elliot Chodoff) until the timing is deemed correct for a new offensive against the West or any other non-Islamists. And as for sanity, Islamists do not consider it rational for there to be a multi-cultural pluralistic world since the only truth is in their understanding of Islam. Projecting their own understandings of conflict on their enemies they fully expect the West to battle them to the same absolutist end and therefore do not believe in the i dea of a cease-fire for conflict resolution but see such explanations as a ruse. They know for sure that the only interpretation of the cessation of hostilities can be a hudna where one side must eventually claim total victory.

The West believes it can buy time and work towards peace with a halt in battle. The Islamists agree to the buying of time but only in the service of final Islamic domination. Hitler was delayed in the 1930s but never deterred. He explained his ultimate objectives of conquest and never veered from them. Stalin too was only delayed, was never defeated and died before he achieved his final objectives. Later Soviet regimes accepted a mutual deterrence with the West after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Each time Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia did come to the negotiating table they left having absorbed other nations under their wings such as Czechoslovakia (1938) as concerns the former and swaths of Eastern Europe (despite the Yalta Agreement) when referring to the latter. The West acquiesced, fearing conflict and thereby sending a message of weakness and encouraging the other side to continue its policy of aggression.

Throughout the history of Islam there have been neighbors with whom Moslem rulers have struck deals for a cessation of hostilities. Some regimes did not appear intent on forcibly spreading Islam as a final objective. This is not the case with the 21st century Islamist movement of the Moslem Brotherhood and Shiite Iran. They are much more comparable to the extremist Islamists of yesteryear such as the Wahhabists in Arabia in the 1700s or Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia of the recent past.

Only when the West has a full understanding of the meaning of hudna will it be able to overcome the lure of arranging a cease-fire with those seeking its ultimate destruction. Only then can the alternative be seized and a strategy towards victory over such oppression be implemented."

Thought provoking to say the least…

J.S.
posted by Jeff Smith at 11/12/2009 10:32:00 AM

 
SOME IRRELIGIOUS THOUGHTS ABOUT RELIGION

A few nights ago I was watching the "Universe" series on the Sci-Fi channel when the subject was the inevitable collision between our Galaxy - the Milky Way - and the Andromeda Galaxy. It’s not going to happen for four or five or six billion years - the astrophysicists aren’t sure of the precise date - but they are sure that the two galaxies are racing toward each other at breakneck speed and will eventually meet, setting off the mother of all July Fourth and Guy Fawke’s Days. Obviously, no life forms will survive such a collision - assuming that any life forms still exist in our galaxy billions of years hence. Unless perhaps if those life forms are pure energy and might enjoy and even benefit from the fireworks. The scientists on the program also said that while Milky and Andromeda are moving toward each other, everything else in the universe is moving away - and the combined galaxies will exist in isolation with everything else so far away that of there were astronomers alive at the time, there would be no stars visible outside of the new giant galaxy from which they would be making their observations.

All of which got me thinking about religion - a subject that I have not touched upon for quite some time. I got to wondering what Christians would think about this kind of information - particularly Evangelical Christians. Would it bother them to accept the scientific prediction that earth would no longer exist billions of years from now? Would they feel confident that no matter what the future holds - it would all happen as a matter of "God’s will" and would have zero affect on believers because they’d all be nestling comfortably up in heaven Or down - or sideways - or in hyper space. I’m not sure why "heaven" is always thought of as being "up" when there’s no up or down beyond the gravity of our planet - but it’s the common vernacular when the subject is heaven.

I then got to wonder, as I do from time to time - who Christians think will be their companions in heaven. Obviously fellow Christians. But if there is an "after life" - surely it extends to all humans. Some of those humans are the Muslim extremists who commit suicide in the course of blowing up "the enemy" - an act that they consider sacred, guaranteeing them wonderful pleasantries in paradise. Do Christians look upon them as fellow heavenly residents? And what about the millions of people who are slaughtered in tribal warfare in Africa or who die from malnutrition. You often see pictures of those people in television reports, usually children with distended stomachs and flies crawling across their faces. There are always flies. Do Christians think of themselves as one with all of these people and do they expect to share heaven with them?

I pose these questions because I have no idea how Christians think about such matters. I know something of the elaborate sets of rules and beliefs of the Christian churches - plural because certainly Christianity isn’t monolithic. Judaism doesn’t talk about after life and I don’t think it’s actually a belief of Jews - even though the concept seems to stem from the alleged preaching of a Jew named Jesus and words he is alleged to have spoken as he was being crucified. I won’t comment on the story of him rising from the dead. But I often wonder what religion and religious beliefs would look like today if Jesus had lived and died in relative obscurity and if Mohammed had spent his life as a carpenter or a fisherman. Would the dominant religion of today’s world be Judaism? Instead of a Pope in Rome, would there be a Chief Rabbi in Jerusalem. Would our national holidays be Yom Kippur and Passover? Would coronation ceremonies be performed in Westminster Synagogue? Would we be wondering when we’re ever going to have a president other than a male Jewish Caucasian?

All of the foregoing might appear to be frivolous, but to me it’s a demonstration of how ridiculous the world’s multiple religions are, with all of their rules and regulations and inventions of what the after life is like - inventions that generations have accepted as "gospel." Many people would look into the cosmos and be awed by the array of millions of galaxies and billions of stars and their reaction would be that some mighty entity must have created all of this. As a matter of fact, they don’t even have to look that far to have that reaction. Just looking at our local night sky is enough for millions of people to believe in divine creation. But you have to wonder - assuming the astrophysicists are correct - what kind of divine entity would be planning the clash of two galaxies, destroying any and all planets that might exist and most assuredly any and all life - down to the lowest single cell creature? It may be too far into the distance for most believers to even think about - but it is pretty clear that there will one day be no human life in the Milky Way galaxy. Even if the clash never occurs, our sun is destined to nova and take all of it’s planets along with it into oblivion. Of course, hundreds of thousands years hence - if the human race still exists - some of our descendants might be space travelers - chasing after galaxies racing away from us at unfathomable speeds - looking for a place to perpetuate our species, but I doubt that it will happen.

Most deists don’t care to think about such matters and I guess they are the lucky ones because they believe that no matter what, when they die they will "ascend" to "heaven" where they’ll meet up with ancestors and loved ones and live forever in a "state of grace." I have a friend who died in 2007 and his widow can’t wait to succumb herself so that she can "rejoin" him. I’m not so lucky. I’m one of those over thinking people who can’t bring myself to believe in a deity and an after life and so I look forward to an eternity of oblivion for myself and for what I can observe in the night sky.

I know such thoughts amount to a terrible downer - but here’s a thought to cheer myself and readers up. No matter who’s right and who’s wrong about deities and religions and after lives - I’ve always believed that as long as we remain sentient - we humans are in a sense immortal. That’s because if only oblivion awaits us after death, our last thoughts will last for all time - even when there no longer is time. And best of all, we won’t know we’re dead - and that’s a kind of immortality.

Happy Halloween.
posted by Jeff Smith at 10/24/2009 12:14:00 PM

 
ODDS AND ENDS


I have sympathy for syndicated columnists who are not confined to a single topic - politics for instance. When I sit down to comment on the passing parade - rarely nowadays, about which I may comment in a week or so - my problem is to pick one of the many current issues that have grabbed my attention and piqued my interest. So some days - and this is one - I’ve decided to simply make a few comments about a variety of issues.

