It's My Country, Too

Digby writes a sarcastic post intended to flip the "moral" argument against tax money going to insurers with abortion coverage:

I have a moral objection to paying for any kind of erectile dysfunction medicine in the new health reform bill and I think men who want to use it should just pay for it out of pocket. After all, I won't ever need such a pill. And anyway, it's no biggie. Just because most of them can get it under their insurance today doesn't mean they shouldn't have it stripped from their coverage in the future because of my moral objections. (I don't think there's even been a Supreme Court ruling making wood a constitutional right. I might be wrong about that.)

Many of the men who are prescribed this medication are on Medicare, so I think it should be stripped out of that coverage as well.

Remember, too, that only after ED drugs hit the market did insurers begin to cover women's birth control products, to avoid sex discrimination lawsuits.

But there is a very real reason to object to paying for the use of Viagra, and even though it's old news, nothing I'm aware of has changed:

America's CIA has found a novel way to gain information from fickle Afghan warlords - supplying sex-enhancing drug Viagra, a US media report says.

The Washington Post said it was one of a number of enticements being used.

In one case, a 60-year-old warlord with four wives was given four pills and four days later detailed Taleban movements in return for more.

"Whatever it takes to make friends and influence people," the Post quoted one agent as saying.

"Whether it's building a school or handing out Viagra."

'Silver bullet'

The newspaper said the use of Viagra had to be handled sensitively as the drug was not always known about in rural areas.

It quoted one retired agent as saying: "You didn't hand it out to younger guys, but it could be a silver bullet to make connections to the older ones."

In the case of the 60-year-old warlord - the head of a clan in southern Afghanistan who had not co-operated - operatives saw he had four younger wives.

The pills were explained and offered. Four days later the agents returned.

"He came up to us beaming," the Post quoted an agent as saying. "He said, 'You are a great man.'

"And after that we could do whatever we wanted in his area."

The pills could put chieftains "back in an authoritative position", another official said.

Ha ha ha. Do whatever we want, once again over the disposable bodies of women. As for the chieftains, they've been in an "authoritative position" for a long, long time. Anyone who has followed the fate of Afghan women and girls knows the brutalization, rape, and indignity they suffer in their role as men's slaves and breeding stock:

Jamila was married off when she was seven years old. Subjected to brutal beatings for nine years by her husband, she approached her father-in-law for help. For this "shame," a family member shot her in the leg.

During a rare visit to her parental home, she sought a divorce. A jirga, or assembly of local elders who act as informal dispute-resolution mechanisms in the absence of a formal justice system in many parts of Afghanistan, rejected her plea and sent her back to her marital home.

Jamila, whose real name and location cannot be revealed for her own safety, was punished once again, this time by her father-in-law, who beat her, cut off one nostril, shaved her head and tied her with a rope before throwing her outside the house.

Or this:

Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands' sexual demands, despite international outrage over an earlier version of the legislation which President Hamid Karzai had promised to review.

The new final draft of the legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work.

"It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying 'blood money' to a girl who was injured when he raped her," the US charity Human Rights Watch said.

In early April, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown joined an international chorus of condemnation when the Guardian revealed that the earlier version of the law legalised rape within marriage, according to the UN.

Although Karzai appeared to back down, activists say the revised version of the law still contains repressive measures and contradicts the Afghan constitution and international treaties signed by the country.

Islamic law experts and human rights activists say that although the language of the original law has been changed, many of the provisions that alarmed women's rights groups remain, including this one: "Tamkeen is the readiness of the wife to submit to her husband's reasonable sexual enjoyment, and her prohibition from going out of the house, except in extreme circumstances, without her husband's permission. If any of the above provisions are not followed by the wife she is considered disobedient."

Nice. This, by the way, is what we're sending people to die for over there, in case anyone forgot. And this is what we are assisting with the dispensation of ED drugs. Not that clever bastards the world over haven't used it for rape before.

You think good old American men haven't thought of it, too? Let's take it to the logical conclusion: allowing insurance companies to cover Viagra once the new insurance exchange is in place is tantamount to using your tax money to facilitate rape.

Oh, but silly me, that's ok. If their victims become pregnant, the Stupak amendment will let them abort, assuming they can find a way to pay for it.

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and

Whereas the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), that the President of the United States is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

It's not often remembered that Armistice Day, the precursor to Veteran's Day, was intended not only to memorialize the deaths of soldiers, but also to give voice to the hope that we would not wage war again. We have proven with ferocity that we are too much the brethren of the murderous chimpanzee to ever achieve that dream. We are, in fact, more horrific and violent and warlike than ever before, and evidently helpless to check this addiction to killing. This is a good moment to remember how pointless and empty continue to be the sacrifices we make of our young. So the homily today comes from a man who has seen more war that most warriors: Chris Hedges.

If I had to boil down the principles for which the Republican party stands, they would be have to be Money, Power, and Punishment.

1) Amassing money for themselves or their friends through privatization, eminent domain, and the legalized chicanery of the free market is a quasi-religious endeavor; the plutocracy is sacrosanct, as the Roberts court is proving. One can never have enough of it, except for the poor, in which case there's really never enough, so they won't be getting any.

2) Power is so important that, despite decades of sneering at government, they just can't stop running for office and schmoozing with those who wield it. This is why, despite all the pandering to the lowest common denominator amongst their constituents, they can always be counted on to vote on behalf of those who can buy their ear when roll call time comes. This is also why the religious right aligns with them, seeking to force a particular creed onto the nation, which is for them ultimate power.

3) And since they believe that human beings are essentially bad and mostly irredeemable, punishing those who have neither of the first two qualities by expanding the criminal code, criminalizing petty or poverty-driven behavior, and dehumanizing the penal system, are the most satisfyingly self-righteous ways for them to turn fear-mongering into another stint in the belly of the damnable government beast.

As for the Democrats, well, they come off looking even worse. They are certainly as venal and power-hungry as the Republicans; they've proven that over and over. But what makes them even worse is that they parade around waving their humanitarian banners as thought they really give a shit about the have-nots, and then, in a remarkable collapse of backbone, sell them down the river every time a reactionary yells "liberty!". One really has a difficult time telling them apart anymore, as Gore Vidal repeatedly warned:

"...the United States has only one party—-the property party. It’s the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican."

To their credit, Dems find the totalitarianism of Republicans, with their demands for compliance with the party line, anathema. But they are far too cowardly for my taste, with no real statecraft to allow them to distinguish between when compromise is needed and when it needs to be left in the dirt. It's as though, despite their humane platform, the Democratic party is beset by an alien hand, one that keeps hitting them over the head with dinner plates:

I've given this a lot of thought, and it's really hard for me to say it, but it's time to kill this bill. The Stupak amendment was just the final straw. It will create a de facto ban on abortions as effectively as if the old laws of the pre-Roe era were back in place. That it will do so within the context of a bill that will lay an enormous financial burden on the middle class without providing them nearly enough real health care compensation in return, is simply unsupportable. I'm with the 41 liberal House Dems who have told Pelosi they will off the bill in conference if the amendment is not removed. The line has finally been crossed, and it's time to junk this thing. For those who say it can be fixed in incremental changes over time, I say, look at how the Hyde amendment and the ripples created by Casey v Planned Parenthood have been changed over time: states and even reactionary federal governments have turned the screws on women ever tighter, until a legal medical procedure has become basically unobtainable to women in 87% of the country. If our elected Democratic officials, riding a wave of anger so palpable that a black man with an Arabic-sounding name could be elected President of the United States, were unable to craft a law that put the needs of their people ahead of their own trifling self-interest, why on earth would anyone think a different breed of politico is going to come down the pike in 5 years and fix it later?

