Chip Kidd Went To Comic-Con...
...and all you get is this link to all his pix of hot chicks and the Energizer Bradbury, aka Ray. You'll just have to make do, I guess.
Photo by Chip Kidd. Used with permission, of course!
Yoohoo...That Isn't Thomas Jefferson Representing You
Probably just some guy who paid good money for his big white capped teeth. And he's the guy who's going to vote on the health care legislation they're trying to fast-track? Over 1,000 pages long?
Here's John Conyers (no prize himself) on that, from Conyers' Wikipedia page:
In late July 2009, Conyers, commenting on the healthcare debate in the House, stated that "I love these members, they get up and say, 'Read the bill'... What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?" His remark brought criticism from government transparency advocates such as the Sunlight Foundation, which referred to readthebill.org in response. In the House, 93 representatives signed a pledge, started by Mike Pence of Indiana, to read a health care bill before voting on it.
Well isn't that special!
Not surprisingly, it turns out there's a health care "reform" loophole that could force us schmucks...uh, taxpayers.. to fund the care of illegal immigrants. Which, by the way, we're already doing, to the tune of at least $1.4 billion dollars for illegals in California alone, and $10.5 billion nationally.
About how that's working for us just here in L.A., in the words of County Supe Michael D. Antonovich:
"We're running an H.M.O. for illegal immigrants, and if we keep it up, we're going to bankrupt the county."
The thing that really surprises me about the health care bill probably few have read through, few have ever will, and even fewer will understand -- it's that no lawmakers snuck in stuff like "And I get a brick of coke and three hookers every Tuesday."
Um...or did they?
Why Pat Condell Is No Longer On The Left
And why he's not on the right, either, and why the burka legitimizes rape.
Get Your Gubbermint Welfare While You Can
"Cash for clunkers" burned through its $1 billion budget in less than a week, write Martin Zimmerman, Tiffany Hsu, and Jim Puzzanghera in the LA Times:
With surprising swiftness, the government's "cash for clunkers" program has burned through its $1-billion budget in less than a week as car buyers swarmed dealerships, and federal officials were scrambling late Thursday night to find more money to keep it going.The program, designed to jump-start car sales and improve the fuel efficiency of the nation's auto fleet, unleashed a wave of pent-up demand that threatened to exhaust funds before dealers could be fully reimbursed for rebates under the plan.
As word got out Thursday that the program might be suspended at midnight, some car dealers reported a surge in nighttime buyers. But government officials later said the program -- dubbed CARS for Car Allowance Rebate System -- was not going to be suspended overnight.
"We are working tonight to assess the situation facing what is obviously an incredibly popular program," the White House said. "Auto dealers and consumers should have confidence that all valid CARS transactions that have taken place to date will be honored."
Buyers rushed to dealerships before the money ran out. At Toyota of Hollywood, general manager Don Mushin said he expected to sell 15 vehicles before closing Thursday.
"It's a mad rush right now with people bringing in their clunkers," he said. "The whole place is full."
Car sales have been in the tank for more than a year as the nation's deepening recession and growing ranks of unemployed turned the market into the worst one in decades and helped send General Motors Corp. and Chrysler into filing for bankruptcy protection this year.
The federal program provided rebates of $3,500 or $4,500 to consumers who traded in vehicles with combined city/highway mileage of 18 miles per gallon or less and bought more fuel-efficient new cars or trucks.
The program was designed to run until Nov. 1 or until 250,000 cars had been sold, whichever came first. Many analysts had expected the money to last at least until Labor Day.
And in true Obama-ian fashion, guess who gets left holding the bag (if that was was hard for you, it's business and 4 is the answer to 2 + 2):
Although the White House is providing reassurances that dealers won't lose money, that could happen based on the cash for clunkers rules. Dealers are required to give qualifying buyers the $3,500 or $4,500 discounts and then apply to the government for reimbursement. Dealers who apply for repayment after the funding runs out will not be reimbursed, according to the program's rules."There's a big concern among dealers that this thing may run out of money and they don't want to be stuck holding the bag," said Michelle Krebs, senior editor of AutoObserver.com.
To make matters worse, dealers are required to permanently disable the engines of clunker trade-ins before they can apply to the government for repayment, Krebs said. If payment is denied, the dealer is out the advanced discount and has a car with a ruined engine that can't be resold.
Victim Conservatism And Lotsa Heart
Cathy Young has "limited sympathy" for Sarah Palin, she writes on her site in early July. Here's an excerpt from her piece on Palin from Real Clear Politics:
Yes, Palin has been the target of extremely vicious attacks (though the notion that no other politician has endured comparable nastiness would amuse Bill and Hillary Clinton). Her left-wing feminist foes have been especially rabid, mocking her in startlingly misogynistic language - "Republican blow-up doll" was one of the milder epithets - and denouncing "her pretense that she is a woman." The bizarre theory that Palin's youngest child, Trig, is really her grandson is still afloat in the gutters of the Internet.And yes, this hostility has an element of snobbery. Former New Republic editor-in-chief Andrew Sullivan, currently a blogger with a bad case of Palin Derangement Syndrome, recently posted a catalogue of Palin's sins that included "white trash concupiscence."
Yet, such revolting extremes aside, some of the unpleasantness has been self-inflicted. Palin agreed to be John McCain's running mate knowing her teenage daughter was pregnant and single. (Of course, if Chelsea Clinton had been the expecting unwed mom, not one unkind word would have crossed the lips of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.) Nor was she particularly eager to shield Bristol Palin from the spotlight.
And then there's the matter of Palin's fitness for the second-highest office in the land. I say this as someone who initially hoped she would be an inspiring standard-bearer for conservative/libertarian feminism, a model of a woman who had it all and was a winner, not a victim.
It's not just the "liberal elites" that found Palin clueless; so did many in her own camp. Indeed, Douthat concedes she has to "bone up on the issues" if she is to have a political future. Those who believe Palin held her own debating Joe Biden forget that the McCain camp had requested a less-challenging format for that debate, with follow-up questions limited.
Palin critics on the right - George Will, Peggy Noonan, David Frum - have been slammed by the Palinistas as "haters," elitists threatened by a political star without proper intellectual credentials. Yet these same conservatives have been devout admirers of Ronald Reagan, hardly a product of the Ivy League.
Some of Palin's followers see her as the second coming of Reagan. But Reagan, despised as a "dunce" by his liberal detractors, had extensively read, written, and talked about the key issues of his day. While not an intellectual, he was a man of ideas. Palin is not known to harbor those. Her appeal is described in terms of "speaking from heart" and exemplifying the virtues of faith and family - which is ironic, given the usual conservative derision of emotion-based liberal politics. Shortly after Palin's nomination, former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson suggested that her choice to bear a child with Down's Syndrome rather than have an abortion was an adequate substitute for a political philosophy.
Compare Reagin, speaking on socialized medicine, from when he was still a private citizen.
And then there's this, from commenter Brad on Young's site:
Whatever one thinks of Sara Palin, she is not the cause of the current and unprecedented crisis, or the idiotic remedies. Could an unqualified, inexperienced, country bumpkin, or other such outsider, engineer as much fiscal insanity, malfeasance, duplicity, fraud, disregard of the law and criminality as the "best and brightest?" Perhaps, we'll find out, although the "qualified" have set a high perhaps a insurmountable standard for any unqualified aspirant to match.
The Binge-Drinking Age
We see over and over that prohibition doesn't work, yet we don't learn. In countries with more liberal drinking policies for teenagers, like France and Italy, and the way I was brought up (always offered a "taste" of whatever my dad was drinking, and crappy screwtop Jewish wine on holidays), people drink more responsibly.
Here, even a guy responsible for the drinking age is now coming out to say it was a huge mistake. Shari Roan posts at the LAT's Booster Shots blog:
One of the people who was instrumental in pushing for laws to increase the legal drinking age to 21 now calls his actions "the single most regrettable decision" of his career.Dr. Morris Chafetz, a psychiatrist who was on the presidential commission in the 1980s that recommended raising the drinking age to 21, made his remarks in an editorial that he is shopping for publication and which he released to the advocacy group Choose Responsibility. Chafetz wrote the editorial to mark the 25th anniversary of the law that was signed by President Ronald Reagan on July 17, 1984.
"Legal Age 21 has not worked," Chafetz said in the piece. "To be sure, drunk driving fatalities are lower now than they were in 1982. But they are lower in all age groups. And they have declined just as much in Canada, where the age is 18 or 19, as they have in the United States."
Chafetz said the law instead has resulted in "collateral, off-road damage" such as binge drinking that occurs in underage youth and crimes like date rape, assaults and property damage.
Betsy Read It
Betsy McCaughey read the health care legislation. Here's what she found -- from her appearance on Fred Thompson's radio show. (Good luck getting that hip replaced, Grandma!)
Scroll down.
Cow Farts
Krikorian posts a reader's musing on The Corner:
What I've never understood is where all the methane from the buffalos went. . . .There were millions and millions of buffalo in America when the white man showed up. . . .there were so many they used to come East over the Appalachians to graze on the lush Piedmont plateau areas of eastern America. The early descriptions of buffalo herds makes it clear there were far more buffalo then that we have cattle now. I think they were emitting a lot of methane. . .
Obama's Get Out Of Political Jail Free Card?
Or he's so arrogant that he thinks he can make promises on Tuesday as if we'll all have amnesia on Wednesday. Or, he doesn't think before he speaks. Or...
Kaus noticed this from Obama at a Town Hall meeting today, calling it a "pretty hyperbolic veto threat". Well, it's something. What is it?
Obama:
"Here's my promise. ...[snip] We will not sign ... I will not sign a health care bill that is not deficit- neutral, that is not paid for. I will not sign a bill that does not have all the reforms that we need to lower health care inflation over the long term."
So, he'll take one look at the health care bill and go, "Whoopsy, this will cost a lot. Not signing!"
That's one way to get out of fucking up the country. Or, is it?
Mind Like A Steel Sieve
From time to time, publishers send me those "improve your memory books," and, well, I forget where I've left them, and that's that.
No, sorry, cheap joke. The truth is, they're all boring as fuck, and I use them to prop up furniture (I like antiques but, in my spirit of frugality, buy old crap with "good bones" from garage sales and junk stores, so there's often a leg that, well, suffers from the furniture version of polio).
Whoops -- almost forgot the subject of this post. It's about a book by an old New York Daily News friend of mine, Lenore Skenazy, who's also the author of Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry
But, this one is actually fun -- a lot of fun to quiz other people with. It's by Lenore and Carol Boswell, and it's called Who's the Blonde That Married What's-His-Name?: The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know--But Can't Remember Right Now
Oh, and thanks to everyone who's pre-ordered my book, I See Rude People: One Woman's Battle to Beat Some Manners into Impolite Society
Eat The Poor
Why The Atlantic's Megan McArdle opposes national health care:
I know, most of you have already figured out why I oppose national health care. In a nutshell, I hate the poor and want them to die so that all my rich friends can use their bodies as mulch for their diamond ranches. But y'all keep asking, so here goes the longer explanation.Basically, for me, it all boils down to public choice theory. Once we've got a comprehensive national health care plan, what are the government's incentives? I think they're bad, for the same reason the TSA is bad. I'm afraid that instead of Security Theater, we'll get Health Care Theater, where the government goes to elaborate lengths to convince us that we're getting the best possible health care, without actually providing it.
That's not just verbal theatrics. Agencies like Britain's NICE are a case in point. As long as people don't know that there are cancer treatments they're not getting, they're happy. Once they find out, satisfaction plunges. But the reason that people in Britain know about things like herceptin for early stage breast cancer is a robust private market in the US that experiments with this sort of thing.
So in the absence of a robust private US market, my assumption is that the government will focus on the apparent at the expense of the hard-to-measure. Innovation benefits future constituents who aren't voting now. Producing it is very expensive. On the other hand, cutting costs pleases voters this instant. This is, fundamentally, what cries to "use the government's negotiating power" with drug companies is about. Advocates of such a policy spend a lot of time arguing about whether pharmaceutical companies do, or do not, spend too much on marketing. This is besides the point. The government is not going to price to some unknowable socially optimal amount of pharma market power. It is going to price to what the voters want, which is to spend as little as possible right now.
It's not that I think that private companies wouldn't like to cut innovation. But in the presence of even rudimentary competition, they can't. Monopolies are not innovative, whether they are public or private.
On Feminism
Smarts from a neighbor from the east.
Why Don't Women Comment At The WSJ?
I'm a woman and I do, typically on entries about politics or economics, and occasionally, on other topics. But, the other night, while commenting on the piece about what a scumbag Charles (taxes and ethics are for other people) Rangel is, I noticed something that resonated in my head -- every commenter but me was a man. In fact, I think that's the case on most of the WSJ political or economic entries I comment on. All women all shy? Only interested in the price of shoes?
Note: When I went back, there were a actually a few women who'd commented -- like four or five out of 131. So, I wasn't the only woman commenting, just nearly the only one.
Yes, here's an area where there's no law to be passed to have equal rights and equal speech -- all you have to do is type some words in and hit "submit" -- and where are all the ladies?
No, You Don't Have A Right To Health Care
From Ayn Rand Institute:
Leonard Peikoff explained the basic point in a 1993 speech given in the context of HillaryCare. It applies equally to Obama's 'reforms.' Peikoff argued that 'all legitimate rights have one thing in common: they are rights to action, not to rewards from other people. The American rights [to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness] impose no obligations on other people, merely the negative obligation to leave you alone. The system guarantees you the chance to work for what you want--not to be given it without effort by somebody else. . . . Under the American system you have a right to health care if you can pay for it, i.e., if you can earn it by your own action and effort. But nobody has the right to the services of any professional individual or group simply because he wants them and desperately needs them. The very fact that he needs these services so desperately is the proof that he had better respect the freedom, the integrity, and the rights of the people who provide them.
The question I'm left with is how does this play out practically?
Barackonomics
It's econ for dummies, and this country is apparently filled to the gills with 'em. At reason, Jacob Sullum writes about the joke that is fiscal responsbility, Obama-style (not that I was impressed with the last guy in there, either):
The president dismissed critics who were unimpressed by his $17 billion in savings as inside-the-Beltway snobs with no understanding of howregular people view things. "In Washington," he told reporters, "I guess that's considered trivial. Outside of Washington, that's still considered a lot of money." White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs used the same rhetorical strategy. "I've said this before, and I'll say it again: $17 billion is a lot of money to people in America," he said. "I understand that it might not be to some people in this town, but that's probably why we're sitting on a $12 trillion American Express bill"--a reference to the national debt.This is the sort of faux-populist argument that insults the public's common sense while pretending to flatter it. Yes, $17 billion is a lot of money for an individual, a municipality, even a mid-sized state. But it is emphatically not a lot of money for a federal government that spends trillions of dollars every year. If you had $12,000 in credit card debt and paid off $17 of it, would you feel like you had made significant progress?
"These savings, large and small, add up," the president said. That is literally true, of course; they just don't add up to much.
...This year, the Associated Press notes, "the government will have to borrow nearly 50 cents for every dollar it spends." Even with optimistic economic assumptions, the administration projects budget deficits of more than $500 billion every year from 2010 to 2019, totaling $7.1 trillion in additional debt at a time when Social Security and Medicare spending will be skyrocketing--a looming crisis Obama has not begun to address.
"We can no longer afford to spend as if deficits do not matter and waste is not our problem," the president said in May. "We can no longer afford to leave the hard choices for the next budget, the next administration--or the next generation."
We can no longer afford it...but we in the White House really don't give a flying crap!
But a question for you: If you were in the White House, how would you deal?
When And Where Is It Okay For Kids To Be Naked?
Julie Scelfo writes for the NYT/MSNBC about the parents who let their kids run around without clothes on and the parents who are appalled by it. A 5-year-old named Alex got naked, then asked his sister and her friend to paint designs on his little butt with nail polish. His mom was okay with it; the friend's mom wasn't:
"The mom was sort of appalled that Alex got naked in front of her daughter," Mrs. Nicola said. "She expressed concern that we hadn't talked enough about private parts. She said, 'In our family, we always talk about how certain parts of the body are not for anyone else to touch.' "For many parents, allowing a child to run around naked at home is perfectly natural, an expression of physical freedom that represents the essence of childhood, especially in the summer. But for others, unclad bodies are an affront to civility, a source of discomfort and a potentially dangerous attraction for pedophiles. These clashing sensibilities can create conflict, even when the nudity in question takes place at home.
Often, the differences in viewpoint are generational. Rachel Sarah, 36, a writer and mother in East Bay, Calif., said that until her 9-year-old daughter, Mae, turned 7, she liked to wear only a T-shirt in the summer, a preference that Ms. Sarah found healthy, but that Mae's grandparents could not accept. "My mom and stepfather were very insistent on her having clothes on for everything," Ms. Sarah said.
Although most days Mae ran half-dressed through the sprinkler or played with friends under a hose, she had to accept different rules when her grandparents were around. "Their view, I would say, is that little girls need to have their clothes on unless they're taking a bath," Ms. Sarah said.
Aly Mandel, 41, a school psychologist and mother of five in Highland Park, N.J., said she, too, felt ire from extended family members for allowing her daughter Ava, now 6, to roam naked in and around the house when she was younger.
"My mother, it used to drive her crazy how naked Ava was," Ms. Mandel said, explaining that the girl abhorred clothes. "My mother-in-law also, they both felt it crossed the line of what was appropriate. My mother-in-law would come in and automatically say, 'Ava, put on your clothes. Put on your underwear.' "
My neighbors' kids would tear through their house naked after their baths. Now, the little boy, who's 9, doesn't do it, but the little girl, about 5, does. It's hilarious. I don't know this based on anything solid, but I would guess kids grow up more comfortable with their bodies and nudity if they're allowed to run around in the buff. Also, it's my experience with the French, Germans, various Scandinavians, and other Europeans with more relaxed attitudes about nudity. Then again, all the last people you'd ever want to see naked are all the first people to strip down on Europe's nude beaches.
via ifeminist
What Does It Mean If A Man Sits Down To Pee?
Eugene Volokh blogged about a child custody case that led me to reminisce about a run I once took around the Champ de Mars, the park area around the Eiffel Tower. Paris firemen (the "pompiers," totally hot) were doing some training there...running and stuff. And, at some point, in bright shining sunlight, they all repaired to a wall in a big long line, turned their backs and peed.
This child custody case initially turned around the opposite -- pee shyness, and the above question, what does it mean if a male sits down to pee?
Eugene links to a Florida Court of Appeals opinion in which the court decided, as a matter of law, that "the allegations and evidence (were) insufficient...to satisfy the substantial change test":
[T]he father [petitioned] for modification of the final [custody] judgment, requesting primary residential custody of their [15-year-old] son.... [T]he trial court based its ruling on evidence that the father was more likely to ensure the child was engaged in productive, normal, and healthy extracurricular activities, and the child would benefit from a greater male influence in his life. The trial court concluded that the child's development was "disturbingly retarded." It went on to find that the child possessed unreasonable fears for his age, and had "unmanlike" toilet behavior.[Footnote: The child would sit to urinate and was self-conscious about urinating in the woods during excursions with the father.]
The Court of Appeals dismissed the toilet issue with "The child simply did not conform to either the father's or trial court's perception of manliness."
But, enough about what the court thinks. What do you think? What does it mean, vis a vis this case, if a boy or man sits down to pee?
The derogatory German term for a man who sits to pee is "sitzpinkler." It also means wimp.
But, does it really matter?
I was an outcast who didn't fit in for my entire childhood and a good part of my early 20s, but it eventually worked out for the best, I think, turning me into a beyond-voracious reader and maybe even making me more compassionate. But, I know it's really rough for kids who aren't socialized according to societal norms. They generally endure a lot of cruelty from other kids. And children of divorce already have it especially rough. And if you look at this particular case, I think these parents both sound like jerks, and sound to me like their kid is a bit of a pawn in a revenge match between the two. I don't have proof of that -- it's just my sense from skimming the case.
Regarding the pee issue, I liked this comment from Still standing:
Respect for women does not call for tolerating petty behavior. This really isn't about manliness, it's about boundaries. A man who tolerates petty, micromanaging crap from his wife is in for a rough marriage. I believe it goes without saying that the reverse (converse?) is true as well.When I got married, my new wife attempted to do what her mother and sister had done - make their husbands sit down to piss.
I told her if she wanted to marry a woman she had missed her chance. It set the tone for years to come, and yes, the marriage is still standing, as am I.
Randy R.'s take:
First, no one has produced any evidence at all that how a man pees has anything to do with his happiness in life or his manliness.Second, any father who thinks that he needs to raise a boy and dictate how the boy uses his body is an abusive overbearing father. What's the father going to do -- beat the kid if he doesn't stand while peeing? Good way to build a lifetime of resentment in the boy.
Third, the real issue here that everyone seems to dance around is this notion that if you sit while peeing, you are somehow a girl, ie., gay.
Trust me -- if they kid is gay, it doesn't matter how he pees.
Owen H writes:
It never ceases to amaze me the fascination so many have with what constitutes "manliness" in other people. I don't give a damn what anyone thinks. If I get up in the middle of the night, I sit down, because I don't feel like turning on the lights. How I pee has nothing to do with being "manly".If this kid is shy about peeing in the woods around his Dad, ever consider it might be his Dad that's the problem, not the kid and how he pees? He sounds like a truly judgmental sod.
