Q&A

As I sometimes like to do, this is a cross-posted question and my answer from another source. During a conversation, someone asked the question of me, and the response is mine.


Q: Liam, do you find the fact that Obama has cancelled the National day of prayer, but approved a day of prayer for Muslims concerning?

A: I find your mis-characterization of both facts a bit concerning.

First, he didn't cancel the National Day of Prayer, he simply observed it privately rather than in public. And in spite of the dangerous levels of mixture of religion and politics in recent years, I think that's correct. I don't believe our political leader should be leading us all in any religious observance in a nation where we have the freedom to choose our own religious views and not have them imposed or infringed upon by our government. If we someday have a Jewish President, or a Hindu President or a Muslim President or a Scientologist President, I don't want him or her to try to lead the country in his beliefs, and so I don't think a President who shares my beliefs should be trying to lead anybody in them, either. That's what freedom of religion is all about.

Second, Obama's "approval" of a Muslim day of prayer amounts to the same level of observance he gave the Christian one: He gave it recognition but did not publicly participate. The level of religious bigotry in your trying to paint the SAME action as somehow skewed in favor of the Muslim religion is pretty hard to stomach.

It's what he, in his official capacity as President, SHOULD do. Treat all religions equally as much as possible under law. (By which I mean if a religion calls for human saccrifice, he can't give blessing to that rite, of course).

But if we're going to have an officially recognized national day of prayer organized by one religion, then any other religion that wants to have one should also be granted recognition... and the President should either publicly participate in ALL of them (which he probably wouldn't have time to do) or NONE of them.

So no, in the end, I don't find Obama's behavior in this troubling. It is the inherent bigotry in the question that I find troubling.

Fun With Czars

This video is called "Dancing With The Czars". It's from the DNC, so you should be aware that their count of Czars under the Bush Administration includes Czar positions that were held by multiple people over the course of the administration. Still, by honest accounting, Obama still has at least one or two FEWER Czar positions than Bush did.





Now, the last time I posted such a thing, I had one person reply that his problem wasn't with the number of Czars but with the specific people Obama is choosing for his Czar positions.

But I've got several responses to that. First off, that's not what I'm hearing from most people. Glenn Beck is trumpeting not the QUALITY of the Czars, but the QUANTITY, and trying to whip his followers into a froth over the false "fact" that Obama has an unprecedented number of Czars.

Second, we should be surprised that Obama's Czars are going to have liberal tendencies? News flash: he was elected as a direct response to 8 years of conservative rule that the majority of voters did not feel made this country stronger or better. That's why the political pendulum swings... we get tired of one side, then we get tired of the other.

Third, among the things that people tired of in the Bush Administration was people being put into positions of authority that came out of the industries themselves or from the lobbying group for those industries. How many foxes could be put in charge of hen houses before people were going to get tired of chickens mysteriously disappearing? If the only alternative to that is someone whose past is a little bit more socialist than I'd prefer, well, I'll still take actual oversight over what we had recently.

And finally, I'm having a really hard time figuring out the complaints anyway. I've had people send me links about some of these guys, and the complaints seem more often than not to relate to something OTHER than the job the person was chosen for. If I need open-heart surgery, I don't particularly care if the surgeon has a history of speaking out on the opposite side from me on political issues, I only care if he's a damned fine surgeon. But on top of that, there's the whole "boy who cried wolf" syndrome again.

Obama has been in office for 8 months now, and I've lost count of how many people have been tarred as "the most liberal" this or "the most socialist" that. A supreme court nominee who in private was the Right Wing's wet dream, a jurist originally nominated to the bench by a Republican, and significantly further to the right than the Justice she was replacing, and yet they still tried to tar her with the "extreme liberal" brush, so that they could not only get someone who was as far to the right as they could reasonably expect, but still score some cheap political points.

They're STILL humping William Ayers as a terrorist and Obama's best buddy, when in fact everything I've read indicates they hardly knew each other, and Ayers has done a lot of atoning since the 70s.