And if you think this can eventually be corrected by the Supreme Court, you haven't been paying attention to the Roberts court decisions.

Too many cowards taking our tax money to sell us down the river. Too many bad decisions about to become enshrined in law. I'm out.

Krugman predicts dire economic consequences if the reactionaries take over the government:

...elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

This scenario is much more frightening than Krugman has painted it. Economists know that the very people who oversaw and approved the recent bubble build-up and crash are the same ones in charge of any potential systemic change, and their lack of will for any genuine reform has set the stage for bigger and better crashes in the near future. Here was Simon Johnson in late September of this year, speaking on WHYY's Radio Times:

Marty Moss-Coane: But are you saying that Wall Street is essentially back to its bad old ways? Before the bailout and the implosion last fall?

Simon Johnson: Oh yes, absolutely. I think in some ways we're in worse shape than that. Now I'm not saying that we're going to have another crisis immediately. Back to back, severe financial crises are very rare. Instead, of course, you go through another cycle where people feel good and the major players take on a lot of risk. Of course, they'll have a good run for a while. They'll pay themselves massive bonuses. When there's an upside, they get the upside. When the downside comes -- 2? 3? 5? 7? maybe 12? years down the road -- it's huge. Look back over the last 20 years. Think about Alan Greenspan's achievement as governor of the central bank, as chairman of the Federal Reserve in this country. In 2001-2005, people said he's the greatest central banker we've ever had. Now you look back and say, "I don't think so. I think he was actually a disaster." What happened over the past 20 years. He was probably the worst central banker this country has ever experienced.

Marty Moss-Coane: What do you say about Ben Bernanke so far?

Simon Johnson: [laughs] Ben Bernanke has done a very good job as a fire fighter. Once the financial fire broke out and once the meltdown occurred, he worked really hard to prevent that from spreading and from becoming even more damaging. But of course fire fighters have two jobs, really. One is fighting the fires when they break out. The other is trying to prevent fires, trying to think ahead, trying to design systems and strategies that make fires less likely -- and less damaging when they break out. And on that one, I'm afraid his track record is not so good! When he worked at the Fed under Alan Greenspan, he was absolutely in line with the Greenspan idea that you don't worry about bubbles or financial frenzies when they're building up, you just clean up afterwards. That's what we just done, the last 12 months. You really don't want to do that and you really don't want to do what we've been doing the past 12 months again. More importantly and more relevantly, in terms of what he's saying now about what he's planning to do...you know, he's been giving speeches -- he gave a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington and he laid out his view of what the problem is and what reform [inaudible] is, and so on. It's all very technocratic, all very hollow-sounding. And it is hollow. He's not confronting or even speaking about the deeper, underlying political realities here and the power of the financial sector and how it's going out of control.

And yes, if Americans vote with their stupid bone, the crazies will be in charge when it all blows up. But don't worry, they will still manage to blame the liberals.

For my own benefit, I wanted to be able to re-read this again and again, and thanks to Tyler Durden and Digby, I can. I wish it was permanently papered onto the side of every financial building, hung in prominent areas of both chambers of Congress, and pasted into the front page of every banking and investment website in the United States, along with the caveat "Too Dumb to Govern."

Yes, I know, everyone's breathless over the passage of the House health reform bill. But just remember this: requiring people to pay for insurance does not mean they are going to get health care:

Because of costs, Massachusetts hasn’t solved the problem of guaranteeing access to health care. Even residents with coverage can’t afford medical treatment because of co-payments and the charges that insurance doesn’t cover, according to a September 2009 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation with headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

This is how you get a 97% coverage rate that looks good on paper: you force people to buy coverage that drains their budgets and costs so much to use that they can't afford to get the health care this was supposed to be about in the first place.

This is what I fear is coming down the pike from our millionaires in Congress, too, where a cap of $12,000 on premiums is considered affordable, and allowing insurance companies to charge older people twice what they charge younger ones is a fair deal.

And as for those vaunted cost savings? Not so much in the Bay State:

Private insurance premiums in the state rose more than 12 percent through the end of 2008, according to an Oct. 21 report in the New England Journal of Medicine co-authored by Massachusetts Health and Human Services Secretary JudyAnn Bigby. The cost of buying insurance increased 10 percent so far this year, the report said.

Price increases like these put pressure on the finances of businesses that provide insurance to employees, workers who pay part of that cost and individuals who buy their own coverage.

“President Obama is a visionary and he’s going to use Massachusetts as an example of how his ideas might play out,” said Regina Herzlinger, an economist at Harvard Business School in Cambridge. “But Massachusetts is a wealthy state and it can afford things that other states cannot. And even now Massachusetts is having trouble.”

I will grant you that Massachusetts put the cart before the horse and rushed everyone into eating an insurance plan before cost reductions had been worked out. But the essential flaw in the system--the idea that you can craft a device that will affordably grant health care to the masses while ensuring corporate profits--is going to cripple every attempt to fix it until it is recognized for the myth it is, and the free market is eliminated from basic health care coverage.

This is how the public herd is encouraged to stampede. From the most recent New York Times headline:

Little Evidence of Terror Plot in Base Killings

"Little" evidence? Then that must mean there is some evidence, right? You can just hear keyboards all over reactionary America tapping furiously with the news: See? Even the communist Jew York Times says he could have been a terrorist!! But when we get to the actual body of the article we find that "investigators have tentatively concluded that it was not part of a terrorist plot." Mind you, that's only tentative. Something else may have yet to surface. Something Muslimy. What else do they know? Well, this:

One significant investigative thrust has involved determining whether Major Hasan had contact with extremists who preyed on his increasingly angry and outspoken opposition to American policies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But so far, investigators have unearthed no evidence that he was directed or steered into violence or ever traveled overseas to meet with extremist groups, as defendants in some recent terrorism cases are accused of doing, the officials said.

The officials emphasized that their findings were preliminary and that the investigation was fluid. New information could alter their perceptions of Major Hasan’s motives. But the early conclusions are already influencing the course of the inquiry, including which law enforcement agencies lead it.

Still fluid, yes, as are all investigations until they are completed, although the way they are reported in the news nowadays, you'd never know it. Once the first edition hits the streets, we stay locked into whatever preliminary information we read, and our minds are made up. Couching incidents in language like this headline only cements those first impressions. Then there's this:

The officials said a continuing search of Major Hasan’s computer indicates that he had logged on to Web sites that celebrated radical Islamic ideologies and that he had exchanged e-mail messages with like-minded people, some possibly overseas. In addition, they believe that he may have written inflammatory Internet postings that justified suicide attacks, though that has not been concretely established.

Still, investigators have found no evidence that Major Hasan sent e-mail messages to known terrorists or anyone else who encouraged or helped him to orchestrate the shootings.

Maybe he did. Then again, we just don't know. Why are they sharing this speculation with us? This is the kind of perfectly legitimate back-and-forth any investigator has to engage in to eliminate all possible dead ends, but to outsiders, it may just look like enough "evidence" to support whatever racist agendas they already have.

And then there is this:

The possibility that the Fort Hood attack involved terrorism arose for a number of reasons...friends and work associates of Major Hasan have described his increasing doubts about the American military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In interviews in recent days, friends and others have portrayed Major Hasan as a troubled man, deeply concerned about being deployed to the war zones.

Jesus. He had doubts about the wars, and he was worried about being sent there. I guess after years of protests against the war, that makes me a suspect of terrorism, too. Having concerns about being dropped into the meatgrinder of somebody else's Big Idea, that's also cause for suspicion.