First - in case anyone didn’t understand what I was talking about on October 2 - and there is an indication that this might be the case - it was parody. I was pointing out how ridiculous it is for national programs such as Social Security and Medicare to be funded only by a specific tax and not also funded from general revenues. Which is why people keep issuing dire warnings about Medicare being bankrupt in - you pick the year. Which is why we would soon be out of funds for the military if it were funded the same way. Which is ridiculous. As is the way we keep funding Medicare et al and keep issuing those dire predictions. Of course if we weren’t involved in wars for years on end and didn’t have military bases around the world - maybe we wouldn’t have to listen to all those dire predictions.

Speaking of Medicare, the big issue over the alleged healthcare "reform" bills floating around in Congress is whether or not the final bill will include a "public" option which some advocates seem to think will keep the health insurance companies in line and make it easier for the less fortunate among us to get health care at reasonable cost. No one knows exactly what a public option will look like - but it’s been described as something akin to Medicare. If that’s the case and that’s the kind of plan that advocates think of as some kind of panacea, they need to take a longer look at Medicare.

Practically everyone on Medicare loves it - according to the public option advocates. Well, I’m on Medicare and it seems to be a reasonably good program - as long as there’s cooperation from the medical profession - but when there isn’t - and non-cooperation is far from a rare event - Medicare doesn’t look quite as lovable. I need to have a procedure performed which is currently scheduled for tomorrow and to schedule it I called a specialist who has treated me in the past when my insurance was Blue Cross - albeit several years ago - only to discover that while he "accepts" Medicare patients , he doesn’t accept Medicare assignment. What this means, it was explained to me, is that his office will bill Medicare and my Medigap insurance - either that or Medicare sends the bill onto my Medigap insurance - and a check for whatever is covered will be sent to me. I will then be responsible for any part of his bill that Medicare doesn’t cover. And to give himself a little extra leeway, he requires a $125 "scheduling " fee before he will agree to perform the procedure. When I expressed surprise and consternation upon hearing this information, his scheduler said - tersely - more and more doctors won’t even take Medicare patients.

A "public option" may indeed do all that its advocates claim it will do, but unless there is some way to induce doctors to treat patients insured this way , it will be a program fraught with problems. We have to assume that the most vulnerable among us - those with limited funds - would be the ones most likely to end up on a public option plan - and if it’s anything like Medicare, they may find themselves in the same situation that I ran up against trying to schedule a medical procedure with a specialist. The idea of a "public option" - indeed the idea of a single payer program - a national health plan - is advocated by many doctors. But unless the reimbursements are close to what they are currently receiving from private insurance companies - it may not be that easy to find a doctor happy to take public option patients.

From medicine to guns - not that unusual a segue. There are those who consider trauma from gun shots a social as well as a neducal problem. I have nothing against limited gun ownership, though I think the recent Supreme Court interpretation of the second amendment to the constitution is little short of being ridiculous. That’s the problem with having a constitution written for the contemporaneous conditions of he United States in the late 1700’s and trying to apply it to the twenty first century. With the record number of annual gun deaths in our country, you would think that the greatest effort by out courts and our law enforcement officials and our states and municipalities, would be to limit gun ownership to responsible people who would be licensed and have their guns registered. Instead, the Supreme Court has given the green light for the entire country to become the wild west of the eighteen hundreds,

I bring up the subject of guns because of a news story I heard the other day - which, in a civilized society should have been on the front page of every newspaper in the nation. A Florida man, hearing the sounds of movement in his house in the night, got up to "investigate" - saw a shadowy figure in the hallway and FIRED at "it" - killing his live in fiancé who he was scheduled to marry the next day. He has not been charged with any crime. It was a "tragic accident" according to police who said that he appeared to display genuine remorse.

If I were prone to puking, I might easily have done so after hearing that story. An accident? No charges? No thought of reckless homicide? Like this sharpshooter, I live in a two person house. I don’t keep a loaded gun by my bedside, but if I happened to hear a "sound" in the night, I would assume it was my wife. But even if I did have a loaded gun handy and I had the slightest inkling that someone had broken into the house - causing no "break in" noise - but only the noise of someone moving about, the last thing I would do would be to fire at a "shadowy figure" in the hall. Not without asking "is that you honey?" Not without asking "who’s there?"

What kind of person’s first reaction to what may be an imagined threat is to fire a gun? I would think some kind of mad man. Someone without the slightest sense of responsibility. I don’t know anything about the guy but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was an NRA member - someone who believes that every American has a right not just to own a gun but to use it in self defense - to fire against any lurking shadow that may be a threat to one’s person or property. At the very least, the man’s actions were reckless and the fact that the law enforcement authorities aren’t even considering a charge of reckless homicide is astonishing. But perhaps I shouldn’t be astonished. I remember a case - not that long ago - of another gun owner who observed what appeared to be a robbery of his neighbor’s house. He called the police. He says "I’ve got a shotgun, you want me to stop him?" The police dispatcher says no way. The guy says - "I’m not going to them go. I’m going to kill him." The plice dispatcher says stay in your house. The guy ignores what the police are telling him. He goes outside and bang bang - he kills two people.

Like the wife/fiance "accidental" killer, he wasn’t charged with any crime either. The two stories aren’t exactly alike but they both say something pretty damned scary. When it comes to gun ownership and use, something is terribly wrong in this country.

Finally, I was pleased to learn that Rush Limbaugh will not be part of any group trying to buy the St. Louis Rams It’s truly astonishing that Don Imus was bounced off the air for calling a group of African American athletes "nappy headed ho’s" while we hear nothing about stations dropping Limbaugh for any of his racists comments over the years of which these are but a few. Six years ago, when I started this blog, I wrote a brief hello and then on the next day, April 3, 2003, I wrote a short piece entitled Shut Up Limbaugh. I called what he did on his radio show "dangerous free speech." I also said he was scary. That he continues to spew forth his daily garbage unabated this many years later is not only scary and dangerous but an insult to the constitutional protection behind which he continues to pollute the public airways.
posted by Jeff Smith at 10/15/2009 05:30:00 PM

 
SOMETHING SMELLS ROTTEN IN DENMARK….

With an even worse smell from US right wing nut country….

By now it should be pretty clear that Chicago had zero chance of being the winning city for the 2016 Olympics. Whatever political skills the Chicago contingent had, they fell far short of understanding the politics of the IOC and its relationship with the US Olympic committee After all, there’s more than a small difference between getting some local zoning changed to benefit a builder or some other clout heavy contractor and persuading Sergey Bubka of the Ukraine or Princess Haya Bin Al Hussein of the United Arab Emirates to vote for Chicago, even if the latter shares part of her name with that of the President of the United Sates. The decision was probably made before anyone from Chicago set foot in Copenhagen and the failure was in us not understanding that.

None of this however was of interest to the conservative nut case wing of the Republican party. For their membership, it was a time for great celebration and for blaming Chicago’s failure on Barrack Obama. No question about it. It was Obama’s inability to "close the deal" that bore the ultimate responsibility for Rio’s triumph and that was a good reason for the nut cases to celebrate. Just as the lefties cheered and danced in the streets when New York lost ITS bid for the 2012 Olympics, blaming it all on Gorge W Bush for only sending a videotape instead of making a personal appeal.. Except that of course it didn’t happen. The reaction from just about everyone was one of sympathy for New York’s losing bid - which of course was a USA bid. And after the loss, Bush expressed total support for Chicago’s bid for 2016. Except of course, no one knew that an African American would be president when the selection was made in 2009.

Liberals are quite capable of hypocrisy - but not at the level of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and the news room crew at the Weekly Standard. To them, anything that could be viewed as a setback for the United States is a victory in the battle to bring down the President of the United States, the legitimacy of whom they do not accept. It’s getting very close to the point where the question has to be asked, where is the line between free speech and sedition? But the blame for the non stop garbage being spilled by Obama hating write wing nuts is not theirs alone. Without radio station and network ownership willing to provide the opportunity for them to spread their messages of hatred and misinformation and sponsors to provide the financial revenues to keep them on the air, none of this would be happening - and you have to ask the second question - why? Why do radio stations and Fox Network and to a lesser extent CNN, keep these people on the air? And why do major corporations continue to sponsor them? And the answer of course is greed.

