NO to Olympic Madness in Chicago. President Obama is plumping for Chicago to get the 2016 Summer Olympics. But I have seen and heard news reports that make me furious at the very idea of such a venue, and I hope that the Olympic Committee chooses to inflict the Olympics on some other city.
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Not only would the construction of the Olympic village require the demolition of quality, historic architecture, which is IMPERMISSIBLE in a civilized country, but the current plans are to build stadiums that would be only TEMPORARY and after the Olympics would also be DEMOLISHED! So the people of Chicago are to destroy distinguished architecture AND spend hundreds of millions of dollars building and then demolishing perfectly good buildings (including an 80,000-seat stadium!) for the sake of a goddamned Olympics! Who comes up with such lunacy?
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How on Earth can anyone take even remotely seriously the idea of spending hundreds of millions if not BILLIONS of dollars, on a f*ing Olympics when libraries are being closed down in the proposed host city because it can't meet ordinary expenses?
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Have the people in charge of the Chicago Olympic Committee not got the word? We are in a RECESSION, you morons, and Chicago has had to FURLOUGH city workers to try to close a huge budget gap, and you want to THROW AWAY HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS on the f*ing OLYMPICS? I have a better suggestion: go to the top of the tallest buildings on the Reese hospital campus and DEMOLISH YOURSELVES by throwing yourselves head-first from the roof.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,346 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
The Worst of All Possible Worlds. The Baucus bill now being reviewed by the United States Senate is like a comedy, a satire of healthcare reform: write the worst possible bill and threaten to impose it upon an unwilling country, then see what hilarity ensues. But there is nothing funny about it. It is authoritarian, and would destroy scores of millions of Americans financially, producing enormous hardship even on people who, by scrimping and sacrificing on vacations, entertainment, eating out, clothing, or toys for the kids might be able to survive. Mass bankruptcy and mass foreclosure would inescapably ensue, because for millions of people, scrimping won't cover the hundreds of dollars a month Max Baucus and Barack Obama insist they pay. The infliction of a new tax on people who are just barely making ends meet would mean that millions could no longer afford to pay the mortgage, because hundreds of dollars a month would be redirected to health insurance that they can presently avoid paying for, because they don't need it and don't want it.
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Businesses of many types would be ruined as people cut back on all nonessentials, producing higher unemployment even than we have now, and the present "jobless recovery" would become a more or less permanent recession. Money that now goes to useful things and sustains myriad businesses all across the country would be directed to uselessness, health insurance that people do not need and do not want. To pay for something they don't need or want, they will have to stop spending on things they do need and want. Restaurants will close. Vacation resorts will suffer massive downturns. Airlines and car-rental companies will be squeezed. People may even lose Internet access because they can't afford it. What will that do to kids who can't do online research, and to national inventiveness? When people are forced to save not a few dollars but HUNDREDS of dollars a month, when they can barely pay their present expenses but may even be falling further into debt every month, there's no fat to cut. They can pay their credit-card bills or face THOUSANDS of dollars in late fees, overlimit fees, and usurious interest (at 30% and more) on those fees as well as the underlying debt. OR they can pay the rent or mortgage. Millions will not be able to do both. And credit-card fees and interest will force millions into bankruptcy or even into homelessness. Just so they can pay for healthcare. They'll need healthcare then, once they have no roof over their heads. But it's hard to keep a job when you're homeless and can't shower, or power a clock-radio. If they lose their jobs, they won't be able even to pay for healthcare! What madness has seized Congress? The Max Tax is a Mad Tax, and must be stopped.
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The Baucus bill would make the U.S. Treasury and every private employer in the Nation into bill collectors for the insurance industry. Anyone who sought to evade this dictatorial "individual mandate" by seeking payment "off the books" or as a "private contractor" would be subject to prosecution for tax evasion, civil penalties, seizure of assets, even IMPRISONMENT! Of course, once in prison, they would have FREE healthcare. Does that make sense to anyone?
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This is Obama's idea of fairness in healthcare, for he has endorsed the Baucus bill. Obama must be insane. Perhaps he should be declared mentally incapacitated, and Vice President Biden elevated to the Presidency until Obama can be made sane again. If that's possible.
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Liberals are forced to agree with Conservatives who say that this is an astonishing assault on liberty. Nothing since the military draft was abolished comes anywhere near the totalitarian attack on basic freedoms that this proposed "individual mandate" would constitute. It must be fought with every resource by every part of the political spectrum. Government does NOT have the right to tell people they have to buy ANYTHING from ANY private company for ANY product or service, and does NOT have the right to steal money out of their paychecks to give it to ANY corporation, for any purpose whatsoever. This is "eminent domain" gone mad, in which EVERYONE is subject to having his property (income) stolen by Government and given to someone else.
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If, by some miracle of Governmental highhandedness, this measure becomes law, the people must take up arms and KILL everyone responsible for it, so that their replacements in Congress and the White House can repeal it. Otherwise we should officially remove all references to "liberty" and "rights" from all American political documents, from the Declaration of Independence ("We hold these Truths this Truth to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness..); Preamble to the Constitution ("and promote the general Welfare", and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity), Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights (; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.); etc.
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Thomas Jefferson (or whoever; the origin of the universally known truism is not agreed) wasn't just a-woofin' when he said "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." Americans need to be reminded, endlessly, of their Revolutionary origins.

"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it." -- Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Even on the other side of the Revolution, within Britain, wise men spoke of liberty, and the need always to guard it. One such man was saddened by the impending separation of our theretofore-linked peoples, and opposed the tyrannical behavior of the British monarch and his subservient Parliament in seeking to destroy traditional English rights in America. He was unable to stop the Revolutionary War, but he tried. Other good men, on our side of the Atlantic, made what he saw as the obvious choice between loyalty (to the Empire), which would have required a loss of traditional rights, as against defending their rights even if it meant leaving the Empire. The resulting war was fought on our own soil, and was filled with outrages on both sides. But that it should have and had to have been fought is very clear. It is impossible to imagine the modern world had an earlier generation (the true "Greatest Generation") not fought for their rights against an oppressive government.
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We are lucky, in that we have the means, especially in this electronic age, to head off the need for violent rebellion, by inundating the Senate and House in indignant calls for the total defeat of the "individual mandate" and Senator Baucus's insane "Max Tax". But we should not delude ourselves that Congress and the President have no dictatorial aspirations that we must be willing to fite against, to (their) death. At present, the Federal Government doubtless believes that emails, letters of complaint, and maybe a few noisy demonstrations by a tiny minority will be the entire extent of public opposition to tyranny in the name of "fairness", first in the matter of healthcare, then in any and every matter the Government may choose. Congress and the President don't believe for an instant that modern-day Americans will shoot their oppressors. They must be made to believe that we will.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke

The Max Tax and "individual mandate" must go. What should the Federal Government do if it's not going to give us what we want, a single-payer program like Canada's? A few things could be widely accepted and do some good:
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(1) Forbid denial of insurance at reasonable rates (to be determined as in (2), below) to people on account of pre-existing conditions.
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(2) Create a regulatory overseer to decide what is and is not a reasonable rate for a person who would have been denied health-insurance under the standards prior to passage of a mandate to cover anyone who applies; veto unwarranted increases in costs to consumers by health-insurance companies (deductibles, co-pays, premium increases); reverse denials of claims where medical good practice so requires; in short, do everything as regards oversite of the health-insurance industry that government regulators do with every other regulated industry, from banking to electric and gas utilities.
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(3) Provide that pre-existing coverage in one employer's plan will qualify a person who changes jobs to take up full coverage under the new employer's plan as tho s/he had been employed by that later employer during all the time s/he was covered by an earlier employer. (3a) Provide as well that people who leave a job due to layoff would continue to receive health-insurance benefits from that plan for some reasonable period, say, two years, at no more than 110% of the cost s/he bore under that plan. This would be a cost of doing business to the insurance company, and regulators would NOT allow the insurer to raise the former employer's rates for expenses that result from layoffs. Employers lay people off to save money because they are in financial distress. Health insurers must not be allowed to destroy distressed companies and produce greater unemployment.
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(4) Create a governmental fund to provide for expenses incurred by hospitals for people who cannot afford or refuse to take health insurance, comparable to the uninsured-drivers funds in the various states for costs of automobile accidents. This would NOT provide private health insurance that would be paid month after month, whether a person uses any medical services or not. That's not cost-effective. Such a fund would be drawn against only by hospitals for emergency services or "charity care" given to people who do not go to a private doctor but encounter an acute problem. Its purpose would be twofold: to keep hospitals from experiencing serious financial strain in providing services to the uninsured; and to keep people from dying or becoming seriously disabled — each of which entails costs to society — because of an unexpected emergency or even an anticipated medical problem they were too poor to pay for out-of-pocket or even too poor simply to pay health-insurance premiums, deductibles, and co-pays.
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There are tens of millions of healthy people (young and not-so-young) who do not need and do not use health-insurance. For-profit health-insurance companies love these people, because the premiums they get from them are free money. They don't have to pay out a cent for them, month after month, year after year. What do these people get for the tens of thousands of dollars they pay over to health-insurance companies? Nothing. Maybe some peace of mind, but that is NOTHING for people who don't worry about a health emergency, and healthy people do not worry about such a thing, so end up getting NOTHING for the thousands of dollars they spend each year and over a hundred thousand dollars over the course of their lives for health insurance they do not use. What do you call it when employers or individuals are compelled to pay something for nothing? Ah, yes: that's called a "scam" or "stealing". For healthy people, health insurance is a con(fidence) racket. It gives people confidence that if ever they need health-insurance, it will be there for them. Little do they know that it might not be.
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That is the worst tragedy in this whole process, the fact that people who might be victimized by health insurers are defending the very health insurers who literally would prefer they die than that the company has to pay out anything to keep them alive. People have been sold a bill of goods, at a very high price, and are so sure (confident) that they won't have a problem with health that their insurance doesn't cover, that they disregard all the dangers and all the ways they can lose coverage: layoff; firing; quitting; being found to have omitted some tiny detail in their health-history declarations that the insurer uses to retroactively cancel the insurance (but does not refund the premiums, of course); getting "too sick", so they exceed an arbitrary payout limit; requiring a procedure that the insurer, without any governmental regulator to review or reverse a decision wholly in the insurer's hands, decides is "experimental" or otherwise not covered; and on and on. By the time they discover that the guarantees of coverage they thought they had, have vanished, it's too late. They will already have opposed reform of the system, and it will have failed. They will have no recourse. If they have any resources of their own, they will be drained by a serious accident or illness, and they may go bankrupt and lose their house trying to pay for hospital and doctor bills. There will be no governmental program to rescue them. This will happen millions of times, because health-insurers and their servants in the Radical Right are powerful and well organized, but the Liberal-Left is weak, disorganized, and disunited. So we seem likely to end up with a bill that not only does not do what we want it to do, but actually does HORRENDOUS things we DON'T want it to do. Because that's the way American democracy "works".
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,346 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:41 PM

 
Emails to Congress on the Max Tax. I dispatched today, via feedback form at their websites, two messages to members of Congress. This first was to Senator Max Baucus.

Please commit suicide and save the American people the trouble of having to assassinate you. The idea of taxing people to hand over money they don't want — and can't afford — to spend, to a private insurance company they don't want to deal with, is STUNNING in its highhanded, indeed tyrannical madness and evil. You really want to go back to Montana after you have stolen 13% of Montanans' income? Aren't there a lot of ropes and guns in Montana? I've been to Montana, and the people there didn't strike me as a bunch of passive losers willing to be taxed to death. You really think a state that has no sales tax is going to welcome the Max Tax? If you are suicidal, I'm sure there are simpler ways to do yourself in. Check the website http://www.angelfire.com/moon/101ways/. No Montanan should face trial for killing you. You should kill you.

This second was to Congressman Anthony Weiner.