After playing this "Terrorist? Not a Terrorist?" game show through most of the text, the article finally boils down to this: investigators seem to be mainly concerned with gathering evidence to show premeditation so they can pre-empt any wussy insanity defense. Not that such a defense has been very useful since 1984 for even the most obvious cases. Because as God is my witness, even a hallucinating schizophrenic will get his comeuppance here in the Land of the Free to Not Give A Damn About Your Problems.

Been a long time since they've been able to have themselves a lynchin' in North Carolina. Them animal spirits keep building up and up until somebody's just gonna have to cut loose. And since all this political correctness, a decent Amuriken has to find his fun where he can take it.

Now that the reactionary fringe has managed to make "standing up to political correctness" a synonym for "proud of my ignorant hate-mongering", anything goes, even among those who once felt constrained to at least appear un-bigoted. Bet rope sales up on the Hill have been off the charts since this nasty bitch has been stirrin' up the good ol' boys. Hey, yew know whut, Miz Sue? How 'bout we put all the Muslims in those FEMA Death Camps!

The spectacle never ends here in the land of the free-flowing ammo. In fact, 2009 is shaping up to be one of the prime years for connoisseurs of mass murder. Somehow, in one of the states with a much ballyhooed concealed carry law, this fool managed to cut a swath through his ex-employer's workplace and no one shot back. Later, I watched Charlie Gibson cover the story of the Orlando shooting, and then turn his pained eyes on Jake Tapper to ask whether there was any solution for these kinds of tragedies. Of course, not once did the possibility of keeping control of our weaponry come up. That was so far beyond the pale that no one could even bring himself to raise the question, despite the fact that Florida, the 9th deadliest state in the Union in 2008, has some of the most risible gun "laws" on the books, including allowing employees to bring loaded guns to work, so long as they keep them outside in their locked cars. Here are a few more examples of Florida's daffiness:

1) Legal to use deadly force as a first resort in public (excellent for taking out a harmless passerby in the street who looks at you wrong).

2) Criminal background checks are only required if the buyer goes to a federally-licensed gun store - no other sales (gun shows, swap meets, want ads) are subject to the background check. (This is actually almost beside the point, because as history has shown ad nauseum, many assaults are committed with guns by people with no criminal records).

3) No restriction on the sale of Saturday night specials, "junk" handguns, or snub-nosed handguns that are easily concealed.

4) No state requirement that gun owners register their firearms.

5) Police are forbidden from keeping any record of gun sales. Police must destroy records on gun sales within 48 hours and are prohibited from maintaining gun sale records that could be used for gun tracing and criminal investigations. The state has no way of knowing whether people who bought guns in the past have become criminals and are no longer allowed to possess firearms.

6) No restriction on the sale or possession of large capacity ammunition magazines that can fire 30, 50 or even 75 rounds without reloading (because we know that in America, bigger is better, including death counts).

7) Police chiefs and state sheriffs are required to give concealed carry permits to anyone who can buy a handgun, allowing them to carry loaded, concealed handguns in public.

Now, you may say, it's not as bad as it could be. Look at Utah, where local police needn't be informed of a concealed carry, and loaded guns are allowed in state facilities, churches, and colleges. Or Oklahoma, that requires no record-keeping on guns whatsoever and allows them to be taken, loaded, onto a private employer's property. Or Vermont, which places virtually no restriction on carrying a loaded handgun.

It seems that there is nothing, and I mean nothing, that could possibly shock Americans into placing some commonsense restrictions--things on a par with restrictions on driving and alcohol--on the very thing that causes these atrocities, atrocities they can be relied on to weep fat, heavily-publicized crocodile tears over each time a new massacre erupts. Oh, we wring our hands and run to the local blood drive (because it doesn't cost us anything to give blood, but don't ask us to pay taxes to really help others), and we wail about how crazy the killer must be, oh, how evil, and why does this keep happening to us, and how can God let this happen? Well, God helps those who help themselves, sweetheart, and we aren't doing one damned thing to try to stop it from happening again. If you think that sweeping up after the fact is some kind of preventative, you must be blind to the lessons you've been taught from years of living with human beings. This is what we do: we get pissed off; we get stressed out; we get shat upon and taken to the cleaners and conned by big American companies taking our tax money, and we reach our limits. And the difference between an incident that may end in the stabbing of an individual, and the mass killing and maiming of many, lies in whether that stressed-out maniac can get his hands on a weapon of mass destruction, or only a kitchen knife. Every day someone without a criminal record shoots someone else, and the only thing that made him a criminal was being able to get hold of that gun. Human beings will get pissed off. But what they do with that anger too often becomes a matter of opportunity bestowed on them by the rankest weapons non-regulations in the civilized world, hand-crafted by the country's biggest numbnuts and first-rate cowards.

So far, 12 dead at the Army's Fort Hood in Texas:

Fort Hood, the country's largest Army post, was the scene of a tragedy on Thursday, a mass shooting. Details are still a little fuzzy as reports come in, but the Army says 12 people have been killed and another 31 were wounded...

At a press conference, Lt. Gen. Bob Cone told reporters that the shooter was among those killed in the incident as authorities responded to the violence, but did not specify if the shooter is counted among the 12 reported dead. Cone said two more soldiers had also been apprehended as suspects in the shooting, but he provided no new details about the circumstances surrounding those suspects. He did say that the shooter used two weapons, both handguns.

Here was a place where nearly every last person had a gun or carried a gun, in a state that never saw a weapon regulation that it could stomach, a state, in fact, that wanted to let teachers carry loaded guns to school, for Christ's sake. This is how they look at it in Texas:

According to Barbara Williams with the Texas Association of School Boards, Harrold remains the only Texas school district with a guns-on-campus policy...

“This is Texas. I have a magnet on my refrigerator of the state with a plastic gun glued to it that says, ‘We don’t call 9-1-1.’ We find that funny in Texas,” she said.

Really? Well, you must be pissing yourself with laughter now, Babs.

Even in a place like Fort Hood, where people are trained to handle weapons as professionals, even there, their guns could not keep them safe. How long do we have to listen to the weapons industry propagandize their profits through the mouths of puppets like Williams? How long before the lies and myths become so glaring that even the ventriloquists' dummies choke on the talking points? Guns, and the sense of omnipotence and invulnerability they confer, create criminals. Carrying one doesn't keep you safe; it makes it all the more likely you will die, no matter who you are.

Update: How many times can you use the word Palestinian in a sentence? BTW, where was the concern about Catholics when Tim McVeigh blew away all those innocents in 1995? I can't remember any priests rushing to assure people that, despite centuries of murder and terrorism, 99% of Catholics are good, law-abiding people.

Maybe since the ultra-reactionary wing of the Republican party has devolved into the Home for the Confused, this is a sign that the few remaining sane are tunneling their way to freedom:

Democrats won a special election in New York State’s northernmost Congressional district Tuesday, a setback for national conservatives who heavily promoted a third candidate in what became an intense debate over the direction of the Republican Party.

The Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, led with 49 percent of the vote, while the Conservative Party candidate, Douglas L. Hoffman, had 46 percent...

Leading conservative voices — including The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and The Weekly Standard and the talk show personalities Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck — took on the Republican nominee, Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, who supports gay rights and abortion rights and had embraced some Democratic economic policies like the federal stimulus package. They labeled her as too liberal.
The attacks on Ms. Scozzafava eventually took their toll, and she stunned her party over the weekend first by withdrawing from the race and then by urging her supporters to vote for Mr. Owens, a 60-year-old lawyer from Plattsburgh.

But you can bet there will be the usual Greek chorus of rightist wingnuts wailing that they just haven't been crazy enough, and if only they could find some Miss America-looking twit to spout lunacies they could take back America!.

Update: BTW, this will not end well. He's going to lower taxes and still maintain good schools? Say goodbye to your roads and bridges, and hope you can find a place to haul your garbage to.