Bruce Hayden writes (and I concur):
I think that part of the problem here is that the boy will likely be treated as a wimp, girly-man, etc. if he doesn't ultimately how to urinate in front of other guys. Or, at least in the urinal next to them in public restrooms. I think that it is just part of being a guy in our society.Ok, I did have four brothers, and then lived in a fraternity house. Not as bad as the military, but still enough that I haven't been self-conscious about it since maybe I was 10 or 12.
I don't think it has anything to do with sexual orientation. My memory of the restrooms in gay bars was that they had mirrors so other guys could see what other guys had. Rather, I think it indicia that the mother raised the boy too much like she had raised her daughters. And, yes, girls are much more private about this than boys are, even around members of their same sex.
And this guy's mom I want to meet:
u. saldin:I once witnessed my mother urinating out of a car window. She's pretty flexible.
To Catch A...Grandfather
A man in his 60s talking to a 2-year-old in McDonald's? Naturally, the retired cop witnessing this calls for backup! SFist blogs the Marin Independent Journal story by Gary Klien:
Units arrived on scene, initiated an investigation, and determined there was negative suspicious activity, as the male subject was the juvenile party's grandfather. The elder party advised units that he had effected a conversation with the juvenile "about nonsense" in order to "keep her entertained."
via freerangekids
Taxes Are What Other People Pay
Charles Rangel called a new income tax surcharge of 5.4 percent that he's leading the charge for "the moral thing to do." Regarding his own tax liability, notes the WSJ, he seems, "well, less fervent":
Exhibit A concerns a rental property Mr. Rangel purchased in 1987 at the Punta Cana Yacht Club in the Dominican Republic. The rental income from that property ought to be substantial since it is a luxury beach-front villa and is more often than not rented out. But when the National Legal and Policy Center looked at Mr. Rangel's House financial disclosure forms in August, it noted that his reported income looked suspiciously low. In 2004 and 2005, he reported no more than $5,000, and in 2006 and 2007 no income at all from the property.The Congressman initially denied there was any unreported income. But reporters quickly showed that the villa is among the most desirable at Punta Cana and that it rents for $500 a night in the low season, and as much as $1,100 a night in peak season. Last year it was fully booked between December 15 and April 15.
...Besides not paying those pesky taxes, Mr. Rangel had other reasons for wanting to hide income. As the tenant of four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem, the Congressman needed to keep his annual reported income below $175,000, lest he be ineligible as a hardship case for rent control. (He also used one of the apartments as an office in violation of rent-control rules, but that's another story.)
Mr. Rangel said last fall that "I never had any idea that I got any income'' from the villa. Try using that one the next time the IRS comes after you. Equally interesting is his claim that he didn't know that the developer of the Dominican Republic villa had converted his $52,000 mortgage to an interest-free loan in 1990. That would seem to violate House rules on gifts, which say Members may only accept loans on "terms that are generally available to the public." Try getting an interest-free loan from your banker.
Piles more evidence at the Journal link that Rangel thinks ethics, like taxes, are for other people.
Ted Would Likely Be Dead By Now
Ted Kennedy, that is...dead as Mary Jo Kopechne.
Under the health care "reform" he's sponsoring, Investor's Business Daily says it's unlikely he would've gotten the treatment he needed for his brain tumor had his case been reviewed by some cost-effectiveness board:
The likelihood is that if Ted Kennedy were British and subject to the tender mercies of that nation's National Health System, he'd be dead by now.
And then there's Obama:
During ABC's June 24 infomercial for government-run health care broadcast from the White House, President Obama was asked if he and his family would abide by the restrictions and limitations that came with his proposed reforms.In what Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com called "Obama's Michael Dukakis moment," President Obama refused to make such a pledge and confessed that if "it's my family member, if it's my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care."
There was no commentary about evil insurance companies making excessive profits or greedy physicians and hospitals doing unnecessary tests and procedures to run up your bill.
There was only a dutiful husband and father wanting the best care for his wife and children, as do we all.
Yet here was the president arguing for the need for 50 million new patients officially in the system while adding no new doctors, a plan that inevitably leads to rationing.
Add to this situation doctors who will retire in droves and doctors who never will be, all to avoid a clone of Britain's draconian National Health Service.
Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center who asked Obama that question, says elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it's not provided by insurance.
Congress is no exception.
As World Net Daily points out, on Page 114 of the Orwellian-titled Affordable Health Care Choices Act authored by Sen. Ted Kennedy's staff and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP), there is a provision that specifically exempts members of Congress from the public plan.
Apparently, for five years -- or longer, according to doctor/Congressman John Fleming, of Louisiana. He issued a resolution that urges those who vote for the "reform" bills to agree to enroll in them. Another Congressman, Dean Heller, from Nevada, went one better, with an amendment to require members of Congress to enroll.
Democrats, not surprisingly, defeated the amendment 23 to 18.
United Breaks Guitars
In case you have yet to see it, here's Halifax singer-songwriter Dave Carroll's YouTube vid:
Chris Ayres, the Times of London L.A. correspondent, blogs about Carroll's unfortunate experience with United Airlines' "customer service" types.
If there's one person in America who you wouldn't want to be right now, it is Ms Irlweg. Her full name remains a mystery. All we know is that she lives in the Chicago area, works for the customer relations department of United Airlines, and will soon become the subject of a new country and western music video, which will be posted at some point over the next week or two on YouTube.It's unlikely to be flattering.
You see, several months ago, Ms Irlweg had the misfortune of handling a passenger complaint from a man named Dave Carroll, who happens to be a Canadian musician with a lethally dry sense of humour. Carroll had been flying on United when he saw baggage handlers throwing around his guitar case on the tarmac outside, and when he arrived at his destination, it turned out that the neck of his beloved $3,500 Taylor six-string had been snapped. But when he asked for compensation, he was fobbed off by department after department, until finally he reached Ms Irlweg, who at least gave him a straight answer.
"No."
"Fine," he said to her, "But I'm going to write three songs about my experience with your airline, shoot videos for each of them, and then post them online." Yeah, right, she must have been thinking.
But Carroll kept his promise. The first song, United Breaks Guitars, has now been played 3,515,357 times on YouTube, become a smash hit on iTunes, and has resulted in Carroll's rather bemused appearance on every major news network in America. Meanwhile, within four days of the song going online, the gathering thunderclouds of bad PR caused United Airlines' stock price to suffer a mid-flight stall, and it plunged by 10 per cent, costing shareholders $180 million. Which, incidentally, would have bought Carroll more than 51,000 replacement guitars.
Did this actually cause their stock to plunge? Who knows. Regardless, I'd like to see more of this sort of thing -- when companies behave badly, people putting the word out...virally.
Sorry, But I Just Don't Believe These Stats
Retaining readership is hard, and it shows. Even Oprah.com is posting pieces about porn; in this case, about the number of women supposedly watching porn. And I don't believe the numbers or the claims for a second. Violet Blue writes:
Personally, I like my pizza deliveryman to do one thing: bring me my dinner. But mention this guy to a group of women, and, while most of us will think of cheesy pies with tomato sauce, a good number of us will conjure up that hilariously bad porn cliché, the randy fellow who's always ready to accept sex in exchange for a medium sausage and mushroom.Notwithstanding how lame the cliché is, or how simply bad most porn is (and after ten years as a professional reviewer of the stuff, I can report that much of it is very bad), the fact is, millions of women use and enjoy "explicit sexual imagery."
What's perhaps more surprising, given the latest scientific research, is that more of us don't.
In the first three months of 2007, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, approximately one in three visitors to adult entertainment Web sites was female; during the same period, nearly 13 million American women were checking out porn online at least once each month.
Theresa Flynt, vice president of marketing for Hustler video, says that women account for 56 percent of business at her company's video stores. "And the female audience is increasing," she adds. "Women are buying more porn." (They're creating more of it, too: Female director Candida Royalle's hard-core erotic videos, made expressly for women viewers, sell at the rate of approximately 10,000 copies a month.)
The fact remains, men and women see things differently. Men have far more visual sexuality. I say this over and over about the difference between male and female sexuality, but don't just take it from me, take it from a man who used to be a woman. An excerpt from my column Battlefield Girth:
Griffin Hansbury, a former lesbian who underwent sex reassignment surgery, talked on "This American Life" about how he saw women before and after "T" -- testosterone injections. "Before...I would see a woman on the subway, and...I'd like to meet her, what's that book she's reading?" Afterward, even nice ankles on a woman would be "enough to flood my mind with aggressive pornographic images. ... It was like...a pornographic nudie house in my mind. And I couldn't turn it off."
So, Only Whites Can Be Racist?
In Austin, Texas, somebody sent a message through a 4-year-old's bedroom window. Juana Summers writes for the Statesman:
Police are investigating a brick with an offensive message thrown into the window of an East Austin home.The brick, thrown through a 4-year-old boy's bedroom window, read "Keep Eastside Black. Keep Eastside Strong."
The homeowner, Barbara Frische, who is white, said she has lived in the home for 10 years.
"It's the first time anything like this has ever happened to me," she said.
Frische was featured in a Statesman Watch article published in May in which she lobbied for action to be taken on a charred house that posed a safety hazard.
She has not received negative feedback from area residents about the article, she said, and does not believe this morning's incident is connected to it.
Police have not classified this incident as a hate crime, said Austin Police Sgt. Richard Stresing, because hate crimes target an individual specifically because of an identifying characteristic, like race. Police say the incident has been classified as criminal mischief and deadly conduct.
Incidents found to be based on race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability or gender are flagged as hate crimes, Stresing said, so they can be referred to the Department of Justice.
I'm not a fan of the notion of "hate crimes," but...doesn't this seem to fit the categorization?
And, as for who's the racist in the whole Henry Louis Gates controversy, Mickey Kaus makes a great point:
(Gates) says he wanted to file a complaint "because of the way he treated me at the front door." How had he mistreated him at the front door? He asked him 'Would you step outside onto the porch?' (where, as Gates notes, the cop would have more rights). When Gates refuses and instead gives the cop an ID, the cop looks at the ID. And at that point Gates has already determined he's been treated unfairly. He's already refusing to answer questions and planning to file a complaint. Again, from his own words it looks like he rushes a bit to the conclusion that a white man in a similar situation would have been treated differently. Is that really true? I'm not saying that Gates wasn't stereotyped in a deeply annoying and disturbing way. Just saying the stereotypes can run both ways.
Austin link via Insty
All Cultures Are Not Equally Squishily Wonderful
Amanda Lee Myers writes for the AP about a brutal rape of an 8-year-old girl -- with four boys, ages 9 to 14, taking turns sexually assaulting her behind a shed. Phoenix police are deeming it one of the most horrific cases they've ever seen. That should be horrible enough -- but what adds to the horror? Police said the girl's parents criticized her for bringing shame on the family by being raped.
"The father told the caseworker and an officer in her presence that he didn't want her back. He said, 'Take her, I don't want her,' " police Sgt. Andy Hill said.The 14-year-old boy was charged Wednesday as an adult with two counts of sexual assault and kidnapping, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office said. He appeared in court Thursday and is being held without bond.
The other boys - ages 9, 10, and 13 - were charged as juveniles with sexual assault. The 10- and 13-year-old boys also were charged with kidnapping, the office said Thursday.
Phoenix investigators said the boys lured the girl to an empty shed July 16 under the pretense of offering her gum. The boys held the girl down while they took turns assaulting her, police said.
"She was brutally sexually assaulted for a period of about 10 to 15 minutes," Hill said.
Officers responding to an emergency call reporting hysterical screams found the girl partially clothed and the boys running from the scene.
"This is a deeply disturbing case that has gripped our community," Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas said Thursday. "Our office will seek justice for the young victim in this heartrending situation."
Hill cited the family's background as the reason the family shunned the girl. All five children are refugees from the West African nation of Liberia.
In some parts of Africa, women often are blamed for being raped for enticing men or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Girls who are raped are often shunned by their families.
Then, in Canada, four women were apparently murdered by their Muslim relatives for being a little too Canadian.
The Real Underground Cinema
John Henley writes for The Guardian:
Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement.Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris's most intriguing recent discoveries.
"We have no idea whatsoever," a police spokesman said.
"There were two swastikas painted on the ceiling, but also celtic crosses and several stars of David, so we don't think it's extremists. Some sect or secret society, maybe. There are any number of possibilities."
Members of the force's sports squad, responsible - among other tasks - for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.
After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.
Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said.
Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".
There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.
A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.
"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."
Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."
Thanks, Crid!
Why Men Shouldn't Volunteer With Children
While children of divorce, especially, benefit from contact with male role models, this chilling story posted by Wendy McElroy should serve as a warning to volunteering-minded men. An excerpt:
I haven't been able to get Anthony J. Tripoli out of my mind. He is the 69-year-old man I wrote about in a July 19th blog post. He was a volunteer who tutored children one-on-one in reading skills at a public school in Florida. Based on the testimony of an 8-year-old girl and without any supporting evidence whatever, he was given a life sentence for allegedly touching her in an inappropriate -- that is, a sexual -- manner. In reading the news story, I thought the man was probably innocent and a victim of the public/legal hysteria that surrounds the issues of children and sex.I looked further into the story in the hope of finding reason to believe Tripoli is guilty because I hate, hate, hate the thought of a man's life being ruined because of an act of kindess he rendered to a child. But the more I uncover the more I am convinced of his innocence.
Let me run down some of the facts giving me great pause:
--There is no physical evidence that molestation ever happened. No suspicions reported by the parents. Medical personnel who examined the girl found no signs of penetration.
--Volunteers for the program Tripoli was in undergo a screening process, that includes exhaustive local and national criminal history and sex offender checks. His record was so clean that he literally did not have a speeding ticket.
--The police could not find other children molested by him. The man was 68-years-old. I find it difficult to believe that Tripoli, who worked with children, suddenly became a child molestor in his retirement years. .
--The tutoring and, so, the alleged molestation supposedly took place in a cafeteria-like area at the public school where food service workers were coming and going unpredictably. Volunteers also know that school officials will monitor their work in some manner from time-to-time.
--No one witnessed Tripoli taking the girl to or from a secluded area.
--Parents approve the tutoring as well as the tutor matched with their child.
--In the courtroom, the girl couldn't identify Tripoli. The prosecuting attorney ascribed this to the fact that he had lost 20 pounds -- undoubtedly from stress-- and was no longer tanned.
--One of the alleged incidents occurred on February 15th, 2008. (Amy's italics) Tripoli was not at the school that day. He established his presence at a softball game through several witnesses.
--The girl was interviewed by Tripoli's female supervisor at least three times and never said anything about inappropriate touching.
You're a guy and you want to "give back"? Keep away from the kiddies or you could lose everything you have.
All Those Unnecessary Tests
@kausmickey brings up a good point:
Does your doctor order up unnecessary tests? I have to pry them out of mine.
And he brings up another good point -- that Kevin Drum has a good point. From Drum's piece in Mother Jones:
...two-thirds of the country already has health insurance through their employer and another big chunk are on Medicare. If these aren't going to be touched, then why should they care about healthcare reform? In particular why should they be willing to pay higher taxes for something that won't help them out in any way?No reason, really. So instead Dems are promising to increase "access" and cut costs. The former is basically welfare and gets only anemic support. The latter is not only unproven, but doesn't do much to excite most people anyway. Sure, they'd like it if their copays went down, but mainly they just want healthcare and they don't care how much it costs.
Especially not if "other people" are paying for it. Except when they are those "other people" and they're paying for it for a lot of "other people."
Where Are The Feminists?
If you're for fair treatment for all (and not special rights for some under the guise of equal rights), how can you not be vocally against all of this below? Phyllis Schlafly writes on WND:
Did you know that a family court can order a man to reimburse the government for the welfare money, falsely labeled "child support," that was paid to the mother of a child to whom he is not related? Did you know that, if he doesn't pay, a judge can sentence him to debtor's prison without ever letting him have a jury trial?Did you know that debtor's prisons (putting men in prison because they can't pay a debt) were abolished in the United States before we abolished slavery, but that they exist today to punish men who are too poor to pay what is falsely called "child support"?
Did you know that when corporations can't pay their debts, they can take bankruptcy, which means they pay off their debts for pennies on the dollar, but a man can never get an alleged "child support" debt forgiven or reduced, even if he is out of a job, penniless and homeless, medically incapacitated, incarcerated (justly or unjustly) or serving in our Armed Forces overseas, can't afford a lawyer, or never owed the money in the first place?
"Never"? I'm not sure about never. Perhaps I'm remembering incorrectly, I've read on Glenn Sacks' site, I think, that a man should go to the judge right away if he loses his job in hopes of getting his child support reduced. And don't get me wrong, I'm for supporting the children you have, but if a child support order serves to make a man homeless and jobless, it's helping no one and hurting both the father and the child.
Schlafly continues:
Did you know that when a woman applying for welfare handouts lies about who the father of her child is, she is never prosecuted for perjury? Did you know that judges can refuse to accept DNA evidence showing that the man she accuses is not the father?Did you know that alleged "child support" has nothing to do with supporting a child because the mother has no obligation to spend even one dollar of it on a child, and in many cases none of the "support" money ever gets to a child because it goes to fatten the payroll of the child-support bureaucracy?
These are among the injustices the feminists, and their docile liberal male allies, have inflicted on men. The sponsor was former Democratic senator from New Jersey and presidential candidate Bill Bradley.
His name is affixed to the Bradley Amendment, a 1986 federal law that prohibits retroactive reduction of alleged "child support" even in any of the circumstances listed above. The Bradley law denies bankruptcy protections, overrides all statutes of limitation and forbids judicial consideration of obvious inability to pay.
I'm not an expert on child support, so please weigh in if there are any inaccuracies here -- or confirm if it's true.
Read Below The Lines
The Frugal Traveler Blog at the NYT has a post about the Top 10 Travel Gadgets Under $50. I bought Gregg and my editorial assistant the Gorillapod Flexible Tripod
It's not exactly a gadget, but whenever I trek-travel, I wear a low-profile sports kneepad: cut a slit at the top, remove the foam insert, and what's left is a pouch that's just the right size to hold my passport, immunization docs, a list of emergency contacts and emergency cash. Check out the Tachikara TK-2000 Volleyball Knee Pads($17.99) or the Wilson Flex Senior
($12.99), both avail on Amazon.
-- Mark G.
Me? In Paris or any big walking/public transportation-taking city, I use a very small wallet, with only my credit card, ATM card, and health insurance card in it, plus cash, and then I put it in the bottom of my rather huge purse, in a very, very crinkly plastic bag.
Who Pays?
Who is going to pay for that wonderful new health care utopia we've been promised? We keep hearing gleeful cries of how Obama's going to stick it to the rich. Kaus has some inkling of who else is going to pay:
Here we're dramatically changing insurance (no more "preexisting conditions") and insuring the uninsured and creating a health care exchange and promoting a public option and generally telling everyone they can stop worrying about whether they will have coverage. It's all going to be deficit neutral over a ten year period....On tax increases, Obama said
I don't want that final one-third of the cost of health care to be completely shouldered on the backs of middle-class families who are already struggling in a difficult economy. And so if I see a proposal that is primarily funded through taxing middle-class families, I'm going to be opposed to that ... [E.A.]In standard Washspeak, this means Obama is open to a health reform that taxes middle class families as long as it isn't "primarily" or "completely" funded by taxes on middle class families. But 49% funded by taxes on middle class families? ... However you interpret these sentences, it's hard to see how Obama hasn't given a flashing green light to non-trivial tax increases on middle class families.
(Not that I think "the rich" should be stuck with everybody's expenses.)
And who are all these uninsured people? Not just people with pre-existing conditions who can't get into insurance programs. Here, from Investor's Business Daily, the reason behind this vast health care experiment, the myth of the 45 million uninsured:
You might be surprised to discover that 38% of all the uninsured -- that's almost 18 million people -- have incomes higher than $50,000 a year. An astounding 20% of all uninsured have incomes over $75,000. These are people who can afford coverage.Is it really a good idea to tax working people to subsidize those who refuse to pay for a necessity they could easily buy? The answer, of course, is no.
One other breakdown of the data is instructive. By far the group with highest share of uninsured is Hispanics. Some 34.1% of all Hispanics lack coverage.
That latter piece of data is alarming. Drilling even deeper, one finds that fully 27% of all the uninsured in the U.S. -- that's 12.6 million people -- aren't even citizens.
Not coincidentally, the government also estimates that about 12 million illegals now reside in the U.S., though some think tanks put the number as high as 20 million.
Putting the two together, this suggests that -- surprise -- a major reason for the uninsured "problem" is our failure to enforce our border.By some estimates, another 20% or so is uninsured only for a couple of months a year. As TV journalist John Stossel recently noted, as many as a third of all those eligible for public health programs don't even bother to apply.
Once you whittle it down, you start to realize that the number of hard-core uninsured who are citizens is in fact fairly small -- perhaps half the reported 47 million or less.