Sponsors know that there at a great many people who watch and listen to these right wing crazies and that they believe what they are told by Limbaugh et al. Large numbers of them believe that only through Fox News and the radio stations that carry the ‘LETALS ’ - Limbaugh et al crew - do they get the real - unfiltered news - as opposed to what they may hear from ABC, CBS and NBC. They really believe it - and I am relatively sure that the conclusion of ad agencies and ad people at major corporations is that if large numbers of people believe anything that Limbaugh or Beck or Savage says - then they are likely to believe any message that an advertiser places within the body of their programs.

I know that after Glenn Beck said that President Obama has a deep seated hatred for white people, dozens of sponsors withdrew from his program but the last time I checked, Fox still had plenty of companies advertising on its network and there was no sign of them canceling or even trying to restrain Mr. Beck - and I would be willing to bet that it won’t be that long before sponsors start to pick up availability’s in his program. There are responsible corporations out there that are not solely motivated by the almighty dollar and would not support someone as irresponsible as Beck with their advertising dollars - or if they did and then discovered what kind of garbage he spewed over the airways daily, would withdraw and not resume their support. But I fear that that kind of corporation is in the minority

People can boycott the sponsors of these irresponsible - and in my view downright dangerous right wing programs - but as long as the programs can demonstrate large audience numbers - numbers much larger than known or perceived boycotters, there’ll be plenty of sponsorship available - enough to enable Rush Limbaugh to make an offer to buy an NFL team!!

What do you think this all says about our wonderful capitalistic system? I think it says something on a par with the current stance of the Republican Party which is "party first and America last" - as witness their celebration over the loss of the 2016 Olympic games which they figure could reflect badly on Obama. I think our capitalists system is one that puts money first and people somewhere down the line. Witness the millions being spent by the country’s medical insurance companies in their efforts keep making the billions of profits they rake in every year and even increase those profits if they are successful in their support of legislation that would force every American to buy health insurance - instead of supporting efforts to create a system that would guarantee every American access to health care without the ever looming threat of financial ruin. Something akin to what every other industrial country in the world has had for decades - systems that our health care corporations, with the aid of bought and paid for politicians - demonize in their insatiable quest for the almighty dollar.

So the next time you’re thinking of buying a Select Comfort bed or booking a flight through Hotwire.com, remember that you’re endorsing the hatred of "Barrack the Magic Negro" as Rush Limbaugh calls the President of the United States.
posted by Jeff Smith at 10/08/2009 04:39:00 PM

 
AND GETTING CRAZIER

Frightening news out of the Congressional Budget Office. It’s being kept under wraps but I have inside sources and what I’ve learned has to be made public. We’re running out of money. By 2016 they’re won’t be a dime left. I’m not talking about Medicare and Social Security. We all know that they’re both teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and that long before 2016 millions of seniors will be living in the streets and dying from the absence of healthcare which will no longer be available to them. No sir. I’m talking about the funds for waging or threatening WAR - the WOTW funds!!

As we all know, the emergency tax enacted during the GW Bush second term - that’s the THEY’RE EITHER WITH US IR AGAINST US tax, paid for through payroll deductions on people making $50,000 or less per year, was never going to sustain the needs of WOTW unless we cut down on future military adventures and closed down some of our far flung military bases around the world. The Republicans of course have blocked every single proposal to extend the tax to people making at least $60,000. Their theory is that if you start extending the tax to people making that kind of money - the next thing you know, Democrats will want to tax people making two or three hundred thousand and maybe even trying to get their blood sucking tax and spend hands on the last protected segment of American society - million and billionaires!! And as long as the Democrats can’t muster 60 votes to raise more money, those important funds will be gone in a dozen years. There is another bill pending to get it from a tax on health insurance company profits - but right now, that doesn’t look like it could muster even forty votes in the Senate.

What all of this means is that starting sometime before 2016, we will be reduced to being one of those countries that watches what goes on in other countries and between other countries from a distance and without any of our military personnel - the few that we are able to maintain on the payroll - involved. Possibly moving in to fill the role we will have to abandon are the Chinese, who are already bidding on our world wide military bases. That could have a beneficial effect depending on how much we could realize from the sales because it could be enough money to fund national health care for every American without any of us having to chip in a dime. But of course the Republicans will filibuster that one to death.

The news is already having an effect. People are trying to figure out why Chicago didn’t win the 2016 Olympic Games. The answer’s obvious. They’re not afraid of us anymore. There’s no shoot from the hip president declaring the IOC is either with us or against us. They like Obama and Michelle and Oprah - but they knew damn well that there would be no invasion if they snubbed the United States of America.

There is one possible way that this tragic future can be averted, I’m not sure who suggested it first, our Philosopher Laureate Rush Limbaugh or pretender Sean Hannity or Beck the revealer or maybe even Congresswoman Michelle Bachman, but the idea seems to have merit. Immediately cancel Social Security and Medicare - not the taxes - just the programs - and transfer all the tax revenues to WOTW. I think there are plans for Joe Wilson to introduce it in the House and Jim Demint in the Senate.

Stay tuned . My sources are hinting at new revelations that will make this news pale in comparison. You think there’s some question about whether Barack Obama was born in Hawaii or Kenya? Ask yourself why of all places he decided to settle in ILLINOIS and in CHICAGO I’ll give you a hint. Try thinking of the word Ikskobar. Regular readers of this blog will understand what I mean.
posted by Jeff Smith at 10/02/2009 07:51:00 PM

 
IT’S A CRAZY WORLD OUT THERE

On occasion I’ve used this blog to write something about my personal life rather than comment on the passing parade - and though I’m not about to do it today, I do want to offer an explanation or perhaps reiterate the reason for the gaps between comments. It is due to physical problems that make it hard for me to sit at the computer for any length of time. I hope things will improve - maybe after a few more surgeries.

Meanwhile…earlier this month - on September 6, I said that there were times when I despaired of some of my fellow citizens - and that day was one of them. I still feel the same way - and I can expand that to some fellow world citizens. A couple of examples of what leads me to despair. The Israeli/Arab conflict has been going on for decades - sometimes it seems as though it has always been with us. Now - as always - there is pressure on to resume the "peace process" and ideas are being advanced for the shape of an independent Palestinian state - living "side by side" with Israel. Like just about all the "ideas" suggested in the past, these are nonsensical and non sustainable. Gaza is supposed to part of this new state, so there’s a suggestion of a sunken highway to connect Gaza to the West Bank across Israel territory. And the Arab section of Jerusalem is to be part of the new state . A piece of a city surrounded by the territory of another nation as part of a new nation. Can you imagine cutting off some part of New York - say the Bronx - to be part of Connecticut?

I suppose one could reasonably conclude that the reason that no "peace" has been achieved after more than six decades of conflict could be ascribed to intransigence on both sides - but surely it is just as reasonable to conclude that the idea of two states living "side by side" is just not a viable solution. Neither is a single state - advocated by many on the Palestinian side - because it would take no time at all for the "Jewishness" of Israel to disappear - and then what would happen to the Israeli democracy? A long time ago I proposed an ideal
"two state solution." It was partly tongue in cheek - but only partly. The underlying idea was that of a "two in one" state solution. It brought a response from one of Israel’s leading peace organizations and they liked what I proposed - but, like everyone else involved I trying to solve the problem, were stuck in the quagmire of who gets what land and who compensates who for what!!