If I'm going to bitch about every health care reform plan that comes out of Congress, I suppose I'd better explain what I think affordability means. It does not mean 10% of one's income for premiums, and it does not mean another 10% in deductibles and out of pockets before one's insurance actually begins doing what you have been paying it to do.

With regard to expanding utilization of current programs:

• First, Medicare drops to cover everyone 40 years old and older. Age discrimination law protects all those over 40, and many illnesses begin to manifest after this age, so this seems a good starting point.
• For those under 30, the option to stay on their parents' or guardians' insurance.
• For the low-income, Medicaid up to an income of $25000, no matter the size of the family.

Regarding the cost of insurance premiums for everyone who doesn't fall into the above categories, no more than the following % of income, on a sliding scale:

$25,999—1% ($260 yr, $22 mo)

$30,000---2% ($600 yr, $50 mo)

$70,000---3% ($800 yr, $67 mo)

$100,000—3 ½ % ($3500 yr, $292 mo)

$150,000---4% ($6000 yr, $500 mo)

$200,000---5% ($10,000 yr, $833 mo)

$250,000---6% ($15,000 yr, $1250 mo)

$300,000---7% ($21,000 yr, $1750 mo)

$400,000---8% ($32,000 yr, $2667 mo)

$500,000---9% ($45,000 yr, $3750 mo)

$1 million and up---10% ($100,000 yr, $10,000 mo)

The excess amount charged to those in the higher income categories can be used to underwrite the costs of insuring those in the lower-income brackets.

What the above chart tells you is that:

1)  No insurance company, no matter how venal, is ever going to charge $100k a year for a family's insurance. This means that the rich will always be at advantage over the poor when it comes to paying premiums. If you found yourself looking at that chunk of the millionaires' share and thinking, “Wow! That's a little steep!”, just imagine how more more cruel that 10% will be on the backs of those with only a fraction of that income; and

2)  Even a small percentage, taken from a limited income, is going to weigh heavily on that family or individual in ways that could break them if other expenses are not taken into consideration.

Deductibles and out of pocket cost limits should be minimal, rare, and for very extraordinary situations; say, cosmetic surgery for purely vanity reasons. For those paying 1% of their income for premiums, they should not exceed the cost of those yearly premiums. For those paying 3-6%, they should not exceed twice the cost of those yearly premiums.

The regulations allowing direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription pharmaceuticals should be eliminated, to cut down on the costs of those drugs ( % of drug company costs are related to advertising and marketing) and reduce patient demand for drugs that may not be appropriate or advisable for their situations.

Accountability should be created by requiring insurance companies to provide regular yearly financial statements to their customers showing where their profits are coming from and where they are going, including top executive salaries and all political contributions and PAC connections.

No this isn't meant to be comprehensive, but it give you an idea of where I'm coming from.

This is going nowhere:

Speaking at a news conference with Clinton on Saturday, Netanyahu repeated the concessions he is willing to make: Israel will build no new settlement communities, expropriate no land for existing ones and limit the number of permits for new housing construction.

In previous statements, Israeli officials had said they would permit no more than about 3,000 new homes for nine months after a new round of peace talks starts.

This is what Hilary's creaming her jeans over? But wasn't the U.S. requiring a full stop on all settlement activity? Seems once upon a time it was so:

The settlements, built on land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War, have been a stumbling block in decades of efforts to end the conflict. The last round of U.S.-brokered talks broke off last December, in part because Palestinian leaders felt the process was undermined by ongoing settlement activity. Nearly 500,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.

Palestinians contend that under a U.S.-backed 2003 peace plan, Israel is obliged to halt settlement growth.

President Obama called last spring for a freeze but, in the face of Israeli resistance, changed course. To the dismay of Palestinian leaders, Obama demanded only "restraint" on settlements when he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Abbas in September.

Well, if the Israelis don't like it, that's good enough for us! Richard Boudreaux, the author of the LA Times article quoted above, points out that back in 2003 we backed a plan that would have ended all settlement activity, so this is not new. Neither is the wussing-out of American diplomacy when it comes to tiny Israel throwing a tantrum to get what it wants.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, trying to coax Palestinian leaders to restart peace talks with Israel, said Saturday that Israel was offering "unprecedented" concessions to limit the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Clinton's remarks moved the Obama administration closer to Israel's position and further from that of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has refused to return to negotiations without a total freeze on settlement activity on land Palestinians claim for a future state.

You know, it's one thing to say, "Well, this isn't what we hoped for, and we want to see even more progress in this area, but at least this is better than what Israel was offering before. Let's see if we can get to the peace table and then move forward." But that isn't close to what Clinton has said. No, she's fairly crowing that this is "unprecedented", and what a helluva guy Netanyahu is, and the Palestinians better just suck it up. Hardly even-handed in tone. President Abbas, who supposedly "controls" the West Bank, still gets no say in how many carpetbaggers and landgrabbers steal the places belonging to his people, more private roads for the thieves are being planned to carve up Palestinian property to exclude Palestinians and create checkpoints, and everyone dogpiles on the Goldstone Report for mentioning Israeli atrocities and spoiling their makeup even though the situation in Gaza remains a humanitarian nightmare and international goddamn shame. For some reason the Palestinians don't welcome this "concession".

(BTW, you see how I re-structured the order of the Boudreaux article above? This is how most reporting is written nowadays...like a damn movie trailer, starting out with a teaser, then broken up in bits and pieces that have to be jigsawed back together to create some kind of sense. This is what the confluence of entertainlment reporting and real news has created.)

From the largest manufacturer of well-publicized cluelessness in the U.S.:

For the past few days I have tried to do what journalists are supposed to do.

Indeed? Since when was David Brooks a "journalist"? Ellen Goodman, describing what commentators do, said their business was to make sense of all that is happening in the world. Did Brooks ever once accomplish that? All I've ever seen under his byline has been what my dear old departed Dad used to call "popping off"-- bullshitting readers blind about how things are in the heartland, a place he never spent one moment in except to gather confirmation for his indigenous prejudices.

The first housing tax credit had its problems, but it was well-intentioned. I felt it was a bad idea to prop up still-inflated housing prices at a time when affordable housing is one of our most intransigent problems, but so be it. Even though some economists worried that it only allowed sellers and realtors to charge more money than they otherwise could have, it was a very limited and circumscribed credit for only first-time buyers with modest incomes.

Well, look out, because we can't just be giving money away to the working class while the rich have their noses pushed up against the candy store window. God forbid we bestow a handful of drachmas to the less-well-off and not give the fat cats get even more. This is America, for God's sake:

Lawmakers announced plans earlier this week to attach the tax-credit proposal to a pending bill on the unemployment benefits. The $8,000 tax credit, enacted earlier this year as part of the $787 billion economic stimulus package, is set to expire at the end of November.

The lawmakers want to extend it until April 30. Their proposal would also expand it to allow higher-income Americans and some who already own homes to qualify for the break.

Homebuyers who have lived in their prior residences for at least five years may receive a $6,500 credit under the plan, said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus. Also, couples earning as much as $225,000 and individuals as much as $125,000 would qualify for the extended break, Baucus said. That’s up from a $75,000 limit for individuals and $150,000 for couples.

That's the way. Hold the country's unemployed hostage until you can get more money into the hands of the Quarter-Million Dollar Club. And make sure that they can include the money from the sale of a current home in the bonanza.

Is there some reason my taxes need to help some rich bastard move on up?

Mind if I piss in the punch bowl?