Yet it's not clear that shrinking the 47 million to zero would help all that much. Because the uninsured still get health care. They get it through Medicaid, the state-run, federally funded program for the indigent. They get care, by law, in any emergency room in the country. No, that's not the best way to care for someone. But to say that people have "no access to health care," as we often hear, simply is a lie.Moreover, it's not clear that those who go the emergency care route are worse off. A study by health economists Helen Levy of the University of Michigan and David Meltzer of the University of Chicago found "no evidence" that boosting coverage for all would be a cost-effective solution to improve overall health.
And, by the way, what, exactly, are we all going to be getting? Here's a CNN piece (thanks, Snake!) of what they're actually proposing.
The Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed
Posted at litemind.com, by Luciano Passuello. Here's an error commonly made by people in relationships -- who stay in bad relationships, well, because they've already put so much time and effort in:
3. The Sunk Cost Trap: Protecting Earlier Choices You pre-ordered a non-refundable ticket to a basketball game. On the night of the game, you're tired and there's a blizzard raging outside. You regret the fact that you bought the ticket because, frankly, you would prefer to stay at home, light up your fireplace and comfortably watch the game on TV. What would you do?It may be hard to admit, but staying at home is the best choice here. The money for the ticket is already gone regardless of the alternative you choose: it's a sunk cost, and it shouldn't influence your decision.
Part two (the second five) are at this link.
The Truth About Statins, Diet And Cholesterol, Cholesterol And Heart Disease
And that's that the evidence just isn't there. Which doesn't stop your doctor from dosing you with side-effect-rich statins and telling you to twist your diet and life around...a lack of evidence. Whoops -- maybe he only read the executive summary. Dr. Michael Eades clears a few things up, blogging:
What do we find when we read the full 284 page report (which you can get here)?We find that the full report presents a totally biased misrepresentation of the underlying scientific material and seems intent on promoting the use of statin drugs despite any evidence to the contrary. Not the "evidence-based and extensively referenced report that provides the scientific rationale" for statin therapy that the executive report would have us believe.
Before we get into some of the specifics of this full report, let's recall that the Framingham data, the Queen Mother of all dietary cholesterol studies, didn't show a correlation between diet and cholesterol, cholesterol and heart disease, nor diet and heart disease. And we need to remember that, despite all the hoopla about statins and lowering cholesterol levels, that cholesterol is an extremely important molecule. The brain is rich in cholesterol, the sex hormones are made on a cholesterol structure, and even vitamin D is built on cholesterol. Consequently, statin drug use has been associated with decreased cognitive ability and sexual dysfunction. Statins can cause liver damage and the breakdown of muscle tissue, both of which can lead to death. In my opinion, these drugs would have to lead to huge reductions in risk for death from all causes to overcome the risk one accepts by taking them.
...The full report looks at both primary prevention against heart disease in men and women under the age of 65 and over the age of 65. And it looks at secondary prevention for men and women who already have heart disease. (Primary prevention is prevention against the development of heart disease in the first place; secondary prevention is prevention against having a heart attack in someone who already has heart disease.)
Dr. Eades summarizes the findings of the full report:
In men under 65 with no known heart disease but with risk factors, i.e. LDL of 130 mg/dL or greater, the studies cited showed no difference in all cause mortality. For those men under 65 who had very high LDL levels, the evidence showed that these men might have a slight benefit from taking a statin, but nothing to write home about. Certainly nothing that would justify putting a third of the population on statins.In women who are under 65 there is virtually no evidence that statins do squat. In fact, the report doesn't even produce evidence that cholesterol lowering does anything for women. The report states that it bases its rationale for treatment of women on an extrapolation of data from men.
In men and women over 65 the studies cited show no evidence that cholesterol lowering brings about any significant decrease in risk for heart disease. (Remember the 34% of subjects, average age 66.9, in the control group of the PD study mentioned at the start of this post who were on statins. According to the papers cited in this full report, none of those subjects could expect a decreased risk for CHD by taking the statins, but based on this report's false reporting of the conclusions of these papers, a third of these folks are on statins.)
Men of all ages with diagnosed heart disease were the only group that the studies used in this report show receive an actual benefit from taking statins. And even that is slight.
Women who have heart disease and who take statins have a reduced death rate from heart disease but no decrease in all-cause mortality.
So there you have it. The giant report that, thanks to the executive summary, has driven most physicians in America to prescribe statins to practically everyone who walks through the door shows, when the data is examined, that statins are only really indicated in men who already have heart disease. They don't do much for anyone else but put them at risk for a host of other problems while running health care costs through the roof for the rest of us.
Who could possibly benefit from this situation? How about the underwriters of the whole scheme: the drug companies and the 'experts' on their payroll.
We've got a situation where 'experts' paid by the drug companies write an executive summary about a report written by 'experts' paid by the drug companies, a report that misinterprets (purposefully?) the underlying data to make the case that the drugs made by the drug companies paying the 'experts' are under prescribed. Others jump on the bandwagon, making pronouncements, based on this faulty reporting, that almost everyone should be taking these drugs made by the drug companies that underwrote the entire enterprise. One buffoon, cloaked in all the trappings of academia, even made the comment that since statins are so wonderful perhaps they should be added to the drinking water. As a consequence, we're paying billions of dollars for drugs that don't particularly work and that cause a number of pretty bad side effects to prevent a disease that can be prevented by fairly simple lifestyle changes. Pitiful.
And don't forget to read the part about what kind of people get heart attacks. Hint: According to Eades' experience, those who haven't been to Marlboro Country are few and far between. He posts this in the comments:
Dr. Eades: I'm not making the case that no one has ever had a heart attack who never smoked, but the odds are much,much higher for smokers.Here is an interesting comment from a cardiac anesthesiologist on a discussion board for physicians only:
I am a cardiac anesthesiologist. One day, I was doing another bypass (I have done a few thousand bypass operations) and I got to thinking about a common link between the patients. There was only one I could come up with. Smoking. With the rare exception of familial hypercholesterolemia or juvenile onset diabetes, I could not think of one patient I had put to sleep for bypass that was not a smoker. I have, however, put several to sleep with "normal"cholesterol profiles. Also, it is good reading to look at what "normal cholesterol"has been considered over time. Back in the 70's, it needed to be blow 275 or 300. Over the years, it has continually been ratcheted down to where we are today. I would be willing to wager that if smoking is never started, the chance of needing coronary artery interventions would be about 5% of the rate that smokers/reformed smokers have. I don't know how the "second hand smoke" group would weigh in, but I think that they would still be well below the "first hand smoke" rate. This is just my own personal observation, and I don't have formal studies to back it up, so I just throw this out for consideration and discussion.He (or she) seems to have had the same experience as I have. Best--MRE
Oh, and check out this bit from Dr. Eades in the comments:
As to how I recommend treating cholesterol problems...I don't believe in the lipid hypothesis. The lipid hypothesis posits that (Coronary Heart Disease) is caused by elevated cholesterol. Strange as this may sound, there is no evidence that cholesterol causes CHD. The Framingham study doesn't show it. If anything it shows the opposite. There is no conclusive evidence that cholesterol has anything to do with heart disease. So, if cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease, why treat it?If any components of the whole constellation of lipids do end up being involved in the development of heart disease, they will be triglycerides, HDL (the so-called 'good' cholesterol), and small dense LDL particles. Ideally, you want to have a lot of HDL, low triglyceride levels, and low levels of small, dense LDL particles. How does one achieve that? Easy. With a good quality whole-food low-carb diet. Restricting carbs decreases triglyceride levels, increasing fat increases HDL levels, and at least a dozen studies have shown that switching to a low-carb diet reduces the levels of small, dense LDL particles. Kind of makes you wonder why all the mainstream folks still harp on about low-fat diets, doesn't it?
More from Eades on statins here. And here's Gary Taubes on What's Cholesterol Got To Do With It?
Evil In The Name Of (Drug Company) Business
How'd you like to take a drug that does fuck all for the illness you have, simply because some drug company marketed the hell out of it as something that cures your disease, and never mind that they have zero evidence it's effective for it? (Profit, baby, profit!)
And let me remind you, I'm a capitalist, not one of those people who thinks earning a profit is a terrible thing, and I'm extremely grateful for the Methylin (generic Ritaln) I take to help me focus and write despite my diagnosed ADHD.
(Personally, I don't see ADHD as a disease, but as a different sort of brain function, but as Martin Seligman pointed out at the Evolution of Psychotherapy conference, it's necessary to pathologize everything so insurance companies will pay for it and pay for drugs for it.)
But, back to the topic at hand, this three-page New England Journal of Medicine paper -- free at this SacBee link -- "The Neurontin Legacy -- Marketing through Misinformation and Manipulation," by C. Seth Landefeld, M.D., and Michael A. Steinman, M.D.
Landfeld and Steinman served as unpaid consultants to the the attorney of the plaintiff, the admirable David Franklin, a young biologist who quit his job at Parke-Davis (a division of Warner-Lambert) three months after being asked to promote Neurontin for illnesses it was not shown to cure. An excerpt from what they wrote:
On May 13, 2004, Warner-Lambert agreed to plead guilty and to pay more than $430 million to resolve criminal charges and civil liabilities. A class-action suit was filed the next day in federal court on behalf of private parties who had paid for illegally marketed Neurontin...The Neurontin cases have revealed the mechanisms of action of a comprehensive marketing campaign -- its goals and strategies, tactics and programs, and the participation of particular physicians and institutions. The campaign involved the systematic use of deception and misinformation to create a biased evidence base and manipulate physicians' beliefs and prescribing behaviors.
In a recently unsealed 318-page analysis of research sponsored by Parke-Davis, epidemiologist Kay Dickersin concluded that available documents demonstrate "a remarkable assemblage of evidence of reporting biases that amount to outright deception of the biomedical community, and suppression of scientific truth concerning the effectiveness of Neurontin for migraine, bipolar disorders, and pain."3 For example, publication was delayed for a report on a multicenter, placebo-controlled study that found no effect of Neurontin on the primary outcome measure for neuropathic pain because "we [Parke-Davis employees] should take care not to publish anything that damages neurontin's marketing success." Ultimately, ghost-written manuscripts downplayed the lack of effect on the primary outcome and emphasized other outcomes and subgroup analyses that favored Neurontin. Although guest authorship and commercial bias in research are a well-recognized threat to scientific integrity, the documentation of comprehensive manipulation of research and publication related to Neurontin is remarkable.
What is Neurontin's legacy? First, we have learned that pharmaceutical marketing can be comprehensive, strategic, well financed, disguised as "education" and "research," influential, and very effective. Promotion of Neurontin was neither discrete, compartmentalized, nor readily apparent; instead, it was intercalated in nearly every aspect of physicians' professional lives, from the accoutrements of practice to lectures, professional meetings, and publications. Although some pharmaceutical marketing may be less opaque, deceptive, and manipulative, evidence indicates that drug promotion can corrupt the science, teaching, and practice of medicine.
Second, such comprehensive marketing involved many people and institutions that apparently failed to recognize the serious ethical and legal problems with their actions. Employees of Parke-Davis, the medical-education companies it hired, and many physicians (consultants, advisors, educators, and researchers) all participated knowingly. Universities, hospitals, professional organizations, and foundations also participated, and oversight agencies such as the FDA and the Department of Justice did not intervene quickly. Apparently, there was a shared acceptance that Parke-Davis's marketing was simply business as usual.
Finally, these cases substantiate the emerging conviction that "drastic action is essential" to preserve the integrity of medical science and practice and to justify public trust. We believe that such action should include the routine placement of legally discovered documents in the public domain, the study of such documents to inform strategies for minimizing abuses, the establishment of penalties that eliminate the profit to be gained through illegal marketing, and the independent public funding of peer-reviewed pharmaceutical research through a National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research that might be funded by a tax on all drug sales.
"Physician educator" Josh Freeman blogs at Medicine and Social Justice:
If David Franklin is the hero in this episode, the villains, in this particular case and overall in drug marketing, are the pharmaceutical companies who are willing to use any tactics to increase their enormous profits. The victims are clearly the patients who paid more for drugs that may have been ineffective, or no more effective than less expensive drugs (and, from their perspective in their class-action suit, the insurers who paid for these drugs). The facilitators, however, are the physicians who were too willing to take their information (as well as gifts, sometimes small, sometimes large) from pharmaceutical company representatives), rather than more reputable sources, and not pay attention to the principles of conservative prescribing (rule #1: use the drugs that we know are safe and work, be cautious of new "miracle drugs"). They are also certainly medical organizations, the paid physician flaks who gave the talks, and even the medical journals that uncritically published some of the company written studies. They are also, however, sometimes the patients themselves, living in a culture of NEW! BETTER! IMPROVED!, of Technology over All, who frequently beseech their physicians for something new, more effective, especially with regard to pain relief.We have met the enemy, and it is them. But, in the words of the immortal Pogo (Walt Kelly) it is also us. If they did before (and a frightening number did!) no physician should now have any business trusting pharmaceutical companies to be completely honest, nor believe that they owe use of new drugs to the "nice men and women" who are the drug reps, nor that drug samples (always, only the newest, most expensive drugs, never the old "standbys" or certainly anything available generically) are "free", nor most of all believe that they are not affected by advertising and gifts. All physicians and students should read not only this piece but the classic "A Social Science Perspective on Gifts to Physicians from Industry"[2] (free at this link) to understand the sublimal efficacy of these tactics. And patients (the medical word for "people") need to recognize this too, and demand not "new", but "best", defined as well-established, effective, and safe.
Here's a look at the potential human cost of taking an ineffective drug -- on a kid who committed suicide after taking Neurontin for his bipolar disease; maybe because of it, maybe not. We can't know for sure. But, if you have a disease, and you're prescribed a drugs, shouldn't it be because there's some reasonable, evidence-based belief it works for what you have? Snigdha Prakash writes at NPR:
Soon after Dustin Yankus was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2001, he was prescribed Neurontin. The Food and Drug Administration has never approved the drug as a treatment for bipolar disease, which is also known as manic depression. But as Prakash reports, some literature -- paid for mostly by the drugmaker and distributed to doctors -- suggested the drug had a favorable effect.In May 2002, the 16-year-old committed suicide. For the previous eight months, despite his complaints to doctors that the drug wasn't working, Dustin took Neurontin every day. He had a long history of psychiatric troubles, and was being treated with many drugs. It isn't known what role, if any, Neurontin played in Dustin's death. But his parents are left wondering why Dustin's doctors turned to that particular drug, without solid evidence that it worked.
And a final note, had Franklin not come forward, it's possible (and probably even likely) the fraudulent marketing of Neurontin would be continuing today.
What drugs are you taking? Are you wondering if they're really effective for what you have...or just really well-marketed? You should be.
When Hairy Palms Met Sally
Wouldn't you know it, he got "bored and curious," as in, "Yawn...I wonder what really enormous fake breasts look like." Just posted another Advice Goddess column. The whole thing is here.
UPDATE: Sorry -- did forget to close comments here -- don't want to make the ones already here disappear, but please comment at the link to the original piece, not here.
Briefly, What's Wrong With American Health Care
According to Jacob Weisberg, who writes on Slate:
The current system of American health care is at odds with America's character in three fundamental respects: moral, economic, and sociological. Morally speaking, Americans are surely more accepting of economic inequality than their European brethren. But the random unfairness that condemns the uninsured to bad health and the risk of untimely death offends the social conscience. There is a general consensus among nearly all supporters of change that we need to move strongly in the direction of universal coverage. On this score, the bill supported by the House Democratic leadership and the one passed by the Senate health, education, labor, and pensions committee both do well.At the financial level, we might as well admit that we're going to continue spending more of our national income on health care than anybody else. We are a rich country, we want the best treatment available, and we're prepared to pay for it. But we also need to recognize that we're getting a crazy-bad deal by spending so much on health care and leaving so many people out. Our society and government are threatened by runaway medical inflation, which saps business profits and undermines fiscal responsibility. On this score, the $1 trillion bills working their way through the House and Senate, which lack incentives to hold down spending, rate poorly. The Congressional Budget Office says they will make a bad situation worse.
It is on the sociological level, though, that we're missing the boat most completely by sticking doggedly with a workplace-based system that no longer makes sense. America has always been a mobile society with a labor market that grows more fluid over time. Once, the norm was to work for a single employer for one's entire career. Today, people change jobs an average of 11 times before they reach 40. Fear of losing health coverage keeps people in jobs they would otherwise leave, creating a drag on economic efficiency. As the Senate's smartest health care wonk, Ron Wyden of Oregon, says: "A big part of the reform challenge is to look at how the culture of the American workforce has changed since the basic structure of American health care was put in place. Today's culture is all about flexibility."
The premise of Wyden's bipartisan bill is that we should move away from job-based insurance. It would do this by converting the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance into a tax credit and requiring that individuals use it to buy insurance. Wyden's bill would achieve universal coverage, apply meaningful cost controls, and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, pay for itself within a few years. It's going nowhere. Instead, Democrats are poised to pass legislation that spends an additional $1 trillion, fails to restrain spending, and shores up an anachronistic employer-based system. I guess you could call it a uniquely American solution.
Why The Toyota Sequoia Is More American Than The Jeep Patriot
Welcome to the iPod economy, where everything is made everywhere. What it really means to "buy American," from Nick Gillespie over at reason.tv:
Do You Give The Addict A New Liver?
Or let him die? Which is what they did in the U.K.
From SkyNews:
A 22-year-old alcoholic has died after being refused a life-saving liver transplant because he was too ill to leave hospital and prove he could stay sober.Gary Reinback, 22, died from cirrhosis of the liver after becoming an alcoholic in his teens.
The alcoholic, from Dagenham, Essex, had admitted binge drinking since he was 13 but was only taken to hospital for the first time with liver problems 10 weeks ago.
He was never discharged.
His mother Madeline Hanshaw, 44, said: "These rules are really unfair."
She told the Evening Standard: "I'm not saying you should give a transplant to someone who is in and out of hospital all the time and keeps damaging themselves, but just for people like Gary, who made a mistake and never got a second chance."
She said he was "desperate to recover" but had deteriorated quickly.
Mr Reinbach's family said he had started drinking aged 11 when his parents split up and drank heavily from the age of 13.
He had recently tried to give up and had signed up for support group Alcoholics Anonymous just weeks before he was taken into hospital, they said.
His brother Luke, 18, told the Evening Standard: "They never gave him the chance to show he could change."
Mr Reinbach died at University College Hospital, London.
via Drudge
How Much Is That Kidney In The Window?
For kidneys, since living people need only one to function,Virginia Postrel (a donor herself) suggests donor chains and financial incentives. From The Atlantic:
Such proposals, of course, attract vehement opposition from people who fear that financial incentives would squeeze out unpaid donors, entice the poor into bad medical choices, or "cheapen the gift." Some volunteers would undoubtedly drop out, relieved to let someone else provide their loved one's new kidney. But real incentives, rather than token rewards, would produce a net increase in the number of transplants. Giving a kidney to a relative or friend could still speed up the process, providing an incentive to do so but relieving such donors of any sense of emotional blackmail.A well-designed system could address the concerns about donor welfare by including educational programs, waiting periods, and follow-up care for donors, and possibly by allocating the payments over time rather than offering immediate cash. As for "cheapening" donation, Matas notes the importance of attitude. "We need to create a culture of dignity. There are many people who want to do this, and the incentive would push them over the edge," he says. "The message should be, 'We can compensate you but never repay you.'"
Outlawing payments to donors is ostensibly a way to keep the system fair, giving rich and poor an equally lousy chance of getting a kidney. But wealthier people can already more easily register at distant centers with short lists. They're also more likely to have friends and relatives who can afford the nonmedical expenses that living donation often entails, including time off from work, child care, hotel rooms, or cross-country travel. (It is legal for recipients or third parties to pay such expenses, but, unlike medical costs, they are not covered by insurance.)
Patients with enough money and the right networks have yet another option. They can go abroad, to countries where the authorities sanction or ignore payments to living donors. That's how Henry David got his new kidney.
...Such "transplant tourism" is growing. Many of the transplants are not as medically sound as David's, and the care for living donors, even when adequate, rarely meets U.S. standards. Laparoscopic surgery is a First World luxury, as are desk jobs to which donors can safely return soon after surgery. With few protections beyond the surgeon's need to maintain a good reputation among potential donors, kidney vendors may not receive the full payments they're promised. In China (which is not where David went), organs may come not only from paid living vendors but also from executed prisoners. Transplant tourism is, in short, an ethical morass.
It is also a completely predictable byproduct of the current system, willed into being by policy makers who ignore the plight of kidney patients and by doctors who see above-board payments--and the protections of contract and malpractice law that would go with them--as pollution. Living donation is a low-risk procedure for the donor that offers life-changing rewards for the recipient. Yet the donor is the only person involved in the process who receives no compensation. "There's no reason that someone who does this should not get something substantial that will make a difference in their lives," says David. To people who like to celebrate living donors as heroes, payment seems terribly crass. But the vicarious thrill of someone else's altruism comes at a terrible cost.
Groceries, Cheaper
Up to 40% off groceries
Thank you to everybody who's been helping me through these troubled times at newspapers by buying stuff I link to at Amy's Mall, and going through my links to other stuff at Amazon so I get a little kickback. Just this morning, I saw somebody'd bought this Cuisinart CPC-600 1000-Watt 6-Quart Electric Pressure Cooker
Why The Charity For Homeowners?