I have heard you express some concern about the constitutionality of some approaches being considered in healthcare. You are quite right that forcing people to buy health insurance against their will is completely unconstitutional, forbidden by the Fifth Amendment prohibition on governmental taking without just compensation FROM GOVERNMENT. The taking that Senator Baucus is talking about would not be "for public use", which is the only way Government has any right to take private property (income). So Government cannot constitutionally take people's income for the benefit of a private company — any private company, for any purpose whatsoever. Stealing from Peter to pay Paul is not permitted by the Constitution.
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The further requirement of the Fifth Amendment is that private property cannot be taken except with "just compensation". But Government provides no compensation whatsoever for this taking. Rather, it will leave the compensation — if any — that is to be made by the private companies to which they move an employee's money, to be determined by that private company, not by Government. Such a proposal is insanely unconstitutional.
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It is not for Government to claim that they are entitled to seize money from our paychecks because the private companies to which they give that stolen money will provide "just compensation". If a health-insurance company can deny a claim, then the person who needs that claim paid will have had his property (income) stolen by Government but receive NO benefit. But it doesn't matter: the just compensation for Governmental taking must come from GOVERNMENT.
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The comparison often made to automobile insurance is not remotely valid, because people do not have to drive. Further, the Government does not deduct the cost of car insurance from people's paychecks and pay it over to a private insurance company. The only things people would have to do to fall afoul of the proposed "individual mandate" are (a) be present in the United States and (b) breathe.
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Government cannot tell people they must, as a requirement of simply living in the United States, buy health insurance, life insurance, a car, a house, or anything else that Government tyrants highhandedly tell us we SHOULD, according to them, have to buy as a condition to living in the United States. Government does NOT have the right, most especially, to SEIZE money from a person's paycheck to TRANSFER it to a private company, any private company, for any purpose whatsoever. Using the model of a car or house, again, on what conceivable provision of the Constitution would the Federal Government — a LIMITED government in the Constitution as written by the Framers in 1787 — be empowered to require people to buy a car or house, and take the payments for that car or house out of their paycheck to transfer to a private carmaker or real-estate company?
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The only way Government can impose an individual mandate and deduct moneys from a person's paycheck is to make health insurance a Government service and levy a tax to pay for it. If we create a single-payer system, the Government would be entitled to levy a tax to support it. But such a tax would properly fall only on the wealthy.
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I know that the Constitution has been very seriously weakened in recent decades, to the point that many people in Government seem to regard it as merely a statement of druthers rather than, as that Constitution itself says, "the supreme Law of the Land" (Article VI, paragraph 2). But if we are to avoid complete social disintegration and the rise of insurrectionary movements all over the country (not just in the South, where talk of secession is already rampant), we must return to first principles, the principles that we all agree on: limited government, and Government as servant of the people, not master. It is not for the U.S. Government to become a corporatist state that uses the power of governmental coercion and seizure to benefit private corporations.
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If the "Max Tax", in any guise, is part of a health-reform bill, you and all defenders of the little guy (which includes some genuine Conservatives) must remove it or defeat the bill. Aside from the constitutional issue, there is the basic economic reality that people cannot afford another tax, and not just because of the current recession — especially not a tax that will NOT cover all the expenses of healthcare but will leave co-pays on TOP of the money seized by the Government and turned over to private corporations. It appears that the bulk of members of Congress have no idea how hard-pressed the great majority of people are, despite all the talk in media about foreclosures, bankruptcies, unemployment, and consumer debt. So let's remind them: real wages have FALLEN for over a decade, as jobs shipped abroad have produced a labor surplus here that has empowered the owners of corporations to cut wages and benefits, as by increasing the cost to employees of such health-insurance as people still have thru their employer.
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There has been a stark and astonishingly rapid redistribution of wealth UPWARD, FROM the poor and middle class TO the rich, since the Reaganite Plutocratic Revolution carried off by the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The income-distribution profile of the United States now approaches that of the most unequal and unfair nations of Latin America. The typical American family, thanks to usury, overlimit fees, and usury on such fees more than just on money actually borrowed — all of these being problems that Congress refuses to fix — is falling further and further into debt every year. THEY HAVE NO MONEY LEFT OVER FOR A NEW HEALTH TAX! Are you people serious? How ignorant, or blind, is Congress that it has no idea that almost NO ONE can afford a new tax, of any kind, but especially not a 13% tax for something they don't want and could not afford to use unless there were NO co-pays whatsoever? A new 13% tax — or 7% tax or penalty, or even 3%; and when you're talking about a seizure that Government has no right to make, and also talking about people who are falling further into debt every month, ANY rate is too much — would ruin millions of American families. They will lose their house; and their car might also be repossessed, so they can't even live in it after they lose their house.
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Congress seems to believe that tens of millions of Americans will consent to have their lives destroyed by Governmental thievery in service of the insurance industry. May I remind Congress, thru you, that there are 200 million GUNS in the United States? How many Americans who lose their house, and car, and furniture, and security of every type, will still have their guns?
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Congress is even talking about cutting Medicare! Are you insane? First off, I face having to lose $95 a month from my Social Security check when I turn 65 at the end of this year, when prices have gone up (despite the recession), my homeowners insurance has gone up, my property taxes have gone up, and I have, now, only $308 a month left from my Social Security check after my mortgage payment (which includes homeowners insurance and property tax) is deducted! $308, for every other expense: electricity, gas, car insurance, food, heating (in winter, which is now racing up to us), clothing, Internet access — everything, for an entire month. No increase in Social Security payments is planned for 2010. Once I have to pay $95 a month, which will be taken out of my Social Security check, that $308 becomes $213! And Medicare benefits are to be reduced?!?
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As it is, I, who rely upon Social Security and have very little money in IRA's, am to pay the same $95 a month for Medicare as people who have tens, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of dollars in IRA's, and a company pension as well as Social Security. Why should they get Medicare at all? But even if they should get Medicare, why do they pay only what I pay, when my total income is less than $15,000 a year? Put the other way around, why do I have to pay the same $1,140 a year that relatively wealthy people pay? That $95 a month will require me to go into my little IRA's every month, and if I can't find some other source of income, I will be destitute within three years. This is what Congress regards as fairness. Working people are to be destroyed by a new tax; retirees are to be destroyed by Medicare costs they cannot afford, while their benefits are to be cut.
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I am ashamed of what this country has become.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,346 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:45 PM

 
Effectively Uninsured. A new Harvard University study says that 45,000 Americans die each year from lack of health insurance. I knew that the figure I had seen, 18,000 a year, had to be wrong. But there is an even larger number that has not been investigated: the number of uninsured AND insured who die because they don't go to the doctor because they feel they can't afford it.
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A great many Americans who have some health insurance are unable to use it, so are actually uninsured as a practical matter. How is a person who has $2 left at the end of the week supposed to pay a $25 co-pay for a visit to a doctor, and another $15 or $50 for a prescription?
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How many Americans technically have health insurance but can't afford to take advantage of it because after the many charges taken out of their meager pay, including the employee portion of the grossly inflated health-insurance premiums the company they work for has to pay, they do not really have the money to use their health insurance? They can't afford the co-pay! They can't afford the prescription/s, even if there is a prescription component to their supposed insurance, because there is so much still to pay after the insurance has paid as much as it's going to pay, that they simply can't afford it. They can't go to the doctor. They can't pay for the medications the doctor may prescribe. So, if they feel so bad that they have to sacrifice other parts of their life — including responsibilities to their children — and go to the doctor because they are concerned that what they have might kill them, and they find out that what they have is only temporary and not potentially fatal after all, they have to ask the doctor what will happen if they don't take the meds he prescribes — or just not tell him they can't afford what he tells them to take. Some are too embarrassed to admit that even after insurance, they can't afford prescriptions. So they make a personal decision to suffer for a while longer, hoping that something in their financial life changes for the better — but it rarely does — and gamble that the doctor is right that it won't kill them. Some people take even riskier gambles than that. They go against the doctor's advice that it is very important they take their medication, because they simply cannot afford the medication, especially if it is for a chronic condition, so will entail an out-of-pocket expense month after month.
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Were they able to admit to the doctor that they can't afford the medicine he wants them to take, he might be able to steer them to a public subsidy program, Astra Zeneca's private assistance program for drugs they make, etc. But some people are too proud to admit any such thing. They are literally embarrassed to death.
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Is this a good way, as comic Blake Clarke says, to "Thin the herd!" of the stupid? I don't think so, because people who don't want to be a burden to society but to take care of themselves have a character trait that, in moderation, we want not just to survive in the gene pool (if it has a genetic component) but also become dominant. Even if this self-reliance trait is merely psychological, if it can be passed along (again, in moderation) to their children, so much the better for society. We don't want people to let guilt over becoming a burden or not "paying their own way" kill them.
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It is one of the most astonishing things that has ever happened that the Republican Rightwing has persuaded poor, uneducated "white trash" who assuredly have much higher uninsured rates than educated people of the same ethnicity, that Liberals, who want them to live well, be paid well, have good working conditions, be treated with dignity, and to have free, high-quality healthcare, are their ENEMIES, but the plutocrats who have exported millions of jobs to China and other low-wage countries to bring crushing pressure on Southern white trash to take less pay, fewer benefits, and accept either a total lack of health insurance or impose a plan that is so costly that they cannot use it, are their FRIENDS. How on Earth did they do that?
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Sadly, the answer is tribalism. The rich and Radical Right have used the lack of education and intelligence in poor white trash to manipulate them into FEELING that the programs that would benefit them the most are put forward by their tribal enemies who hate them. They will point to verbiage like mine, about "poor, uneducated white trash" as proof that we are their enemies — never mind that we don't want them to be poor, or uneducated, or self-made trash (subverting their lives by dropping out of school, subverting their health by smoking tobacco and using methamphetamine, etc.) but want them instead to "straighten up and fly rite". We lose patience with their stupidity, in letting themselves be led around by the nose by magic chains labeled "gay marriage" and "abortion", into working to kill themselves and their children by so delaying medical care they cannot afford because The System is rigged against them by the rich, that they DIE or are permanently disabled. We want them to wake up to who the real Enemy is: the Radical Right in the service of the rich. But no, they'd rather pretend that the rich who use them see them as their equal — HA! — and treat them with respect. Oh yeah, of course they do. To your face. But the instant you are out of earshot, they say horrendous things about the stupid rubes and worthless white trash whose only use is to keep Congress from acting to rein in the abuses of the obscenely rich.
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What are Liberals to do or say? Play the same game of tribalism? "Hey, man, we're just like you. No, we're not uneducated, poor, and illiterate. No, we don't work for cents on the dollar of a fair wage, and no, we don't subvert our health with chronic smoking, alcohol excess, or drug use. But in every other way, we're exactly like you!" Who is going to believe that?
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And there is one unbridgeable line that poor white trash won't cross. They'll accept a Jew as House minority whip, but they won't accept a black President or Congressman as someone "just like them". And they won't accept no damned faggot as "just like them" — even if cousin Billy Bob never married and doesn't date. We're not fools. We know you look down your nose at us. But our friends in the Republican Party treat us like equals. They really need our votes, and look out for us.
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Sure they do.
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Listen, you ignorant morons. WE know you are ignorant morons. YOU know you are ignorant morons. Wake the f* up! If you had the sense of a retarded chipmunk you would know — and do know, in your unspeaking heart — that the Republican Party doesn't give a crap about your lives, and Republican members of Congress do NOT regard you as their equal. They are playing you, fool.
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We Liberals will tell you that we are better than you, because we are. We stayed in school. We got our education. We work not just hard, but also smart. We'll tell you you're being used by your betters. Not us, tho yes, we are better. But by the rich in your own region, and other parts of the country, who HATE you. We feel sorry for you, and we're angry at you when you shout us down and even threaten violence to preserve your own economic and sociological oppression! We're trying to help you, you sh*heads. Do you really LIKE being white trash? Do you really LIKE being poor and having nothing? being unable to go to the doctor — or, crucially, dentist — so having aches and pains and fevers, and not being able to chew without pain? Do you like paying thru the nose for health insurance, and not being able to use it unless you're afraid you'll die if you don't come up with the co-pay and prescription costs? Does it do your heart good to see your kids cough and hear them cry thru the nite?
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"Well, my life may not be great, but at least I'm not a goddamned nigger!" That's a comfort to you, is it? Poor black people reach out and say, "Hey, we're all in the same boat. We've got to get past this race nonsense and work together for better pay, better healthcare, dental care, working conditions, education. These are the things that matter, not the color of our skin or the texture of our hair." And you say? "Go f* yourself."
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And that's the way you f*k yourselves, decade after decade, generation after generation. The people who want to work with you to improve your lives are the Enemy. The people who want to use you and keep you down are your Friends. Of course. What were we thinking?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,345 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:56 PM