While everyone else is wahooing and celebrating the new House Health Care Reform plan, I have to ask: is this really what I'm supposed to break out the champagne for? Limits on premiums that allow insurance companies to gouge people living at 400 percent of poverty for 12% of their income? For a family of 4 making $88,200, that's a yearly total of $10,584 just to pay for the privilege of having something called "insurance". But wait, there's more. Once you've paid to "have" insurance, you may then have to actually "use" it. Now what would you pay??

Well, that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish, my friends. But don't worry! This fabulous bill "prevents bankruptcy" (that's really what it says) by capping total out-of-pocket spending for covered benefits that cannot exceed $5,000 for an individual and $10,000 for a family. So our family of 4 at 400% of poverty can look forward to shelling out, at most, no more than $20,584 during the year in a worst-case scenario, provided the medical expenses are ones covered by their policy.

So this means that now our hypothetical family will need to put aside only 23% of their income for medical care. That year. Because, of course, they might have to incur the same amount of debt next year, too. And if someone is hit by a particularly nasty illness or impairment, it could go on that way for years. No worries about bankruptcy now, eh?

And you know what the best part of this culmination of our fight for universal coverage is? It won't even be universal: an estimated 18 million people will remain without insurance. But it's all good. The CBO has given its blessing, and in the end, it's really only the price tag that wags this dog. Parsimony wins the day when it comes to saving lives, because there's lots more money needs to be shat down the Pentagon/contractor toilet to make the world safe for Wall Street. The odd thing is that Pelosi backed off a public option that would dictate fees for providers, and instead went with negotiated fees, which all agree will add expense to the system. And despite all the whinging about how budget-busting a single-payer system would be, there's this:

"The new House bill would expand Medicaid to cover childless adults, parents and others with incomes less than 150 percent of the poverty level, or $33,075 for a family of four. This goes beyond the earlier House bill and a companion measure in the Senate, which would extend Medicaid to people with incomes less than 133 percent of the poverty level ($29,327 for a family of four).

This change saves money. It is less expensive for the federal government to cover low-income people under Medicaid than to provide them with subsidies to buy private insurance."

I tell you, I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning. Smells like...Congress.

Ah, life is good. Now let's see how that financial regulatory reform is coming.

The dismaying crowd scenes whipped up by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, the horrendous beatings and rapes that turned into audience participation opportunities for those who were there, all have the element of crowd-intoxication in them.  People have been wondering out loud how others can do such things, but if you read Aldous Huxley, you know.  Nothing drives the reason and humanity out of a man like the comforting anonymity of being surrounded by a crowd.  Here is Huxley, from his epilogue of The Devils of Loudon.  It speaks for itself:

"The professional moralists who inveigh against drunkenness are strangely silent about the equally disgusting vice of herd-intoxication—of downward self-transcendence into subhumanity by the process of getting together in a mob.

"Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." In the midst of two or three hundred, the divine presence becomes more problematical. And when the numbers run into the thousands, or tens of thousands, the likelihood of God being there, in the consciousness of each individual, declines almost to the vanishing point. For such is the nature of an excited crowd (and every crowd is automatically self-exciting) that, where two or three thousand are gathered together, there is an absence not merely of deity, but even of common humanity. The fact of being one of a multitude delivers a man from his consciousness of being an insulated self and carries him down into a less than personal realm, where there are no responsibilities, no right or wrong, no need for thought or judgment or discrimination —only a strong vague sense of togetherness, only a shared excitement, a collective alienation. And the alienation is at once more prolonged and less exhausting than that induced by debauchery; the morning after less depressing than that which follows self-poisoning by alcohol or morphine. Moreover, the crowd-delirium can be indulged in, not merely without a bad conscience, but actually, in many cases, with a positive glow of conscious virtue. For, so far from condemning the practice of downward self-transcendence through herd-intoxication, the leaders of church and state have actively encouraged the practice whenever it could be used for the furtherance of their own ends. Individually and in the co-ordinated and purposive groups which constitute a healthy society, men and women display a certain capacity for rational thought and free choice in the light of ethical principles. Herded into mobs, the same men and women behave as though they possessed neither reason nor free will. Crowd-intoxication reduces them to a condition of infrapersonal and antisocial irresponsibility. Drugged by the mysterious poison which every excited herd secretes, they fall into a state of heightened suggestibility, resembling that which follows an injection of sodium amytal or the induction, by whatever means, of a light hypnotic trance. While in this state they will believe any nonsense that may be bawled at them, will act upon any command or exhortation, however senseless, mad or criminal. To men and women under the influence of herd-poison, "whatever I say three times is true"—and whatever I say three hundred times is Revelation, is the directly inspired Word of God. That is why men in authority—the priests and the rulers of peoples—have never unequivocally proclaimed the immorality of this form of downward self-transcendence. True, crowd-delirium evoked by members of the opposition and in the name of heretical principles has everywhere been denounced by those in power. But crowd- delirium aroused by government agents, crowd-delirium in the name of orthodoxy, is an entirely different matter. In all cases where it can be made to serve the interests of the men controlling church and state, downward self-transcendence by means of herd-intoxication is treated as something legitimate, and even highly desirable. Pilgrimages and political rallies, corybantic revivals and patriotic parades—these things are ethically right so long as they are our pilgrimages, our rallies, our revivals and our parades. The fact that most of those who take part in these affairs are temporarily dehumanized by herd-poison is of no account in comparison with the fact that their dehumanization may be used to consolidate the religious and political powers that be.

"... Religious and political ceremonials are welcomed by the masses as opportunities for getting drunk on herd-poison, and by their rulers as opportunities for planting suggestions in minds which have momentarily ceased to be capable of reason or free will.

"The final symptom of herd-intoxication is a maniacal violence. Instances of crowd- delirium culminating in gratuitous destructiveness, in ferocious self-mutilation, in fratricidal savagery without purpose and against the elementary interests of all concerned, are to be met with on almost every page of the anthropologists' textbooks and—a little less frequently, but still with dismal regularity —in the histories of even the most highly civilized peoples....To men and women sick of being their insulated selves and weary of the responsibilities which go with membership in a purposive human group, (a revolutionary leader) offers exciting opportunities for "getting away from it all" in parades and demonstrations and public meetings. The organs of the body politic are purposive groups. A crowd is the social equivalent of a cancer. The poison it secretes depersonalizes its constituent members to the point where they start to behave with a savage violence, of which, in their normal state, they would be completely incapable. The revolutionary encourages his followers to manifest this last and worst symptom of herd-intoxication and then proceeds to direct their frenzy against his enemies, the holders of political, economic and religious power.

"In the course of the last forty years the techniques for exploiting man's urge toward this most dangerous form of downward self-transcendence have reached a pitch of perfection unmatched in all of history....(M)eans of transporting vast herds of them from considerable distances, and of concentrating them in a single building or arena, are much more efficient than in the past....There is the radio, which has enormously extended the range of the demagogue's raucous yelling. There is the loudspeaker, amplifying and indefinitely reduplicating the heady music of class- hatred and militant nationalism. There is the camera ...and its offspring, the movies and television; these three have made the objectification of tendentious phantasy absurdly easy. And finally there is that greatest of our social inventions, free, compulsory education. Everyone now knows how to read and everyone consequently is at the mercy of the propagandists, governmental or commercial, who own the pulp factories, the linotype machines and the rotary presses. Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights, and the oratory of a demagogue who (as demagogues always are) is simultaneously the exploiter and the victim of herd-intoxication, and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs or criminals of so many."

I remember hating Kubrick's version of The Shining when I first saw it, probably with an extra-special hate because I loved Kubrick and loved King's novel, and imagined that the confluence of the two could not help but create a masterpiece.  What we got instead was a Kubrick ego-trip that destroyed everything elegant and horrifying about the story from which it was born, in a maelstrom of bad acting and over-the-top moog puke that omitted some of the most compelling elements of the storyline.