They're still trying to tell us that health care reform means government telling us when Grandma has to die. They're still trying to tell us that Obama was not born in this country when there's simply no credible evidence to that effect and an overwhelming set of evidence that he was born in Hawaii.

So at this point, I'm afraid another blog post frothing at the digital mouth about how this advisor or that Czar wrote a paper in college supporting one socialist policy or another just doesn't convince me of anything. I just hear the boy crying wolf again and go about my business.

And one last note, by the way: there is no such title in the government as "Czar". It's a shorthand developed by the media for what had previously been known as "policy advisors". One of the first of these "Czars" was the guy in charge of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. That was a bit of a mouthful, and a lot for reporters to type, so they coined the term "drug czar".

And so ultimately, this whole anti-czar crusade has the same intellectual honesty as the re-labeling Prisoners of War as "Enemy Combatants", and by the same token, I could (if I were inclined to be just as intellectually dishonest) point out in all truthfulness that the number of officially designated "Enemy Combatants" increased by whatever factor I chose under President Bush, and I could write it in such a way as to imply that Bush created all of these terrorists and other enemies of the state, and was thus the worst President ever. After all, since he created the new designation, there were none before him, and there existed some under his administration. Mathematically, that's an infinite increase, so I could say "more than doubled" or "more than 10 times as many" or "more than a million times as many", whatever number I thought would be large enough to scare people but small enough to sound credible, and I wouldn't be lying.

If worded carefully, such an argument could be made without ever making any statement which was false, but yet the overall impression given would be a blatant falsehood: That President Bush was somehow responsible for the creation of all of these "Enemy Combatants", rather than simply for their labeling.

The same is true here. If you look at what they ARE, instead of what they are CALLED, these "czar" policy advisors have existed since before anyone alive today was born.

Then again, I'm not sure why I'm still ranting. Those who are going to get anything out of this probably already realize what I'm saying, and those who happily swallow every implied smear against Obama's character will most assuredly either have stopped reading long since (having convinced themselves that I'm just another lying liberal) or have already started to rationalize away the things I've said in favor of some bit of spin or other they've heard that they think disproves what I've said.

Glenn Beck: An Ex-Pat's View

Someone forwarded me this article, written in the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper. It is a piece by an ex-New Yorker who has, in the years since 9/11/2001, moved to Britain, written in reaction to Glenn Beck's 9/12 project.

Click through and read it, then come back and read my thoughts, below (if you're interested).

* * *

Y'know, when I first heard Beck speak of the 9/12 project, I understood his point, but I thought he was being awfully selective. For every bit of unity we felt as a nation, there was a whole lot more shock, a whole lot more anger, a whole lot more fear and a whole lot more "damn the consequences, get the bastards", even though we as yet had no idea who "the bastards" were.

We were hardly the altruistic, fellow-man-loving people Beck romanticizes, we were a terrified mob, willing to string up whoever was responsible, and in the absence of any definitive proof as to who that was, happily ready to string up whoever we happened to find convenient, and willing to throw away our own rights and trample those of others in the thirst for vengeance and for a way to not feel quite so powerless and afraid.

I wish that I could believe something, anything, good came out of 9/11, no matter how small. But it didn't. It was an act of complete evil, and one which we merely managed to survive.

No one who truly loves this country would take us back to that day. No one.

Governments Can't Run Health Care? Really?

Today, I learned some new statistics, and I'm wondering what's left to the argument that government health care causes worse results.

Comparing the United States to Great Britain (socialized health care), Canada and Germany (government single-payer systems), two fun statistics.

First, from the CIA comes infant mortality rates. The rates are given in number of deaths per thousand live births, so the lower the number, the better.

The United States comes in a perfectly respectable 6.26. That's a rank of 180 out of 224 (in this case, the higher the rank, the better. Singapore is #224, with 2.31 infant deaths per 1000 live births).

Canada is #189 (5.04), the U.K. #193 (4.85) and Germany #210 (3.99). All three systems have better infant survival rates that the United States.