AEI fellow John H. Makin calls for government to stop playing favorites -- that home ownership should neither be penalized nor favored by the tax code. He writes in the WSJ:
Home ownership is granted an advantage over all other forms of ownership in the form of an enormous deduction on the interest payments most individuals incur in financing their homes. Nothing else in the tax code comes anywhere near that deduction in scope or size...."Pareto optimality," a term named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848- 1923), is defined as an allocation of economic resources that produces the greatest good. Thus, if one changes the allocation of resources away from "Pareto optimality" for the purpose of making someone better off, that change will make someone else worse off. Economists have expended a great deal of effort to demonstrate that free and competitive markets produce an outcome that is "Pareto optimal."
...National defense is a public good, perhaps the original public good.
Owner-occupied housing is something else that has been deemed a public good. Herbert Hoover's affirmation of the need for encouragement of home ownership "at all times" came in 1932 at the fiercest stage of the Great Depression. Others have made powerful arguments that homeowners make better citizens and contribute to stable communities. Why renters do not and cannot offer the same contribution to the public good is never specified, but existing homeowners, homebuilders, mortgage lenders, and mortgage servicers have all seized on the idea that subsidizing home ownership is "Pareto optimal."
It isn't.
Subsidies for home ownership--in the form of full deductibility of mortgage interest, lower mortgage borrowing rates derived from government guarantees for mortgage lenders like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and deductibility of local real-estate taxes--have long benefited those who own homes at the expense of those who do not. The size and severity of the burst bubble makes a mockery of the argument that the disproportionate gains to homeowners also improved the welfare of renters. By erasing, in just a few years, nearly one-third of the wealth on the national balance sheet, the collapse has created a substantial loss in national welfare, including for renters.
Home ownership should not be considered a public good deserving of government subsidies even without the bubble collapse for a simple reason: Those who receive the subsidy get to capture the benefits in the form of home prices that are higher than they would otherwise be without government support. The subsidies make homeowners better off while they make renters worse off. They are, therefore, not Parieto optimal.
In addition, home-ownership subsidies are inherently unjust. They favor the relatively well-off at the expense of those who are poorer. Why? Because the value of an owned home and the size of the government subsidy both grow as income increases. A tax deduction tied to home ownership for a well-to-do American with a $1 million mortgage and a $60,000 annual interest payment is worth $22,000 (assuming the American is in the 35 percent tax bracket). The higher the marginal tax rate rises, the more valuable the mortgage-interest deduction is to the homeowner. For a family with a modest income that may pay little or no income tax, the mortgage-interest deduction is worth virtually nothing. And yet, for the past 15 years, even the party in the United States most associated with preferential treatment for the poor began preaching the evangel of home ownership as a form of class salvation.
Amnesty International Comes Out Against Meddling
Muslim apostate Nonie Darwish, on FrontPage, criticizes Amnesty's Iran specialist, Elise Auerbach, who bizarely argued that the film The Stoning of Soraya M. does more harm than good because it "distorts" the issue of stoning. Darwish writes:
To Ms. Auerbach, I would like to say that the act of stoning is sensational to all those who cheer and participate in it. As a "specialist," perhaps she can compare the movie to videos of actual stonings, noting not just the horrific violence upon the victim, but also the chilling enthusiasm of the crowd.
The director of the movie, Cyrus Nowrasteh, simply showed the truth that no one in Hollywood dares to touch. Stoning is one of the most horrific acts committed against humanity. I want to thank Mr. Nowrasteh from the bottom of my heart, not just for the realistic stoning scene, but also for his portrayal of the Muslim culture of secrecy, pride and shame which condones, indeed encourages, such actions.
When I lived as a Muslim in the Middle East, I personally knew victims of honor killings, and heard about the bodies of women floating in the Nile that no one cared to report. Even the police ignored such horrific murders. In Muslim culture, women's bodies belong to men. If they are shamed, men cannot live with dignity and respect in society unless they kill the suspected wife or daughter. One of the most moving parts in the movie was the pressure placed on Soraya's father to throw the first stone. That father could not have survived in dignity if he had refused. It was brilliantly done and so true.
Speaking as though the defense of human rights in Iran are the exclusive right of one group or another, Auerbach sounds like an Iranian official when she say, "Iranians don't need people from outside Iran telling them what is good for them." Accordingly, since Amnesty International is an outside entity, can she say the same thing applies to both her and her organization? Indeed, it has been external pressure applied by that very organization and others which has compelled Iran to place moratoriums, however brief, on stoning in the past.
...Ms. Auerbach is apparently very concerned that the film portrays Iranians "as barbaric, bloodthirsty savages." I cannot understand why she is more concerned about the reputation of Iran than the atrocity of stoning people to death there. The movie never generalizes about Iranians. It's a cheap shot by her to criticize a well-done movie that stands for human rights.
Auerbach stresses that "we must look at stoning in the overall context of executions in Iran." Wow. Is she talking about the slow hangings of homosexuals in public squares? I don't think so. Execution of murderers is swift, but perpetrators of "moral" crimes are killed torturously. Ms. Auerbach must understand that the barbaric, cruel and slow death by stoning in which fathers, sons and husbands participate is not equal to execution of mass murderers which must still be done humanely.
Amnesty International, a noble and well-intentioned organization, has less impact on ending tyranny in the world than a great and courageous film like "The Stoning of Soraya M."
Who Can They Milk?
Jonathan Weisman writes in the WSJ that Democrats have to worry about their own rich voters:
A group of Democrats elected in recent years from some of the country's richest congressional districts have emerged as a stumbling block to raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for President Barack Obama's ambitious health-care overhaul just as the plan has begun to meet increasing resistance over its cost.Friday, two freshmen representatives -- Dina Titus, from suburban Las Vegas, and Colorado's Jared Polis, representing Boulder, Vail and some of the tonier suburbs of Denver -- joined Republicans to vote against Mr. Obama's top-priority health-care overhaul when it faced a vote in their House Education and Labor Committee. One reason was a one-percentage point-surtax on couples earning between $350,000 and $500,000 -- gradually increasing to 5.4 percentage points on earnings more than $1 million -- to pay for it.
The bill passed the committee anyway, but if the number of Democratic defectors grows it could pose a serious obstacle to the president.
Also on Friday a busload of freshmen Democrats went to the White House to plead their case against sharp tax increases with the president and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. The organizer was Rep. Gerald Connolly, the president of the freshman class whose Northern Virginia district is the richest in the U.S. as measured by median household income.
"There could come a time," said Rep. Michael McMahon, a freshman Democrat from New York City's borough of Staten Island, when Democrats are in open rebellion. "We will certainly see in the next few weeks where we are going."
Election gains in some of these affluent regions have helped give Democrats big majorities in the House and Senate. Of the 25 richest districts, 14 are represented by Democrats, according to Congressional Quarterly. In 1995, Democrats represented just five of those districts.
What's that version of that line..."a Democrat is a Republican who has yet to be mugged"?
Should Health Care Be Rationed?
Princeton bioethics prof Peter Singer writes in New York Times Magazine that health care must be rationed:
You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn't going to be good. But suppose it's not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man -- and everyone else like him -- with Sutent, your premiums will increase. Do you still think the drug is a good value? Suppose the treatment cost a million dollars. Would it be worth it then? Ten million? Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone's life? If there is any point at which you say, "No, an extra six months isn't worth that much," then you think that health care should be rationed.
...Remember the joke about the man who asks a woman if she would have sex with him for a million dollars? She reflects for a few moments and then answers that she would. "So," he says, "would you have sex with me for $50?" Indignantly, she exclaims, "What kind of a woman do you think I am?" He replies: "We've already established that. Now we're just haggling about the price." The man's response implies that if a woman will sell herself at any price, she is a prostitute. The way we regard rationing in health care seems to rest on a similar assumption, that it's immoral to apply monetary considerations to saving lives -- but is that stance tenable?
Where do we draw the line? Who gets to draw the line?
@Kate Coe Tweeted:
Why (not) ration health care by how popular a patient is? More FB, Twitter pals, better medicine for you.
Ronald Reagan Against Socialized Medicine
He was highly articulate on the issue -- in 1961, as a private citizen:
Hope For Hope
My pals Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie from reason write in the WaPo that Obama is going all Carter Country on us in his popularity, with every major initiative of his "meeting not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike":
The key to understanding Obama's predicament is to realize that while he ran convincingly as a repudiation of Bush, he is in fact doubling down on his predecessor's big-government policies and perpetual crisis-mongering. From the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists to gays in the military to bailing out industries large and small, Obama has been little more than the keeper of the Bush flame. Indeed, it took the two of them to create the disaster that is the 2009 budget, racking up a deficit that has already crossed the historic $1 trillion mark with almost three months left in the fiscal year.Beyond pushing the "emergency" $787 billion stimulus package (even while acknowledging that the vast majority of funds would be released in 2010 and beyond), Obama signed a $410 billion omnibus spending bill and a $106 billion supplemental spending bill to cover "emergency" expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, improbably, a "cash for clunkers" program). Despite pledges to achieve a "net spending cut" by targeting earmarks and wasteful spending, Obama rubber-stamped more than 9,000 earmarks and asked government agencies to trim a paltry $100 million in spending this year, 0.003 percent of the federal budget.
In the same way that Bush claimed to be cutting government even while increasing real spending by more than 70 percent, Obama seems to believe that saying one thing, while doing another, somehow makes it so. His first budget was titled "A New Era of Fiscal Responsibility," even as his own projections showed a decade's worth of historically high deficits. He vowed no new taxes on 95 percent of Americans, then jacked up cigarette taxes and indicated a willingness to consider new health-care taxes as part of his reform package. He said he didn't want to take over General Motors on the day that he took over General Motors.
Such is the extent of Obama's magical realism that he can promise to post all bills on the Internet five days before signing them, serially break that promise and then, when announcing that he wouldn't even try anymore, have a spokesman present the move as yet another example of "providing the American people more transparency in government."
...What are his options? First, stop doing harm. Throwing money all over the economy (and especially to sectors that match up with Democratic interests) is the shortest path to what Margaret Thatcher described as the inherent flaw in socialism: Eventually you run out of other people's money.
No matter how many fantastical multipliers Obama ascribes to government spending, with each day comes refutation of the administration's promises on jobs and economic growth. Even his chief source on the topic, economic adviser Christina Romer, now grants that calculating jobs "created or saved" by Team Obama is simply impossible.
Which leads to the second point: Stop it with the magical realism already.
Save terms such as "fiscal responsibility" for policies that at least minimally resemble that notion. Don't pretend that a budget that doubles the national debt in five years and triples it in 10 is the work of politicians tackling "the difficult choices." Americans have a pretty good (if slow-to-activate) B.S. detector, and the more you mislead them now, the worse they'll punish you later. Toward that end, producing real transparency instead of broken promises is the first step toward building credibility.
That the administration is now spending millions of dollars to revamp its useless stimulus-tracking site Recovery.gov is one more indication that, post-Bush, the White House still thinks of citizens as marks to be rolled.
Understudy
Sunsets in the Marina (Marina Del Rey, where I had drinks with a friends and his friends) aren't usually quite what they are on the ocean, but they still aren't terribly shabby.
And then, from Hustler's 35th anniversary party, here are (rather NSFW) some stars and a couple moons.
When Pigs Fly
Actually, they take off every minute from airports around the world. And when they aren't on planes, throwing their trash on the floor, they're leaving it behind in movie theaters or throwing their towels all over the bathroom floor in health clubs.
Is it sort of a revenge thing? (A misplaced revenge thing, that is?) Maybe people want to say "screw you" for paying what they consider a high price for their movie or plane ticket or health club membership. But, who are they screwing? In my friend Lauren's case -- the teacher who brings me in to speak at the high school -- it's the little old ladies who clean up at her health club. And on airlines or in movie theaters, it isn't the owner or board of directors down on their knees -- it's some low wage employee.
Pilot Patrick Smith writes about pigs on planes on Salon:
Dear passenger: Look, I know it's a long flight, and I realize that, at least in your mind, commercial air carriers are the most malevolent entities the universe has ever known, fully deserving of your disrespect. But must you? Must you throw your damn garbage all over the floor?The amount of post-flight trash littering the floor of airplanes is more or less proportional to the time spent aloft, but the sheer volume of litter can be astonishing even after a short flight. The photograph accompanying this column was snapped after a flight from Europe to the U.S. Can you make out the quarter-pound of Pringles, mashed into the carpet like sawdust? Or the plastic bags, wrappers, crackers and assorted other debris?
...Such detritus is normal after a flight. And all of it, of course, needs to be reckoned with prior to the next takeoff. Recently at Kennedy airport I watched a cleaning crew -- 10 or so Dominicans and Venezuelans ranging from ages 21 to about 50 -- tackling the leftovers of 200 passengers. Truth be told, overseas cabin cleaners tend to do a much better job than those in the States, but this particular crew had only a half-hour to tidy up a 767 cabin that looked as if a typhoon had blown through it. The end result was, well, acceptable if not immaculate.
Their job would be a lot easier, and airplane cabins would on the whole be cleaner, if only customers had the decency to pick up after themselves. People don't act this way on public buses or subway cars, but they tend to show a lot less restraint when flying. There are some reasons for this, I know: You are seated for an extended period of time in cramped quarters, and it's not as if there's a waste receptacle at every seat. But I'm afraid that is not a good enough excuse for, say, leaving leaky Chinese food cartons or a half-eaten Chick-fil-A sandwich under your feet. Litter is one thing; garbage is something else. It's common to find apple cores, wads of chewing gum and even sullied diapers stuffed into a seat pocket.
In the comments, there's all sorts of boohooing about how hard it is to bend down to pick stuff up. I don't know about you, but I consider it very rude to leave a bunch of stuff on the floor, and neatly place my trash in the bag I've brought it in (because I don't eat airline food, except on long flights) and hand it to the flight attendant with my cup. And I don't leave some little present in the pocket for the next person. And I don't drop stuff all over the floor, period. Accidents happen, sure...but at every seat on the plane?
And, then, in a movie theater, if I have a cup of something, I take the cup out with me and throw it away. Same for when I used to eat popcorn. How hard is that?
And in a health club...while I don't belong to one, I have in the past. When you throw that towel on the bathroom floor, do you think it will grow wings and fly into the hamper, or do you think somebody might have to pick up after you?
My feeling: If you wouldn't throw it on your own floor, don't throw it on somebody else's.
Hardware
And software, NSFW, from Hustler's 35th anniversary party. Photo of the naked girl at the above link by my man Gregg Sutter.
9:57 a.m. HOT News Tip
Quadriplegics are now blocking the gate to Schwarzenegger's Brentwood house. LAPD is enroute, either going to give them "release from custody" misdemeanor tickets -- hard to get out of -- or arrest them and transport them to County USC.
Bye-Bye Private Insurance! Helloooo, Taxes!
I wish I could believe they're all spending the week getting high over there at Investor's Business Daily, because this is really chilling. From an IBD editorial:
Congress: It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.
It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states: "Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised -- with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.
...Drawn by a public option that will be 30% to 40% cheaper than their current premiums because taxpayers will be funding it, employers will gladly scrap their private plans and go with Washington's coverage.
The nonpartisan Lewin Group estimated in April that 120 million or more Americans could lose their group coverage at work and end up in such a program. That would leave private carriers with 50 million or fewer customers. This could cause the market to, as Lewin Vice President John Sheils put it, "fizzle out altogether."
What wasn't known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.
As for what it will cost, if you think private insurance is expensive (I pay $339 a month for the Cadillac of Kaiser plans, with unlimited lifetime expenses and maternity care that I can't detach but will never use)...check out this WSJ editorial:
Say this about the 1,018-page health-care bill that House Democrats unveiled this week and that President Obama heartily endorsed: It finally reveals at least some of the price of the reckless ambitions of our current government. With huge majorities and a President in a rush to outrun the declining popularity of his agenda, Democrats are bidding to impose an unrepealable European-style welfare state in a matter of weeks.Mr. Obama's February budget provided the outline, but the House bill now fills in the details. To wit, tax increases that would take U.S. rates higher even than most of Europe. Yet even those increases aren't nearly enough to finance the $1 trillion in new spending, which itself is surely a low-ball estimate. Meanwhile, the bill would create a new government health entitlement that will kill private insurance and lead to a government-run system.
A few of the details:
A huge new income surtax. The bill's main financing comes from another tax increase on top of the increase already scheduled for 2011 under Mr. Obama's budget. The surtax starts at one percentage point for adjusted gross income above $350,000 in 2011, rising to two points in 2013; a 1.5 point surtax at incomes above $500,000, rising to three in 2013; and a whopping 5.4 percentage points in 2011 and beyond on incomes above $1 million.This would raise the top marginal federal tax rate back to roughly 47% or 48%, if you include the Medicare tax and the phase-out of certain deductions and exemptions. With the current top rate at 35%, this would be the largest rate increase outside the Great Depression or world wars.
...Other new taxes, including an as yet undetermined levy on private health plans. This tax, which Democrats say could raise $100 billion or so, would make it even harder for private plans to compete with the government plan, which would already benefit from government subsidies and lower capital costs. For good measure, the House bill also gets the ball rolling on tax increases on foreign-source corporate income.
We could go on, and we will in coming days. But the most remarkable quality of this health-care exercise is its reckless disregard for economic and fiscal reality. With the economy still far from a healthy recovery, and the federal fisc already nearly $2 trillion in deficit, Democrats want to ram through one of the greatest raids on private income and business in American history. The world is looking on, agog, and wondering why the United States seems intent on jumping off this cliff.
"One Of The Least Impressive Supreme Court Noms..."
Jennifer Rubin blogs at Commentary about Jeffrey Rosen's much-criticized TNR piece on Sotomayor (criticized for its unattributed sources -- the reason I didn't blog it at the time). Rubin writes about Sotomayor:
Whether examining her verbal skills, her command of the law or her intellectual acuity, I come away thinking she is one of the least impressive Supreme Court nominees to come along in recent memory. Judge Robert Bork was obviously not everyone's ideal judge, but the man's intellectual prowess was undeniable and he refused to lie about his views. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was frankly charming and sharp-witted in her testimony and could march the senators through the evolution of a number of strains of jurisprudence.Whether you agreed with their philosophy or not, you had the sense with the Clinton, Reagan, and George W. Bush nominees (yes, I leave Souter off the list) that there was good reason to put them on the Court. You listened for a day or even and hour and said, "Yes, that's a Supreme Court Justice." It was hard to dispute, even if you disagreed with one or another on his or her judicial methodology, that the nominee was bringing some intellectual heft.
Does anyone really have that sense from Sotomayor? And all of this is made worse, much worse, by her ham-handed efforts to distance herself from her own speeches and deny her own involvement with PRLDEF.
Rosen was trying to warn his liberal compatriots that they could do "better" than Sotomayor. He was right and should get some credit for his effort. Imagine if Diane Wood or Kathleen Sullivan, both liberal in philosophy but undeniably impressive, had been up there over the last couple of days. I suspect that conservatives would have been staring at their shoes, struggling for reasons to say "no" and grudgingly acknowledging that the nominee was going to add something to the Court beyond her gender.
The question is not whether Sotomayor will get through, but why the president felt so compelled to select her. If he was desperate to find a Latina, he should have found a wise one.
via Volokh.com
A Brief History Of Sotomayor
From wise American (who happens to be Latina) Linda Chavez, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sotomayor:
Despite her assurances to this Committee over the last few days that her statement that "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life" was simply "a rhetorical flourish that fell flat," nothing could be further from the truth. Judge Sotomayor's words weren't uttered off the cuff. They were carefully crafted, repeated -- not just once or even twice -- but at least seven times over several years. If Judge Sotomayor were a white man who suggested that whites or males made better judges, we would not be having this discussion because the nominee would have been forced to withdraw once those words became public.Judge Sotomayor's offensive words are a reflection of her much greater body of work as an ethnic activist and judge. Identity politics is at the core of who this woman is. And let me be clear here, I am not talking about the understandable pride in one's ancestry or ethnic roots, which is both common and natural in a country as diverse and pluralistic as ours.
Identity politics involves a sense of grievance against the majority, a feeling that racism permeates American society and its institutions, and the belief that members of one's own group are victims in a perpetual power struggle with the majority.
From her earliest days at Princeton University and later Yale Law School to her 12-year involvement with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund to her speeches and writings, including her jurisprudence, Judge Sotomayor has consistently displayed an affinity for such views.As an undergraduate, she actively pushed for race-based goals and timetables in faculty hiring.
In her senior thesis, she refused to identify the U.S. Congress by its proper name, instead referring to it as the "North American Congress" or the "Mainland Congress."
During her tenure with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, she urged quota-seeking lawsuits challenging civil-service exams.
She opposed the death penalty as racist.
She made dubious arguments in support of bilingual education and tried to equate English language requirements with national origin discrimination.
As a judge, she dissented from an opinion that the Voting Rights Act does not give prison inmates the right to vote.
Finally, and perhaps most dramatically, she showed in the New Haven firefighters case a willingness to let her policy preferences guide her, ruling that it was perfectly lawful for the city there to throw out the results of a promotion exam because those who did well on it were the wrong color.
Although she has attempted this week to back away from her own words -- and has accused her critics of taking them out of context -- the record is clear: Identity politics is at the core of Judge Sotomayor's self-definition. It has guided her involvement in advocacy groups, been the topic of much of her public writing and speeches, and influenced her interpretation of law.
