That "birther" nonsense

Why is "single-payer" so threatening?

I just discovered an article entitled "Obama's Doctor Speaks Out for Single-Payer Healthcare Reform" by David L. Scheiner, M.D. Here's how it gets started:

I write today because years ago I was practicing medicine in an office on the South Side of Chicago with my partner and friend, Dr. Quentin Young, when a young community organizer came to see me as a patient. I became his personal physician for 22 years and he became president of the United States. I support and admire him and consider him to be the most promising president of my lifetime, which stretches back to 1938. But I respectfully differ with him on his approach to health care reform.

I speak to you today as an advocate for the single-payer approach to health reform, an expanded and improved Medicare for all, but I am hoping that President Obama and Congress will hear me also. As some of you may know, I was supposed to be at the recent town hall meeting at the White House where I was to ask a question of the president, but my visit was cancelled at the last minute, presumably to prevent the national airing of my views on health reform. Is the single-payer message so dangerous that it cannot even be discussed by Congress and the administration?

Yes, there are parties who stand to lose out under a single-payer program - the private, for-profit health insurance companies and their multimillionaire CEOs in the first place. The head of Aetna, for example, received $18.6 million in compensation last year. That's obscene.

Yes, it is obscene. And it disgusts me for several reasons - one of which is that Aetna happens to be my health insurance company.

Now click on through and read the rest of the article. It's short. And it's compelling.
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More on the Professor Gates incident

Okay. This highlights the problem:

The fallout from the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest continues: the Boston Police Department has suspended an officer named Justin Barrett for using a racial slur in reference to the Harvard professor in an email, the AP reports.
...
The AP omits the phrase Barrett used from its article, but the Boston Globe reports that the phrase was "jungle monkey," and that the officer used it while reacting to the media coverage of the arrest.

Just unbelievable. But I'm very glad this stuff is coming out into the open.
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Last week's best quote - definitely!

I just discovered the following. It was published last Wednesday:

When the federal minimum goes up this Friday, a lot of people are going to get a raise. The economy won't crash and American small business won't become extinct. And those facts won't be news, because "House Not on Fire" isn't a headline. But "Conservatives Maintain Perfect Record of Being Wrong About Minimum Wage" should be. Seems to me that's kind of newsworthy and it seems to me that that's the story being ignored here.

Why are these people allowed to get away with being completely wrong so consistently? That should be Friday's question of the day.

It's by a guy whose moniker is Wisco and you can find it right here.
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Something about immigration

Here's an important observation from an editorial in the Denver Post:

If this country is ever going to get a handle on its illegal immigration problem, more than a secure border and a workable guest-worker program is needed. Mexico's economy also needs to prosper.

People would not risk their lives to come to the United States unless they were truly desperate. I don't understand why all the mean-spirited anti-immigration Americans don't realize that. And a lot of our policies have negatively affected Mexico from an economic standpoint. For example, the fact that we flooded the market with our cheap, government subsidized corn (thereby driving down prices) made it impossible for the traditional family farmer in Mexico to survive. What are they supposed to do? Just lie down and die?
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"This is not liberty"

Below is an excerpt from a Sojourners article entitled "Health Care and Structural Violence" by Valerie Eleverton Dixon:

When health insurance is linked to employment, employees are forced to work jobs they despise. They must too often travel farther, work harder and longer for less pay and less satisfaction in order to keep the job because they cannot afford to lose health coverage. This is not liberty. Such is especially the case when a spouse or a child has a serious medical problem that requires continual treatment.

Moreover, this system of health care is burdensome to businesses that have to include the cost of health care in compensation packages in order to attract and keep good people. For people whose employers do not offer health insurance, for part-time or temporary workers, for self-employed people, buying individual health insurance is not an affordable option. So, they go without primary health care that could prevent more serious illnesses in the future.

Now that the nation is facing this problem and is taking steps to address it, some members of Congress are worried about how to pay for it. I do not recall such worried, furrowed brows over deficit spending and the national debt when the George W. Bush administration took this nation to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I do not recall an interest in going slowly and taking our time to “get it right” before going to war.

You really would think this stuff would be obvious, wouldn't you? But I learned something by reading some of the comments to this article. Conservatives are utterly horrified at the idea that someone will get an "entitlement". Well, with that principle, I think we ought not to be "entitled" to police protection or fire protection or paved roads. Heck, let's just let society descend into chaos. God forbid that anyone get some help that they don't personally pay for 100% !!! (Sheesh.)
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Hatred and religion

Oh my. Sadly, this is so true:

Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.