 
Obama as Decolonizer. I sent the following message to the President via feedback form at the White House website.

When I was born, Hawaii was a territory, not a state. When you were born, it was a state. You later moved to the mainland, so your right to run for President was never in doubt. But what of U.S. citizens born in Puerto Rico who remain on that island? Are they eligible to run for President? If not, you need to correct that injustice. You need to bring Puerto Rico — and the U.S. Virgin Islands, right alongside, in which the same uncertainty holds — into the Union together as the 51st State, and end the outrage of there being two types of U.S. citizenship, first-class and second-class.
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If Puerto Ricans do not ratify statehood in the followup referendum, the statehood act should provide that refusal of statehood in referendum constitutes a vote for independence, and produces an automatic grant of independence as of the day the results of that plebiscite are certified.
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In that way, you can end the status debate that has paralyzed Puerto Rico for two generations, and move the question. Tell Puerto Ricans and Virgin Islanders that they must decide: statehood or independence, and they've got to choose now.
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If they choose statehood, we rid ourselves of the humiliating hypocrisy of speaking out of both sides of our national mouth, about freedom from one side and colonialism from the other. We will gain two Hispanic votes in the Senate and five Hispanic votes in the House, which will help diversify membership in Congress and strengthen the voice of the meek against the mighty. (It would also help pass universal healthcare.)
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If they refuse statehood, both Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands should be forced into independence, so they no longer parasitize the U.S. Treasury, which now has to pay out some $11 billion a year for the privilege of maintaining colonies that embarrass us before the United Nations every year. The one country on Earth that should never have had colonies has half a dozen of them. The small Pacific territories can all easily be merged into the State of Hawaii, where their small populations can make themselves heard.
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Even if some of the $11 billion Puerto Rico takes would continue to be paid to individuals in the form of earned benefits such as Social Security, the Treasury would still see a sharp cut in outlays if Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands choose independence. That cut would help us reduce the deficit and tend to the needs of people who are proud to be U.S. citizens, by cutting loose people who are not proud. But it is probable that most people in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands will vote for Statehood — if someone forces them to stop procrastinating and make the choice they must someday make. This is someday.
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The first President born outside the 48 conterminous states should feel a special obligation to end the colonial condition of other insular territories. The first black President should as well feel a special obligation to end the second-class citizenship of the racially mixed populations of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
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Abraham Lincoln was known as the "Great Emancipator" for ending slavery. Might Barack Obama become known as the "Great Decolonizer", who ended the disgrace of the people who waged the first war against colonialism ending up with colonies?
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As the first President from Oceania, you can bring all of our Pacific colonies into full union with the Nation, as part of a "Big Hawaii", or let them "assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station" that we ourselves sought from our colonial overlord. I hate to think of the United States as a "colonial overlord", but that is, speaking bluntly, what we are as regards Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, the 'Commonwealth' of the Northern Marianas, and our other "insular territories". Tho "insular territory" may sound much nicer than "colony", only the correct term makes plain the ugliness of the current relationship between those territories and the United States: they are colonies, we are the colonial overlord. That must end. You should end it.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,344 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:35 PM

 
"Socialist" Does Not Start with an N. In the past couple of months, and especially during "Tea Parties" and anti-"Obamacare" demonstrations, a lot of preposterous language has been thrown around. The Radical Right has called President Obama (aloud and on posters in which fotos of various infamous people appear) a "socialist", "communist", "radical", "leftist", "Hitler", "tyrant", "Stalin", "Lenin", and other extravagant and absurd things. None of those words starts with N, but the N-word lies behind them all. Why don't these Rightwing demonstrators just call him a "nigger" and have done with it? That's what it all boils down to, and we all know it. Be forthright. If your racial attitudes are legitimate, so is the word that encapsulates them: NIGGER. We all know that's what you mean.
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We have heard insistence on justice being called "tyranny" before. Here's George Wallace on his inauguration as Governor of Alabama in 1963:

In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth [he means "white people"], I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

