At The New Yorker, Steve Coll recommends we see the documentary on HBO “Afghan Star.”
It follows contestants in the runaway-hit Afghan version of an American Idol-inspired televised talent contest. Two female finalists are shadowed by Taliban threats, although one of the pair, a Pashtun from Kandahar, claims on film at one point that ethnic loyalty has trumped ideology and that many Taliban are texting votes to support her, an entirely plausible boast.
Here are ten benefits which come online within six months of the President’s signature on the health care bill:
- Adult children may remain as dependents on their parents’ policy until their 27th birthday
- Children under age 19 may not be excluded for pre-existing conditions
- No more lifetime or annual caps on coverage
- Free preventative care for all
- Adults with pre-existing conditions may buy into a national high-risk pool until the exchanges come online. While these will not be cheap, they’re still better than total exclusion and get some benefit from a wider pool of insureds.
- Small businesses will be entitled to a tax credit for 2009 and 2010, which could be as much as 50% of what they pay for employees’ health insurance.
- The “donut hole” closes for Medicare patients, making prescription medications more affordable for seniors.
- Requirement that all insurers must post their balance sheets on the Internet and fully disclose administrative costs, executive compensation packages, and benefit payments.
- Authorizes early funding of community health centers in all 50 states (Bernie Sanders’ amendment). Community health centers provide primary, dental and vision services to people in the community, based on a sliding scale for payment according to ability to pay.
- AND no more rescissions. Effective immediately, you can’t lose your insurance because you get sick.
I watched the very good Frost/Nixon the other day. Nixon was rightfully forced to resign the presidency for being involved in an obstruction of justice. The specific crime he helped cover up was a break-in.
As Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict it appears was involved in an obstruction of justice. The specific crimes are the rape and abuse of children. In 2001, the then Archbishop, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, sent a letter to every bishop directing them to refuse cooperation with legal authorities.
Just sayin’.
“Now that the bill has passed, repealing it (which I presume is what Republicans campaigning in the fall will call for) will mean, literally, voting for allowing insurance companies to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, voting to permit rescissions, and voting to make it much harder for people who lose their jobs to stay insured. I have a hard time believing that advocating these things will be a political winner.”
James Surowiecki : The New Yorker
Republicans voted 178-0 against the bill.
Video shot by the Columbus Dispatch from [Tuesday’s] Honk and Wave in Support of Health Care at Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy’s district office contains a segment wherein the teabaggers mock and scorn an apparent Parkinsen’s victim telling him “he’s in the wrong end of town to ask for handouts”, calling him a communist and throwing money at him to “pay for his health care”.
Progress Ohio has the video.
At 3:34 am local time, today, February 27th, a devastating magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Chile, one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. According to Chilean President-elect Sebastian Pinera, at least 120 people are known to have been killed so far. The earthquake also triggered a Tsunami which is right now propagating across the Pacific Ocean, due to arrive in Hawaii in hours (around 11:00 am local time). The severity of the Tsunami is still not known, but alerts are being issued across the Pacific. As this is a breaking story, I will be adding more photos to this entry, as warranted, throughout the day. (24 photos so far)
Timothy Egan on The Missionary Impulse is worth your time. An excerpt:
At the least, the curious case of Laura Silsby raises questions about cultural imperialism: what makes a scofflaw from nearly all-white Idaho with no experience in adoption or rescue services think she has a right to bring religion and relief to a country with its own cultural, racial and spiritual heritage?
Imagine if a voodoo minister from Haiti had shown up in Boise after an earthquake, looking for children in poor neighborhoods and offering ‘opportunities for adoption’ back to Haiti. He could say, as those who followed Silsby explained on a Web site, that ‘the unsaved world needs to hear’ from the saved.
Who says they are “unsaved?” …
As Egan says, “Blame it on the missionary impulse, a lingering personality disorder of Western culture.”
Good insight from John Cassidy of The New Yorker on the revolting Tea Party. An excerpt:
Another factor, which rarely gets mentioned, but which appears obvious to people who didn’t grow up here, such as myself, is that many Americans reach adulthood with a set of values and sense of self-identity that is historically inaccurate and potentially dangerous. If you have it banged into your head from the cradle to adolescence that America is the chosen nation—a country built by a rugged and God-fearing band of Anglo-Saxon individualists armed with pikes and long guns—you are less likely to embrace other essential features of the American heritage, such as the church-state divide, mass immigration, and the essential role of the federal government in the country’s economic and political development. When things are going well, and Team USA is squashing its rivals, this cognitive dissonance is kept in check. But when “the Homeland” encounters a rough patch and its manifest destiny is called into question, the underlying tensions and contradictions in the American psyche come to the fore, and people rail against the government.