Also from the CIA, there is a list of average life expectancies. Of 224 countries, the U.S. comes in 50th, with an average life expectancy of 78.11. This time the LOWER rank is better, the #1 rank is held by Macau with an average life expectancy of 84.36.

The U.K. is #36 (79.01), Germany is #32 (79.26) and Canada is #8 (81.23). Again, each significantly better than the U.S.

So the question I have is this: With these results, how is it that I'm supposed to be afraid of the government getting involved in my health care?

***

Update: Someone just pointed out that France spends 11% of their GDP and covers everyone, we spend 16.5% of ours and leave about 20% of those under 65 un-covered. So I figured I'd check where France fell on the above metrics. They beat all of the above on infant mortality, coming in at #217 (3.33 deaths per thousand live births), and they come in just behind Canada at #9 on the longevity list, with an average life expectancy of 80.98.

One more check in the "government run health care" box.

Forget What I Said Yesterday

Y'know what, forget what I said yesterday. This isn't the place for it.

I still intend to see if I can push this, but re-purposing an essentially failed blog isn't the place for it. If we get started, I/we will start a new one, and I'll redirect my 3 regular readers to look there as we get started.

But this place should remain a place for me to talk about the things I feel I need to talk about, even if it is mostly just to myself.

That said, I've just finished reading this piece by Maureen Dowd of the NY Times, and I wanted to comment.

In the piece, Ms. Dowd makes a pretty strong case that the "you lie" heckling by South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson was prompted primarily by a racist inability to accept that a man of African American heritage is President, and goes on to provide a reasonable argument that this may be an endemic problem throughout the south.

For the first time in my life time, we have what seems like credible groups discussing secession of their varied states. In my life, there have been groups in various states, most notably VT and TX, that have advocated for secession, but these groups never rose to the level of prominence that one could believe that it might actually happen, but I'm not sure I recall a sitting Governor advocating for secession.

And right now, I'm torn between believing that my country is strong enough to overcome this, just as it was strong enough to overcome the civil war and the integration of schools and the striking down of anti-miscegenation laws, and wondering if this racism will actually be enough to rend my country into pieces.

And I find the racism sickening. Literally, physically sickening.

I'm probably over-reacting. In fifteen or twenty years, there will be new troubles to face and I'll probably look back on today, bouncing my grandchildren on my knee, and if I think of it at all, feel silly for having worried.

Still, the powers of hatred are strong, and I think we ignore them at our peril.

This doesn't end as strong as I would like it to, but these are just my thoughts for today.

It Might Just Happen

I'm hoping to re-dedicate this blog to a new purpose in the coming months.

Anyone who has been reading for any length of time at all knows my position on our voting system: How I believe that our country would be strengthened considerably by moving to a system of "instantaneous run-off" elections in which a candidate had to take more than 50% of the vote to attain high office (at this point I'm thinking of federal level stuff, I'm not sure enough people pay attention to their local stuff to differentiate between a plurality of candidates).

I believe this would break the two-party stranglehold that the Democrats and the Republicans have on our Federal government. It would give both of them more targets to vie against, so that they couldn't spend all of their time polarizing us as a society into a people whom (at least the vast majority) believe that their party are the forces of good and the other party a batch of corrupt evil people out to destroy the country for their own gain.

The majority party (or at least, the party with the highest number of seats) in most countries that have such a system has a lower percentage of power than the minority party in our Congress.

They say power corrupts, but in our system, when it does, we have only one viable option: Hope that the other guys have sufficiently recovered from THEIR last bout with power and corruption to be better than the current guys. I remember a quote by one of the Republicans about 5 years ago to the effect of "The Democrats took 40 years in the majority to become this corrupt. We've managed to do it in 7." The quote is approximate, and I forget who made it, but it demonstrates my point: We voted the Democrats back into power because the Republicans had become corrupt, but it had only been 12 years since the Democrats LOST power due to their own corruption. Quite a few of the same people are still in Congress from those days.