Likewise, I’m disappointed that Barack Obama keeps pushing the old idea of resuming "peace talks" and insisting that Israel stops building within existing settlements as though that would be a magic bullet that would change the nature and demands of the Palestinians. Someone needs to start proposing something other then the elusive two state solution. At least that would give the parties something that they could actually talk about with each other instead of past each other.

Back home, almost anything connected to the ongoing debate about healthcare "reform" can lead to a feeling of despair. The proposals floating around at the moment would make Rube Goldberg proud. Even the idea of a "public option." So far, that proposal has a name and little else, so it’s hard to see why so many are vehemently for it and other just as vehemently against it. One stupid thing that left me in the uncomfortable position of trying to balance uncontrollable laughter with irrepressible groaning at the suggestions being tossed out about how to keep undocumented workers dirty, socialistic and communistic hands off of what’re "reforms" are finally enacted. We already have the requirement that citizens show their proof of citizenship to benefit from whatever aspect of the "plan" is beneficial. But beyond that, there is a proposal to bar those UW’s - or as some prefer to call them, IA’s for Illegal Aliens - from being any part of an insurance exchange even when they have used their own money to buy their own health insurance - costing taxpayers nothing. You have to wonder what’s next - a requirement to present proof of citizenship before you can buy a car - or maybe your groceries?

It’s crazy. The only true "reform" is to have a national health service where everyone has an identity card and everyone gets the care they need without having to pay any "co-payments" or very modest co-payments - including for prescription medications. All that alongside health insurance companies from which you can buy insurance covering anything the national health service covers and beyond - or just things that will upgrade you coverage - for example to guarantee that you can get single room when hospitalized in situations where your national health coverage only pays for a double room. It’s a system that works fine in England where my brother lives with his national health insurance and his private insurance paid for by his former employer. And yes, National Healthcare in England did not put the English private healthcare insurance companies out of business. And by the way - if you’re in England, legally or illegally and you get sick, the national healthcare service will take care of you. They may kick you out if you’re not supposed to be there, but they’ll take care of your health problems first.

Finally - in the vein of despairing of my fellow humans - every once in a while I provide an example of why "they" won’t come - "they" being superior beings from another planet in a galaxy far, far away. What better example could there be than the successive speeches of Moammar Gadhafi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the U.N? The Iranian people perhaps have some slim hope of replacing nut case Ahmadinejad at some point in the future - but Gadhafi has reigned for forty years and you have to wonder how the Libyan people allow it. But you don’t have to wonder why they don’t come. Even if they overlooked the comical performers at last week’s UN show, there’s always Kim Jong Il, Robert Mugabe, OmarAl- Bashir and on and n….

Ah well. It’s cocktail time at the Whatshallthisthen abode. I’ll try to increase the frequency of my comments.. pain permitting.
posted by Jeff Smith at 9/27/2009 04:38:00 PM

 
A CYNIC’S VIEW OF THE HEALTHCARE REFORM SPEECH

I’m a little late responding to the President’s speech to Congress but that’s what happens when annoying physical ailments slows one down. I’m trying to catch up.

As readers of this blog know, I am an Obama supporter. I supported him with money during the campaign and my wife worked the phones. Unless the Republicans slate Superman to run in the next election, I’ll probably vote for him again. And I am a supporter of the concept of healthcare reform - though I can’t imagine what kind of reform can be accomplished without something like a Medicare Part E. Medicare for everyone. Buy in for a premium based on age. With plenty of insurance companies ready to sell any needed Medicare supplement policies.

Having said all that, a comment or two on the big healthcare reform speech. It wasn’t a bad speech but it didn’t strike me as a game changer and for sure not the "greatest" speech that Obama has ever delivered - as some have described it. Any speech loses a little of its potential luster when "snippets" are released in advance - and then you hear those snippets verbalized. We know he’s reading from a TelePrompTer but when you’ve seen some of the phraseology in advance, it sounds a little contrived when you hear it being read back to you. I’d rather hear it for the first time from the President’s mouth and not have any advance leaks.

Anyway - I thought it got a little heavy as he tried to lay out the details - but he made up for it with his reference to the letter a dying Ted Kennedy had sent him and with his categorization of healthcare for all as a matter of morality - as a measure of who we are as a people. That part I applauded. And if regulation of the healthcare industry can be accomplished and they can be forced to accept people with pre-existing conditions and restrained from dropping people arbitrarily - I applaud that too - though I can’t see the industry accepting those restrictions without a battle,

Speaking of applause - as I noted here many moons ago after a State of the Union speech - I think the interruptions for standing applause during these joint sessions are close to silly. There’s nothing wrong with brief bursts of applause to show approval of a particular point - but multiple standing ovations? It almost comes across as contrived. The Republicans of course did not applaud or rise to their feet - except for the brief mention of malpractice insurance. The President didn’t even say what he might do about malpractice - but the word itself was enough to arouse the Republicans out of their stupor. I’ll have a word on that topic in a moment.

There was nothing unusual about the lack of applause from the Republicans. The Democrats act the same way when the president happens to be a Republican. But I must say that the Republicans that we were able to see on camera looked particularly dour - and some were obviously trying to insult the president with a "what bill" on one idiot’s lap and a bunch of others waving something - a Republican bill perhaps? Cut taxes as a cure for cancer?

And then we had the idiot yelling "you lie" when Obama was assuring us that illegal aliens would not benefit from his version of a healthcare bill. I’m sure a lot of people were thinking "good luck with that" - including me - but yelling "you lie" was far beyond the pale. Even in the House of Commons where insults are common - , when one member wants to call another a liar - even if it’s the Prime Minister, he will say something along the lines of "the honorable member is lying through his false teeth" - rather than just yell "you lie." But the Prime Minister is just the chief executive, not the head of state. No British politician would dream of yelling "you lie" during a speech by the Queen. We have no royalty of course, but the office of the President represents the symbolic head of state and should command the same measure of respect no matter who is in the White House.

The president wasn’t lying of course. His version of a final bill would specifically exclude undocumented workers from benefiting from tax supported programs - but come on - how are you going to enforce that? Even if you include a provision that proof of citizenship or legal residence is required - what will be asked for? Many illegals have phony social security numbers and other fraudulent documents. Are we going to ask for birth certificates? It gets pretty silly. Of course in countries that have national health programs - everyone who needs medical attention can get it - but this is the USA. We have to make it as complicated as possible.

I hold out little hope that any bill that gets signed into law will solve the problem of healthcare costing way too much and continuing to cost more year after year. The way things are being described at the moment - the executives at the nation’s health insurance companies must be having multiple orgasms at the prospect of every last American being forced to have insurance. It’s what they want. It’s what they are spending millions of dollars in television ads that purport to support "reform." Just listen to the ads from "America’s healthcare companies." And if they like it - it can’t be good for the rest of us.

If I sound cynical about the prospects for real change in healthcare, it’s because of alleged "reforms" that we’ve already seen that have done nothing for the consumers of healthcare. Changing malpractice laws for example - the magic words that brought Republican Representatives and Senators to life during the President’s speech. There was an editorial in the Chicago Tribune a few days ago lauding the fact that changes in malpractice laws have been enacted in Illinois and how money is being saved. The question of course is what money? What savings? For whom? There has been absolutely no change in the cost of healthcare for the average consumer. On the contrary, premium costs and deductibles have continued to rise since the changes were enacted in Illinois - as has the cost of pharmaceuticals. And speaking of pharmaceuticals , seniors who were conned into Medicare Part D are being promised that this convoluted program with its "donut hole" and other restrictions will be improved with healthcare reform. . Of course the geniuses who created this program totally ignored the real problem - which is the ridiculous cost of drugs - and instead of finding a way to drive those costs down, opted to play footsie with the insurance companies - handing them another boondoggle. Another reason why I have doubts that we’re going to get real reform.

