Post-feminism

Barbara Ehrenreich has a fabulous response to a so-called research survey showing women are unhappier now than they were in 1972 -- and therefore feminism must be to blame.

I remain mystified why feminism is the only "f" word that young women don't want to use.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175126/barbara_ehrenreich_do_women_have_the_blues_

Brain Science proves Torture Victims Lie

Read the full story in Wired:

Severe interrogation techniques like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions and the exploitation of phobias aren’t just morally reprehensible, they’re based on bad science, destroying the very memories they’re supposed to recover.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/badintelligence/

An American without health insurance is like a...

According to the man speaking for the Cato Institute on PBS last night, everyone should have a right to an "uninsured" body.

Afterall, as he said, you can opt out of car insurance if you don't drive. Similarly you can refuse home insurance by not having a mortgage. We deserve, he said, the say "opt out" choice for health insurance.

But what if non-health insurance paying citizens aren't worth the expense they cause all of us later when they get sick?

Isn't it true that if you don't own a car you can't have a car accident, but if you have a body, you may still get sick, and if you do, other people, taxpayers or charites who cover the uninsured will have to intervene to save your life.

It's not about who gets covered, it is about who pays. Healthcare is the one thing that it seems Americans like to overpay for, as long as the people they overpay to are not the government. But they only want to overpay if they can also punish people with the freedom to be uninsured.

Health insurance reform without cost reform is pointless. For more about how to create both, see the free article on the New England Journal of Medicine’s web site:

http://healthcarereform.nejm.org/?p=1627&query=TOC


"There is, however, another option that could control spending across both the public and private insurance pools. Other countries that have multiple insurers, such as Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands, use all-payer regulation to control costs. In these countries, insurers come together to negotiate, or the government takes the lead in setting, common payment rules for medical care. With a few exceptions, payments to all doctors in a given geographic area follow a standard fee schedule. Hospitals are also paid on comparable terms."


For more about how multiple insurer systems work in Germany, Japan, and Holland, see the new book, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care By T.R. Reid, and listen to his interviews on NPR.

Healthcare reform

For an excellent analysis of why reforming America's health care system is essential to the country's financial health, see Simon Johnson and James Kwak in today's Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/01/AR2009090101027.html

Their well-argued conclusion:

Put another way, if you are for fiscal discipline, you should be for health-care reform. If our government cannot produce some kind of reform, that will only reinforce the perception that our political system is incapable of resolving our largest, most difficult problem -- and that is what will make investors think twice about investing in America.

Kennedy Legacy

I am more moved by Ted's death than I expected. I grew up among Protestant, Republican skeptics of the Kennedy myth -- a cynicism that lingered even after we all became Democrats.

It was Bobby's murder that I felt as a personal loss, since 1968 was my year of conversion. I think we lost our ignorance when Jack was killed and our blind optimism when Bobby died. I trust that Ted's realistic idealism has a true heir in President Obama.

I also had a feeling that the death of Eunice and her last brother is the real end of the truly liberal wind that Vatican II blew -- in a truly, "catholic" way -- all over the world. Eunice devoted herself to the feminine personal world, Ted to the masculine, political one. And they did not hesitate to insist on making a difference here, on this Earth, in this life-time.

For those of us who think the torch must be passed on, we may do it without their religion, but only because their ethics have become so ingrained in our secular lives.

We should find a way to make our generation as committed to ideals that transcend their roots in Irish, Catholic, Democratic dogma. Something as powerful a liberal counterforce to fundamentalist demogogues as these two were.

Cynicism will not do it.

Real Info about Healthcare and Public Opinion

The New England Journal of Medicine this week has a free article with an excellent analysis of recent polls on what Americans really believe, like, and dislike, about health insurance and health care. The scary part of this analysis is that so many Americans who have insurance are afraid their coverage will be worse -- and their taxes will be higher -- under a new plan.

Too many believe that reform will make the status quo worse, for their families and for the country as a whole.

How can we convince the public that much worse is what healthcare -- quality and cost -- will be without reform?


http://healthcarereform.nejm.org/?p=1424?query=TOC

For an excellent critique of anti-health-care rhetoric, which demolishes the distortions, see this article:

http://mediamatters.org/research/200907290047

1930s American Fascists rise again

I had no idea how much Rush Limbaugh was borrowing from the anti-FDR gang, until I read some old speeches by Coghlin.

The "birthers" are using exactly the same kind of inflamatory about "Barak Hussein Obama:"

Here is an historical quote from a 1935 radio broadcast by Father Coghlin:


"I refer to Bernard Manasses Baruch whose full name has seldom been mentioned but which name from this day forth shall not be forgotten in America. This was the name which his parents gave him, the name Manasses. This is the name, General Johnson, of your prince of high finance. Him with the Rothschilds in Europe, the Lazzeres in France, the Warburgs, the Kuhn-Loebs, the Morgans and the rest of that wrecking crew of internationalists whose god is gold and whose emblem is the red shield of exploitation--these men I shall oppose until my dying days even though the Bernard Manasses Baruchs of Wall Street are successful in doing to me what the prince, after whom he was named, accomplished in doing to Isaias."

http://www.ssa.gov/history/fcspeech.html father coghlin speeches

Rush Limbaugh's Father Coghlin's playbook

By calling Obama's health plan "nazi," Limbaugh is beating the same demagogic drum that Father Coghlin and America Firsters did in the 1930s.

In those days, the weapon was anti-semitism -- disguised as "National Union for Social Justice;" today it's Orwellian "new speak" which calls liberals "nazis" and redefines free market fanatics as populists protecting the little guy.