So here's why I'm hoping over the next weeks or months to rededicate this blog to that purpose: I have recently become re-acquainted with a friend of mine from high school. He has apparently become something of a high powered ad man, and so while I have what I think are good ideas, I have no idea how to get my message out there for people to hear (as evidenced by the double digit (at its peak) readership of this blog).

He and I agree that the first thing we need to do is get a "Million Man March" sort of thing, with roughly half being supporters of the red guys and half supporters of the blue guys, to march on Washington and tell our elected leaders that we're tired of their first priority being their own party's power and their second being their donors, and only a distant third their constituents.

And based on the things he's been doing since High School (while I've been fiddling around with making computers do funky things), he might actually have some idea as to how to create such an event and get people to hear about it.

I'll write more if we actually decide to take this on. It's a huge task, and we both have lives. But we're also both extremely frustrated with the path this country is on, and so we may very well do this.

Finally, I just want to say that if we ever manage to make this a real thing, and we end up doing publicity for it on the late night shows, I want dibs on the Daily Show. ;-)

Liam.

Enough Already

At what point do people look at the Republican party and Fox News and say "Enough"? Enough lies about the President. Enough false outrage about death panels. Enough pretending that a birth certificate validated by a state isn't sufficient. Enough fear-mongering that encouraging speeches to children as given by Presidents throughout my life time are unprecedented indoctrinations of our youth.

How long until all of their credibility is gone?

I was talking with my Mother this morning, and she asked me for my opinion on some political topics, because she considered me fair minded, and I had to tell her that I'm afraid I'm not any more.

Not because I don't want to be, but because there are only so many times you can hear something and find it to be a lie before you stop hearing it. And the Right Wing Machine has cried wolf so many times now, and demonstrably so, that I'm afraid if Obama DID do something heinous and horrible, it would take extraordinary proof for me to believe it.

And it's not that I'm some huge partisan Democrat, I never have been. It's that in a bit over 7 months of a Presidency, I've already seen so many lies told about this President that I'm beginning to numb to them.

The first few, I investigated carefully. The next few, it took significantly less time for me to become convinced that the accusers were lying.

I pray they day doesn't come when there will be something to it, and I'll just ignore it as the boy is eaten by the wolf. Except that in the story, it is the boy who lied who ends up eaten. In this modern crying of wolf, the boy who lies won't be the boy who dies, the boy who dies may be my country.

And I can only hope and pray that Obama is something close to the man his supporters believe him to be, something significantly more than the last 8 years have given us.

Because I, for one, have had enough of the lies, the liars, and the people who (in some cases through no fault of their own) trust the liars.

ENOUGH!

Three Different Health Care Systems

Folks,

I keep hearing the term "socialized medicine" and "socialism" tossed around with regard to health insurance reform, and I get the sense that a lot of people don't really understand the terms, so I wanted to give a little primer.

There are three different systems that people talk about.

Socialized Medicine

In a fully socialized medical system, health care is not in any way a commodity. Doctors all work for the government, and are paid a salary. Hospitals are owned and run by the government. Pharmacies are owned and run by the government. This is the sort of health care system they have in Britain, their "National Health Service", the one that according to Investors Weekly, would have never allowed Stephen Hawking to survive (although it turns out he's a British citizen, and so has been under NHS care his entire life).

Regardless, that argument was spurious on its face, because at no point since the last election has anyone seriously suggested such a system be put in place here in the U.S.

Single Payer

This is what Canada and much of the rest of Europe has. Doctors and hospitals are still private enterprises, paid by a single health care insurance system run by the government. In the U.S., Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans plan (which I believe is called "TriCare") are all examples of single payer systems.

In some countries and some systems you can "opt out" of such a system, in others it's just part of your taxes, there is universal coverage in much the same way we have universal roads. You can't "opt out" of the road system here, because you don't have any way of figuring out what portion of your taxes go to road building and maintenance, and you can't get out of paying that portion even if you wanted to.

Such a system has no competition, of course, but it's not run for profit, and spreading insurance over as wide a population as possible, it works in the way insurance is meant to work: Everyone pays into the system whether they need it or not. The ones who get unlucky and need it, get to use it without having it ruin them financially on top of their physical malady. Those who are lucky and don't need it in their entire lives lose, but they still gained the comfort of knowing that IF they got sick, it wouldn't be an additional fiscal burden on top of the physical.