More broadly, the conference championships came down to Intellectual Man, in the person of Peyton, in one game, and Instinctive Man, in the person of Brett Favre, whose Vikings played the Saints in the other. For once, blessedly, Intellectual Man won the day. Instinctive Man, to be a little hard on him—though it’s my own view that you can never be too hard on Instinctive Man—cost his team a title for the second time in three years, throwing an interception (this one right across the grain of the play) that was not merely ill-timed, but dim-witted. Credit to Favre for getting them there, but let us have no doubt that he throws those things not because he thinks he should, but because he feels inside that he can, with predictable results.
Gopnik has another good line in referring to the Jets, “just when they needed the Audacity of Audacity. (Larger life-political lesson here, of course.)”
Yup, a little less audacity of hope and a little more audacity of audacity, that’s what we need.
I’m missing something; perhaps someone can help me out.
In federal election campaigns individuals may only donate up to $2300 to a candidate. The Supreme Court says corporations are just like individuals. The analyses of the decision say corporations will be able to spend great amounts.
But if corporations are just like individuals, how come corporations aren’t also limited to $2300?
[I]t has long been a staple of conservative thought to criticize “judicial activism”—the practice of unelected judges imposing their own policy judgments to overrule the will of the people’s elected representatives. But it is hard to imagine a more activist decision than the Citizens Union case. Congress passed the McCain-Feingold law, and President George W. Bush signed it, in the knowledge that the Supreme Court had repeatedly blessed restrictions on corporate political activity. But Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion blithely overturned Court precedent, and rejected the work of the elected branches—all in service of the bizarre legal theories that (1) corporations have the same rights as human beings, and (2) spending money is the same thing as speaking. This was judicial activism of the most egregious kind. Indeed, it wasn’t as much a judicial opinion as it was Republican talking points.
Amy Davidson asks some provocative real and rhetorical questions about Haiti — and beyond.
A first hand report from Haiti via Tracy Kidder.
Very worthy of the two-three minutes it will take you to read it.
Matt Taibbi translates David Brooks for us. Taibbi begins:
A friend of mine sent a link to Sunday’s David Brooks column on Haiti, a genuinely beautiful piece of occasional literature. Not many writers would have the courage to use a tragic event like a 50,000-fatality earthquake to volubly address the problem of nonwhite laziness and why it sometimes makes natural disasters seem timely, but then again, David Brooks isn’t just any writer.
It’s raw, even for Taibbi — and it’s pitch perfect. He takes a segment of Brooks’s column, then tells us what it means. An excerpt:
TRANSLATION: The best thing we can do for the Haitians is let them deal with the earthquake all by themselves and wallow in their own filth and shitty engineering so they can come face to face with how achievement-oriented and middle-class they aren’t. Then when it’s all over we can come in and institute a program making the survivors earn the right to keep their kids by opening their own Checkers’ franchises and completing Associate’s Degrees in marketing at the online University of Phoenix.
1. 100% of your donation will be go to these charities: not even the PayPal fees will be deducted from your donation, since Richard will personally donate a sum to cover the cost of these (capped at $10,000). This means that more of your money will reach the people in need.
2. When donating via Non-Believers Giving Aid, you are helping to counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans.
It goes without saying that your donations will only be passed on to aid organizations that do not have religious affiliations. In the case of Haiti, the two organizations we have chosen are:
• Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières)
• International Red Cross
You may stipulate using the dropdown menu which of these two organizations you want your donation to go to; otherwise, it will be divided equally between them.
As you may have expected, The Big Picture has photos from Haiti; 48 yesterday, 33 more today.
These before and after satellite photos of the destruction in Port-Au-Prince are remarkable.
Donate through Wyclef Jean’s foundation, Yele Haiti. Text “Yele” to 501501 and $5 will be charged to your phone bill and given to relief projects through the organization.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie reportedly gave $1 million to Doctors Without Borders.
The New York Times has a list.
A good choice, I believe:
[S]omething happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heal of the French. You know, Napoleon the third, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it’s a deal.
And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor.
Today, the second day of the Perry v. Schwarzenegger trial, opened with continuing expert testimony from Nancy Cott, a Harvard University historian and the author of “Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation.” Cott’s testimony will give the Boies and Olson, pro-gay-marriage side the opportunity to make the argument that marriage is a dynamic institution, one that changes as society does: which is why, for instance, married women can now own property, people of different races can marry, and couples of all sorts can divorce, and why, by implication, it could stretch without breaking to accommodate same-sex couples. Her testimony will also be used to counter the other side’s argument that the state has a legitimate interest in upholding “procreative” marriage.” Today, according to Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury, who is live-blogging the trial, Cott testified that “procreative ability has never been a qualification for marriage.” George Washington, “the father of our country,” she said, was likely sterile when he married Martha Custis.