FDR and the New Deal survived those times, and Obama will too.

War between the States continues

In case you thought the Civil War was over read this story about a new poll:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/31/new-poll-less-than-half-o_n_248470.html

That only a plurality of Republicans were willing to acknowledge the president was born in America is nothing short of astounding, considering the preponderance of evidence that confirms his Hawaiian birth.
The conspiracy has a regional flavor. Overall, even including Democrats and independents, only 47 percent of respondents in the South said they believed Obama was born in America, with 23 percent saying he was not and 30 percent saying they were unsure. In the Northeast and Midwest, the percentage of respondents who believe Obama was born in the U.S. was over 90 percent.

New Hampshire welcomes marriage equality!

In a world of change (not the least in Iowa), there is interesting news Iceland:

...voters overwhelming selected as prime minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, who’d first taken the job in February, replacing David Oddsson, who’d shepherded the nation into a free-market bankruptcy....
Siguarsdottir is also the first openly gay prime minister, though voters are likely more concerned about economics than labels.

(This came via a useful site, http://www.womensvoicesforchange.org/)

Just a reminder about the false threat to "freedom of religion" conservatives are now claiming, since the Iowa Supreme Court decision. (If you think there's not a lot of money being spent, check out HRC's website:
http://www.hrcbackstory.org/2009/04/national-organization-for-marriage-creates-fake-ad-for-fake-problems/.)


In fact, gay marriage poses no more threat to religions which preach homosexuality is a sin than civil divorce impinges on the Catholic doctrine which forbids it. Freedom of religion cannot include the freedom to impose your religious beliefs on other. It allows discrimination only within the faith, not against "non-believers."

You can keep me out of your Church, but not your hospital or the hall you rent for profit to the public. You can hire only Catholics in good standing with the Church to work in your school, office, hospital, which would, of course exclude any married homosexuals from CT, but if you employ any people who are not Catholic, you cannot only discriminate against qualified homosexuals, married or not.

You can't take all patients except homosexuals, accept all students except the children of homosexuals, or allow all people to have a marriage in your hall except for homosexuals.

You can't send your children to public school and prevent them from hearing teachers say that gay marriage is legal in CT, MA, and VT. You have plenty of home schooling and religious school options if you want them to follow your religion instead of secular law -- or science.

Don’t assume that misleading ads and silly talk-show media won’t really affect the way people vote. While religious freedom crosses all state borders in America, my civil right stop outside my region of New England.

I couldn't find a better piece on gun violence than today's opinion by NYT Reporter Timothy Egan:

http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/the-guns-of-spring/?th&emc=th

Does it strike any one else strange that all these husbands murdering wives and children isn't seen as a social problem, but marriage equality in Iowa threatens the foundations of democracy?

Legal in THREE STATES!

WASHINGTON, April 7 — The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force hails the Vermont Legislature’s override today of Gov. Jim Douglas’ veto of a bill extending the freedom to marry to same-sex couples. The Senate passed the measure by 23 to 5 and the House by 100 to 49. Vermont is the first state in the nation to extend the freedom to marry through the legislative process.

I had forgotten how wonderful CBS Sunday Morning News is! Today, I saw an incredibly inspiring program, Holding Court And Performing Miracles, profiling Bob Hurley's 40 years successfully coaching HS basketball at a small parochial school without its own gym. All but 3 of his inner city players have gone to college during those decades.

This is another of those "things that work" news stories that we don't talk enough about.

I just found a very interesting progressive blog which today reports on the drive for marraige equality across New England, as covered in today's New York Times article:

http://www.ablueview.com/2009/04/new-england-once-again-the-leader-in-abolishing-unjust-laws.html

I first heard on NPR about the positive results that Missouri has with rehabilitating juvenile offenders. Last week, the NYT had an an article about how other states, like Florida, are also finding the benefit of similar programs which keep young criminals out of jail, where they consistently grow up to be (expensive, as well as dangerous) adult felons.

In the category of "things that work but we don't talk about them, even when they could make us feel good and save taxpayers money," you can't find a better example than this story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/us/27juvenile.html

Glenn Loury has an article in the March 11th Cato Unbound (also cited in the online Atlantic Monthly) with an excellent argument about why we need to reverse the trend in America of being a "nation of jailers" (cf Pew Trust recent survey on the incarcerated population of states):

...we benefit from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our behest. Put differently our society — the society we together have made — first tolerates crime-promoting conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then goes on to act out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/03/11/glenn-loury/a-nation-of-jailers/

In the literacy category

Harvard has just announced a media tracking tool for the webm Media Cloud. It sounds like a fun way to explore which stories get covered where. See the article in The Chronicle of Higher Ed.

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3654/harvard-unveils-web-tool-for-studying-media-trends?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Using the links on Media Cloud, I found this interesting site which posts front page headlines from various newspapers:

http://rayogram.com/news/

The economic future of newspapers is addressed very cogently in a current article in The American:

http://american.com/archive/2009/february-2009/preparing-the-obituary

The world would be better off if we would...

Help President Obama reach out to the moderate Taliban in Afganistan -- it's bound to be much easier than reaching moderate Republicans in the House.

Sell GM's Hummer division to the Iraqis, since they will need 4-wheel drive on their roads for decades to come.

Cut government spending by laying off politicians who never sponsor legislation or vote "yes."

Spend more money on military veterans and less on civilian contractors.

Take away the legal "privileges" of marriage to a man who abuses his wife and children and give them to a man who adopts a child with another man.