Such a system has been debated, but was taken off the table in the very first compromise the Democrats made with the Republicans (the same Republicans who will look at a bill with tens or hundreds of Republican amendments to it and say "See! The Democrats aren't willing to negotiate or compromise!"). None of the current proposals contain a "single payer" system, although there are those who believe it should.

Public Option

This is what's actually being proposed, and even that is under extreme risk of going away, with all this talk of "socialism", in favor of a watered down bill that will solve no problems and potentially cause more.

Under a public option plan, the government provides a plan such as the "single payer" plan above, but runs it as any other insurance policy, paid for by premiums, and available as an option only. Under such a system, there is no mandate for people to use that particular plan; if a person (or more likely, a company) likes the service they're getting from a private insurer, they're welcome to stay with that private insurer. It just provides a non-profit baseline for comparison, and being government-run, will generally accept people on to its rolls that the private insurance companies deny coverage to.


And by the way, it turns out that we are the only westernized nation that allows insurance companies to be for-profit entities, which is (at least in part) the problem. Competition has been minimized and insurance companies are one of the few industries not subject to anti-trust legislation, meaning that in some places one company can hold a virtual monopoly.

As a result, we have an industry that can afford to spend (according to PBS) $1.4 million every day to fight health insurance reform. Think about that: Their profits are so large, that they can both afford to spend, and are WILLING to spend the equivalent of half a billion dollars per year to defend their cash cow.

Now, decide as you will. But to me, the current system is untenable, and we either need to break down the barriers to competition (which the industry will fight), add in a new option for competition (which the industry will fight) or pass a law disallowing insurance companies from being for-profit companies (which the industry will fight).

A lot of this "socialism" stuff is coming from the PR campaigns bought by that $1.4 million dollars each day ($1.4 million that isn't going to pay for someone's health care, as it would be with a non-profit).

Finally, if we decide to break down the barriers to competition, as some have suggested, take away the states' rights to regulate who can operate in their state and what restrictions they'll be under, we also have to remove the anti-trust exception for insurance companies. Without that, likely we'd have a little bit more competition, but because most health care insurance policies are written by one of four or five major companies, they would likely just agree among themselves to divvy up the territory and maintain the status quo.

Data Mining

Update (9/3):

I've done some digging, and I THINK I've found the origin of this story, and as seems to happen a lot with "Ooooh, look at what big bad Obama" stories, the actual facts are pretty harmless.

As far as I can tell, this archival project comes out of the White House trying to follow existing laws in untested waters.

Recall that one of the many complaints about the Bush White House is that large numbers of official e-mails were not archived properly, and there was some evidence early on of staffers using private e-mail accounts on Yahoo, GMail, etc for official business, to avoid the archiving.

So anyway, the Obama White House has taken web presence to unprecedented levels, with accounts on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc. And since this is all electronic communication, they're archiving it. And because these sites all allow people to post comments and send e-mails TO the accounts, they're archiving that as well.

And they MAY be being a tad overzealous in the amount they archive, but the intent is to make sure they fully comply with the intent of the laws, even though they've not yet been tested in these arenas.

I'm guessing that many of the same people who are to today yelling about invasions of privacy and big brother and the like would be the same people who, if they WEREN'T doing this, in a few years would be asking "What are they covering up, that they won't show us the archives of their Facebook communications?"

And if you think I'm being overly simplistic, just remember that these same people have been telling us that Obama wants us to turn in our friends and neighbors for opposing health care, when in fact he asked people to tell him about UNTRUTHS about health care. Not who told them, just the untruths themselves, so that they (the White House) could effectively correct the record.

I'm going to consider this matter closed, unless someone comes to me with conclusive evidence that there's more to it than this. I doubt that will happen.

-----------------------

This is the response I wrote to the posting at this link.