So we know what you mean when you call Obama a tyrant. Just say it, so we can deal openly with your unease. Yes, some of us on the Left will dismiss you on the absolutely unsympathetic ground that you are just simpleminded bigots who are The Enemy who must be crushed, or at best ignored. Other people will be more understanding. Things have changed, and sometimes big changes are hard to accept and adjust to. Liberals who understand, that change is hard, will reach out to try to assuage anxieties.
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We see plenty of anxieties out there in the crowds of unhappy white people assembled by the Radical Right. They say things like, "We have lost our country" — by which they plainly mean "White America", a United States in which white people ruled governmentally and were at the top of the heap socially.
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I am part of the white portion of the United States, but not of White America. I'm not threatened by Obama's rise to the Presidency. When I was a child, I thought I would/should be President someday myself, but in that I am homosexual, that was even farther out of the picture than becoming the Nation's first black President. Even today, the jivest street nigger feels free to use "faggot" as a putdown for anyone who irritates him. Yup, those damned faggots, with their education and a job, self-respect and internal contentment — they sure do deserve contempt by unemployable ghetto-mentality losers.
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I am still amazed, on occasion, that we have a black President, and it makes me smile, broadly. I'm almost 65 years old. When I was born, the South was segregated. Throughout my childhood, our cities were mainly white. The world heavyweight boxing champion was Rocky Marciano. In my teens, white Northerners who went to the South to register black voters were being killed by the KKK. President Eisenhower had to send troops to Little Rock. George Wallace stood in the door of the University of Alabama to block 'nigras' from getting into that lily-white institution. Medgar Evers was shot. Then MLK.
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To a lot of people my age, of all colors, the idea of our having a black President seems preposterous. It's like we're in some ridiculous dream. "A black President! Dream on! That will never happen." Remember, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever". And the Presidency has a "Whites Only" sign on it.
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When we watch the news and see a competent black man behind a podium with the Presidential Seal on it, we are, nearly 8 months in, still amazed, and so very, very proud of our country for having moved so far on the road to social justice. Maybe we can have an openly homosexual President someday soon. (Now all I need is to win a couple hundred million dollars in the lottery. Stranger things have happened, right? Like a black man becoming President of the United States. You can't get much stranger than that.)
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Millions of other Americans, of my age and younger but of the insecure-whitey variety, are not so much amazed as appalled that we have a black President. And they don't smile broadly when they see Obama standing behind the Presidential Seal.
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The bulk of Americans are very proud of the status that our magnificent society has permitted people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey — and even some black people with normal names! — to achieve. But for some people, no one can rise unless someone else falls. This might be called the "Teeter-Totter View of History" or "of Society". It's not like cream rising to the top of unhomogenized milk, in which each drop of cream melds with all the other drops and the whole quart remains milk. A quick shake of the bottle (with the cap on) will return the cream to a mix with the rest of the milk, and we had that on 9/11/2001. The whole Nation was shaken by the events of that day, and we overcame our differences, briefly.
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The images of black Americans, stunned, staggering down the street covered in white ashes from the World Trade Center, made us all cry (well, all of us with a heart). And they were Us. That 21st Century era of good feeling did not, however, last. For many white people, and not just in the South, blacks are back to being Them again.
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To justify their feeling that They are out to "get" Us, these 'conservative' (reactionary) white people project onto President Obama, as loathsome Fox News drama queen Glenn Beck put it, "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture" — that is, half of himself — which they figure Obama must feel, because they feel 'a deep-seated hatred for black people and the black culture'.
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Obama is so 'dangerous', a word you hear over and over from the Radical Right, because he's not a caricature. He speaks perfect (white) English, not Ebonics. He hasn't the scantest trace of a black accent. If you heard him only over the radio or telephone, you wouldn't know he was black. That's dangerous. You might even take him as white and treat him the same as you treat (other) people.
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Obama is educated — Columbia and HARVARD-educated (and his wife is both PRINCETON and Harvard educated). He is likely to inspire millions of young black people to eradicate the black accent they hear around them, in deciding what their own speech, going forward, should be. And then we'll have millions and millions of black people you might mistake for (white) people.
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What are we going to do if all blacks stay in school, become educated, use absolutely standard English, plan for the future, and work diligently toward reasonable goals? One has already become President. "Once you go black, you never go back." It's like Jackie Robinson. Look at sports today! Before you know it, They will take over the whole country, every institution, from politics to finance to education to the military. White people won't be able to compete — because blacks are intrinsically superior to whites? Is that what they're really afraid of? Black men are especially scary because they are reputed to have great big, um, sexual organs, which proves their superiority over white men, right? No, manhood isn't measured in inches.
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They were bred, during the slave era, to produce stronger children, just as horses or dogs were bred for certain preferred characteristics. How are we supposed to compete with eugenically designed reproduction? Well, I don't know how many arranged marriages/breeding couplings there were in the slave era, but that's a very long time ago, and in the several generations since then, no eugenically-intended selective breeding program has been going on. So are you really just worried that white people are inferior generally, and the only way we have achieved anything in the world is by force of arms? Now blacks are being trained in the military to use arms. So they will inevitably turn those arms against their trainers and reduce us to the same inferior condition that they once suffered at our hands — and which Nature consigned us to a long time ago anyway, to boot?
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At end, the people behind the Tea Party protests (which were obviously misnamed and misconceived, because the Boston Tea Party was about "no taxation without representation", and the protesters assuredly have representation in the bodies that decide taxes) and all the rest are not proud of their (white) race and defending against unfairness but actually suspect that they are inferior, and their inferiority is about to come out and consign them and their descendants to social, financial, and political inferiority to the end of time.
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Once Liberals understand "where these people are coming from", as we used to say in the Sixties, we can address their anxieties and apply rationality. There is one human species, which is everywhere roughly identical in natural abilities of all kinds. What makes for different levels of accomplishment are various factors, key among which is motivation. Given the same advantages and the same motivation, levels of achievement among races are not noticeably different. Blacks may dominate boxing at the moment, but only because whites don't feel that getting your face battered and your brain jangled is a good way to make money or seek fame. Blacks may seek out a career in professional sports because that doesn't require an advanced degree that they can't afford to pursue. In some cases, they can go directly from high school to pro sports, music, or other industries that pay well, without delaying several years and incurring vast debt for college loans. Economic inequities have pointed a larger proportion of blacks in some directions and whites in others.
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We can deal with the root causes of the irrational and exaggerated fear that motivates the rage against all things Obama. But first the anti-Obama activists must admit what they really fear. The (white) people so upset with President Obama need to heed Dr. Phil's fourth Life Law, "You cannot change what you do not acknowledge." They must as well consider this discussion of Life Law #9 from that same good old Southern boy (who has some brains and an education): "There is power in forgiveness."

Hate, anger and resentment are destructive, eating away at the heart and soul of the person who carries them. They are absolutely incompatible with your own peace, joy and relaxation. Ugly emotions change who you are and contaminate every relationship you have. They can also take a physical toll on your body, including sleep disturbance, headaches, back spasms, and even heart attacks. * * *

Forgiveness is not about another person who has transgressed against you; it is about you. Forgiveness is about doing whatever it takes to preserve the power to create your own emotional state. It is a gift to yourself and it frees you. You don't have to have the other person's cooperation, and they do not have to be sorry or admit the error of their ways. Do it for yourself.