Well, I just finished watching it again, hoping that time would have mellowed my acceptance of it.  No dice.  It was painful to watch, and even though there were some genuinely scary moments, it fell flat amidst the clown-like performances.  For a textbook example of ham-handedly wooden exposition, nothing beats the first 20 minutes, especially Barry Nelson, whom Kubrick must have slipped Thorazine prior to filming.  Jesus, what a clusterfuck.

As H1N1 plows through the nation, it seemed timely to re-post the science piece below, which I originally wrote in October 2005 when bird flu was grabbing headlines. I imagine swine flu as the logical evolutionary descendant of avian flu, and you'll understand why when you read the post. For an even more interactive picture of a virus in action, you can't beat Robert Krulwich's remarkable video on NPR, here.  In the meantime, ponder the cognitive dissonance in a culture that condemns the vaccine and warns people away from getting it, and then boo-hoos and whines when that same dreaded "killer" vaccine is too slow in arriving.

Scary Stories

I love this time of year. Time for scary stuff, like more mad cow disease news, and brand-new Supreme Court deliberations, and creepy pictures, like this one of a virus penetrating a human cell. That's right, folks, it’s Pandemic Flu Awareness Week, and that means learning all about how the influenza virus works, what it can do to you when it gets its hemagglutininous hands on your sialic acid receptors, and lastly, getting worried enough to pay attention to what the powers that be are doing (or not doing) about it all.

The synchronicity of this is also fairly creepy. Over the last couple years I've been learning about the great flu pandemic of the early 20th century. Just a few years ago PBS ran a documentary about it, Influenza 1918. Then last week, baited by the Borders' 3 for 2 sale, I picked up a copy of John M. Barry's fine book, The Great Influenza, an account of the 1918 pandemic of the influenza virus known affectionately among scientists as good old "H1N1". And I've been buttonholing friends and innocent bystanders with all the gory details ever since.

In that exponential way the quest for knowledge expands when a curious reader is exposed to the virus of a fascinating concept, I started reading everything I could find to try to understand what all this was about. I knew something about viruses from the first literary Big Scare, brought on by Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, which gruesomely detailed the habits and effects of the Ebola and Marburg viruses. What I didn't know was that the 1918 pandemic killed "more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history," as Barry put it in his book. And it did it in only 2 years' time. The last two days the papers have been full of the latest Bush talking points about how to prepare for a pandemic. Yesterday, as I was working on this post, I heard NPR announcing that a couple teams of scientists have made a major breakthrough, identifying the 1918 H1N1 killer as a bird flu virus that had jumped species directly into humans. The story has been on the online NYTimes for two days now.

Influenza virus is believed to have originated in wild birds. The one that particularly worries scientists today is known by the catchy name “H5N1”. You've probably heard plenty about this by now: the intermittent reports of avian flu in Southeast Asia, the slaughter of over a million domestic fowl in Hong Kong, the deaths of a Thai woman and her daughter that pointed to a possible first human-to-human transmission, the surprise deaths in a wealthy Jakarta suburb of a father and his two young daughters who had no known contact with birds.

Why is this so worrisome? While the virus has demonstrated that it can transmit itself bird-to-human, it has not been positively identified as being able to transmit human-to-human (though some circumstantial evidence exists that it may have). And in human-to-human transmission lies the potential for a pandemic. If it establishes itself as a human vector, it can devastate untold numbers of people around the world because, since no such virus has ever attacked the current living human populace, no one now living has developed any immunity to it.

Transmission is a tricky business, because viruses have an almost sci-fi ability to mutate. Most of them are species specific; they may only infect horses and birds, or birds and pigs, or humans and monkeys. Some can adapt to leap the species barrier from, say, bird to human, but once into the new species, cannot go any further. Others, though, can adapt to not only leap that barrier, but settle in and spread throughout the new species, and these adaptations are made possible by genetic mutation. But more on that in a minute.

Yesterday Bloomberg reported:

“A 23-year-old Indonesian man who died last week tested positive for bird flu, increasing to seven the number of human fatalities from the disease, a doctor at the Sulianto Saroso hospital in Jakarta said.
The World Health Organization laboratory in Hong Kong will need to confirm the local test results. The UN agency has so far confirmed four human fatalities from H5N1, a deadly strain of the avian influenza virus, in Indonesia....
More than 140 million chickens have been slaughtered in Asia because of concern the H5N1 strain of the virus may mutate into a form easily transmissible between humans. As humans are unlikely be immune to such a virus, the World Health Organization is concerned it may trigger an influenza pandemic like the one that led to more than 40 million deaths worldwide in 1918.
The highly pathogenic H5N1 is endemic in poultry in many parts of Indonesia, WHO said in the statement, citing the Food and Agriculture Organization. More than 10 million chickens have been killed by the virus since the outbreak in 2003, Agriculture Minister Anton Apriantono said on Sept. 19.
There has been no confirmation of human-to-human transmission of the virus. One case of probable human-to-human infection occurred in Thailand last year, when a mother and her daughter died from the disease.”

No confirmation. But the more recent deaths in Jakarta also occurred where no direct contact with fowl was known to have taken place. Let’s take a few steps back, and see what we’re dealing with.

The influenza virus, like all viruses, has only one known function: to replicate itself. It does this by invading a host cell, hijacking the gene-making machinery inside, and forcing the cell to reproduce so many of the original virus that the sheer number of them finally bursts open the cell and kills it. The newly-escaped brood of up to a million new viruses then sets out to do the same to the nearest suitable cells.

What makes a suitable cell? When a bird gets the flu, it goes for the gastrointestinal tract. In human beings, it attacks the respiratory system, which means the epithelial cells that protect the surface of the lungs and bronchi. (While it may take the virus less than 72 hours to denude the respiratory surfaces of epithelial cells, it will take the body weeks to build them back up again--if it survives). In the meantime, their destruction can allow the virus to penetrate deep into the lobes of the lungs, resulting in viral pneumonia, or let bacteria in, causing bacterial pneumonia. In either case, the resulting war between the invader and the body's immune system can wreak such destruction that, in the worst cases, the capillaries can be destroyed by killer proteins and the lungs fill up with fluid, blood, dead cells, collagen, and fibrin, drowning the victim or causing heart failure or death by exhaustion from the sheer strain of trying to breathe.

Normally when a micro-organism invades the body, the immune system rallies to attack it, and it recognizes the foreign invader by the antigens it carries. Once it has engaged the enemy in combat, the immune system "remembers" what that enemy looks like because the antigens have caused it to release antibodies specific to those antigens. Thereafter, any further attack will rally the same antibodies, resulting in a response so swift and effective that the body can be said to have developed an immunity to the invasive organism. The principle of vaccination capitalizes on this process by introducing antigens into the body in a controlled way so the immune system can learn to recognize them and create the antibodies that will immunize the body in case of future encounters.