Three years ago, I wrote about the way we are being ripped off by the pharmaceutical industry with a table of what we are paying for certain drugs and how much the actual ingredients of those drugs costs.. Do you take Lipitor? Three years ago, the average cost for 100 pills was $272.37 and the cost of the ingredients to make those 100 pills was $5.80 - a mark up of 4,696%!! And that’s a bargain compared to Prozac. Eleven cents for ingredients turns into $247.47 for a hundred tablets - a mark up of a whopping 224,973%!! No kidding, You do the math. Get out your trusty calculated and multiply .11 by 224,973%.. Yes I know there’s a lot more than the cost of ingredients that goes into the final retail cost of drug - but you can’t convince me that there isn’t something terribly wrong when the cost of the ingredients for a pill that costs $2.47 is .0011 cents!!!

And the administration tells us they’ve made a "deal" with Big Pharm?"

I hope all my doubts about real reform being enacted before I get to be too old and demented to care will be proved wrong - but I’m not holding my breath. It’s dangerous to one’s health.
posted by Jeff Smith at 9/13/2009 09:14:00 PM

 
THE YEAR OF THE YAHOO

You have to wonder how many of them are out there - the crazies, the ignoramuses , the bigots. If you paid attention to their co-conspirators - the electronic media - you would think they were close to representing a majority - the way they are drawn to them like moths to a flame - ignoring the sane among us - hopefully a majority

The last time I wrote anything here, I asked if those protesting healthcare reform were lacking in basic intelligence or were bigots - using healthcare town hall meetings to express their bigotry- or had some misdirected mistrust of the Federal Government. Today I’m sure of two out of three. The bigots have come out from under their robes ands hoods to brazenly expose themselves - and ignorance abounds. There are times when I despair of some of my fellow citizens and this is one of them.

Many years ago, when I returned to the United States after spending my youth in England, I was appalled at some of the questions people asked me about the mother country. One that has stuck in my mind for all these years was - "do you have refrigerators in England?" I kid you not. It was a question sincerely posed. The questioner simply didn’t know anything about countries outside of the United States. Now here we are a lifetime later and hearing the same kind of ignorance from the healthcare protesters. A couple of years later, I took a driving trip to Florida and came face to face with racial discrimination and racial hatreds. I can’t forget the looks of hatred thrown at me when I stopped along the way to buy refreshments and insisted that the black man in front of me at the counter not step aside to let me be served first.

I’m not about to say that decades later, things are still the same in this country. Obviously they can’t be with a true African-American in the White House. But there is no question that for a percentage of the population - representatives of which we are now seeing spouting ignorance and hatred on the nightly news, there has been no passage of time. Like some Islamic cultures - our ignoramuses continue to live in the past. That’s why you see signs and hear nitwits proclaim that they "want their country back." Presumably the country where black people knew their place and Presidents were middle aged Caucasians that they could identify with as "one of them."

One piece of nonsense that we are hearing from the ignoramuses is that we don’t want the federal government "messing" with our healthcare system because it’s " the best healthcare system in the world." Really? In what way? Do we have the best doctors? The best nurses? The best hospitals? The best access and the best outcomes? The statement is patently ridiculous - but is the kind of thing we are hearing from idiots who know nothing of the rest of the world but automatically assume that no nation can have something better than us. Yes we have good doctors and good nurses and good hospitals - but if a system that can easily bankrupt a citizen who gets hit with a devastating disease or dies because he or she lacks the funds to pay for needed medical care or life saving drugs is the best in the world - then the rest of the world must be in a sorry state.

There is absolutely nothing that we are hearing from the protesters that makes sense. There is nothing being proposed by Republicans that can be thought of as healthcare reform. Yet the protests are coinciding with a drop in the president’s approval numbers and the president seems to be willing to strip his healthcare reform ideas of any real meaning just to get one Republican on board. Olympia Snow may win herself a moment in history - but there will be no winners if the nonsensical "trigger" idea becomes the keystone of any final bill. We’ll know next Wednesday, but I have little hope that Obama will present the nation with an FDR moment.

A final word about the crazies at the town hall meetings. Americans are known to be generally a generous lot when it comes to giving. But they often fall far short of the mark when it comes to common courtesy. In such simple things as driving habits for example. How many hundreds of times I have pulled up behind a car at a traffic light waiting to turn left when I too have wanted to turn left - only to neglect to move out into the intersection so that at least one more car can make the turn when the lights change That’s a driver who has no concept of common courtesy to fellow drivers. . Another example. Because of my accumulated surgeries, I have had the need of late to use a riding cart when shopping at a large store. The other day, I had to wait several minutes at a Sam’s Club while an employee found one out in the parking lot. As I wheeled into the interior of the store, I passed an area where people could sit and eat pizza which was being sold there - and there were two couples sitting and eating, each with a riding cart full of their completed shopping and not caring one whit about anyone with problems similar to theirs who might be waiting for one of those carts.

The news clips of the crazies we’ve been seeing now for weeks reveal the personification of that lack of common courtesy. Perhaps the worst I have seen was a woman confined to a wheelchair describing her medical condition which required drugs that she could barely afford, being booed and shouted down at an alleged "town hall meeting." And the media moguls at networks and local stations thought it was appropriate to end the clip with a yahoo complaining that the wheelchair bound woman shouldn’t have more rights than him to speak - or in his case, to interrupt someone else speaking. " I didn’t come here to listen to people’s opinions" said this yahoo, "my rights are no less important than a women in a wheelchair. Which is of course true. And unfortunate. As is this excuse for an American’s right to vote.
posted by Jeff Smith at 9/06/2009 11:45:00 AM

 
HEALTHCARE OR HATE? WHICH ONE ARE WE DISCUSSING?

It’s ironic that my current poor state of health has prevented me from chiming in on the topic of health care reform. I almost said the health care "debate" - but what has been going on for the past few weeks is about as much removed from "debate" as chalk is to cheese. Don’t ask me where that phrase comes from. I don’t know but it’s certainly descriptive of things that are as far apart as they can get.

It’s absolutely astonishing to me that something as basic as affordable healthcare for the citizens of this country could be the basis for the utter madness that it has spawned. We are alone among the industrial countries of the world when it comes to national healthcare. We don’t have it. Get sick in England or Germany or France or Sweden or Canada or Japan or any other industrialized nation and you go to see your doctor - or a specialist. And if need be, you are hospitalized. And if need be you are provided with necessary medications. At no time do you have to worry about costs. No one asks you if or what "insurance" you have. You may have to pay a modest sum here or there - but there is never an expense that can bankrupt you. There is never a decision that needs to be made between buying food or filling a prescription. It matters not if you are a billionaire or a minimum wage worker - or if you are unemployed or retired. You are able to get all the health care you need .

As the madness that substitutes for debate over healthcare reform rages, people in England and Canada and likely elsewhere - but I know about those two - are watching us with horror and disbelief. And they are fighting back angrily at idiots on the right in this country who point to their healthcare systems as the "disaster" that would befall us if we adopted a similar system. Letters to newspapers. Statements by government officials. And I don’t blame them. According to aforementioned idiots, my sister-in-law - my brother’s wife - was euthenized many years ago. That’s because she lives in England and had/has a physical problem that required multiple complicated surgeries to save and maintain her life . But since the idiots are liars, my dear sister-in-law - now 80 - continues to thrive with the unrestricted help of the dreaded National Health Service.