Do it for the Nation.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:57 PM

 
Confederacy II, The Sequel. 2009 feels very much as 1861 must have felt to Americans looking at the savage intolerance and wild rhetoric of Southern loons who actually thought they could destroy the United States because they didn't like the way an election went, and could not face the fact that history was about to move on and leave their "peculiar institution" (black slavery) in the dust. Again we hear talk of secession. Again we see people taking guns near the President.
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Let us make plain that if there is a rerun of the Civil War, the result will be the same, except much, much worse for the South. We learned from the first Civil War that you can't forgive and forget. When we tried to 'heal the Nation's wounds', the Rebels took that as recognition that their cause was just, and that the North had no guts nor the stomach to carry thru the emancipation of blacks. The unrepentant South undid Reconstruction, took away the rights that the Union Army had delivered for black Americans, then organized the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups to employ systematic terrorism to enforce white supremacy, which was recodified in laws passed by Southern states in defiance of the Fourteenth Amendment. The North stood idly by, and let it all happen, because for many Northerners, the war was about the indissolubility of the Union, not emancipation, much less political or social equality for all races.
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The moral of the story is that if "the South shall rise again", the penalties imposed upon the defeated traitors must be MASS DEATH. Leave none alive. If they take up arms against the Union, the Union must KILL THEM ALL, and replace them with immigrants — preferably nonwhite, Spanish-speaking, Catholic immigrants to make fundamental and irreversible changes to the South and finally bring it into the Union of whole heart.
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The very least that should happen to traitors who serve in the political organizations (all participants in insurrectionary military organizations should be executed, summarily: you find them with a gun in their hands, you kill them) that incite mass treason is forced sterilization — castration is quick and permanent — so that there will be no future "Sons of Veterans of the Second Confederacy", pair to the present treason-minded organization Sons of Confederate Veterans. Had we sterilized every Rebel soldier in 1865, there would be no SCV nor League of the South today to stir up secession talk and destabilize people whose grasp on reality is tenuous at best. Governor Rick Perry (listed by Wikipedia as a member of SCV) should be made to understand with certitude that if he even TRIES to take Texas out of the Union, he will, at the least, be castrated, and possibly both castrated first and executed second. And his execution should be by hanging — and not trapdoor-gallows hanging. Place a noose around his neck (and, appropriately, a hood over his face so witnesses don't have to suffer unpleasant images), then hoist him slowly off the ground so he can dance his way to hell.
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There is too much of the "good old boy" glorification of a savage version of manhood in the South. We need to cut it out of the culture, just as we tame some horses and bulls: with a knife. You don't geld your best animals, but Southern racists and secessionists are not remotely our best animals. Animals, yes. Best? No. And when the gene pool has been tidied up a bit, the moron population in southern portions of the United States will plummet. Recruiting sturdy, intelligent people from Mexico and points, um, south will replace Southern indolence with Mexican industriousness, and the Nation will profit mightily.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,344 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:03 PM

 
Hearts and Minds. Further to my post last nite about fiting in Afghanistan, Americans may have to face an extremely unpleasant choice, fairly soon. In counterinsurgency warfare, the force that wants to suppress a guerrilla movement has to win "the hearts and minds" of the people, at least to the point of passive cooperation. At present, we don't have that. The Taliban does. The local population in much of Afghanistan passively accepts the Taliban among them. They do not tell the central government where the Taliban fiters they know of are probably camped; they do not tell the Americans or other NATO troops operating in their area who among them is Taliban or pro-Taliban, and point them out to be dealt with. They keep their silence, and thus silently participate in the war on the Taliban's side.
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But we don't have to fite the Afghanistan war as a counterinsurgency, so we DON'T have to win the "hearts and minds" of Afghans.
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Key portions of the Afghan populace are involved in the heroin trade, growing poppies and sending their chemical products off to poison the West, including all the NATO countries, including the U.S., that are involved in the war. Some of that money also funds Taliban activities: it buys the fertilizer that is used not for cash crops, not to grow food, but to create roadside bombs. Encouraging poppy growers to plant different cash crops instead has not worked. Because the poppy farmers are indecent, antihuman scum. We have an absolute right to treat them as the subhuman scum they are.
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Afghans must be shaken out of their sleepy dreamworld, which permits them to play both ends against the middle and continue to attack the world with drugs. They must be told that at some point our patience will run out, and we will turn from trying to help them free themselves from the Taliban to regarding them all as enemies to be attacked with deadly force, all the force, indeed, that may be needed to render them incapable of harming us in any way, abroad or, especially, in the United States.
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At end, we need to tell Afghans that there comes a time when only total war suffices, and we may decide that we have no acceptable alternatives to waging total war not for but against them, and killing every last one of them who we even think might endanger us. We didn't reason with the people of Japan in World War II. We didn't ask the people of Germany to turn against Hitler and come over to our side. We crushed them with overwhelming force. We subjected them to more death and destruction than they could stand, and they finally surrendered. THEN we were able to reconstruct their societies according to our own principles. We had to tear down what was there to build new societies in their place.
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To get to that point — nation-REbuilding — we had to drop two atomic bombs on Japan. In the end, we and our allies killed MILLIONS of Germans and Japanese. And we must be prepared to kill MILLIONS OF AFGHANS to protect ourselves. Afghans must be made to understand that there is no price in Afghan life that we are not prepared to pay to prevent the recapture of Afghanistan by the Taliban and the reestablishment of Al-Qaeda training camps on Afghan soil.
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If we reconceive the Afghan war not as a counterinsurgency struggle but as total war, we untie our hands. No longer do we have to be concerned about civilian casualties. They become sad necessities, unavoidable side effects of total war. We didn't attack them first. They attacked us, by actively conspiring to train Al-Qaeda for war against us, on our own territory thousands of miles from their own country.
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Afghans must understand that we are perfectly willing to kill every last person in Afghanistan if that's what it takes to keep the United States safe, and that we don't need to endanger ourselves to do that. We have bombers that can drop very large bombs from very high up. We have intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads that can obliterate Afghanistan for us, killing millions instantly and millions more over days or weeks, from radiation sickness, a terrible way to die. The cloud of fallout will take two weeks to reach our shores, by which time most of its radiation will have been reduced below seriously dangerous levels. Much of the material that originally rose into high altitudes will have fallen out of the sky, some onto countries far from the United States, but most into the Pacific Ocean, where it will do minimal harm even to sea creatures. But Afghanistan? There will be no Afghanistan, in any recognizable form, after total nuclear war.
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Tell Afghans:

If it comes down to you or us, it's not going to be us. You don't have to love us. You don't even have to embrace democracy or end your corrupt, childish ways. All you have to do is help us to destroy our enemies. If you don't, we will have no choice but to conclude that you are our enemies. As we regard things, the only proper way to deal with enemies is to destroy them. So, you can help us destroy the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, or we can destroy you. Your choice. But remember, if it comes down to you or us, it's not going to be us that gets slautered. We will save ourselves by killing you.

We might be saddened by that necessity, but we will be angrier at you, for making us do that, than at ourselves for accepting the inescapable necessity of doing it. In any "Them or Us" choice, we are always going to choose to save "Us" and kill "Them". You can be "Us", by being our active allies in destroying the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. You can be "Them". What you can't be is uncommitted. We have an expression you need to take very seriously, as the basis for a literal life-or-death decision: "If you're not with us, you're against us." If you ARE with us, you BECOME "Us", entitled to the same consideration we give our own people. If not, however, you are "Them". And in any choice between "Them" and "Us", we never choose to spare "Them" and sacrifice "Us".