To me, this smells a lot like a propaganda effort. We know people are a bit testy about the illegal spying program that Bush put into place, so lets take something the Obama administration is doing that sounds, superficially, to be similar, and see if we can transfer that anger from Republicans to Democrats.

Keep in mind that the difference between the two is that the earlier program was sifting through (reportedly) all of our phone calls and e-mails, things which are supposed to be relatively private and are supposed to require a court order to access. The second is a program to compile a database of the public information people put on Facebook. It may be creepy to compile it all into a database, but then again, I have friends on there under pseudonyms like "Mare Astra" and "Terma Gant". All they're going to have is a list of your public statements associated with as much of your identifying information as you chose to leave public.

Anyway, here's what I wrote in my comment on the site:


So, let me get this straight... we didn't make a big deal with the previous administration went through our (ostensibly private) e-mails and phone records, but we're going to have a tizzy when this administration goes through the PUBLIC information we put on file with Facebook?

I'm not entirely happy about this, but to me there's a huge difference between compiling publicly available data vs. snooping through things that are supposed to be private and are supposed to require a court order in order to see.

To me, this whole uproar smacks of people trying to tap into the outrage over the illegal spying to use it to tarnish the current administration.

It's Facebook, people. They can only access the stuff you put out and available for everyone to see!

A Great Health Care Read

I know a lot of the people that most need to read this will dismiss it because of the source, and that's sad.

But if you go to this link, you can read an excellent answer to all of the health care reform naysayers' arguments, and a really compelling argument in favor of a public option in the health insurance market.

Check it out. Seriously. Even if you don't want your mind changed, just want to understand the other side a little bit better than "they're socialists who want to destroy America".

Just read it. Please.

Chill Out: Humor Isn't Dead

(And Hyperbole CERTAINLY isn't).

There's an echoing meme making its way through the collective consiousness (or at least, through the media) that the election of Barack Obama has killed political comedy.

Now, I supposed Time magazine (this week, the latest to weigh in on the phenomenon, and I must admit I've only skimmed the start of the article, so I don't know what conclusions they come to) has to fill column inches to stay alive, but c'mon...

Every time there's a new administration, people question whether it's going to be bad for late night shows and comedians, apparently on the mistaken assumption that there actually exists a politician who won't have any scandals, who won't after the ubiquity of the Presidency have ticks and foibles to make fun of and who will never be seen as anything but serious and low-key.

Here's a thought: A new President is GOOD for political comedy. Yes, it makes the job a little harder, but that refreshes the humor for a while! How many more times can we watch Jon Stewart of the Daily Show (and I pick on him because he's still one of the best) do his snarky little Bush laugh or his "Dick Cheney as the Penguin"? He, at least, finds ways to keep the CONTENT of the routine fresh and funny, but how much more comedic gold is there to be wrung out of the recurring Dick Cheney segment "You don't know D*CK"?

Every four or eight years, it's time for the political comedians to get off of their asses and do their jobs, stop riffing on years-old material and actually come up with something new and funny to say. The good ones do it without trouble, to give props where I previously dinged, I have no question the Daily Show will continue to serve up good offerings under this or any other administration.

But the bad ones... the ones who have been feeding us a diet of Iraq jokes and malapropisms and "Dick Cheney is Darth Vader" for the last 5 years. This will be hard on them, but GOOD for comedy, and thus GOOD for us.

I wanted to close this with a call back to an essay I wrote about 4 months back on how there was no "death of the Republican party" as some where saying, any more than there was a "permanent Republican majority" as Tom DeLay and Karl Rove were claiming prior to the 1996 elections... but then I realized that I wrote that one on a business trip and I don't think I ever posted it, and one of the things they teach you about writing is that a call back is really only effective if there's a good chance your readers have READ the thing you're calling back to.

So instead I'll just say that superlatives are rarely accurate and hyperbole is not the greatest thing ever. Tired political comedy will return with familiarity. The Republican party will return with the contempt that familiarity breeds.

In the words of a picture that was going around the internet last November and December, but with Obama replaced by Father Time: Chill out, MF-ers, I got this.