We on the on the other hand have a wild west system of health care. Every man and woman for themselves. You either have the cash to pay for your medical needs or - in one way or another - you have insurance that pays for some of those needs. None of us - other than the extremely wealthy - has the luxury of not having to think about the cost of our health care. And you have to ask yourself why? Why as the world leader in so many areas, do we lag so far behind when it comes to providing all of our citizens with not just "affordable" healthcare - but healthcare that is a guaranteed right without the need for you to have any kind if insurance, . With "no questions asked" healthcare. And the answer is greed. Money. Filthy lucre. Insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment companies and other sections of the healthcare industry rake in billions and control the nation’s healthcare system and Lord knows how many of our elected officials. They will spend millions telling every kind of lie to scare you into believing that a national healthcare plan like those in England and Canada will raise your taxes and control your access to healthcare. At the same time they are running ads that seem to support the idea of national healthcare for everyone - even people with preexisting conditions - but what the ads are really supporting is compulsory healthcare insurance for everyone which of course would make them even more in control and a great deal richer. You couldn’t more disingenuous than that. Watch those ads carefully that are from "America’s Healthcare Insurance Companies" and you’ll see what I mean.

But as disgusted as I am over the surrender of a national interest to the profit motive, I am even more disgusted at what I am hearing from those who oppose any kind of national healthcare reforms. I’m not sure whether what we are seeing from those "protesting" any kind of healthcare reform is merely a lack of basic intelligence or a bigoted reaction to the color of the White House occupant or to some misdirected mistrust of anything to do with the Federal government.. Maybe a mixture of all three . Luckily, we, the sane among us, are in the majority - otherwise Obama would never have been elected. And despite our disappointments at the paucity of the promised "change" that has so far occurred, we will reelect him four years from now. But if the expressions of hatred that we are hearing from idiots at town meetings - purportedly about healthcare but clearly about extreme disappointment by some with the result of the election and the color and policies of President Obama - continue with the urgings of reckless right wing media pundits and with tacit approval by elected officials from the House and Senate - the next four years may well be one of constant turmoil with the very distinct possibility of some violent eruptions. Watching and listening to some of these yahoos at town meetings with their "Hitler" and "Socialism" and other assorted nonsensical signs , I truly fear for the safety of the president.

Perhaps things will calm down some when some kind of healthcare bill is finally signed into law - but from what I have seen during the past few weeks of the ignorance and bigotry of what seems to be a substantial portion of the electorate, despite the roaring rhetoric of then Senator Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, I have serious doubts about how UNITED the United States of America will remain during his first term in office.
posted by Jeff Smith at 8/27/2009 08:53:00 PM

 
GATES ‘GATE’ - RACIAL PROFILING OR A CASE IF D.P.O?*
*explanation below

It’s almost passed into obscurity - but before it fades completely, leaving the equivalent of the grin of a Cheshire cat, a thought or two.

It’s been years since I last bumped into and spoke to Lynn Sweet. I can’s say that I really knew her - just that on occasion we happened to be attending the same meeting - she as a Chicago based newspaper reporter and me in another capacity. I mention it only because on the few occasions when we actually did meet and chatted, she struck me as a pleasant, efficient and fair minded reporter who had little interest in the sensational side of news reporting. So it was a bit of a surprise that given the privilege of asking the last question at Obama’s July 22nd news conference, she opted to bring up an issue that might well have been one or two news cycles away from being "yesterday’s news" and opened the door into it becoming -mat least for a while - the new "Gate De Jour" - the Crowley-Gates Gate!!

Of course Obama could have avoided the question. As he made clear, he wasn’t there - but he still made the stupid comment that the local police acted stupidly - setting off a firestorm about "racial profiling." I was as far away from the incident as the president, but I’d give odds that I know what happened. The professor didn’t know what the cop was doing there. He was almost certainly suffering from jet lag and he was in his own home and here was a police officer asking stupid questions Of course he didn’t know that there had been a report of a possible break in and the cop didn’t know who the professor was - and somewhere along the line the conversation became heated and the cop asked the professor to calm down which probably made him more angry to the point where he committed an unofficial criminal offense - DPO - disrespecting a police officer.

The fact that he was handcuffed and dragged down to the police station and held there for a while was pretty close to inexcusable. The cops are supposed to be trained to handle this kind of situation. Once he was convinced that Gates lived there and that no break in had taken place, Crowley should have backed off and left. His decision to do what he did however, had nothing to do with "racial profiling." I don’t claim to have any particular expertise on the subject, but my understanding of racial profiling would be Crowley or some other cop - spotting Gates approaching his house and stopping him and asking him what he was doing there. Assuming that Gates wasn’t acting suspiciously - like crouching down behind some bushes and then weaving his way towards the house in a manner that would suggest he didn’t want to be seen. But to suggest that the fact that the cop got mad and arrested Gates had anything to do with the man’s skin color is, to me, an expression of paranoia.

I once saw a woman - not a block from my home, who had obviously been pulled over for a traffic violation, being handcuffed - presumably as a prelude to being hauled off to the local hoosegow. I couldn’t overhear the conversation that preceded that action, but clearly the women had become hysterical and was screaming at the officer and I guess handcuffing her was his reaction to what he probably considered an extreme case of DPO. She was white - but had she been black, would that have been racial profiling? Some would say so without a second thought. And that has happened in the Gates case - but what is truly surprising and disturbing to me is that it isn’t just coming from the average man on the street who might - perhaps for good reason - harbor deep distrust for the police - but from people who should know better,

Distinguished and respected black columnists, commentators and assorted pundits, took to the airways to decry the incident as something that only happened because Gates was a black man - or at the very least, that it wouldn’t have happened if Gates had been white. I heard one such commentator opine that such a thing wouldn’t have happened if the home owner had been Henry Kissinger!! Seriously! President Obama, whose response to Lynn Sweet’s question had created a racial mountain out of a quasi color blind molehill, backed away from his assertion that the police acted "stupidly" and suggested that the entire incident presented an opportunity for a "teaching moment." There have been a few cynical responses to the idea that there is something of value to be learned regarding race relations from professor Gates’ arrest - among them the lesson that you just don’t mouth off at a police officer no matter what. And that’s a lesson well learned no matter what your skin color or that of the police officer.

But sadly, I think there is something to be learned from this incident - and that is to understand the deeply held feeling of African Americans - from the most successful and admired to the man in the street - that their color continues to play a negative role in their encounters with police - even in an era of an African American president. How else would you explain the belief of award winning journalist Eugene Robinson that race "must" have played a part in professor Gates’ arrest ? I may not have his exact words down but that was the sentiment he expressed in an appearance on MSNBC shortly after the incident - and to a certain extent -even though I have described such a reactions as expression of paranoia - I can understand how he could come to believe something so illogical. I think of the history of the world’s Jewry - of which I am a member - and how, after centuries of oppression and decades of illogical discrimination , many of us have become sensitized to the point where we see anti-Semitism where it doesn’t exist. Criticism of Israel for example. While it is clear that there are bigots who hide their anti-Semitism behind criticism of Israel - legitimate criticism is frequently perceived by many American Jews as a form of anti-Semitism.

The Gates affair would appear to be a clear case of being unfairly arrested for refusing to stop arguing with a cop - having nothing to do with the color of his skin. Yeah - maybe it wouldn’t have happened if the home owner had been Henry Kissinger. The cop would probably have been scared out of his pants in the face of a stream of invective in a guttural German accent and would have been happy to get out of there with his dignity intact. But now that we have been made aware of the belief that even a Kissinger would have been hauled off in handcuffs had his skin been black, we should all take a step back and think about how far we still have to travel in healing the residual pain of decades of racial discrimination.