There is no reason to believe that her elevation to the Supreme Court will temper this inclination, and much reason to fear that it will play an important role in how she approaches the cases that will come before her if she is confirmed. I therefore strongly urge you not to confirm Judge Sotomayor as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
Chavez' book: An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal [Or How I Became the Most Hated Hispanic in America]
Again, if a white man would have been booted for that remark -- and he certainly would have -- so should she. Of course, it would be naive of me to expect Senators or any other politicians to put getting the best justice in there before getting the Latino vote. But, is it possible there are more Latinos out there than they think who are like Chavez? Or do Jews just vote for Jews, Latinos just vote for Latinos, Christians just vote for Christians? Personally, I left a comment on the WSJ's site last night about how great I think Jeff Flake is -- a Mormon with, like, 12 children, who was a missionary in Africa, but who doesn't seem to want to impose his religious values on the rest of us, but who ran the Barry Goldwater Institute and is an outcast in his own party for opposing earmarks -- and seems a bright guy and a fiscally conservative libertarian. More, please!
Love And Hookers
A woman who wrote to me is revolted -- maybe right out of her relationship -- upon finding out her boyfriend saw escorts in the years before they got together. And probably not a lot -- just from time to time. He did this instead of fooling women into thinking he wanted a relationship when he only wanted sex. I might've asked you all this before -- but I don't see it in my blogsearch -- but talk to me about why a woman would be revolted right out of a relationship with a great guy because he paid for sex. If you're a woman, would you be so revolted that you couldn't remain in a relationship with a guy you otherwise love, respect, and think is a great person?
You've Got Tail
Here's a link to girl with a tail -- a spiked one -- another photo from Hustler's 35th anniversary party, taken by my man Gregg Sutter. NSFW, of course, unless you work for me or somebody like me.
P.S. Small real breasts are just so much nicer than fake'uns of any size.
The War Hero And The Tootsie Pop
I'm no fan of smoking, to say the least, or the costs it imposes on nonsmokers like me, but I don't think you send men and women off to war and go all nannyish on them. But, that's exactly what the military is about to do. They want to ban smoking for soldiers. Because smoking causes health problems and could even...kill them! Hmmm...perhaps they could also ban roadside bombs, enemies with sniper rifles, and Muslim ladies in burkas with bomb belts on underneath.
If the ban does get put in place, war photography will never be the same (picture Marines sucking popsickles and counting the licks to the center of a Tootsie Pop). And I'm guessing soldiers aren't exactly thrilled about being in close quarters with somebody jonesing like mad for a cigarette.
My feeling? War is no candy store, and if people we send off to fight for this country want to smoke, well, let 'em. Here's a picture of one of them -- that iconic shot by photographer Luis Sinco of soldier James Blake Miller with the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Sinco writes for the LA Times:
I was embedded with Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, as it entered Fallouja, an insurgent stronghold in Iraq's Sunni Triangle, on Nov. 8, 2004. We encountered heavy fire almost immediately. We were pinned down all night at a traffic circle, where a 6-inch curb offered the only protection.I hunkered down in the gutter that endless night, praying for daylight, trying hard to make myself small. A cold rain came down. I cursed the Marines' illumination flares that wafted slowly earthward, making us wait an eternity for darkness to return.
At dawn, the gunfire and explosions subsided. A white phosphorus artillery round burst overhead, showering blazing-hot tendrils. We came across three insurgents lying in the street, two of them dead, their blood mixing with rainwater.
The third, a wiry Arab youth, tried to mouth a few words. All I could think was: "Buddy, you're already dead."
We rounded a corner and again came under heavy fire, forcing us to scramble for cover. I ran behind a Marine as we crossed the street, the bullets ricocheting at our feet.
Gunfire poured down, and it seemed incredible that no one was hit. A pair of tanks rumbled down the road to shield us. The Marines kicked open the door of a house, and we all piled in.
Miller and other Marines took positions on the rooftop; I set up my satellite phone to transmit photos. But as I worked downstairs in the kitchen, a deep rumble almost blew the room apart.
Two cannon rounds had slammed into a nearby house. Miller, the platoon's radioman, had called in the tanks, pinpointed the targets and shouted "Fire!"
I ran to the roof and saw smoldering ruins across a large vacant lot. Beneath a heap of bricks, men lay dead or dying. I sat down and collected my wits. Miller propped himself against a wall and lighted his cigarette. I transmitted the picture that night. Power in Fallouja had been cut in advance of the assault, forcing me to be judicious with my batteries. I considered not even sending Miller's picture, thinking my editors would prefer images of fierce combat.
The photo of Miller was the last of 11 that I sent that day.
Not The Kid's Dad, But Still Jailed For Not Paying Child Support
I was hoping, when snakeman sent me this paternity fraud link with a note about the guy doing a stint in jail, that it was a case I'd already blogged or read about. It's not. This guy is homeless, and he's done over a year in jail for not paying child support for a kid who...is not his!
In the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Bill Rankin writes:
Frank Hatley has languished in a South Georgia jail for more than a year.The reason? He failed to reimburse the state for all the public assistance his "son" received over the past two decades.
The problem? Hatley is not the biological father -- and a special assistant state attorney general and a judge knew it but jailed Hatley anyway.
"I feel bad for the man," Cook County Sheriff Johnny Daughtrey said Tuesday. "Put yourself in that man's shoes: If it wasn't your child, would you want to be paying child support for him?"
Daughtrey said he hopes a hearing Wednesday will resolve the matter. Hatley has been held at the county jail in Adel since June 25, 2008, costing the county an estimated $35 to $40 a day.
Even after learning he was not the father, Hatley paid thousands of dollars the state said he owed for support. After losing his job and becoming homeless, he still made payments out of his unemployment benefits.
Hatley's lawyer, Sarah Geraghty of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, said two independent DNA tests -- one nine years ago and one just a few days ago -- prove he is not the biological father.
"This is a case of excessive zeal to recover money trumping common sense," she said. "What possible legitimate reason can the state have to pursue Mr. Hatley for child support when he does not have any children?"
And get this -- it hasn't ended. A bit from the end of the AJC story:
When he is released, the order said, Hatley must continue making payments to the state at a rate of $250 a month.
Okay, so a bank is robbed. You aren't the one who robbed the bank, but you were waiting to make a deposit when it happened, and somebody should pay for the crime, so, hell...why not you?
thanks, snake - via abovethelaw
Mother-In-Law In Chief
Mickey Kaus does a good job analyzing Obama's chat about health care with NBC's Dr. Nancy Snyderman. An excerpt:
2) He lectures: It's also time, Obama tells his viewers, to lose weight, and stop smoking, and pull up your socks. Later on he tells people that they are foolish to prefer brand name drugs to generic drugs, and to want multiple medical tests. "If you only need one test, why do you want five tests?" Stop clinging to your tests! You're worse than those people in Pennsylvania.Who knew we were electing a national mother-in-law? And get a chance to endure increased taxes for the privilege. Obama's supposed to be rallying support from voters, not castigating them. Outside the S& M parlor, most people do not enjoy paying to be disciplined.
3) The pain today is designed to avoid a problem that is over the horizon:
Well, I think that the most important thing for people to understand is that the system, as it is, is unsustainable. And if people understand that; if you look at the trend lines, where your premiums have doubled over the last nine years; your out-of-pocket costs have gone up 62 percent; the federal government is being bankrupt by Medicare and Medicaid - if you look at all these things, then you know that, just standing still, we are going to be overrun by health care costs.Once the American people understand that, then it's a matter of us making intelligence choices.
As a matter of policy, maybe it makes sense to "look at the trend lines" and ward off unsustainability down the road. As a matter of politics, it's a proven loser. When was the last time we cut Social Security benefits because, sometime in the future, the "trend lines" might produce a crisis? Voters tend to say, "Thanks. Call me when the crisis actually hits." Why gratuitously make the health care bill seem like the (apparently unpopular, now-stalled) global warming bill--a costly prophylactic measure to ward off a danger that experts tell us may hit in coming decades?
FDR would never have made a pitch like this. He would have talked in simple terms about what was in it for "the people" now. Obama's arid, wonky, condescending approach might convince a majority of subscribers to the Brookings Institution email list. It's hardly going to create the kind of public demand that will push health care reform over the goal line.
The first positive thoughts I've heard in a long time. I am for health care reform -- like untying it from the workplace and seeing that people like Deirdre's 19- or 20-year-old son, who has a pre-existing condition, can get care. I'm not for tanking private insurance companies and taking our insurance system socialist.
Dorothy Drove A Hybrid
This photo of one of my vintage Oz books didn't quite work for the blog item I'd intended it for, but it was too beautiful not to post.
And, yes, there are more nudie pix from the Hustler party -- "NSFW," as they say. To keep a few of you from getting fired or sent to H.R. for a good swatting, I'm posting them as links: NSFW link one and NSFW link two.
At What Point Do They Call The McNair Murder "Domestic Violence"?
Carey Roberts has a point:
A July 6 article in the New York Times conjectured the incident may have been a "double homicide or part of a murder-suicide." But no mention of domestic violence.A July 8 story from ESPN relied on artful phrasing to sidestep the dreaded "DV" words. Police "waited for further tests and the revelations about Kazemi's personal problems before concluding that she pulled the trigger," ESPN explained.
Excuse me, but what do revelations about someone's personal life have to do with figuring out whether she pulled the trigger?
By the following day, the rehabilitation of Ms. Kazemi had shifted into high gear. An article in the Washington Post was crafted to evoke the reader's sympathy, informing us she was "increasingly tormented by a rush of personal problems" and "her life was falling apart."
...Domestic violence workers will insist until they're blue in the face that domestic violence is the consequence of patriarchal oppression. As such, women are constitutionally indisposed to resort to such nefarious actions, they claim.
So when women deep-six their boyfriends and husbands, their apologists turn to the thread-bare excuse that she was only acting in self-defense. But in this case the self-defense ploy doesn't fit. Kazemi had bought the gun two days before, she pursued her prey to his apartment, and he was aslumber when she squeezed the trigger.
If the self-defense argument doesn't fly, then go to Plan B -- the "he had it coming" excuse. While I certainly don't condone infidelity, there are lots of women I know who have strayed from the straight and narrow. Somehow I don't remember anyone insulting their memory with a "she had it coming" comment.
McNair threw for 174 touchdowns and more than 31,000 yards. His extraordinary skill and exuberant passion for the sport inspired a generation. So let's take a collective deep breath and utter these mournful words: "Former NFL star Steve McNair was a victim of domestic violence, killed at the hand of a spiteful girlfriend."
Domestic Violence: Trying To Stop
A commenter writes:
Hello Amy,Like the fellow you posted about the other day I also have a sensitive situation that I wish to remain confidential and thus cannot post in comments, at least not under my usual moniker.
I think there is one more missing side to the treatment triangle: the abusers themselves. I am a domestic abuser. I am not proud of this or happy about it and I do not want you to think I am making excuses for abusers at all. But I want to tell you a little bit about how difficult it has been for me to find help with this problem.
Years ago I knew I had anger management issues so I contacted the local municipal court to find out where they send people for anger management training. When I called the local wellness center they referred me to (this is a town of about 15,000 people, only one provider) they asked what I had been sentenced for. When I told them I was actually trying to be proactive and get help before I did something to get arrested over, they informed me that they do not provide services unless you have been convicted and sentenced to AM training. Strike 1, fair enough, move on.
I began to search for psychologists/therapists through my health insurance network. It was not only difficult to get appointments but of the few in town, I knew 2 personally or professionally so they're out. At this point I ran up against the stigma problem. It's bad enough to have to sign out for a doctors appointment once a week, but HR also gets the Explanation of Benefits (EOB), I don't know how much to trust them but I kind of have to.
My next step was to just call 911 and ask the police to come pick me up. Bad move. Fortunately I did not tell them that I had actually pushed my wife over that night, just that I needed help. and to their credit, they did their best to help me. 1 night strapped to a gurney in the ER and then 2 weeks in the county mental health hospital. That was my one and only late mortgage payment. One Flew Over the Coocos Nest is no exaggeration. Not only could they not help me since their job is merely to keep people from killing themselves, they have no counselors who spend time talking with patients. Discharge was similar to the bus ticket out of town, they had no resources to help me build a support network. At that point in my life I literally needed someone to pick up the phone and make the call for me.
I looked into Behavioral Health clinics, once I learned that term, but they all seem to operate on the same model: 2 week intensive treatment, either in patient or out. Again stigma problem, I can't take 2 weeks sick leave and I don't want HR to get the EOB. My work is not cut throat corporate but this is still just not something you want your coworkers to even suspect.
Years later I've grown up and stopped accepting excuses in this realm. Everytime a door slams shut, I find a new one to open. I now have a psychologist who meets me after hours and an anger management support group, similar to AA. It's going to be a long road, and I do not expect I will ever be able to repair the relationships I have damaged but I am committed to this and will see it through.
The point is that it has taken quite a bit of determination on my part to build my support network. I think the trouble here is that you have a bunch of proud, insecure abusers and it is not going to work to put the onus on them to find help, especially if it is rare and or does not readily exist. There is so much shame and guilt after an episode of abuse, I cannot imagine that the abusers themselves don't also want help, but perhaps I am naive.
All this time it never donned on me to call a DV support hotline and see if they have resources to help the abusers as well. I guess now I have an experiment to try when work slows down.
I'll keep you posted on the results.
Why Female Lawyers Make Less Money
And not just female lawyers. I happen to be one of those women who negotiates, and pretty well, I think, instead of just taking whatever deal is being offered. I've successfully sold my own column and a number of other projects, and I tend to work as a team with my agent and/or lawyer to strategize what we want and what we can get.
But, from time to time, I talk to women who tell me that they've just gotten a job, and who never think to ask for more money or certain perks (within reason, of course). Nothing. Nada. They just take exactly what they're given. In other words, they start off meek (we could call this "meek-qual pay"), showing their employer, even before day one, that they aren't in the habit of playing tough or "thinking outside the box." I have to wonder: Are these some of the women complaining that they don't make as much as men?...men who are generally more likely to negotiate for more, from everything I've read and heard.
In this vein, Debra Cassens Weiss writes in the ABA Journal about a female lawyer's advice to other female lawyers seeking advancement: Study Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz:
"Dorothy was a true leader," writes Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe employment law partner Patricia Gillette in a post for the Am Law Daily. "She identified the tasks at hand, formulated a plan, and overcame obstacles to reach her goals: a brain for the scarecrow, a heart for the tin man, and courage for the cowardly lion."But Dorothy had a failing, much like many women lawyers. "When push came to shove, what did Dorothy ultimately ask for herself from the Wizard? Nothing," Gillette says. Too many women lawyers are like Dorothy, asking for no credit, reward or recognition, she writes. "And thus, no one knows what she has done and no one thinks of her as a leader."
Gillette says women need to take a more active role in managing and advancing their careers, in part by courting clients, socializing with firm leaders, touting their capabilities and pressuring firms to expand leadership opportunities for women.
Actually, I disagree on that last point. I think leadership opportunities should be expanded for all who earn them, whatever kind of genitalia they have in their pants.
Negotiation and speaking up not your strong suit? Well, boohoo. I have ADHD, and organization and concentration aren't mine, but I work really hard to compensate. As did Frank Ricci, who has dyslexia, but studied his white ass off to pass the firefighters' written exam.
A couple books on negotiating: Negotiation Genius: How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and Beyond
One more I forgot: Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want
Here's A Question (Okay, A Few Questions) For You Straight Girls
If you can either pass the time in the dentist's waiting room looking at a magazine of naked women or naked men, which would you choose? And, if you were waiting for hours to get your teeth cleaned, and could only watch porn to pass the time, would you rather see two girls having sex or a guy and a girl? Pick only one in each case.
And boys, feel free to weigh in on this one, too. (I already know you want to look at chicks unless you're gay. Weigh in one what the chicks want to look at, I mean.)
The Naked And The Bread
There were bare-ass naked girls everywhere at Hustler's 35th anniversary party at Hanger 8 at the Santa Monica airport. They were in all sorts of setups -- a throne thing out front, beds, cages, a torture wheel.
The girls would go all posey the moment they saw you were photographing them...including the girl who made sure she exposed her butthole for somebody taking her picture. (Yes, she really is "smiling on the inside.")
My personal favorite shots, however, were the ones where I caught the girls in an unposed moment -- talking about their car payment or lining up for a plate of food. (NSFW shot follows at this link.)
Oh, and in case you're wondering, those are two little stuck-on devil's horns coming out of her forehead (figured your first glance wouldn't be at her forehead).
Why I've Started Having A Baby...Every Night
Except maybe Monday. No, I don't mean the hard way, where you have fat ankles for nine months and then rush to the hospital to do the equivalent of squeezing a Ford Escort out your nostril. I just invent one. In fact, I think I'll name him Spike.
There's a badly run bar near my house. Used to be a drunk bar -- for probably 50 years. It was quiet then. A good neighbor, run by people who know how to run bars. Now, it's a hipster bar. They have bouncers there who...I don't know what they do, but they don't keep the assholes who patronize the place quiet.
We can't get permit parking in my neighborhood, so unless my neighbors and I can put our cars in front of our places before it gets to be evening, there's a good chance some team of assholes will be out in front of my house bellowing at 2 a.m. Like last night. Twice. Once at 1 a.m., and then another crew at 2 a.m.
I used to point out the proximity of the houses -- like, four feet away from where their car is parked, not behind some thick thicket of trees, and note that it's 2 a.m. and people (like me) were sleeping, and/or would like to be. This gets them combative. Even though I like to call an asshole an asshole, it appears to be an extremely counterproductive technique.
My new move is to come out and say, "Excuse me, my baby's sleeping..." Shuts the assholes right up and gets them to move, to boot. And they even apologize. Nicely. So...if you're 45 and would like to sleep, "Fuck you!"...but if you've extruded a child, "We're so sorry, Ma'am"?
What do you make of this?
So Where Are All Them Jobs?
Jerry Bowyer, chief economist at Benchmark Financial Network, blogs at CNBC.com on why America isn't hiring:
The stimuli plans were supposed to be job plans. The auto/bank bailouts cum nationalizations were supposed to be about saving jobs, not 'Wall Street'. So given two record breaking stimuli within two years, why isn't America hiring?America isn't hiring precisely because of government policy. Small business owners, who are usually the first into and the first out of the job pool, are standing by the fence and watching. They are paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty. If they hire someone who ends up doing poorly, will they be able to fire that person? Will they have to pay their health care bills after they've been terminated? If so, for how long? Who will pay for all these stimulus checks? If it will turn out to be small business, why would they hire instead of keeping costs low to prepare for the big tax bill? Where will the market move? Are you in the right business or are your clients in a politically disfavored industry? Are your clients in health care (being nationalized), autos (already nationalized), banking (somewhat nationalized) or any energy production process which uses carbon (pulverized)? Until you know, you don't grow, and until you grow your market, you don't grow your payroll.
Jobs aren't languishing despite the government's best efforts. They're languishing because of them.
A favorite small business of mine, a café I go to, is doing poorly now because people just aren't coming in like they used to. UCLA cut professors' salaries 10 percent. USC has a wage freeze on. And in my own industry, a paper dropped me this month after their page count went from 70-something to around 40. They're in a smaller market; this isn't just about newspapers in general being in decline. It's the economy.
Anybody see any bright spots? Any predictions?
via Dr. Helen
Get Ready To Follow California Into The Ocean!
Matt Welch writes in reason about what's to come for the rest of you, thanks to our union-luvvin' president and Congress:
California is the Ghost of Federal Government Future.During the last two decades, the Golden State has been transformed from what was once known as the nation's most anti-labor outpost to a state essentially run by public-sector unions. Nearly three in five public sector workers are unionized, compared to less than two in five public employees in other states. The Democratic Party, which is fully in hock to unions, has controlled the legislature and most statewide posts, with the notable exception of the governor's mansion, for more than a decade. That means more government workers, higher salaries, and drastically higher pension costs.
According to Adam Summers--a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine--the state's annual pension fund contribution vaulted from $321 million in 2000-01 to $7.3 billion last year. According to public databases, more than 5,000 people are drawing pensions in excess of $100,000 from the state of California each year.
So pervasive is the union influence that big labor doesn't even try to defend its deleterious effects on California's finances. Just before the special election, a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board asked Service Employees International Union chief Andy Stern to respond to charges that unions are the 21st-century equivalent of the railroads that were once all-powerful in California. Stern verbally shrugged: "I think democracy is an ugly thing at times."
That ugliness has made the California budget, like those in most of the other 49 states, less efficient and more bloated. Government spending, unlike spending in the private economy, is a zero-sum game--especially on the state level, since governors can't print money. Every dollar spent gilding a pension is a dollar not spent funding an orphanage. Naturally, the same elite outlets that were busy blaming voters after the election spent even more time detailing the horrors of the "annihilating cuts," as the Los Angeles Times called them in a news article, that were coming down the pike. (In early June, the paper invited readers to be shocked that a high school with 3,200 students would have to make do with just three guidance counselors.) Bloated pension costs and the increasingly inefficient provision of state services received a fraction of the coverage.