From Amy Davidson at The New Yorker:
It’s hard to say who was thinking less clearly: Gilbert Arenas, of the Washington Wizards, who brought four guns into his locker room and then, depending on whom you believe, laid them out with a note that said “Pick one” as a joke or to threaten a teammate about a gambling debt; or Slovakian airport security, which planted real explosive materials in the luggage of an unwitting passenger as part of a training exercise and then, when the passenger got past the checkpoint, let the materials go on a plane to Ireland, through the Dublin airport, and home with the still ignorant passenger before alerting Irish authorities in terms unclear enough to cause them to surround the man’s apartment building and arrest him. What if someone had been shot before it was cleared up? (That question applies to both the basketball and airport scenarios.) There’s no tie breaker in the contrition department: Arenas released an apologetic statement, but then did a quick-draw pantomime during a pregame huddle; the Slovaks apologized, too, but then said that everyone was overreacting and that the Irish press was being mean to them.
The United States spends more on medical care per person than any country, yet life expectancy is shorter than in most other developed nations and many developing ones. Lack of health insurance is a factor in life span and contributes to an estimated 45,000 deaths a year. Why the high cost? The U.S. has a fee-for-service system—paying medical providers piecemeal for appointments, surgery, and the like. That can lead to unneeded treatment that doesn’t reliably improve a patient’s health. Says Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies health insurance worldwide, “More care does not necessarily mean better care.”
National Geographic Magazine – NGM.com
That’s all very nice but click on the link and check out the graphic. BE SURE YOU ENLARGE THE GRAPHIC.
Why do we fail to detect or defeat the guilty, and why do we do so well at collective punishment of the innocent? The answer to the first question is: Because we can’t—or won’t. The answer to the second question is: Because we can. The fault here is not just with our endlessly incompetent security services, who give the benefit of the doubt to people who should have been arrested long ago or at least had their visas and travel rights revoked. It is also with a public opinion that sheepishly bleats to be made to “feel safe.” The demand to satisfy that sad illusion can be met with relative ease if you pay enough people to stand around and stare significantly at the citizens’ toothpaste. My impression as a frequent traveler is that intelligent Americans fail to protest at this inanity in case it is they who attract attention and end up on a no-fly list instead. Perfect.
Christopher Hitchens – Slate Magazine
It’s a good essay. You should read it all.
After all, who was looking through the bags at Fort Hood?
My new favorite futile argument for passing the current POS is that, in our politics, simply by passing the aforementioned POS, we forever will have established, banners aloft, the notion that healthcare is a right or, at least, an affirmative obligation of the national government. As a result, we will be freer to move forward as the years go by. This is a fine argument, provided that you were cryogenically frozen in 1958. Let me explain to everyone holding this particular view what is going to happen. The POS is going to pass. The Republicans are going to oppose it and run against it. The Democrats are going to look ridiculous for a year defending it, and the Democrats who most opposed it are going to look the most ridiculous, because it is going to be politically impossible for a Democrat to run against this bill. The prevailing media narrative will prevent it. Millions more American[s] will have health insurance, but millions of Americans will be forced by law to fork over their money, during a grisly recession, to the greediest and least popular industry the country has seen since the railroads were running amok in the 1890’s. These people will go broke a little more slowly, depending on how sick they get. The industry will jack up its rates until we all have to put in new attics. The subsidies will fail to keep up. And then the industry will lie about doing any of it, and the White House will send out a sternly worded letter. The industry will be stopped by the new “consumer protections” approximately as effectively as a butterfly stops a freight train. By the end of 2009, these “reforms” will be thoroughly despised by a healthy portion of the electorate. The Republicans will then use the weaknesses of the reforms to assume control of the Congress, whereupon they will leave the mandates in place, gut the regulations, and laugh their way to the bank doing it. And that is what’s going to happen.
You should go read all of it. Scroll down to Pierce.
POS stands for Piece of S..t.
“In writing this post, I am assuming that speculations about Tiger taking performance-enhancing drugs, mentioned in the L.A. Times yesterday, will turn out to be untrue. If Tiger has been cheating on golf as well as his wife, he’s toast.”
John Cassidy of The New Yorker takes an adult look at Tiger’s problems; a solid assessment. (The line above is actually a post script.)