Quote of the day

I found this in the comment section over on Alternet after an article called "Four Reasons Why the Public Health Care Option is Irrefutable":

The US has the most expensive and worst health care system of all modern countries. It is suited to benefit corporations of the health industry, not patients. The US is a corporate dictatorship in democratic disguise, and lobbying is institutionalised corruption.

I so agree.

Snark for the day

Well, well. He's definitely off to a good start:

President Obama's in the news, of course. He's put health care back in the news. Yup. President Obama says he wants to create a national health care plan that's both affordable and easy to use. Yup. Yeah, good. Yeah, and the insurance industry says they'll fight the plan with congressmen who are both affordable and easy to use.

-- Conan O'Brien

Quote of the day

From an email sent out by Sojourners:

Compared to any other time in the last 30 or 40 years, there's a better chance of success than ever before. But this is going to be like an Indiana Jones movie, where we kind of slip through a lot of narrow escapes.

-- Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, on the prospects for health care reform.

Health care realities

It's really hard to understand how we, as a society, have allowed these things to happen:

Let's be clear. Our health care system is disintegrating. Today, 46 million people have no health insurance and even more are underinsured with high deductibles and co-payments. At a time when 60 million people, including many with insurance, do not have access to a medical home, more than 18,000 Americans die every year from preventable illnesses because they do not get to the doctor when they should. This is six times the number who died at the tragedy of 9/11 – but this occurs every year.

In the midst of this horrendous lack of coverage, the U.S. spends far more per capita on health care than any other nation – and health care costs continue to soar. At $2.4 trillion dollars, and 18 percent of our GDP, the skyrocketing cost of health care in this country is unsustainable both from a personal and macro-economic perspective.
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In recent years, while we have experienced an acute shortage of primary health care doctors as well as nurses and dentists, we are paying for a huge increase in health care bureaucrats and bill collectors. Over the last three decades, the number of administrative personnel has grown by 25 times the numbers of physicians. Not surprisingly, while health care costs are soaring, so are the profits of private health insurance companies. From 2003 to 2007, the combined profits of the nation's major health insurance companies increased by 170 percent. And, while more and more Americans are losing their jobs and health insurance, the top executives in the industry are receiving lavish compensation packages.

I found this article on the OpEdNews website. The writer is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Quote of the day

From Sojourners:

Our society has deteriorated to the point where people will take the battle right into the church. People see it as a soft target rather than see it as a place of reverence anymore.

-- Jeffrey Hawkins, executive director of the Christian Security Network, a national organization focused on helping churches plan for emergencies.

Sunday art blogging

"At the Window"

Artist: Leonid Pasternak

Image from Wikimedia Commons

In honor of the day :-)

Well, as all you church people out there know, today is Trinity Sunday and I just had to share the following with you!

Not to be blasphemous, but I wonder if even the Holy Trinity understands the American tax code.

-- Maurice Carroll

Too funny!
~~~

Something really needs to be done about this

The main thing that needs to be done is that applicants for police work need to be screened for sadistic tendencies and anger management problems:

This is from the CNN website:

Surveillance video shows a Passaic, New Jersey, police officer beating a 49-year-old man standing idly on a street corner.

Surveillance tape from Lawrence's Grill and Bar in Passaic on May 29 shows a police car pull up to Ronnie Holloway, who is standing still on the curb outside the restaurant. After a few moments Holloway zips up his sweatshirt -- because the female officer in the car instructed him to do so, Holloway said.

At that point, the other officer in the vehicle, Joseph R. Rios III, exits the car, grabs Holloway and slams him onto the hood of the police car. He then pummels Holloway with his fist and baton.

Holloway said he had exchanged no words with the officer before he pounced on him.

After the incident, police locked Holloway in a holding cell for the night and did not provide treatment for his injuries, according to Holloway's attorney, Nancy Lucianna. Those injuries included a torn cornea and extensive bruising to the left side of his body, she said.

Holloway is schizophrenic, according to his mother, Betty, with whom he has lived for more than 20 years. But Holloway's attorney says that is not the full extent of his mental disabilities and that her client was "mentally challenged on multiple levels."

At the time of the incident, Holloway told CNN, he was in the midst of a walk around the neighborhood. His attorney described such walks as his chief pastime.

Some information has come to me about another police officer who likes to beat up people for fun. (I'm not at liberty to discuss details here.) To say that this is appalling is to put it mildly. For our society to tolerate it says something very unsavory about our society.

An oldie but goodie

Just in case you've forgotten this one:

The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.

-- Cicero, 55 BC

What despair does to people

I want to recommend that you read an article I found today entitled "Economic Fallout Has Spurred an Epidemic of Murder and Suicide That Has Gone Largely Unnoticed". Here's a little bit of what it says:

Last summer, in the pages of the Nation magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich called attention to people turning to "the suicide solution" in response to the burgeoning financial crisis. Months later, major news outlets started to examine the same phenomenon. Last fall, a TomDispatch report on suicides and a range of other extreme acts -- including self-inflicted injury, murder, arson, and armed self-defense -- in response to foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, and layoffs, was followed, months later, by mainstream media attention to the notion of "econo-cide" -- prompted, in large part, by a spate of familicides (murder/suicides in which both parents and their children die).

While it's impossible to know the myriad factors, including deeply personal ones, that contribute to people resorting to drastic measures, violent or otherwise, many press reports suggest that the global economic crisis has played no small part in a range of extreme acts.

An analysis by TomDispatch of national, regional, and local news reports in 2008 and early 2009 indicates that a silent, nationwide epidemic of drastic measures may be underway. News of such acts linked to economic woes -- from armed robberies to pay the rent to financially-motivated suicides -- has filtered out of cities and towns in no less than 30 states, many of which have seen multiple incidents. And since only a fraction of such acts ever receives media coverage, what is being reported, even if mostly in local newspapers, qualifies as startling.

Tell me again how great capitalism is supposed to be????
~~~