The antigens of the influenza virus consist of two types of protrusions carried like spikes all over its surface: hemagglutinin (the "H" factor), which enables it to bind to the host cell, and once inside, break into the genetic machinery, and neuraminidase (the "N" factor), which destroys the sialic acid of the host cell and allows the newly-created viruses to escape the dying cell and explode into the body. The flu virus' RNA-based genetic code provides no safeguard against mutation as it replicates in the hijacked cell (resulting in the creation of literally millions of different kinds of "quasi-species" in the course of a few hours), and unlike many other viruses, it can survive the mutation of its antigens and continue to function. Worse, it has the demonic ability to mutate not only properties of these antigens when replicating (antigen drift), but even entirely new antigens if it comes into contact with other different types of flu viruses (antigen shift). "Antigen drift" hides a virus from an immune system that once recognized it, resulting in epidemics, which is why flu vaccines have to be constantly changed and updated. But “antigen shift”, essentially the creation of a brand-new type of virus that the immune system has never encountered in any form, is what causes pandemics, the ultimate concern scientists have about the H5N1 virus. This means if a human being contracts the H5N1 virus from a bird, and also happens to be carrying a human flu virus, the two organisms may collide during replication, where the loose strings of RNA genes may come apart and reassort with each other, suddenly resulting in a virus that inherits the human virus’ ability to transmit from person to person. The same can happen when a 3rd party “mediates” the mutation, as with pigs, which are susceptible to both avian and human viruses. If a pig happens to carry both at the same time, it may pass to its handlers a mutant that may go on to infect other humans.

At this point there is uncertainty as to whether H5N1 has yet mutated in this way, though if it had, its virulence would have likely begun killing far more people by now. The World Health Organization reports that as of 9/29/05, there were 116 cases resulting in 60 deaths--a mortality rate of 52%. But even if the transmission issue is still uncertain, there is absolutely no doubt among scientists everywhere, from those at WHO to the Center for Disease Control, that it is a very real danger. The announcement yesterday by the teams of researchers at the CDC confirms that the pandemic flu of 1918 developed just as they fear H5N1 is developing.

Here is the paradox: the more virulent the influenza virus, the more violently the immune system reacts, and the healthier the immune system is, the stronger that reaction will be. This is why the pandemic of 1918 killed so many young adults. The deaths of young, healthy people in Asia who contracted H5N1 is a warning signal.

What can we do? It's not as if we can get into the lab and whip up our own genetically recombined virus for a vaccine. Mike Davis, author of Monster at Our Door, outlined in Common Dreams last year the many problems that would prevent an appropriate and sufficient response to a pandemic: lack of a vaccine and limited production capacity, lack of a vast-enough vaccine delivery system, and lack of public knowledge or interest. Add to that John Barry's more recent assessment: drug-resistant bacteria, insufficient medical facilities, long waiting lists and insufficient manufacturing capacity for antiviral drugs like Tamiflu, massive economic and social disruption, and of course, the deaths, for which current casket inventories would be completely inadequate, resulting in the piling up of corpses in homes and everywhere else.

How many corpses would H5N1 leave in it's wake? Barry's equation is that a new flu virus will make between 14-40% of the population symptomatic. Using that percentage, and using the mortality rate of 52% mentioned above, here in the United States we could expect from 44 million to 115 million to fall ill, and from 23 million to 58 million dead. We have never, ever experienced that kind of devastation: 20% of our populace dead, and the majority of them, if true to the 1918 virus, young adults.

So now the government has been all over the news the last couple days crowing about all the work they're going to do on this issue.

You saw the Katrina response.

What will you be expecting?

Gutless and gutted.

Michigan legislators decide they want to be clergy instead, but forget to change jobs:

HOUSE JOINT RESOLUTION II

October 14, 2009, Introduced by Reps. Slezak, Paul Scott, Moore, LeBlanc, Bolger, Green,Rick Jones, Lund, Lori, Walsh, Kurtz, McMillin, Dean, Genetski, Wayne Schmidt, Haveman, Daley, Knollenberg, Kowall, Hansen, Spade, Sheltrown and Mayes and referred to the Committee on Judiciary.

A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the state constitution of 1963, by adding section 28 to article I, to establish the right to life of all human beings from the beginning of their biological development.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the state of Michigan, That the following amendment to the state constitution of 1963, to establish the right to life of all human beings from the beginning of their biological development, is
proposed, agreed to, and submitted to the people of the state:

ARTICLE I
SEC. 28. (1) EVERY HUMAN PERSON HAS A RIGHT TO LIFE, WHICH IS THE PARAMOUNT AND MOST FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT GUARANTEED UNDER THE CONSTITUTION AND LAWS OF THIS STATE.

(2) WITH RESPECT TO THE FUNDAMENTAL AND INALIENABLE RIGHT TO LIFE, THE WORD "PERSON" APPLIES TO ALL HUMAN BEINGS, IRRESPECTIVE OF AGE, RACE, GENDER, HEALTH, FUNCTION, CONDITION OF DEPENDENCY, INCLUDING PHYSICAL OR MENTAL DEPENDENCY, OR METHOD OF REPRODUCTION, FROM THE BEGINNING OF THEIR BIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT, INCLUDING FERTILIZATION.

(3) THE LEGISLATURE SHALL IMPLEMENT THIS SECTION BY APPROPRIATE LEGISLATION.

Resolved further, That the foregoing amendment shall be submitted to the people of the state at the next general election in the manner provided by law.

Clearly, these clowns must feel the good people of Michigan have very little else on their plates. The problem with this, aside from that whole "bureaucrats getting between people and their doctors" thing (let's not kid ourselves that this is NOT an attack on contraception meant to be enshrined as state constitutional law), is that it opens up a whole nest of wasps if taken to its logical conclusion. Because as the President's Commission on Bioethics noted in 2003, women lose a whole lot of "babies" every month:

PROF. SANDEL: Thank you. I have two questions about the rate of natural embryo loss in human beings. The first is what percent of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost? And the second question is is it the case that all of these lost embryos contain genetic defects that would have prevented their normal development and birth?

DR. OPITZ: The answer to your first question is that it is enormous. Estimates range all the way from 60 percent to 80 percent of the very earliest stages, cleavage stages, for example, that are lost.

PROF. SANDEL: Sixty to 80 percent?

DR. OPITZ: Sixty to 80 percent. And one of the objective ways of establishing the loss at least as of the moment of implantation, well, even earlier, let's say as of five days because the blastocyst begins to make a chorionic gonadotrophin and with extremely sensitive assay methods, you can detect the presence of gonadotrophins, let me say, first around Day 7. That's the beta of human chorionic gonadotrophin. And if you follow prospectively the cycles that has been done on quite a few occasions in the Permanente study in Hawaii and so on, a group of women, of nonfertility, who want to conceive and you detect the first sign of pregnancy there of human chorionic gonadotrophin, about 60 percent of those pregnancies are lost.

It is independently corroborated by the fact that the monozygotic twin conception rate at the very beginning is much, much higher than the birth rate and then if you follow with amniocentesis, the presence of the two sacs in about 80 percent of cases,the second sac disappears, one of the sacs disappears.

CHAIRMAN KASS: The 60 percent then would be of those that have at least reached the 7 days so that you could trace the – so there might be even greater loss at the early cleavage stage, is that correct?

DR. OPITZ: That's correct. And the earlier the stage of loss, the greater the rate of aneuploidy. There exists sort of a standard, textbook formula whereby 60 percent of spontaneous abortions have a chromosome abnormality. Six percent of all stillbirths and 6/10ths percent of all live born children. Now the latter figure is probably closer to 1 percent if you include some growth variants. So that's sort of a rule of thumb.

In my own lab in Helena where I did all of the autopsies on all pregnancy losses for 18 years, the rate of chromosome abnormalities was a little bit higher.

PROF. SANDEL: So if we take the 7-day stage, it's 60 percent. The 80 percent is if you go back to the moment of fertilization. But if you take just starting at the 7 days, there's 60 percent rate of natural loss. And of those 60 percent that are lost from the 7-day stage, what percentage of those have abnormalities or defects such that they wouldn't otherwise be able to be born?

DR. OPITZ: I would say somewhere around 50 to 60 percent and mind you, many of these are empty sacs, tiny, tiny stunted little embryos, but when you culture the sacs you find a chromosome abnormality, even though the embryo has vanished already.