The federal government is now run by a president and Congress more responsive to union concerns than any in at least two decades. The same bloat currently bogging down statehouses and city halls is being duplicated in boomtown Washington, D.C. President Barack Obama even brought Andy Stern in to help warn Schwarzenegger that federal stimulus money would not be disbursed to California unless the governor rescinded some proposed state job cuts. Though that threat was later withdrawn, Schwarzenegger at press time was pushing for a measly work force reduction of 2 percent.
Matt does find a little hope in how so many of us voted against all the ballot measures this last time around.
Faced with a political class that ignored bureaucratic inefficiency, that demanded higher taxes, that filled the newspapers with scare stories about people who will literally die as a result of budget cuts, the citizens of one of the bluest states in the nation collectively said we just don't believe you anymore. If even California's famous fruits and nuts can call the statists' bluff, there may be hope for the rest of the country.
On a somewhat related note, I'd like to point out that G.M. has gone bankrupt and the country has not disintegrated into a small pile of ash.
Are You Afraid Of Death?
Hitchens on death, and how it's "the height of immorality" for religions to lie to people and tell them they'll go to heaven after they die -- as if they actually have evidence there's such a place.
The Dumbshits Who Can't Access The Internet From School
Those would be the teachers. Justin Reich writes on WaPo.com:
Content filters are knee-high fences around the Internet: They may trip up older folks, but teens leap right over. Walk the halls of a public school, and students will readily share tips for evading filters, some of which would be good work-arounds for the Great Firewall of China. Recently, a student from Hingham, Mass., pointed me toward the Facebook group "How to access Facebook from school," which has 187,000 members. Those members receive strategies on simple methods to surf freely at school. Put another way, every time school administrators patch one weak spot in their defenses, these kids are prepared to drill open a hundred more holes.In a battle between overwhelmed school IT staff and a 187,000-member Facebook group, plus dozens of other filter-bashing networks, blogs and e-mail discussion groups, the smart money is on the students.
Under the Children's Internet Protection Act of 2000, any school or library that uses federal funds to buy computers is required to install Internet filters. Such legislation may score political points, but it isn't safeguarding students from online hazards. More often, filters hamstring teachers' efforts to develop lessons that effectively prepare students for 21st-century challenges.
Ask teachers about how to get around filters and a frequent response is, "I have no idea." The next most-common response: "I have no idea, but when I need to get to a blocked site, I ask a student for help."
...The best strategy for protecting students online is educating them about Internet citizenship and safety. Young people need to learn about safeguarding their personal information, handling cyber-bullying, reporting and ignoring advances from strangers, avoiding online scams, and being courteous in online communication. They must understand the dangers and consequences of making details of their private lives available to the public. This education needs to happen at home as well as in homerooms, health classes, school assemblies, technology classes and guidance counseling.
The other effective strategy for protecting youths online is supervision, both high-tech and old-fashioned. Teachers whose classes use computers need to patrol their classrooms to observe student screens. School librarians and IT staffers need to have desks near computer clusters. As new schools are built, computer labs should be placed in high-traffic areas with big windows that enable staff members to easily monitor activity. Schools also need to use classroom management software that allows a staff member at one computer to monitor the screen activity of all students in a lab or classroom.
These are big tasks, but schools can't shy away from them. The Internet is an integral and growing part of our lives and, to prepare our children for the future, schools must help students wisely and safely use the Web.
Check out this idiocy from the comments under the piece:
RhymesWithRight wrote: I like these suggestions a whole lot better than the filtering software.I recall the issues a few years ago at the school where I teach. In an effort to protect our students, the word "breast" was added to the list of keywords that would get a site banned. That meant that the student doing research on breast cancer was unable to access any resources at school. On the other hand, the name of a popular restaurant was not blocked -- so I suppose if she could have found websites on "hooter cancer" she would have been able to complete her research project with no difficulty. It only took six weeks to get this little bit of absurdity undone.
Moreover, district policy denies teachers (you know, the responsible professionals) any work-around to the filter -- if you need access to a site that is blocked, requests must be submitted two weeks in advance with a fully developed rationale and lesson plan to justify unblocking the site. So much for enabling a teacher to improvise in order to answer student questions!
Now a number of teachers responded to the filter problem by bringing their own laptops with wireless internet cards -- until the district made their use an offense for which one could be suspended without pay after one teacher (out of 10,000) was caught looking at porn during his prep period.
Love this. If some teacher's caught with a print copy of Hustler, do they...ban reading?
RhymesWithRight continues:
Oh, yeah -- and forget checking your gmail from school. Blocked, so that no kid can send or receive porn on a school computer.
On a related note, cell phone use by brats in class is a big problem in schools -- except in classes like my friend Nat's, where she confiscates all cell phones used in class. Last night, a friend told me about a schoolteacher friend of hers who never has kids talking in his class. He bought a cell phone jammer (illegal), and the kids think his room just has really bad reception.
Who Killed California
I voted for one of them (the governator's been such a disappointment). Joel Kotkin lists five economic forces for disaster in California in Forbes. An excerpt:
1. Arnold SchwarzeneggerThe Terminator came to power with the support of much of the middle class and business community. But since taking office, he's resembled not the single-minded character for which he's famous but rather someone with multiple personalities.
First, he played the governator, a tough guy ready to blow up the dysfunctional structure of government. He picked a street fight against all the powerful liberal interest groups. But the meathead lacked his hero Ronald Reagan's communication skills and political focus. Defeated in a series of initiative battles, he was left bleeding the streets by those who he had once labeled "girlie men."
Next Arnold quickly discovered his feminine side, becoming a kinder, ultra-green terminator. He waxed poetic about California's special mission as the earth's guardian. While the housing bubble was filling the state coffers, he believed the delusions of his chief financial adviser, San Francisco investment banker David Crane, that California represented "ground zero for creative destruction."
Yet over the past few years there's been more destruction than creation. Employment in high-tech fields has stagnated (See related story, "Best Cities For Technology Jobs") while there have been huge setbacks in the construction, manufacturing, warehousing and agricultural sectors.
Driven away by strict regulations, businesses take their jobs outside California even in relatively good times. Indeed, according to a recent Milken Institute report, between 2000 and 2007 California lost nearly 400,000 manufacturing jobs. All that time, industrial employment was growing in major competitive rivals like Texas and Arizona.
With the state reeling, Arnold has decided, once again, to try out a new part. Now he's posturing as the strong man who stands up to dominant liberal interests. But few on the left, few on the right or few in the middle take him seriously anymore. He may still earn acclaim from Manhattan media offices or Barack Obama's EPA, but in his home state he looks more an over-sized lame duck, quacking meaninglessly for the cameras.
No Nukes Is Really Bad News
Melanie Kirkpatrick interviews James R. Schlesinger for the WSJ:
'Nuclear weapons are used every day." So says former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, speaking last month at his office in a wooded enclave of Maclean, Va. It's a serene setting for Doomsday talk, and Mr. Schlesinger's matter-of-fact tone belies the enormity of the concepts he's explaining -- concepts that were seemingly ignored in this week's Moscow summit between Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev. [The Weekend Interview] Terry ShoffnerWe use nuclear weapons every day, Mr. Schlesinger goes on to explain, "to deter our potential foes and provide reassurance to the allies to whom we offer protection."
Mr. Obama likes to talk about his vision of a nuclear-free world, and in Moscow he and Mr. Medvedev signed an agreement setting targets for sweeping reductions in the world's largest nuclear arsenals. Reflecting on the hour I spent with Mr. Schlesinger, I can't help but think: Do we really want to do this?
...Above all, Mr. Schlesinger is a nuclear realist. Are we heading toward a nuclear-free world anytime soon? He shoots back a one-word answer: "No." I keep silent, hoping he will go on. "We will need a strong deterrent," he finally says, "and that is measured at least in decades -- in my judgment, in fact, more or less in perpetuity. The notion that we can abolish nuclear weapons reflects on a combination of American utopianism and American parochialism. . . . It's like the [1929] Kellogg-Briand Pact renouncing war as an instrument of national policy . . . . It's not based upon an understanding of reality."
In other words: Go ahead and wish for a nuclear-free world, but pray that you don't get what you wish for. A world without nukes would be even more dangerous than a world with them, Mr. Schlesinger argues.
"If, by some miracle, we were able to eliminate nuclear weapons," he says, "what we would have is a number of countries sitting around with breakout capabilities or rumors of breakout capabilities -- for intimidation purposes. . . . and finally, probably, a number of small clandestine stockpiles." This would make the U.S. more vulnerable.
...Mr. Schlesinger expresses concerns, too, about the safety and reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons, all of which are more than 20 years old. "I am worried about the reliability of the weapons . . . as time passes. Not this year, not next year, but as time passes and the stockpile ages." There is a worry, too, about the "intellectual infrastructure," he says, as Americans who know how to make nuclear weapons either retire or die. And he notes that the "physical infrastructure" is now "well over 60 years" old. Some of it "comes out of the Manhattan Project."
The U.S. is the only major nuclear power that is not modernizing its weapons. "The Russians have a shelf life for their weapons of about 10 years so they are continually replacing" them. The British and the French "stay up to date." And the Chinese and the Indians "continue to add to their stockpiles." But in the U.S., Congress won't even so much as fund R&D for the Reliable Replacement Warhead. "The RRW has become a toxic term on Capitol Hill," Mr. Schlesinger says. Give it a new name, he seems to be suggesting, and try again to get Congress to fund it. "We need to be much more vigorous about life-extension programs" for the weapons.
We should also be focusing on nuclear power. One great way to turn terrorists back into the goatherds they'd be without Western technology, money, and need for oil.
Seth Godin On The High Cost Of Business By Committee
Big company, big stupidity and waste is often the case. In my (repeat) experience, company that won't pay for X will pay three times the cost of X to fix something else they've screwed up by committee. Godin, author of a slew of books
In my experience, 40% of the fee goes for the work and 60% goes to pay for the do-overs, staffing, project management and hassle that comes from working from big organizations and committees. A lot of small businesses get burned when they charge just the 40% and the client expects that the other 60% comes for free. It doesn't. If you want to be good at this capability, you can. You can buy it and learn it and then turn around and sell your skill. But it's unlikely you will randomly back into it.
The Vacation That Never Ended
That's often how I feel about where I live -- that I can meet a friend for post-writing day drinks and look out on this.
Photo by Claudia Laffranchi
Health Care Rationing Suddenly Troubles The Dems
Granny broke her hip? She's kinda old. Maybe she doesn't get a new one. I mean, how much use are we going to get out of her for the money we spend? Kaus blogs about suddenly skittish Obama health care reformers:
It wasn't the Republicans who billed health care reform as a cost saving, budget-balancing measure that would start to deny payments for treatments deemed "ineffective," or (as one acolyte put it) when "a person's life, or health, is not worth the price." And to think when they heard that people started to worry about rationing! Fancy that.
Mickey links to this Alec MacGillis WaPo story.
Gavin Nanny-some Wants You Growing Lettuce On The Median
And grazing on wheatgrass growing up between the cracks on Van Ness. (If you prefer yours light on urine, try not to munch too close to Geary.)
Please, please, please, California, don't elect Gavin Newsom governor. San Francisco mayor Newsom wants to control the way SF eats. Heather Knight writes for the SF Chron:
Newsom on Wednesday issued an executive directive he hopes will dramatically change how San Franciscans eat.All city departments have six months to conduct an audit of unused land - including empty lots, rooftops, windowsills and median strips - that could be turned into community gardens or farms that could benefit residents, either by working at them or purchasing the fresh produce. Food vendors that contract with the city must offer healthy and sustainable food. All vending machines on city property must also offer healthy options, and farmers' markets must begin accepting food stamps, although some already do.
The mayor will send an ordinance to the Board of Supervisors within two months mandating that all food served in city jails, hospitals, homeless shelters and community centers be healthy.
And effective immediately, no more runs to the doughnut shop before meetings and conferences held by city workers. Instead, city employees must use guidelines created by the Health Department when ordering food for meetings.
Examples include cutting bagels into halves or quarters so people can take smaller portions and serving vegetables instead of potato chips.
"We have an eating and drinking problem in the United States of America," Newsom said Wednesday. "It's impacting our health, and it's impacting our economy."
Was Newsom elected mayor or crowned king? Best of all, here he is telling everybody what to eat, yet like so many people, he hasn't a clue as to what actually is healthy. According to evidence (see below), those who want to take off the pounds should cut out carbohydrates like bagels, no matter how small Nanny Newsom makes city workers dice them, and breakfast on a cheese omelet and two strips of bacon instead.
Why must vending machines "offer healthy options"? And, shockingly, although I eat very few carbs these days, I sometimes like a candy bar. Am I a dietary criminal -- or an occasional chocolate consumer? And who says what's healthy? The medical establishment, which has been directing people's diets based on "science" instead of science for decades? But, don't just take it from me. This e-mail arrived on Sunday:
I usually don't have either the time or the brain power to read all the books you recommend through your blog. I did check out Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories", and am stunned by the bad science that has dictated dietary policy and medical procedures for my lifetime. I am making changes to my diet and dietary habits accordingly.Please keep up the excellent writing and always challenge your readers to think and behave honestly.
Andy from Los Angeles
And, back to Nanny-some's bloodless coup of San Francisco's stomachs, how dare he tell farmers or those who sell at farmers' markets what form of payment they must take? I go to a café that, until recently, was cash only. Should the government be able to tell them they have to take Discover and American Express?
via reason
If You're A Domestic Violence Or Sexual Assault Victim
Try not to be male. I got this e-mail from a reader who wishes to remain anonymous:
I do appreciate you speak up and are willing to have opinions that aren't politically correct. Being politically correct doesn't solve anything. It only allows society to hide the problems better. It's a feel good fix that when all is said and done usually makes things worse.I have always been in favor of equal rights. Equal to me means a level field open to all. To quote George Orwell's Animal Farm, some are more equal than others. That is why I already knew about the shelter issue. I met a guy, who after a trip to an emergency room wasn't allowed into a shelter. The best the shelter did was offer him a bus ticket out of town. I'll admit that is better than some places will do.
I know this isn't exactly on your topic. It is close enough that I think you might want to know though. You'll understand why I asked about privacy though.
I am male. I had less than a stellar childhood. Among other things I was sexually assaulted. As an adult this continued to bother me until the point when I felt I needed to deal with it. I kept hearing about a sexual assault hotline where I lived. The hotline said it was all kept anonymous. They said it didn't matter how recently it happened you could call and talk. That they had resources and could help. So I called. I was shocked at the response I got. "We're not set up to deal with people like you". "You can leave your name and number and we'll try to have someone get back to you in a few weeks". I asked what people like me were and the reply was men. They were there to help women and children not men.
I have run into this same attitude over and over trying to get help dealing with what happened. Some of the more memorable comments have been as follows. Men are the enemy not victims. Men are the perpetrators not victims. Why dig up the past and stir up all those feelings? Once I got a real enlightened lady got mad at me and started yelling that since I had been molested I had to have become a molester myself therefore not a victim at all. Does that mean women who get molested or raped turn into predators too? I get the feeling she wouldn't say that to a women.
I wish I could say that I thought things were changing for the better. I really don't see it happening. Women are allowed to be victims and get help. Men aren't allowed to be victims. If they try to get help they often get victimized for the effort. The shame and guilt from my past has only been made worse mostly by trying to get help that is supposedly offered to all.
These are examples of the reality I have faced. Some people haven't liked me because I am not willing to be politically correct. I have always had the bad taste to say my experience and feelings on a topic. I am just not comfortable posting about this on the internet with my name attached. Thanks for reading this. Good luck fighting the apathy in the US.
"Good, Cheap, Fast -- Pick Any Two"
Right out of college, I worked as an assistant producer then a producer at Ogilvy & Mather, and my old boss Ed Kleban used to say that, and he was right. I don't know anything about whether this software is any good, but for $29 after rebate, you sure can get it cheap off Amazon, and fast:
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There's also this: Boxed Set DVD Sale, up to 60% off
Noonan On Palin
Noonan writes that Palin was bad for the Republicans -- and the republic:
She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.
...To wit, "I love her because she's so working-class." This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they're working class "tropes." Because, you know, that's what they teach in "Ways of the Working Class" at Yale and Dartmouth.
What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.
"She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism." This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it's included in U.S. News and World Report's top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!
America doesn't need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this.
"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.
"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.
Mangu-Ward And Reynolds On Palin
An L.A. Times "dust-up" on Sarah Palin's political future, between reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward and Instapundit (and law prof) Glenn Reynolds. An excerpt from Mangu-Ward first:
Here's the thing about running for office: People are going to talk a lot of smack about you. This is how it has always been, especially in America, where even our founding fathers (and their press surrogates) were masters of the insulting putdown. A Thomas Jefferson-friendly newspaper labeled George Washington a "debaucher of the republic" and called John Adams "a ruffian deserving of the curses of mankind." And modern historians were hardly the first to note Jefferson's fondness for slave Sally Hemings.When Sarah Palin complains that people are spreading lies about her -- shocking untruths that cast aspersions on her intelligence, integrity and fecundity -- she is right, but it's like a stripper complaining about catcalls. There's a reason lifelong politicians are often self-important blowhards (cf. Joe Biden) -- a Kevlar ego is an asset come election season. This is how we choose our candidates: It's the folks who remain standing after everyone digs dirt, turns it into mud and slings it.
...If, on the other hand, Palin really is resigning to spend time with her family, then I, for one, am profoundly disappointed. In a previous Times Dust-Up, I praised Palin for being a conservative superwoman who sparked some fascinating soul-searching in movement feminism. She breast-feeds during conference calls! She gives news conferences while in labor! She finds time to jog! So when Palin offers boilerplate explanations about family time in her resignation speech, it means something altogether different than when it comes from a person with a Y chromosome. When Palin says it, it means, "Gee, being a mother of five, governor of a large state, author and candidate for national office is more than I can handle. Especially when everybody is being so mean to me."
Palin's right that her kids probably would have been better off never having heard, as she put it, "their baby brother Trig mocked by some pretty mean-spirited adults." But her constant complaints about unfair attacks made her look, at best, like a whiny girl. At worst, she seemed to believe a bizarro version of Hillary Rodham Clinton's "vast right-wing conspiracy." She probably was the victim of a double standard; her clothes and kids got more scrutiny than did her opponents'. But that's the way the teething cookie crumbles, lady.
And now, an excerpt from Reynolds:
To me, the least interesting part of the Sarah Palin story has been Sarah Palin. She gave a great speech at the Republican National Convention, and she possesses considerable raw talent as a politician. But the key is "raw." By throwing her hat into the race in 2008, the Republicans ate some of their leadership seed corn. If she were still just the well-thought-of governor of Alaska, she'd be well set up for future races. Instead, she's been a target -- a "designated hate object" for many on the left -- and is now, if not damaged goods, at least no longer fresh.But it's the hate that I find hard to understand. Even some leftist feminists have been troubled by the way she's been treated by the "supposedly liberal doods" of the left, and are noting that it's hard to call her dumb when Joe Biden is around. There's been a lot of indecent behavior from folks who are all to quick to play the "have you no decency" card when it suits them.
...Yet it's not as if the GOP has a surplus of talent. Palin managed to dominate the airwaves and political chatter even amid all the Michael Jackson bathos. What other Republican figure could have made such a splash? Camille Paglia says that Palin doesn't have the necessary coterie of expert advisors to deal successfully with "the mainstream media, with its preening bullies, cackling witches, twisted cynics and pompous windbags." Perhaps those GOP potentates might have offered a bit more help.
As for the preening bullies, pompous windbags and so on, there are certainly plenty of those out there. They'll probably treat the next fresh face in American politics -- at least the next fresh Republican face -- the same way, in between writing columns on ... the shortage of fresh faces in American politics.
Your take?
We Need More Of This
A woman who falsely cried rape goes to jail for a year in the U.K. It's not enough jail time, but it's a start. From a story by an unnamed reporter in the Daily Mail:
Gary Wood was hoping for romance when he arranged to meet Natalie Jefferson after chatting to her online, but ended up facing a potential 10-year jail term.Instead 27-year-old Jefferson is beginning a 12-month jail term after detectives saw through her lies.
Mr Wood, 31, of Walker, Newcastle, said he was still baffled by her motives.
...Newcastle Crown Court heard how Jefferson, of Fellgate, South Tyneside, agreed to meet Mr Wood in Newcastle's Gateshead before going for a drink in nearby Jesmond.
But she received a phone call during the evening and claimed one of her children had been taken to hospital.
Mr Wood offered to go with her but she only let him travel on the Metro underground system part of the way with her.
Luckies, NewcastleFalse allegation: Jefferson accused Gary Wood of attacking her near Luckies wine bar in Newcastle, above
He phoned her later but was horrified when she told him she had been raped by a stranger.
It was a lie - but she had already called police claiming Mr Wood himself had raped her. Soon officers were on his doorstep to arrest him.
He said: 'I got a call saying the police wanted to speak to me. They didn't say what it was at first but when they came to my flat, the officer said, "I will be up-front with you - we have had an allegation of rape against you."'
Mr Wood was held in custody for three hours.
Jefferson - also known as Natalie Dawn Dodsworth - had alleged Mr Wood attacked her on January 7 near Newcastle's Luckies bar and even agreed to go to a rape crisis centre.