There is no middle ground. Passivity is not an option. You must be actively involved in taking the war to the Taliban, or we will take the war to you. Make your choice, and live, or die, with the consequences.

There is a further fillip that might prove decisive. Tell the Afghans that we are tired of fiting for principle alone. From now on, any war we are forced to fite will be for territory, and every country we defeat will be annexed, permanently; first as a colony ("territory"), then, over time, as a state or part of a larger state. In the case of Afghanistan, a conquered Afghanistan would be administered as a territory for a transitional period of, say, ten years, during which the people would be taught English (tho they could continue to speak their own language as well) and American civilization. Then, when the ten years is up, all Afghans would be made U.S. citizens, and their country would be made over into the State of Afghanistan, with two Senators in the U.S. Senate and however many Representatives its (war-reduced) population would be entitled to.
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Perhaps if everyone on Earth understood that any country we are forced to go to war against will be permanently added to our Empire — as was the case with most great powers thru most of history — and converted to a mere part of a 'Greater America' that speaks English and is governed by U.S. law and custom (including the absolute right of Moslems to convert to Christianity if they like), there will be few countries willing even to think of attacking us. If any does attack us, however, we should make good on our threat: conquer, annex, reorganize, and convert all conquered territories into integral parts of a world-spanning federal Union in which everyone has the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and everyone is called "Americans".
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:44 AM

 
Insincerity and Idiocy on Afghanistan. Two quite different men, George F. Will and Senator Carl Levin, have both come out publicly as opposing the addition of large numbers of U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Both make public pretensions, obviously disingenuous, that the Afghan government and society themselves must assume the main burden of defeating the Taliban and bringing Afghanistan into the modern world, and our role should be (at least relatively) reduced. George F. Will, an extremely stupid man I have long despised and held in considerable contempt, pretends, at least for the general public, to believe that unmanned drones and the occasional airstrike will suffice to keep the Taliban from retaking all of Afghanistan — even as reports surface that the Taliban operates with impunity in some 80% or more of the country, even WITH all the U.S. and NATO troops on the scene.
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George Will is a Rightwinger who plainly has enlisted in the campaign to disgrace the current President, even if it should bring disaster to Afghanistan, a new Taliban government, reopened Al-Qaeda training camps, and more attacks on U.S. territory, embassies, etc., by people trained in Afghanistan. The Rightwing is so militantly hostile to a Democratic President — any Democrat, but especially the current BLACK Democrat — that they are willing to risk humiliation of the United States Government and renewed attacks upon the "homeland" to oust him.
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What is Democratic Senator Carl Levin's excuse?
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I am so disgusted with that Jewish Senator that I sent the following message via feedback form at his website:

If the Taliban announced that upon triumphant expulsion of the Americans, the restored Taliban government would bring tens of thousands of Palestinian militants to Afghanistan and give them intense military training, then arm them to the teeth and send them back to Palestine to kill Jews at the highest levels of the Israeli government and to wipe out Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, would you be so blasé about the possibility of a massive U.S. failure in Afghanistan because YOU oppose sending more troops? I doubt it. Your devotion is, I suspect, not to the United States but to Israel, and if the Taliban were a danger to Israel rather than to the United States, you wouldn't hesitate to send a HUNDRED THOUSAND troops to Afghanistan. By the way, Senator, do you really think the Taliban has NO designs on Israel?

The stupidity of the human race never fails to amaze me. George Will suggests that we can't win a war in Afghanistan with 62,000 men but could with 0. Carl Levin says we can't win with 62,000 troops today, but can tomorrow if the Afghans themselves will just step up. He pretends that we can somehow magically make the current inept and corrupt government 'ept' and honest, and thus able to win the support of the people. Does he suggest we overthrow the crook Karzai? And install whom? Abdullah Abdullah? Do we know that he actually would have won the election if it were completely clean? And if the current government does not have the support of the people, why would Afghans unite to defy and defeat the Taliban if they will be mowed down because there's no one to protect them?
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Levin favors an Afghan "surge". What he doesn't admit is that to the extent there was any lasting success from the surge of U.S. troops in Iraq it is because an increased U.S. presence emboldened Iraqis to turn against insurgents they had not dared to oppose openly before, because to oppose them before an increased U.S. presence, would have meant death. Levin wants to pretend the Afghan government and military are capable of carrying out their own surge, even tho they haven't done so heretofore, WITHOUT any increased U.S. cover to embolden them. On what basis does he reach such an astonishingly, contemptibly STUPID conclusion?
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Nancy Pelosi is also openly opposing more troops for Afghanistan, solidifying her place in history as the very worst Speaker of the House this Nation has ever had, and possibly the very worst there will ever be.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,343 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:05 AM

 
Madness in the News. Two items on one screen in AOL today show that madness reigns supreme in this country, in this era.
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The first item is a news story that speaks to a 115-year-old woman's dying of a heart attack in a Los Angeles HOSPITAL. Why on Earth was a woman of that age taken to a hospital? This is the kind of insane waste that people are rightly concerned about with universal healthcare. No way on Earth should a 115-year-old have been taken to a hospital for ANYTHING. How much did that preposterous and inexcusable waste of everyone's time and money cost? And whom did it cost? I think a 115-year-old has been ready for decades to die at any time, and prolonging her life for a few minutes or hours is not worth any expenditure of any emergency personnel's time nor hospital's money. Let extremely old people at the edge of death die with dignity in their own home.
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The second absurd item is an Internet poll:

CENK UYGUR asks ...
Who kept us safer during their first 8 months in office?