The weak point of our defenses

We have had such extraordinary prophets in our national life. Pity we rarely listen to them:

Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to publick opinion. This is the weak point of our defenses, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem the true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, and the wrong the right.

-- James Fenimore Cooper

Voice of the Day

This is from a Sojourners email:

The choice we face is broader than politics, deeper than charity. It is whether we see the world chiefly as property to be controlled, defined by walls and fences that must be built ever higher, ever thicker, ever tougher; or made up chiefly of an open weave of compassion and connection.

- Rabbi Arthur Waskow

I so agree. It grieves me that a "you're on your own" attitude has come to prevail in our society. It's a component of that politization of empathy that I reported on yesterday.
~~~

The politics of empathy

Oh, my. George Lakoff does it again. PLEASE go read his excellent article entitled "Conservatives Are Waging a War on Empathy -- We Can't Let Them Win"

Take a look:

The Sotomayor nomination has given radical conservatives new life. They have launched an attack that is nominally aimed at Judge Sotomayor. But it is really a coordinated stealth attack -- on President Obama's central vision, on progressive thought itself, and on Republicans who might stray from the conservative hard line.

There are several fronts: Empathy, feelings, racism, activist judges. Each one has a hidden dimension. And if progressives think conservative attacks are just about Sotomayor, they may wind up helping conservatives regroup.

Conservatives believe that Sotomayor will be confirmed, and so their attacks may seem irrational to Democrats, a last gasp, a grasping at straws, a sign that the party is breaking up.Actually, something sneakier and possibly dangerous is going on.

Let's start with the attack on empathy. Why empathy? Isn't empathy a good thing?

Empathy is at the heart of progressive thought. It is the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of others -- not just individuals, but whole categories of people: one's countrymen, those in other countries, other living beings, especially those who are in some way oppressed, threatened, or harmed. Empathy is the capacity to care, to feel what others feel, to understand what others are facing and what their lives are like. Empathy extends well beyond feeling to understanding, and it extends beyond individuals to groups, communities, peoples, even species.
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Progressives care about others as well as themselves.
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But the target is not empathy as it really exists. Instead, the conservatives are reframing empathy to make it attackable. Their "empathy" is idiosyncratic, personal feeling for an individual, presumably the defendant in a legal case. With "empathy" reframed in this way, Charles Krauthammer can say, echoing Karl Rove, "Justice is not about empathy."

Please read the rest of the article. I just can't do it justice with a few excerpts here.

You know, I've always been taught that a lack of empathy is a serious symptom of psychological pathology:

The absence of empathy - for instance in the Narcissistic and Antisocial personality disorders - predisposes people to exploit and abuse others. Empathy is the bedrock of our sense of morality. Arguably, aggressive behavior is as inhibited by empathy at least as much as it is by anticipated punishment.

But the existence of empathy in a person is also a sign of self-awareness, a healthy identity, a well-regulated sense of self-worth, and self-love (in the positive sense). Its absence denotes emotional and cognitive immaturity, an inability to love, to truly relate to others, to respect their boundaries and accept their needs, feelings, hopes, fears, choices, and preferences as autonomous entities.

That's from an article I found here.

Well, we expected this, didn't we?