PROF. SANDEL: So of the 60 percent that are lost at the 7-day stage, 40 to 50 percent did not contain defects or abnormalities, could have been born?

DR. OPITZ: Right.

PROF. SANDEL: And become babies.

Right. So what happens if such a power grab becomes law? Do we track down every woman having a period and hold her under surveillance to determine her pregnancy status post-menses? Do we require her to turn over the bloody discharge in each pad or tampon until her period is done for microscopic examination? And given the 60-80% chance that she was pregnant and lost the fertilized egg, what then? Microscopic autopsies to look for foul play? Forced funeral arrangements and burials? Think of the children!!!

Now I understand that when times are bad those who got shall get and the rest will get got, but just what will it take to satisfy these control freaks who so desperately fear and hate female reproductive power?

Once again, a finely sourced article foreshadowing doom and disaster turns out to be a dud. On October 23, 2009, Brian Buetler at Talking Points Memo posted "Sources: White House Pushing Back Against Senate Public Option Opt Out Compromise," which began with this promising line:

Multiple sources tell TPMDC that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is very close to rounding up 60 members in support of a public option with an opt out clause, and are continuing to push skeptical members. But they also say that the White House is pushing back against the idea, in a bid to retain the support of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME).

"They're skeptical of opt out and are generally deferential to the Snowe strategy that involves the trigger," said one source close to negotiations between the Senate and the White House. "they're certainly not calming moderates' concerns on opt out."

These observations, no doubt furtively whispered on pain of death in some dripping cavern under the city sewage works into the ear of our intrepid reporter, set off a rash of breathless and increasingly frantic denunciations of the White House by commenters at TPM as well as some verbal knife-wielding between those who were tarred as apologists for the Administration and those who were berated for never having anything positive to say about them. At other blogs where it was repeated without question, the response was also predictably breathless, as well. Discussions about the ethicality of such promiscuous use of un-named sources was birthed in those comments as well, but died an ugly death beneath the flurry of ad hominim attacks that have become the lifeblood of internet dialogue.

What a shame. Once, the use of un-named sources was careful and cautious, and done to protect informants from serious harm, even death. Sources were required to be verifiable prior to their publication, and often, as in the case of Deep Throat, provided information used to verify other sources of evidence of illegal activities. Use of these kinds of sources were a matter of serious debate within the newsroom, because a reporter put him- or herself on the line if it came down to protecting them. As with uncooperative witnesses, there is no time limit to the amount of jail time one may serve for refusing to identify an un-named source. They damned well better be 1) verifiable, and 2) worth it. Here is the current Confidential News Source Policy of the New York Times (in part):

In routine interviewing – that is, most of the interviewing we do – anonymity must not be automatic or an assumed condition. In that kind of reporting, anonymity should not be offered to a source. Exceptions will occur in the reporting of highly sensitive stories, when it is we who have sought out a source who may face legal jeopardy or loss of livelihood for speaking with us. Similarly they will occur in approaches to authoritative officials in government who, as a matter of policy, do not speak for attribution.

In any situation when we cite anonymous sources, at least some readers may suspect that the newspaper is being used to convey tainted information or special pleading. If the impetus for anonymity has originated with the source, further reporting is essential to satisfy the reporter and the reader that the paper has sought the whole story.

We do not grant anonymity to people who are engaged in speculation, unless the very act of speculating is newsworthy and can be clearly labeled for what it is.

We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack.

That last one definitely slipped past Bob Novak. The problem isn't new. As early as 1994, The American Journalism Review was writing that:

"Part of the problem is that reporters and sources have become so comfortable with the arrangement here," says Edward Pound, an investigative reporter for U.S. News & World Report who has worked in Washington for 17 years. "If you call somebody at the White House or in an agency, they almost expect to be anonymous and they frequently won't talk unless they are."...

At the White House, on-the-record sources are rare.

Karen Hosler of Baltimore's Sun covered the White House for five years, serving a term as president of the White House Correspondents Association. Hosler didn't like White House officials' insistence on briefing reporters without allowing their names to be used, but says she was powerless to change the situation.

"For reporters, it's difficult to unilaterally say you won't take advantage of the information," she adds. "A stand on principle just costs the story... The White House is the worst and most difficult place to report about. We as a press corps could change things if we as a group did something. But it's much too competitive and cutthroat to do that."

Imagine a world in which no one went on the record? How soon would the standard for truth go out the window, when accountability could no longer be verified? Even now it seems we're on that road, and people are ready to jump at shadows on the basis of any damned vaporous allegation they get a whiff of. Step back a minute when you hear those words "Sources say..", and ask yourself whether it feels credible, and who could benefit from the story if it isn't. We now live in an age where lies, hoaxes, and bullshit pour into our ears and off our monitors like the blood tides in the hall of Kubrick's Overlook Hotel, and it's time to get a grip and start filtering this muck. Even attributable quotes often turn out to be not worth the snot left on a Kleenex. How much more worthless might be the words of those who cringe behind indiscriminate cloaks of obscurity?

Oh, and that story on the White House? Here is Buetler's update, as of this morning:

Late update: In response to this report, White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer issued the following statement. "The report is false. The White House continues to work with the Senate on the merging of the two bills. We are making good progress toward enacting comprehensive health reform."

The CDC has a regular posting of updated information regarding all influenza types and subtypes, including H1N1, here. For their purposes, the regular flu season begins at week 40 of the calendar year, and the report I'm looking at right now, for the week ending October 10, 2009, is a real eye-opener. H1N1 has made up fully 60% of all reported influenzas and 90% of all pediatric deaths since August 30, 2009, and the proportion of deaths due to pneumonia and influenza is "above the epidemic threshold":

"From August 30 – October 10, 2009, 4,958 laboratory-confirmed influenza associated hospitalizations, 292 laboratory-confirmed influenza associated deaths, 15,696 pneumonia and influenza syndrome-based hospitalizations, and 2,029 pneumonia and influenza syndrome-based deaths, were reported to CDC."

Compared to previous years, the jump start the flu has gotten on the season, seen here, is sobering. And the number of patients seeking care for flu symptoms this year shows that, beginning in week 33, 2009 saw a rocket-like acceleration of visits so fierce that by week 40 (only just the START of the flu season) the number exceeded those during the heavy season of weeks 7-9 during the epidemic 2007-2008 year.

What this all means to me is that the virulence of the H1N1 virus is demonstrating a stunning ramp-up that is hitting hard and fast, while the witch doctor cohort among us is sneering and spewing dipshit advice about the horrors of vaccination.

Get the fucking vaccine, people. It's not just YOUR life that's at stake.

For all the chin music we've heard over the last 30 years about how important science and math education are, the truth is that, thanks to an array of nincompoops, morons, superstitious cave-painters, religious numbskulls, and opportunistic political hacks, the science education infrastructure in this country has steadily rotted away.  Attacks on scientific veracity have crippled the usefulness of much of what is still being taught.  Fueled by ancient mythological constructs and fear of--well, just about anything that might pop out from behind a rock including one's neighbors, people who went to college, and elected officials, those who are most responsible for the weakening of our scientific tether to reality have wreaked such destruction that now, when faced with a genuine pandemic of deadly proportion, they have managed to convince a sizeable minority of the country that vaccines=death:



Leave no child behind?  Hell, the whole damned nation's still sitting on the launch pad while the rest of the developed world has already made it to Mars.

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Even that damned socialist Hollywood is broadcasting crankfests now.  This is truly a pitiful and shaming development:



Will Bill Maher really expect people to find him credible when he skewers the Creationist Museum, after he has devolved down to the same level of intellectual rigor as his targets?  Too many glass houses, inhabited by idiots telling tales.