Barack Obama
George Bush
Not Sure

Given that January 20th (Inauguration Day) plus 8 months takes us to September 20th, 9 days after the catastrophic attacks upon the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, there is no factual question here. The 9/11 attacks occurred on George Bush's watch, so everyone should answer that Barack Obama kept us safer, right?
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Wrong. The actual results of that Internet poll are Obama 23%, Bush 71%, and Not Sure 6%! Only 4 states (Delaware, Montana, Washington, and Vermont) got it right, 100% for Obama. Alas, in two of those states, there was only one vote at the time I checked; in the other two, a total of 7 votes.
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How could a result that is 180 degrees contrary to fact, happen? Well, I'll let you in on a dirty little secret about Internet polls: the Radical Right spends a lot of time and energy falsifying Internet political poll results by voting repeatedly. How do they do this? Easy. With most such polls, there either is no control at all on how many times a given computer can submit a vote (as is the case in the poll at issue), or the controls are easily sidestepped. How? You just erase cookies, because any info about a given machine's having answered the poll will be stored in a cookie. Erase the cookie (and you don't even have to know which cookie it is but can simply delete all cookies) and you can vote again — and again and again and again. Thus does the Radical Right skew ALL political polls they wish to skew, thru massive dishonesty.
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What else would you expect of the Radical Right? If you don't want the Nation to realize you are a tiny fraction of the electorate, you manipulate the Internet and media to give the appearance of a large group. You send the same few people to "town halls" in different locations and tell them to make a lot of noise. You have a relatively few people vote 30 and 40 times in key Internet polls. And naive people will believe the nonsense. George Bush kept us safer than Barack Obama! Of course he did. We lost only 3,000 Americans to terrorist attacks at home in George Bush's first 8 months in office, but we have already lost 0 Americans to terrorist attacks at home under Barack Obama in his first 8 months, and there are more such fritening figures still to come under that BLACK man's appalling leadership!
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Publishers of Internet polls can't do much about this. For one thing, there are multiple users of many computers. So if you bar more than one vote from a computer, you might bar legitimate multiple voters in one household (father, mother, several teenage children, grandparents resident there or making use of their kid's computer to check email and read the news). And there are computers in use at libraries on which each of many different users might want to vote in an online poll. So there could be many legitimate votes from a single computer.
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We could place some sort of control on voting by requiring people to log into an account, with a distinct email address — checked for uniqueness and validity of address — for each vote. But even then people intent on voting more than once could do so. I, for instance, have 5 email addresses, by category of activity in my life, on AOL alone. I also have two Gmail accounts (one for myself and one for a high-school reunion (Middletown Township High School class of '62) that I am helping to organize) and one email account on MS Office Live for my TourismNewark.org website. If I wanted to, then, I could vote 8 times even in a login-controlled poll. And I could create additional email accounts on Yahoo, MSN, Gmail, and other free services in several different countries to vote more still. I do NOT, because I am not a liar nor fraudster trying to manipulate public opinion. But unethical people on both sides of an issue could do that.
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The moral of this story is, Internet polls are at best nearly useless, and at worst profoundly misleading because of massive fraud. Regard them as entertainment at best. And if a poll result seems out of keeping with what you know from your own reading and listening to people, feel free to disregard the poll as fraudulent. The poll on who kept us safer should be EXHIBIT A for fraudulent manipulation of Internet polls.
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Elsewhere on AOL, there is a story that the South African "woman" runner whose gender is suspect may be an intersex, with (if the leaked details are correct) internal testes but no ovaries. YET the international sports authority that oversees the award of medals does not plan to strip "her" of the medal "she" won because "she" wasn't "doping". No, it's the sports organization that is doing the doping with this dopy thinking. Intersexes should be permitted to compete only against other intersexes of the same type, not against either normal men or normal women. To allow a masculinized intersex to compete against women is hugely unfair to women and to sanity. The South African intersex runner is an unfortunte monstrosity, but its sad condition must not be allowed to victimize normal people. We don't stone freaks anymore, nor force them into carnivals, but nor should we give them medals that properly belong to normal people!
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Addendum: I turned on the TV to check what the topic is on Dr. Phil while drafting this. I generally can't watch very long because I have little patience for a lot of the silliness on that show. Dr. Phil wasn't on. Instead, there was supposed to be U.S. Open (tennis) coverage. But, guess what? There is a rain delay, and apparently has been for some time, that is expected to continue for some time. Instead of just returning to regular programming, CBS is showing pointless chitchat among its sports commentators, interviews with players, and reruns of earlier matches! What an astoundingly stupid waste of time. Why bump regular programming for nonsense? More madness in the U.S.A. of today.
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(I cannot, as I was accustomed to doing, show the current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, because a server crash has knocked out the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", and it's taking them a while to restore the site to use.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:09 PM

 
Public Option or NOTHING! Liberals in both the House and Senate must make clear before President Obama's speech this coming Wednesday that Congress will veto any attempt by a cowardly Obama Administration to sell out a "public option", and that Congressional Democrats refuse any demand that they be "good soldiers" — mindlessly obedient automatons — and vote for a bill that is absolutely not worth passing. Democrats must tell Obama:

A minimalist tinkering that will not even come close to fixing the horrendous mess that this country's healthcare 'system' has become, is not remotely good enuf. You may be willing to compromise away all principle. We are not.

The Republicans pretend that things are just fine as they are now, and they have persuaded millions of stupid, stupid people that we should do nothing. We would fite them, and crush them, if you would fite with us. But you won't. So we'll do nothing.

We accept, sadly, that things apparently must get even worse before public opinion will permit us to make them better. Who knows? Maybe the health-insurance and medical systems will self-regulate, chastened by the bullet they just barely dodged. We doubt it, but we'll let them prove their good faith. Or bad.

We suspect that healthcare costs will continue to rise mutiply as fast as the overall rate of inflation, and that millions more people's lives will be ruined — even ended — by claims denied. Perhaps a few more years of reduced benefits, increased co-pays, and massive increases in premiums is what employers and the general public will need to suffer before even the stupidest and most evil Republican admits that they were wrong. Only THEN, once they have APOLOGIZED to Liberals and to the people whose lives they have ruined, will we put ourselves on the line again. We do not trust you, Mr. President. We are not drinking your Kool-Aid.

If Liberals make plain that Congressional Democrats can be as much a "Party of No" as the Republicans, maybe Obama will start to respect them almost as much as he respects — or fears; and in politics, the two are pretty much the same — Republican Rightwingers.

Mr. President, you don't seem to value your friends and allies, only your enemies. WE can be your enemies, if you like. We can be as determined to consign you to a failed Presidency as they are. We can stop you at every step of every piece of legislation you attempt to pass. We can deny every spending initiative you make. We can join with your Republican enemies to frustrate you at every turn and OVERturn every veto you might dare to make of legislation of Congress's own devising that you don't like. We can cause your poll numbers to plummet like a stone. And we can deny you the Democratic nomination in 2012, to put forward instead somebody much more to our liking.

Do not take us for granted. We are not your "soldiers", good or bad. We are not children, to be lectured about practicality and when to compromise on principle — that canard about not letting "the perfect be the enemy of the good". We are not your puppies, either, to be smacked with a newspaper if we dare to propose legislation you don't like or don't have the guts to stand with us to enact.

We belong to the true Democratic Party, the "Party of the Little Guy" who needs and deserves help from the Government now and then. We are not going over to the enemy. We are not playing games with the enemy. Yet. But if you abandon us, we will abandon you, and indeed cozy up to your Republican enemies: "We hate the guy too. Let's do business."

You seem to be on the verge of making a terrible mistake, treating us with contempt and selling out our principles to curry favor with implacable enemies not just of your Administration — and your race — but also of the American people. Don't do this, or you will regret it. We will make you a textbook case of what not to do as President.

There are a lot of white people in this country who are unhappy with a black President and will work for his total humiliation. It's not even about principle, just about race. Because it's not about principle, some of these racists will side with us on many legislative initiatives, if those initiatives will destroy you. So we can accomplish some of our goals for the people, by manipulating the racism of Republicans. That is at least as principled as your behavior has been regarding healthcare reform. We would remind you that the Democratic Party was very happy to do business with racists. Does the word "Dixiecrats" sound familiar? It should. We might revive it. If we're going to have to do business with racists and reactionaries from the South, why shouldn't they be Democratic racists and reactionaries? They'd be more likely to vote with other Democrats on at least some issues that Republicans won't.

Question: Do you want to go down in history as the first BAD (or "failed") black President?

We can make that happen. Don't play with us. Don't sell us out. Or we will DESTROY your Presidency. And in that, we will have LOTS of help. Wouldn't it be odd if you were finally able to achieve broad bipartisanship — but only in destroying you?

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:49 PM