Quite a distance I would say. And the road probably won’t be a smooth one.
posted by Jeff Smith at 8/17/2009 03:12:00 PM

 
THOUGHTS BROUHT ON BY MY ABSENCE FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE

Having a knee replaced is a painful business and recovery is slow - but despite my absence from this page for so many weeks, I hasten to assure those who come here to read my words of wisdom that I have not shuffled off this mortal coil and blogging will continue - even if sporadic. Not that it would be missed should I decide to discontinue the hobby. That one quickly learns when circumstances force a long absence. There has been no clamoring for my return - now outpouring of inquiries about why I have stopped blogging. It’s a humbling experience.

As I’m sure I’ve indicted before, I maintain this site for my own amusement. I know that I have readers. I have met people who have been informed of this blog’s existence and who have said I read your blog - or I enjoy your blog. And I hear from readers occasionally. But beyond the few that I know about, I have no idea how many people come to this page. I know I am one of the millions of bloggers who labor away in relative obscurity and who wouldn’t really be missed if I stopped blogging.

Even those who gather a substantial reading audience and then disappear are soon forgotten. I am reminded of "Riverbend" - the young girl from Iraq who began blogging shortly after we invaded her country - at a time when people around the world were looking for voices from within. We followed her commentaries for months on end - and many of them were gathered together and published in book form. But in October of 2007, she and her family fled to Syria from which she published a report on the twenty second of that month - and then - silence. I sent an e-mail to her address asking f she was O.K. as I’m sure many other people did - but there was no response and the e-mail didn’t bounce, indicating that her e-mail address was still active - but obviously no longer being used by a blogger who no longer blogs.

But a blogger to whom I might more closely relate as I contemplate the silence of this page from July 15 - the day before my surgery - until today - is George Sodini - the disturbed woman hater who charged into a health club with guns blazing a few days ago, killing three women before turning the gun on himself. Of course I don’t relate in any way to his murderous rampage - but this twisted young man had apparently though about carrying out the murders in a public forum. He had a BLOG and wrote about it on his blog!! In the news stories following the incident, there was talk of the existence of the blog and speculation over whether anyone other than Sodini - ever read it and thus might have alerted authorities.

The blogosphere is supposed to be the new and exciting addition to journalism - an alternative to and on a par with print and broadcast media, local, national and international - and indeed there are blogs and bloggers that make appearances on or are regularly quoted by the "conventional" media. Yet it is pretty clear that the vast majority of the millions of regular and occasional bloggers labor in relative obscurity being read by no one other than themselves.

It’s something to thing about - but not for too long. Obscure or not. Readers or not, I fully intend to keep airing my opinion on anything and everything that I consider to be of interest whenever the urge grips me - ands boy has the subject matter to be tackled accumulated over the past twenty eight days. Where to begin? Healthcare? The $32,000 plus for the hardware of my new knee? It’s certainly something to talk about - but it may have to wait it’s turn as I resume blogging.

That may be tomorrow - or the next day. Stay tuned my sparse audience.
posted by Jeff Smith at 8/12/2009 07:15:00 PM

 
KEEPING A RECORD INTACT

You’d think if there was a subject that would persuade me to take a break from my blog sabbatical it would be a news story of major importance but instead it is something simplistically trivial - thus worthy of no more than these few lines. Looking at the last thing I’d written, I note the date was June 15 - a month ago!! Tomorrow I’m having surgery to replace one of my knees and there is a distinct possibility that I’ll be sleeping on the ground floor of our Georgian house for a week or more after I get out of the hospital and may not get to my computer which is on the second floor until NEXT MONTH.

I’ve been blogging away since April of 2003 - and while I’ve slowed down recently, posting comments only a few times a month, I have never let a month go by without having something to say - so these lines are for that single purpose - to keep that record intact.

I’ll be back when I can manage stairs again and I have a backlog of commentary swirling around in the back of my head - bursting to get out. So be patient regular readers. I promise, the wait will be worthwhile.
posted by Jeff Smith at 7/15/2009 08:52:00 PM

 
BIBI STATING THE OBVIOUS

Maybe Obama will chime in as I suggested below - but Netanyahu has made it pretty clear that no peace agreement can be reached unless the Palestinian leadership abandons the impossible. I didn’t include a demilitarized entity as a potential self governing neighbor for Israel - but of course it must be. The idea of two sovereign states - with all that implies - in the sliver of land left over after Jordan was created on 80% of the the Palestine Mandate- had some small possibility of success in 1948 - but that depended on mutual good will and a willingness for both sides to recognize and accept the other - the condition that Obama is urging 61 years later - but once the Arabs rejected it out of hand it became the non starter that it has remained ever since.

So what now? The Palestinians won’t even begin to consider the Netanyahu conditions. A one state solution is a non starter for Israel because the Arab birthrate would soon make Jews a minority. A " two in one" state solution that I outlined here many moons ago could turn the area into the envy of the other nations of the Middle East - but it would require that mutual good will and true desire for peace that was absent 61 years ago - and sane leaders on both sides. No "Greater Israel." No "Right of Return." Bill Clinton called Bibi’s speech an "opening play." It’s more like the umpteenth opening play to another season of treading water. I just hope Obama doesn’t wear himself out persuading both sides to reach another "agreement" which will finish up going where all the past agreements have gone - nowhere.

Of course I hope I’m wrong. I’ve been hoping for 61 years. I was a kid when Israel became a state - but yeah - I’m that old. Not too much time left for me to witness the impossible morphing into the possible
posted by Jeff Smith at 6/15/2009 10:13:00 PM

 
CAN OBAMA BRING PEACE TO THE ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS?

I’m still on a blog sabbatical but the Israeli/Palestinian part of Obama’s Muslim "reach out" speech deserves some comment.

I am sure that those on the Palestinian side of the issue - which would include everyone on the "Arab Street" - and sympathizers in the rest of the world, are feeling somewhat encouraged by what he said. Some neutral observers are saying that the speech signaled a new and hopeful approach to the problem by the United States and that maybe - finally - peace between the parties is really possible. But this observer thinks that the opposite might be true - that the speech could make a difficult task - the achievement of an Israeli/Palestinian peace - even more difficult.

The president pleased the Palestinians by trotting out the same claims and complaints that they have used and have been used in their behalf for decades. The Israelis created settlements on "their" land and continue to build and expand. A barrier to peace. No mention of no settlements before the ’67 war and no mention of no peace before any settlements existed and no mention of the land being disputed in any event.

Thousands of Palestinians live in refugee camps. I don’t recall if he mentioned any numbers but he certainly mentioned the camps. But no acknowledgment that Israelis neither put Palestinians in refugee camps nor have anything to do with keeping them there. Hundreds of thousands of people became refugees during World War ll. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled from Arab nations and became refugees after 1947. None remain refugees today - only "displaced Palestinians" - kept under refugee conditions for 60 years as a political ploy - and enabled for 60 years by the United Nations. But of course that aspect of refugee camps wasn’t mentioned.