-- Eric Hoffer (1902–83), U.S. philosopher

I well remember being very influenced by Eric Hoffer's amazing work, The True Believer, back when I was a philosophy student in the early 70s. It is about the psychology of fanaticism and, if you're unfamiliar with it, I urge you to read up on Hoffer's thought in this regard.

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New Rules

Ya gotta watch this one. Really.

Some important history

This is from an article entitled "Health Care Hypocrisy":

In 1950, when President Truman sent a universal health insurance bill to Congress, the American Medical Association (AMA) launched what was then a massive counterattack. The AMA claimed that government health insurance would lead to rationing of health care, higher prices, diminished choices and more bureaucracy. The AMA beat both Truman and the unions that were backing the legislation, using the phrase "socialized medicine" to scare the people.

Fifty-nine years later, "corporatized medicine" has produced all these consequences, along with stripping away the medical profession's independence. Today, the irony is that the corporate supremacists are accusing reformers in Washington of what they themselves have produced throughout the country. Rationing, higher prices, less choice, and mounds of paperwork and corporate red tape. Plus, fifty million people without any health insurance at all.

-- Ralph Nader

Nader is at his best when he is advocating for the best interests of the people.
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Friday cat blogging!

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Why we need single-payer

The president explained it himself:

Now, the truth is that, unless you have a -- what's called a single-payer system, in which everybody is automatically covered, then you're probably not going to reach every single individual because there's always going to be somebody out there who thinks they're indestructible and doesn't want to get health care, doesn't bother getting health care, and then, unfortunately, when they get hit by a bus, end up in the emergency room and the rest of us have to pay for it.

Come on, people. What's not to get?
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Something about the so-called "birthers"

I guess it's time for me to say something about the really silly "birthers" movement. I didn't know until today that it is also utterly racist. It seems that the Southern Poverty Law Center is asking that Lou Dobbs be taken off the air because of his support of this movement. Here's part of their letter to the head of CNN, Jonathan King:

As he has in several other instances, Mr. Dobbs, in taking up the birthers' claims, is adopting an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that originated on the radical racist right. As Gawker.com has reported, this particular conspiracy theory was first developed by an open anti-Semite and circulated by right-wing extremists who cannot accept the fact that a black man has been elected president of the United States. Among its adherents was neo-Nazi James von Brunn, the alleged murderer of a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., this June. Von Brunn had helped spread the birthers' claims on the Internet and attacked the "dishonest & conspiratorial Media" for not taking them up.

This is not the first time Mr. Dobbs has pushed racist conspiracy theories or defamatory falsehoods about immigrants. We wrote you in 2007 to bring to your attention his utterly false claim that 7,000 new cases of leprosy had appeared in the United States in a recent three-year period, due at least in part to immigrants. (The real number, according to official statistics, was about 400. Mr. Dobbs took his spurious information from the late right-wing extremist, Madeleine Cosman.) In addition, Mr. Dobbs has reported as fact the so-called Aztlan conspiracy, which claims that undocumented Mexican immigrants are part of a plot to "reconquer" the American Southwest. He has suggested there is something to a related conspiracy theory that claims the governments of Mexico, the United States and Canada are secretly planning to merge into the "North American Union." He has falsely claimed that "illegal aliens" fill one third of American prison and jail cells. And Mr. Dobbs has routinely disparaged, on CNN's air, those who have had the integrity to point out the falsity of these and similar claims.

Respectable news organizations should not employ reporters willing to peddle racist conspiracy theories and false propaganda. It's time for CNN to remove Mr. Dobbs from the airwaves.

I read about this over on AMERICAblog.
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Right wingers re-write history (or try)

Just take a look:

The Christian right is making a fresh push to force religion onto the school curriculum in Texas with the state's education board about to consider recommendations that children be taught that there would be no United States if it had not been for God.

Members of a panel of experts appointed by the board to revise the state's history curriculum, who include a Christian fundamentalist preacher who says he is fighting a war for America's moral soul, want lessons to emphasise the part played by Christianity in the founding of the US and that religion is a civic virtue.

Opponents have decried the move as an attempt to insert religious teachings in to the classroom by stealth, similar to the Christian right's partially successful attempt to limit the teaching of evolution in biology lessons in Texas.

It's from an article in the Guardian. You can read the rest of it right here.
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