But she was arrested and charged with perverting the course of justice after investigating officers interviewed Mr Wood and witnesses, as well as studying CCTV, and grew suspicious about her version of events. In court Jefferson admitted the charge.
Robin Patton, prosecuting, said: 'It's quite clear she had concocted this account for no good reason at all.
The guy's just one of the lucky ones -- that the police saw through it, and that there was closed-circuit TV that disputed the woman's story. What if you're one of the ones who doesn't have evidence at hand to prove your innocence? What then? You could lose everything -- over a false accusation.
By the way, I think the false accusers should serve the same amount of prison time the accused would have, had the conviction gone through. This miniscule prison term of hers is not punishment enough -- or deterrent enough -- given the 10 years Mr. Wood could've gotten.
thanks, Deirdre!
Never Mind The Hurt, Maimed, Or Dead Men
The New York Times praises the Obama administration for coming up with an advocate for female domestic violence victims, the White House adviser on violence against women:
A national survey of domestic violence shelters released in May showed a significant increase in the number of women seeking assistance since last fall, a rise largely attributable to the stresses of the economic crisis and rising unemployment. States need to set up more emergency shelters and find more transitional housing for people fleeing violent situations. And they must do more to help these victims rebuild their lives.
Did they also show an increase in the number of men seeking assistance? Probably not, and not because men aren't domestic violence victims, too. Men are embarrassed to admit to being victims of domestic violence, and try to laugh it off. Sometimes all the way to the grave or at least serious injury. And domestic violence shelters and programs are often women-only. An excerpt from a piece on Lew Rockwell by Wendy McElroy:
Indeed, women's shelters often deny entry to male children over 12 years old. (The legality of doing so at tax-funded shelters is dubious, to say the least.)Why should even male teenagers be excluded? In a protest letter to the Transition House Board, the feminist organization About Women explained that the shelter must be a space where "women could feel safe from male intrusion and could openly unburden themselves of the experiences of male violence they had undergone without fear of censure, criticism or inhibition by male presence."
One interpretation of the foregoing statement makes sense. Some female domestic violence victims have been so brutalized by the men in their lives that a mere male presence may well terrify them. For that category of domestic violence victim, a women-only shelter may be the most compassionate and effective option.
(Men-only shelters for similarly devastated male victims would be equally valid.)
...In short, women-only feminists argue that women are battered not merely by an individual male abuser but by the entire male gender and, so, they must be protected from both.
This is similar to claiming that a white person who has been beaten by a black needs to be in a black-free environment because they have been battered not merely by a specific black person but by an entire race.
To carry the analogy one step farther, it is similar to demanding that blacks should not be employed or allowed on the premises of a whites-only shelter...even if those premises are tax-funded and, so, prohibited from discrimination.
The ideological argument for women-only shelters - as opposed to the practical argument that, sometimes, such shelters just make sense - is class guilt. The guilty class is "male." Class guilt does not allow an individual male to demonstrate his innocence because, simply by being a member of a class, he is guilty by definition.
The concept of class guilt never ceases to anger me. As a victim of domestic violence, I know the fist that legally blinded my right eye was wielded by a specific man, not by a class. And I refuse to dilute his responsibility by extending it to men who've done me no harm.
It angers me as well because I'm the sort of domestic violence victim who needed exposure to non-abusive men, not isolation from all male presence, in order to heal. I needed to realize that decent caring men still existed and that I could interact with them in a positive way. In other words, a specific man was my problem; men as a whole were part of the solution.
It's especially important for domestic abuse victims, male and female, to have access to groups where other domestic abuse victims talk about their experience, according to my friend Sergeant Heather (of the LAPD). She's found that the most effective way to get victims to stop denying what's happening to them and get out is to get them to listen to other victims tell their stories. Telling victims to leave tends to just make them defensive.
Esquire, $7 For Two Year
Special on at Amazon -- $12 with an instant $5 off at checkout -- means two years of Esquire 
Convert An Atheist Game Show
It's from Turkey. The story via CNN:
The show, called "Tovbekarlar Yarisiyor," or "Penitents Compete," features a Muslim imam, a Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi and a Buddhist monk attempting to persuade 10 atheists of the merits of their religion, according to CNN Turk.If they succeed, the contestants are rewarded with a pilgrimage to one of their chosen faith's most sacred sites -- Mecca for Muslims, Jerusalem for converts to Judaism, a trip to Tibet for Buddhists and the chance to visit Ephesus and the Vatican for Christians.
But the show has been condemned by Turkish religious leaders. The head of the country's supreme council of religious affairs, Hamza Aktan, told CNN Turk that it was "disrespectful" to place different faiths in competition with each other...
Why? They're all about getting people to believe, sans evidence, that there's a god. Your particular god flavor may vary.
I've apparently had some success in persuading some to use not only their opposable thumbs but their ability to reason, thanks to my rantings on this blog and via e-mail to people who are gullible enough to believe in god, feng shui, numerology, and astrology. (I have far less success with people hearing voices.)
Personally, I'd love to see a show where atheists dig out why believers believe what they do, and see if they can persuade them to remove the shredded lettuce from their brain sockets or whatever it is that allows people in 2009 to believe they have a big Supervisor In The Sky.
And yes, Christopher Hitchens is right -- religion poisons everything -- but all religions are not equally poisonous. The Jews do not proseletize -- not because they're better people, wishing to avoid dragging others into irrationality and superstition, but because they surely would've been murdered for it or at least gotten in serious shit from the Christians and certainly, the Muslims.
"Beheading, anyone?""Um, no thanks, I just washed my hair."
Christians these days are rarely deadly but often annoying, with the way they often try to force their beliefs on others:
Me: Don't care much for sodomy? Use the front door instead.And okay, maybe your fellow thumpers frown on you drinking on Sunday, but why make me toast with Kool-Aid, too?
Of course, as I've said many (countless?) times before, of all the major religions, Islam is the worst, because it's the religion most likely to leave you dead or missing several limbs (note, as Wafa Sultan did, that you don't see Jews blowing up German restaurants). Actually, as George Mason noted, Islam is not really a religion but a totalitarian system, with the Quran commanding Muslims to convert or kill the rest of us and install "The New Caliphate," and with a serious number of Muslims ready to off themselves and us to go for those 72 virgins they've been promised. Or are they raisins? (Wash my car and I'll give you a bag of dried apples -- but feel free to call them Playmates if it makes you feel less ripped off.)
Sadly, reportedly 80 percent of the Muslim world is illiterate, so it's going to be terribly hard bring them around to any degree -- even to where Christians are, merely annoying but rarely deadly (except in rare cases, not condoned or encouraged by preachers, as Muslims are by some imams).
Finally, and the next time you spend an hour at the airport standing in a hot sweaty TSA line, try to remind yourself that it's because people believe in Islam, and maybe mention it to the people around you if you can do it without somebody bending you over and peering between your butt cheeks with a flashlight. I really hate that few people seem to make the Islam/TSA-hell connection.
Billie Jean Was Not My Lover
Virginia Postrel's Tweet is exactly right:
Michael Jackson service costs L.A. nearly $4 million. Family should reimburse. They're charging admission ($25).
Here's the LAT story by Andrew Blankstein and Mitchell Landsberg:
A city accustomed to outsized public spectacles headed into uncharted territory today, uncertain how fans would respond to a carefully planned public memorial to singer Michael Jackson -- an event expected to cost nearly $4 million in city services alone....Thousands of police officers and firefighters were being assigned not only to that event, but to the Jackson family compound in Encino, the home Jackson rented in Holmby Hills and to Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in the Hollywood Hills, where the family was to hold a private service at 8 a.m.
Two Good Books For The Sex-Deprived
First, there's Hot Monogamy: Essential Steps to More Passionate, Intimate Lovemaking
Then there's The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple's Guide
And for general problem solving and making a relationship work better, check out The Secrets of Happily Married Women
Getting Your Car Fleeced, Uh, Serviced
What do you think happens when you take your car in for service? Amazing story up at Consumerist, complete with video, about Toyota employees stealing from a guy and watching porn in his truck. An excerpt from his letter to the dealership:
In June 2008, I decided to use Hampton Toyota to get my truck serviced again. I previously used dealerships out of Lafayette, but I was tired of the drive and inconvenience of driving to Opelousas or New Iberia. After all, I was not in the wrong. This time I decided to take action to prove the theft. I placed a small digital video camera, clearly visible, in the passenger side inside door handle compartment. Upon me arriving I hit record to see what would happen. I also inventoried everything in my truck, specifically the amount of money inside. The result is on the DVD enclosed. On this DVD you will find the following:1. The first person to touch my truck was the service manager, Mike (see DVD video #1 "Mike the Service Manager"). He opens my door, puts my keys in the ignition, writes down my mileage, and then removes the keys. Next, he takes a notice in my keys. I keep a red pill vile, used for hikers, on my key chain. I keep personal medication in it for emergencies. He then unscrews the vile, looks inside and smells the vile. Next, he pours them into his hand and inspects them. He then puts them back in the vile and then licks the pill dust from his hand. He then screws the vile back together, replaces the keys, and then writes down the VIN number from the door sticker. Before closing the door, he checks the door compartment where my previous thefts occurred. He closes it without taking anything. He then returns to the vehicle, opens then compartment and proceeds to remove quarters (3 of the 6, totaling $0.75). He then inspects the other contents of the compartment, closes it, and then inspects the bottom door compartment before closing my door.
"Outrage Of The Week"
That's what Free Range Kids author Lenore Skenazy calls it when people go overprotective parenting-crazy. And what did this particular mother do that led to her being arrested, let the children frolic in a meth lab? Nope, she just let the younger children go with the older children to the Bozeman, Montana Mall.
Bridget Kevane writes, in a reprinted piece on Lenore's blog:
On Saturday, June 16, 2007, I was charged with endangering the welfare of my children, a criminal charge that, in the city where I live, Bozeman, Montana, can lead to imprisonment in the county jail. The Montana Code 46-16-130(3) states that a parent can be charged with this offense if she "knowingly endangers the child's welfare by violating a duty of care, protection, or support."Typically, prosecution is pursued when an adult supplies a child younger than eighteen with drugs, prostitutes the child, abandons the child's home, or engages in sexual conduct with the child. A violation of duty of care is described as cruel treatment, abuse, infliction of unnecessary and cruel punishment, abandonment, neglect, lack of proper medical care, clothing, shelter, and food, and evidence of bodily injury.
I was charged with this crime because I dropped my three children and their two friends off at the Bozeman Gallatin Valley Mall.
Bozeman is a small town known for its quality of life, striking physical beauty, easy access to the outdoors, and great public schools. It is also known as a safe community. The mall is considered a family place where kids trick-or-treat in October to escape the cold, and groups of children meet friends, shop, eat and see movies. It is a popular activity both during the long Montana winters as well as the summer months.
The mall is a safe place. There are no signs posted at the mall saying that children cannot be left unattended. No child has ever been kidnapped or molested at the mall. And yet, I was charged as a criminal for dropping children there without my direct supervision.
My oldest daughter, Natalie, and her friend, were both twelve at the time, going into seventh grade. The girls, who had known each other since they were three years old, had attended a babysitting class sponsored by the local hospital for girls eleven and older. The class teaches CPR, infant care, responsible behavior and more. They both also had enough experience babysitting other people's children that I trusted having them supervise the other kids at the mall--Ellie, eight, Matthew, seven, and my younger daughter, Olivia, who was three.
An outsider, or someone used to a bigger, more crowded way of living, might be shocked to know that I left children that young in the care of two twelve-year-olds. But these kids were a pack. They grew up together in a neighborhood full of children. They walk to and from their local schools together, play together, and frequently spend time at each other's homes.
...So when the older girls asked if they could go to the mall that Saturday, I said yes, if they took the younger kids with them.
...The plan was for the kids to have lunch and walk around a bit. I told the older girls the rules. They could not leave the younger kids unsupervised. They could not make a ruckus. They had to behave. Olivia, the three-year-old, had to stay in her stroller. When I called my husband and the other mother to let them know the plan, there was no hesitation on their part. My husband was at his office down the street from the mall, less than five minutes away. I would be at home with my cell phone, and my daughter had her cell phone in case they wanted to be picked up early.
I dropped the group off at roughly one forty-five p.m. and said that I would pick them up at four for the barbeque we were going to that night. It was to be an afternoon activity, as simple as that.
About an hour later, my husband, who was home by then, received a call from the police telling me that we had to come down to the mall immediately. My first thought was that the kids had made a scene, that they had knocked something over, that they had run about recklessly. We jumped into the car.
When I walked into the mall, the children were all in an enclosed security office behind a glass wall, smiling, eating candy, and talking to a security guard and some Macy's employees. I smiled and waved to them, relieved that everything appeared fine.
That feeling was quickly about to change.
P.S. My parents allowed me to walk around the mall without an armed guard at 12, yet somehow, I managed to survive. And I also babysat for a 3-year-old when I was 13, although only at her house, not the mall.
Whoopsy!
"We misread the economy," admits Biden on George Stefanopoulos' blog on ABC.com:
Biden acknowledged administration officials were too optimistic earlier this year when they predicted the unemployment rate would peak at 8 percent as part of their effort to sell the stimulus package. The national unemployment rate has ballooned to 9.5 percent in June -- the worst in 26 years."The truth is, there was a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited," said Biden, who is leading the administration's effort to implement it's $787 billion economic stimulus plan.
"Now, that doesn't -- I'm not -- it's now our responsibility. So the second question becomes, did the economic package we put in place, including the Recovery Act, is it the right package given the circumstances we're in? And we believe it is the right package given the circumstances we're in," he told me.
The vice president argued more time is needed for the stimulus to work.
"We misread how bad the economy was, but we are now only about 120 days into the recovery package," he said. "The truth of the matter was, no one anticipated, no one expected that that recovery package would in fact be in a position at this point of having to distribute the bulk of money."
As for the economy they "inheirited," there's this, from a Meghan Loftus piece at America.gov:
Barth, during an America.gov webchat November 12, explained some of the problems that precipitated the downturn in the U.S. financial markets, in particular the subprime mortgage crisis. These mortgages, which were extended to individuals with questionable creditworthiness, often were securitized, meaning they were pooled into securities and then were sold internationally. When the loans declined in value due to the inability of homeowners to pay their loans, the securities declined in value also, spelling trouble for investors.
Perhaps it's my fragile eggshell memory on the blink again, but wasn't there something about forcing banks to give loans to people who couldn't really afford them, in the name of housing for minorities? And wasn't that spearheaded by people in Biden's party? No capitalist (except maybe one with a serious head injury) would give a loan to a person who shows little means of being able to repay it.
"I'll Give You 20 Dollars To Blow Me..."
"But I won't come in your mouth."
That was my first thought when I read this line from Politico, from a Mike Allen and Michael Calderone piece about the pay-for-access dinners planned by Whoreshington Post publisher Katherine Weymouth:
Weymouth said the paper had planned a series of dinners with participation from the newsroom "but with parameters such that we did not in any way compromise our integrity.
What's now being served? Yoohoo, Ms. Weymouth -- head, meet platter.
If Woowoos Ran The Emergency Room
"A pinch of Chinese medicine for that heart attack, darling?"
"He's coding! Quick, somebody get the crystals and dreamcatchers!"
I made that top bit up, but there's more like that below, as the Brit comedy show That Mitchell and Look does "Homeopathic A&E" ("Accidents & Emergencies -- the Emergency Room in Britspeak):
via BoingBoing
The White House Is "Family Friendly" For Just One Family
There's a story in The New York Times about the insane hours worked by White House staffers who are parents. Rachel L. Swarns writes:
WASHINGTON -- When President Obama talks up the family-friendly vibe at the White House -- the nightly family dinners, the flexibility to attend school presentations and join impromptu plunges in the pool with his girls -- his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, sets him straight. "Family friendly to your family," Mr. Emanuel counters.The schedule of Christina D. Romer, the president's chief economist, is so packed, for example, that her first visit to her son's school this year came at 10 p.m. on a Friday. "It felt wretched, just wretched," Ms. Romer said of the evening that her 12-year-old boy pointed out his classroom in the dark.
Peter R. Orszag, the White House budget chief who is a divorced father of two, works so many weekends that he often imports his parents to help care for his 9-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son. "We're still sort of groping here," Mr. Orszag said.
As for Mr. Emanuel, he recently squeezed in a swim with his two daughters, 9 and 11, at 5 a.m. "No matter how much the president tries -- and he and Michelle try, they do -- the White House is brutal on family life," said Mr. Emanuel, who has struggled to make time for his wife and three children since they moved here from Chicago.
The Obamas have vowed to create an accommodating workplace for their employees. For many advisers, though, the work-family balance that the Obamas enjoy remains elusive.
White House advisers often work 60 to 70 hours a week and bear the scars of missed birthdays and bedtimes, canceled dinners and play dates, strained marriages and disgruntled children, all for prestigious posts that offer a chance to make an impact and unparalleled access to the president. At a time when the nation is in recession and at war, the public expects no less, many argue.
As I commented over at the NYT, working in jobs like this is for BARREN! girls like me. I'm not a fan of helicopter parenting, but once you have kids, you have no right to disappear from their lives like this, plum job or no.
How To Kill Private Insurance (And Kill Us All)
Kaus says:
It's seemed to me that the Obama administration has made a mistake in the framing of the health care issue: 'We'll raise your taxes and in exchange we're going to cut your treatments.' I mean, how could that not have widespread appeal? It's pain/pain!
Here's Mickey with Robert Wright (who looks like he could use a nap) on Bloggingheads:
Untie health care from jobs! Untie health care from jobs!
And, P.S., when government "takes care" of you, that means the rest of us are paying for you. Health care is not a right. It's expensive because it's valuable. Making private insurance compete with government will mean the value goes down. There's really no way around it.
Please Burn The Flag
UCLA law prof Eugene Volokh wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal, criticizing a constitutional amendment Congress is considering to prohibit flag burning.
He says it probably won't get enough votes, but even if it doesn't, the incorrect notion that the First Amendment doesn't protect symbolic acts is likely to live on.
Eugene, who gave me a signed copy of his terrific law book, The First Amendment
The Framers were working within a late 18th century common-law legal system that generally treated symbolic expression and verbal expression the same. Speech restrictions -- such as libel, slander, sedition, obscenity and blasphemy -- covered symbolic expression on the same terms as verbal expression.Many cases and treatises, including Blackstone's "Commentaries" published in 1765 and often cited by the Framers' generation in America, said this about libel law. And early American court cases soon held the same about obscenity and blasphemy. Late 18th and early 19th century libel law cases and treatises gave many colorful examples: It could be libelous to burn a person in effigy, send him a wooden gun (implying cowardice), light a lantern outside his house (implying the house was a brothel), and engage in processions mocking him for his supposed misbehavior.
This equality of symbolic expression and verbal expression was also applied to constitutional speech protection as well as to common-law speech restrictions. For instance, the first American court decision setting aside a government action on constitutional free speech or free press grounds (Brandreth v. Lance in 1839) treated the liberty of the press as covering paintings -- not just words.
Likewise, in a 1795 Pennsylvania case, the prosecution and defense agreed that erecting a liberty pole was the sort of thing to which constitutional free speech principles might apply. These tall poles, usually surmounted with a flag or a liberty cap, were originally a symbol of opposition to English government, but by the 1790s they had became a symbol expressing opposition to perceived domestic tyranny as well.
Kind of like those tea parties people are having tomorrow -- which I fully support.
And while I'd like to thank WSJ commenter Ed Ball, like so many others, for serving this country in the military, I have to say, I find Ball's remark under Eugene's piece sick and misguided:
* Ed Ball wrote:Since we're on the topic of freedom of speech, or perhaps expression, let me just say as a 20 year veteran, I would much rather see it legal to douse an individual in flammable liquid attempting to burn my nations' flag and turn them into a human torch, just out of respect for all my comrades in uniform that paid the ultimate sacrifice to this nation and had their coffins drapped in that flag for any liberals sorry freedom. If you don't care for this country, might I recommend a third world country with limited electricity, no running water, and less than ideal sanitary conditions, that would make those with the same ideals appreciate what this nation has to offer, just don't desecrate my flag.
Because it's the 4th of July, I hope you won't mind me going a little profound'y on you (and if you do, well, tough taquitos). Here's the comment I left on WSJ.com -- sort of an antidote to Ed's:
I love this country, feel I'm tremendously lucky to be American, and couldn't imagine burning the flag. But, part of what makes this country great is the freedom we have, greater than in any other country in the world, to speak our minds.I will defend your right to speak, even if I despise what you're saying, and I likewise defend your right to burn the flag if that's how you choose to communicate your message. And I support people who support this point of view and organizations like FIRE (Foundation For Individual Rights In Education), which defends liberals and conservatives alike on college campuses when their speech is constrained.
And they didn't say it in the blurb about Eugene Volokh, but for the person above who sneered at his piece, Eugene wrote a law school textbook called "The First Amendment." If anybody knows this area it is he. To see more of his thoughtful writing about the law, check out his blog, Volokh.com .
I agree with George Funk, who said this well: "While I personally don`t agree with flag burning, I`m quite confident that our country proves itself stronger for allowing it. The fact that our citizens can use this form of expression freely while in other countries they would be thrown in jail is one of the best advertisements for freedom the US has."