The president said the long suffering Palestinians have aspirations that should be supported. They should be able to create their own state. Nothing wrong with that. It was a pretty good idea when the United Nations came up with it in 1947. I wonder what went wrong with those aspirations? Oh yes - it meant that that it also would involve the creation of a state called Israel and they weren’t having any of that

There was of course the obligatory admonition that the Palestinians should stop their violence - but the thrust of his discussion of the conflict was that the United States recognizes and sympathizes with the complaints of the Palestinians and that they deserve their own state. So why do I think the speech may actually move the so called "peace process" a few steps backward? First of all, peace can only be achievable if there are sane people on both sides of the question. In more than sixty years, there has been no Palestinian leadership that has exhibited a sane approach to solving the problems of the region. If you’re on the losing side of a conflict and then either reject any offer to talk peace with the winning side or want to dictate the terms of any peace - that’s insane. That was the Palestinian position after Israel defeated five Arab armies in 1948 and after subsequent wars - and it hasn’t changed that much since

But even with sanity on both sides, I don’t see how the "new" Obama approach is going to help. Yes, the words he used will placate the Arab street for a while but how will that help? Obama has no leverage with the Palestinians. Not with Abbas and certainly not with Hamas. He has leverage with Israel - the U.S. being Israel’s only true friend in the world - and maybe he can push Bibi to back away from settlement expansion and give lip service to the so called two state solution - but then what? The strategy of Abbas, who is no leader to begin with, is to wait - and now he'll be encouraged to keep waiting - waiting for Obama to push for Israeli concessions - starting with a settlement freeze and maybe even evacuation. But of course no matter what Israel does, it won’t be enough. "Settlements" have never been THE barrier to peace and Obama is smart enough to know that, so while he may be playing some strategic card with the Arab world by calling for a halt to settlement expansion, he must know that it will have no practical effect. We’ve seen how the Gaza population greeted the removal of settlements. They destroyed valuable assets left by the departing Israelis instead of using them to improve their circumstances and set about the practical peace loving business of launching daily rocket attacks into Israel.

Everyone agrees that the speech needs to be followed up with action. But what kind of action? If it’s not the right kind, the "peace process" will go nowhere - except backward. The Palestinians will expect Obama to put the squeeze on Netanyahu - but Bibi is hanging on to power by the skin of his teeth and if he is pushed into a position of pulling back on new housing within existing settlements - it will accomplish nothing in the cause for peace but might result in the collapse of his governing coalition.

What Obama can do that might move the parties closer to some kind of future peaceful arrangement is to tell the Palestinians something that they won’t want to hear but that needs to be said - and that is that they have to move first - that he can bring great pressure on Israel to respond in kind but that he can’t make them do anything as long as the position of Palestinians is to refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, to refuse to take the "right of return" - a known non starter - off the table - and to insist that Jews can’t live among them (settlements) - while more than a million Arabs live in Israel. In other words, to approach the future with sanity. I’m not there to measure the pulse of the Israeli people, but I could almost guarantee that if they were totally assured of the Palestinians willingness to give up violence and to stop making demands that they know will never be met - they’d be 100% behind Netanyahu sitting down with whoever emerged as the recognized and publicly supported leader of the Palestinians - not just to negotiate - but to make a deal.

It may never be possible to arrive at the kind of "two state solution" that Obama envisions - two sovereign nations living side by side - but a peace agreement is possible if sanity prevails. We should hope for that as a goal to be accomplished during Obama’s first term.
posted by Jeff Smith at 6/11/2009 11:23:00 AM

 
IT’S HEALTHCARE "REFORM" TIME AGAIN

Still on Blog sabbatical but I’m making time today to note that it’s that time of the year again - a time when despite having the sinking feeling that the world is going to hell in a hand basket and that we’ll never ever be able to recapture what we fondly remember as "the good old days" - along comes an annual ritual to jerk us out of our stupor and remind us that - as I’ve observed here many times - plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - the more things change, the more they stay the same. And our rescuer from the doldrums is of course (Fanfare) spiraling gas prices!!! Can indignant proclamations from our elected officials be far behind? And threats of hearings? The good old days are still with us.

But this spring season we have a double whammy to remind us that there are more things than death and taxes that are permanent in our otherwise changing world. Health Care Reform. I have to capitalize each word to emphasize the importance of this perennial reminder of things that never change. Of course we have a new twist this year. The foxes gathered with the reformers with promises of better times ahead for the hen house occupants.

According to the president, we now have promises from the healthcare industry that will save TRILLIONS of healthcare costs over the next decade. It sounds impressive but I have a hard time understanding how those trillions are going to affect my medical costs for the rest of this year or next year or the year after. From what I can gather from the promised largesse of the American medical industry, there might be a slow down in the growth of medical costs. Not any reduction in costs - just a slow down in cost increases. So a life sustaining medication that’s costing - say - two bucks a pill this year - might only cost $2.85 next year instead of $3.00. And multiply that sort of reduction a few million times and we arrive at those trillions in cost "savings." We’ve heard this sort of thing before and it’s mathematical hokum.

So is the other item of health care news that was "breaking" even as representatives of the health care industry were assuring the president that their cooperation would obviate the need for any drastic action - such as a single payer insurance program. Representatives of the Chicken Littles of America Association were warning that thanks to the recession, Medicare would run out of money by 2017 instead of one of the other, later, multiple estimates of the Medicare year of disaster - leaving millions of seniors scrambling for ways to pay for their doctor visits, hospital stays and the medications that are keeping them alive. So much for the wonderful "single payer" idea. No wonder the health care moguls are cooperating with the president. Having the best interest of the American populace at heart, they want to make sure that this impending disaster won’t affect a greater number of Americans than those already on Social Security and relying on Medicare as their primary source of medical insurance. Except for a third item of news that really isn’t "news" in the sense of something new and different because it’s been known for years - and that is the billions of dollars of profit earned annually by the HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY!!

Look at any "top ten" list of profitable industries and you’ll find healthcare represented more than any other industry or industry group - with healthcare insurance companies close to the top of the list. Billions of dollars are being poured into the business of healthcare and keeping it "healthy" as an industry - and those billions don’t come from harvesting the fruit grown on Money Tree Farms.. They come out of the pockets of Americans and from contributions of American employers - and huge amounts of it are retained or distributed as PROFITS.

I have to hope - I want to believe - that despite the rosy picture painted by Mr. Obama - he doesn’t for a moment buy this sudden change of heart by the enemies of change and that what he is really doing is following the ancient admonition of keeping his friends close and his enemies closer and that he is "playing" them at the moment when they think they are playing him. I think that the president knows without question that the only kind of "reform" that would make sense would be for the billions collected by the money making machines known as medical insurance companies to be diverted to a version of Medicare that would provide healthcare coverage to every American. An insurance program that would cover care in and out of the hospital - including medications for a reasonable co-payment. Just like the hated Canadian and British National Insurance programs that Canadians and Brits wouldn’t give up for the keys to Fort Knox - despite a recently launched despicable anti single payer television campaign featuring purported British patients claiming that they were denied live saving procedures by National Health Plan authorities. . I’ve only seen it once but I’m going to find out who’s behind it and who the "patients" are and the truth of their denial of needed care.

The money’s available in the United States to provide the same kind universal care that’s enjoyed by Canadians and Europeans who don’t have to worry about going bankrupt if they are hit with a serious illness and don’t have to choose between a needed medication and food for the week. .The money’s there. It’s just going to the wrong places. Like to Blue Cross and Blue Shield and to the dozens of insurance companies selling healthcare policies. Like into the pocket of Aetna’s Ronal Williams and poor old Ed Hanway - who had to take a cut down to $11.4 million in 2008 because Cigna’s stock price and profits were down for the year.

We have the most convoluted healthcare system of any 21st century industrial country - where the ability to receive healthcare is dependent on one’s ability to pay for it. And please don’t come back at me with nonsense about emergency rooms This argument about the best way to provide healthcare to all Americans is about money - the profits that insurance and pharmaceutical companies make on the backs of sick and injured people and that they’re not about to give up. The president can make all the announcements he wants to about the "progress’ that’s being made and how wonderful it is that the same group of interests that have been fighting the very hint of single payer coverage for years are now "cooperating" with him - but nothing is going to change unless he - or some president sends a National Healthcare proposal to Congress and the elected members of that body resist the influence of healthcare industry money and start putting the interest of their constituents ahead of their obeisance to the money that feeds their campaign coffers and keeps them in office.

It’ll come one day but don’t hold your breath. And don’t be fooled by that meeting at the White House the other day and how the president described it.
posted by Jeff Smith at 5/15/2009 10:54:00 AM