And finally, I'm a fiscal conservative and a libertarian -- alienated by both the Democratic party, with its ridiculous approach to economics and socialist programs, and the Republican one, with its pandering to the religious nutters and its pretense of being for small government. (At least the Democrats are honest about going for the bloat.) I do find that Republicans are more likely to accuse a person of being anti-American for speaking freely, even offensively, when that's exactly the opposite of what they're doing by speaking out. It's by exercising free speech that we maintain a democracy -- it's healthy, and even essential, to have even the ugliest speech (and ugliest symbolic speech) be heard.
-Amy Alkon, advicegoddess.com
Have A Good Fourth Of July Read
Sale at Amazon: Magazines, $8 or less
What I'm reading now: David Sedaris' When You Are Engulfed in Flames
What I just finished reading: A review copy of Debra Ollivier's terrific book, to be published in September (but available for pre-order), What French Women Know: About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind
What I'm still reading: Arts & Letters Daily's Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
What I hope to read soon: Ev. psych prof Geoffrey Miller's Spent
And finally, thanks to everybody who's been buying stuff through my links here and at Amy's Mall, to help me through the downturn in newspapers. I just lost a paper the other day -- their page count was cut in half -- but they hope to bring me back when they get their advertising back up.
Shrewd Move On Palin's Part
Maybe she really couldn't do the business of the state anymore, but regardless, she's got plenty of time now to prep for 2012 and, while doing it, to earn up writing a book and seizing other opportunities.
I think this will help, not hurt, her. Nobody can really contest her claim -- that she was a lame duck, no longer effective -- and she looks like a maverick for making it. And actually is one. She consistently says and does stuff that breaks the political mold -- and a few others, too. And I say that as somebody who didn't want her for vice-president, but would've voted for her for governor of Alaska.
No, I don't like all her policies -- or all of anyone's. But, it seems she was good for Alaska while it lasted.
Loved the fish joke, too, that only dead fish go with the flow. The Independent's David Usborne writes:
Some will take it as the move of a woman fed up by attacks on her character that, if anything, have picked up again eight months after her doomed partnership with the 2008 Republican nominee John McCain. The pairing of her and McCain has widely been judged a disaster. "I have never believed that I or anyone else... need a title to make a difference," she said, in a long and often disjointed address that appeared to be off the cuff. "I am not going to put Alaskans through having a lame-duck governor in office."She added that she would not be running for re-election either. "Only dead fish go with the flow," the Governor continued in an effort to explain to reporters why she was quitting. Her move means that the office of the governor will pass automatically to the state's Lieutenant Governor, Sean Parnell.
"It is my duty to always protect our great state," Ms Palin said in a separate, pre-prepared statement released by her office.
"With that in mind, my family and I determined that it is best to make a difference this summer, and I am willing to change things, so that this administration, with its positive agenda, its accomplishments, and its successful road to an incredible future, can continue without interruption and with great administrative and legislative success."
She told watching Americans that she is ready to campaign alongside other Republicans seeking office in the months ahead, hinting that she is not prepared to leave the political arena for good.
No kidding.
Pat Condell: "Filthy Kaffir Who Will Burn In Hell"
On banning the burka and feminist silence on the subject.
Here's a post on Feministing criticizing Sarko's burka ban. For those who assume France treats religion as we do, see this, from therevealer, on laïcité -- which translates roughly as "secularism":
Although passed only a century ago, the law of secularism was incorporated into the First Article of the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic. Some might say that France has taken this concept too far, with the 2004 law banning religious symbols, such as the hijab, Christian cross and Star of David, in school.
Fjordman has more on American feminism's support for Islam's sick practices at Islam Watch:
Dr. Wairimu Njambi is an Assistant Professor of "Women's Studies" at the Florida Atlantic University. Much of her scholarship is dedicated to advancing the notion that the cruel practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) is actually a triumph for Feminism and that it is hateful to suggest otherwise. According to Njambi "anti-FGM discourse perpetuates a colonialist assumption by universalizing a particular western image of a 'normal' body and sexuality."
At least she's probably in the minority. Feminist.com comes out against the practice, and other feminist sites do as well. But there does seem to be a bit of a controversy. Ick.
thanks, kishke (Condell link)
Whoreshington Post
Watergate was a long time ago. The WaPo thought they'd deal with the downturn in the newspaper biz by charging lobbyists to have chats with their publisher. Richard Perez-Pena writes in The New York Times:
For generations, The Washington Post has been a scrupulous watchdog over the capital's cozy world of power networking. For a short time, it almost became the network's host.The Post decided Thursday to cancel plans to charge lobbyists and trade groups $25,000 or more to sponsor private, off-the-record dinner parties at the home of its publisher, Katharine Weymouth, events that would have brought together lobbyists, business leaders, Post journalists and officials from the Obama administration and Congress.
The revelation of the parties early Thursday morning by Politico.com appalled members of The Post newsroom and put the paper squarely in the cross hairs of journalism ethicists. In response, Ms. Weymouth canceled the first dinner, scheduled for July 21.
A flier describing the events promised corporate sponsors conversation ("Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No.") at the Washington home of Ms. Weymouth. Sponsors were asked to pay $25,000 to attend an event, or underwrite a series of 11 for $250,000.
...In midafternoon, Ms. Weymouth sent a memo to employees, saying: "A flier went out that was prepared by the marketing department and was never vetted by me or by the newsroom. Had it been, the flier would have been immediately killed, because it completely misrepresented what we were trying to do." She added that other salon dinners would not involve the newsroom.
Ms. Weymouth can have din-din with whomever she wants, but charging $25,000 for it? I mean, there's pot luck and there pot very lucky. Personally, when I invite people to my home, I don't expect them to bring anything or pay. It's rude. If you can't afford to provide dinner -- and I'm guessing, despite the downturn, Ms. Weymouth isn't suffering terribly -- you don't have people over. This was about something else. And sorry, if all it takes is a little economic trouble for you to drop your ethics like a hooker's panties...well, you never had ethics at all.
From the LA Times' Peter Nicholas:
Little in the way of news was likely to emerge. The events were to be "off the record," meaning nothing revealed at the dinners could be reported. Although Post reporters would be present, they could be counted on to be "nonconfrontational," the fliers promised.A Post reporter interviewed Thursday said the newsroom was "furious" about the plan. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the reporter said the ethics code at the paper is so strict that if reporters get so much as a coffee mug from someone they cover, they must donate the gift to charity.
"The whole thing stinks, but the money was the worst part. I was always taught that's the line you never cross," the reporter said.
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said in an interview: "The problem here for the Post is pretty simple, and that is, a news organization derives its credibility from the idea that it's operating in the public interest -- it's trying to gather information and make it public.
"By holding off-the-record events for money, it's hard to see how that generates any knowledge for the public. And it potentially undermines its claim that its first loyalty is to the citizen."
Jack Shafer writes on Slate:
I want to take Weymouth's and Brauchli's screams of shame as genuine, if only for this reason: If the paper decided to sell the newsroom's integrity, wouldn't it charge a thousand times the sticker price quoted in the rogue flier? Besides, the Post's "health care reporting and editorial staff," whose attendance the flier promised, would have refused to participate.There's nothing new about journalists sitting down to a meal with high government officials, Washington fixers, and even "intellectuals" at the home of the publisher of the Washington Post. Katharine Graham hosted hundreds of such off-the-record affairs at her Georgetown residence during her years as Post publisher and company chairman.
...Of course, there's a big difference between a conference run in broad daylight and an intimate for-pay gathering at a publisher's home. At a conference, sponsorship is transparent, and attendees aren't purchasing direct access to the notables on the stage. The whole point of buying a ticket to Weymouth's house, though, is to buy access--the publisher has essentially gone into the business of facilitating lobbying.
To gauge just how unkosher the Weymouth salon is, consider a smaller-scale version of the same practice: A reporter throws a poker party at his home. The guest list includes legislative aides and junior lobbyists. That's OK, right? It's just a poker game among a bunch of guys who live in Washington. But the minute the reporter starts charging the lobbyists money on the promise that legislative aides will attend, he's crossed the line. He's no longer hosting a party; he's arranging a lobbying session for personal profit. His editors would tan his hide. Then they'd fire him.
If it's ugly for a Washington Post reporter to lobby for lobbyists, it's doubly ugly for the publisher to do the same. The publisher should sell lobbyists all the subscriptions to the paper that they want, sell them as many pages of advertisements in the Post as will make them happy, and, I suppose (if she wants to take the heat), even sell them the right to sponsor a Washington Post conference, as long as the sponsorship is public.
Sometimes, There's Nothing So Expensive As "Free"
Stossel writes in reason that there's no such thing as free health care -- "The costly truth about Canada's health care system." An excerpt detailing some of the unseen, unanticipated costs. And yes, I think we need to make provisions for people like Deidre's 19-or-20-year-old son, who has some pre-existing condition which keeps him from being able to get health care. But revamp our system to become Canada? It's literally the deadliest, and therefore, the most costly option:
President Obama says government will make health care cheaper and better. But there's no free lunch.In England, health care is "free"--as long as you don't mind waiting. People wait so long for dentist appointments that some pull their own teeth. At any one time, half a million people are waiting to get into a British hospital. A British paper reports that one hospital tried to save money by not changing bedsheets. Instead of washing sheets, the staff was encouraged to just turn them over.
Staph infection anybody?
In America, people wait in emergency rooms, too, but it's much worse in Canada. If you're sick enough to be admitted, the average wait is 23 hours."We can't send these patients to other hospitals. Dr. Eric Letovsky told us. "Every other emergency department in the country is just as packed as we are."
More than a million and a half Canadians say they can't find a family doctor. Some towns hold lotteries to determine who gets a doctor. In Norwood, Ontario, 20/20 videotaped a town clerk pulling the names of the lucky winners out of a lottery box. The losers must wait to see a doctor.
Shirley Healy, like many sick Canadians, came to America for surgery. Her doctor in British Columbia told her she had only a few weeks to live because a blocked artery kept her from digesting food. Yet Canadian officials called her surgery "elective."
"The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live," she said.
It's true that America's partly profit-driven, partly bureaucratic system is expensive, and sometimes wasteful, but the pursuit of profit reduces waste and costs and gives the world the improvements in medicine that ease pain and save lives.
"[America] is the country of medical innovation. This is where people come when they need treatment," Dr. Gratzer says.
"Literally we're surrounded by medical miracles. Death by cardiovascular disease has dropped by two-thirds in the last 50 years. You've got to pay a price for that type of advancement."
Canada and England don't pay the price because they freeload off American innovation. If America adopted their systems, we could worry less about paying for health care, but we'd get 2009-level care--forever. Government monopolies don't innovate. Profit seekers do.
More on Canadian wait times here, from the CBC:
"Despite government promises and the billions of dollars funnelled into the Canadian health-care system, the average patient waited more than 18 weeks in 2007 between seeing their family doctor and receiving the surgery or treatment they required," said Nadeem Esmail, director of Health System Performance Studies at the Fraser Institute and co-author of the 17th annual edition of Waiting Your Turn: Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada.
A commenter over at reason writes:
BTW, the hernia surgeon used to do the procedure in his office within 2 weeks of diagnosis on Saturdays at a cost of $1,200. Then the Chretien government threatened to pull funding out of any province that didn't ban such practices. So, not only did I wait 18 months, but the Canadian Taxpayer wound up footing a bill from Vic General for $3,500, being their chargeout for day surgery. (Actually, even at 18 months, I was lucky. A new surgeon happened to join the practice of the original surgeon and had to start filling his allotted OR times. If I hadn't been willing to change surgeons, the stats are that I would have waited another year.)
As for the cost of this behemoth, and the effects, Lawrence A. Hunter writes at NRO:
One thing we learned from the Medicare experience is that the original estimates of radical new government programs are vastly understated because of government's inability to control program costs and the impossibility of imposing price controls (by whatever name) on an entire economy-wide industry. But price controls and spending caps it will be, just as it would have been with HillaryCare, followed by health-care rationing, just as it has been with Medicare. And although these bureaucratic machinations will harm people, they won't appreciably hold down costs.At its inception in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion a year. At that time, the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives projected "conservatively" that the program would cost approximately $12 billion a year by 1990. In 1990, the cost of Medicare was actually $107 billion -- nine times greater than the Ways and Means estimate.
One might argue that no matter the price tag, it would be worth it to achieve universal health-care coverage. But will Obama & Co. actually achieve this Holy Grail? Not even close. According to the CBO, even assuming Congress enacts an individual health-care mandate (i.e., a requirement that everybody in the United States obtain insurance), somewhere between a fourth and a third of the uninsured still would not have coverage.
Schiffren Chick Bungles France, Comes Back On Sanford
NRO's Lisa Schiffren is kind of an idiot on what to eat in France, and in her assumption that the French "don't much like children" (couldn't be farther from the truth). She posts with abandon -- apparently without making any effort to understand or investigate French culture -- and doesn't get that children are not catered to in France, but expected to act like little adults if they're in adult places like restaurants.
She complains that restaurants are only open at certain times. What times? Meal times! That's because the French tend to eat meals...they don't walk the streets shoving Cheetos in their snoots all day. Doesn't work for you? Easy answer: Stay in Cleveland!
Contrary to her complaint, you can get food at a café at all hours, at least in Paris, where her whining starts. About an hour and a half after Gregg and I arrived in Paris, on our very first trip together about six years ago, we popped by Les Deux (Magots) at around 3 p.m. to sit out and watch the world go by and have this snack.
If your kiddies can't survive in a small town without having their little faces fed every 20 minutes, buy some cheese and a Swiss army knife and carry it around in a baggie in your purse, or stay in the big cities until they become big childish adults.
Hmmm...could this be a Paris alternative to "McDo"?
And no, shockingly, the food around tourist sites usually isn't fantastic -- which is why savvy travelers don't eat at the tourist sites. Is there any city where the tourist site food is gourmet?
Many of her complaints would be moot if she'd been smart enough to rent an apartment and tailor her vacation to American children (if hers are typical, they push their parents around with great success: "I want macaroneeeeee! And I want it nowwwwww!") Three kids, perhaps used to being coddled at meals (and in between)...you can't take them to France and expect things to be perfect for their finicky little American stomachs. French children, on the other hand, get a choice at mealtimes, over plates of liver, brains, and other food that isn't exactly a hot dog on a Wonderbread bun: Eat or starve.
Yes, the French may be socialist nitwits, but there are a few areas they have their heads screwed on right compared to Americans, and one is in the parenting department. Their kids are not only expected to eat what everybody else is eating, they are also allowed to run, play, fall down, and lose at sports (none of that business where "everybody wins!" -- because this is not real life, and the French are pretty real and realistic, except when it comes to the socialism thing).
Schiffrin's also clueless about what's healthy to eat, buying into the idea that vegetables fried in duck fat will kill you -- yet never putting together that the French are not all dropping dead in the streets of coronaries. (P.S. the evidence-based science -- as opposed to the "science" most American's diets are guided by -- suggests it's carbohydrates, not fat, that make us fat and cause us numerous health problems.)
Something else is a little different, too, from the way it is in America (why don't people who complain about that sort of thing simply stay home?). Note the portion size. 
This was my lunch -- a rather inexpensive and delicious plate of duck and potatoes -- from a neighborhood restaurant out in the 14th arrondissement called Bouquet d'Alesia. You want inexpensive and delicious meals? Don't expect to find them on a cart underneath the Eiffel Tower.
As misguided as Schiffren is on France, she manages a bit of wisdom on L'Affaire Sanford, from another post on NRO:
You know what we call men who have dumb affairs and keep their mouths shut? Husbands. Occasionally, presidents. Hard to see how a wife with any self-respect could tolerate hearing the guy she's trying to forgive and reconcile with refer to the other woman as his soulmate -- on the record, and in public. There are limits to what marriage therapy can do when someone doesn't want to be there. Ditto being politically sound. You can have great ideas and be such a head case -- in this case, such an egotist -- that voters can't pull the lever. We're there. And I bet that Sanford -- unlike Newt, Giuliani, Clinton, etc. - isn't unhappy with that resolution. Mark Sanford doesn't want to be president.
Hmmm...there, finally, she could almost be French. Or Spanish or Italian. The latins, they are much more pragmatic about marriage than we are. But, there is a line that gets crossed -- in any culture.
And back to Paris, come to think of it, the first time I went there, with my friends M. and E. and E's daughter, none of us were exactly flush with money. M. bought baguettes, sausage and cheese (and horsemeat, or he said so, because he's a kidder). We went to up to Sacré Coeur, and after touring around, sat out and ate overlooking Paris. I remember thinking the sausage and cheese were pretty amazing compared to the food in America. It was a wonderful time, and of all my Paris memories that have disappeared into some dusty file cabinet in my head, I still remember that one 20 years later.
photos, except for Sacré Coeur and the duck, by Gregg Sutter
George Carlin On Novel-Writing
Elmore says "Never open a book with the weather," and once told readers it was raining simply by having a character look up at the sky and yell "FUCK!"
Carlin continues on the theme. From his book Brain Droppings
Every book you read, if there's an outdoor scene, an open window, or even a door slightly ajar, the writer has to say, "As Bo and Velma walked along the shore, the clouds hung ponderously on the horizon like steel-gray, loosely formed gorilla turds." I'm not interested. Skip the clouds and get to the fucking. The only story I know of where clouds were important was Noah's Ark.
All Jackson All The Time
That should be the new name of CNN and other TV news venues. It's 3 a.m., and CNN could be telling me what's going on in the world -- if they weren't too busy reporting on the whereabouts and lifestyle of Jackson's chimp Bubbles. Somebody please e-mail me when it's safe to turn the news on again.
Highland Hound
Highland Avenue, Tuesday evening, on my way to Burbank.
The Trouble With Black Muslims
A black African, Rudolph Okonkwo, talks turkey to one of the black American converts to Islam, a guy carrying a newspaper put out by the Nation of Islam:
"Why are you a Muslim?" I asked him at one point.
"Because my people were Muslims before the blue-eyed white devils bought us and brought us to America as slaves and forced us to be Christians and to worship a blue-eyed Christ."
"O' yeah."
"Yes!"
"But I am from Africa and my grandfather was never a Muslim nor was he a Christian."
He was shocked when I said that.
"It is OK if you want to be a Muslim and follow Elijah Muhammed and changed your name to Muhammed, too. But don't tell me you are trying to be like your forefathers," I said.
And for four years, we continued our debate. Like some members of the Nation of Islam, he became a convert to Muslim while in prison on drug charges. He had accepted the myths of the Nation of Islam. He told with all the seriousness in his bones that the white man was made in a laboratory in Egypt by a black scientist named Yakub....First of all, I came from a country where there are Muslims. Those who have Arabic features assume superior position over those who are black. In many instances, the black Muslims are totally disregarded, treated as inconsequential.
I have asked black Muslims mad at how white people treated black slaves to ask themselves were the millions of slaves the Arab world took from Africa were? They disappeared. They were used and disposed of. If not, the Arab world would be booming with its own share of black men and women.
I have asked black Muslims mad at the "war" between the West and Islam to look at the genocide in Darfur and find out how Muslims treat their black brothers and sisters.
In Africa, the homeland of all black people, Islam came from the Middle East and Christianity came from Europe and they all exerted inordinate damage. But where Islam touched, there is no recognition of the ways of life of the people. Islam, being a way of life, swallowed all that was African in the people.
All black people must think before they jump from frying pan to fire. And before you pick up arms to fight for those Talibans dying in Afghanistan, spare a minute for two million children who die of malaria each year in Sub-Saharan Africa. Those are your people. For real!
Guess who takes in the black Muslim refugees from Darfur? That would be those evil Israelis, not Arab Muslims, who only care about other Muslims (Palestinians) if they're white and provide a really excellent excuse for hating Jews.
Why Internet Companies Shouldn't Have To Charge Sales Tax
reason's Nick Gillespie interviews Overstock.com's CEO, Patrick Byrne about the sales tax issue, what is "good regulation," and other issues:
From the reason link:
Raised in New Hampshire, Byrne describes himself as a former "Yankee Republican" who has never felt comfortable with anti-market Democrats and no longer recognizes the GOP as the party of small government and individual liberty.In this 10-minute interview, Byrne explains why school choice is the key issue of our day, how bad regulations contributed to the current economic crisis, and why "the government should pave the roads, run the Post Office, and stay off my porch."
He feels libertarians should transcend left and right, and I'm with him. Now, if only the Libertarian party would present a candidate who isn't a fucking joke.
A whole bunch of you have been really great, buying stuff from Amy's Mall when you needed something from Amazon, helping me stay afloat during the downturn in newspapers. Well, if California has its way and starts charging sales tax for Amazon purchases, I'll be rather screwed, since Amazon's likely to make good on its threat to pull out of this state, as it's already done in North Carolina. Regarding California's prospects, here's a piece from San Jose Biz Journal:
Amazon.com Inc. reportedly sent a letter to California legislators Monday warning that it will cease doing business with marketing affiliates in the state if it is forced to collect sales taxes there.The Wall Street Journal said the Seattle company called the move unconstitutional and quoted directly from the letter which said the proposed law "ultimately would require sellers with no physical presence in California to collect sales tax merely on the basis of contracts with California advertisers."
