Month: August 2009

Charity is a Free Market Principle

by digby

I’ve missed a lot of stuff this week due to Netroots Nation, but this story is a doozy. Evidently, CNBC is asking the teabaggers to act for their cameras and the teabaggers are responding with neat ideas like going to “health fairs” and intimidating the sick people who don’t have health care.

One of the spokespeople for the teabaggers says they decided against it, however:

I have thought about this more and think it would be best to send a press release saying how we think the health fair is a perfect example of free market events. That we support free markets and the fact that in America we are compassionate and take care of the uninsured. Look at these businesses who are doing this without the government taking over our health care.

The system works just great:

WENDELL POTTER: Well, I was beginning to question what I was doing as the industry shifted from selling primarily managed care plans, to what they refer to as consumer-driven plans. And they’re really plans that have very high deductibles, meaning that they’re shifting a lot of the cost off health care from employers and insurers, insurance companies, to individuals. And a lot of people can’t even afford to make their co-payments when they go get care, as a result of this.

But it really took a trip back home to Tennessee for me to see exactly what is happening to so many Americans. I–

BILL MOYERS: When was this?

WENDELL POTTER: This was in July of 2007.

BILL MOYERS: You were still working for CIGNA?

WENDELL POTTER: I was. I went home, to visit relatives. And I picked up the local newspaper and I saw that a health care expedition was being held a few miles up the road, in Wise, Virginia. And I was intrigued.

BILL MOYERS: So you drove there?

WENDELL POTTER: I did. I borrowed my dad’s car and drove up 50 miles up the road to Wise, Virginia. It was being held at a Wise County Fairground. I took my camera. I took some pictures. It was a very cloudy, misty day, it was raining that day, and I walked through the fairground gates. And I didn’t know what to expect. I just assumed that it would be, you know, like a health– booths set up and people just getting their blood pressure checked and things like that.

But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they’d erected tents, to care for people. I mean, there was no privacy. In some cases– and I’ve got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement.

And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee– all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.

There could have been people and probably were people that I had grown up with. They could have been people who grew up at the house down the road, in the house down the road from me. And that made it real to me.

BILL MOYERS: What did you think?

WENDELL POTTER: It was absolutely stunning. It was like being hit by lightning. It was almost– what country am I in? I just it just didn’t seem to be a possibility that I was in the United States. It was like a lightning bolt had hit me.

I’m sorry to have to say this, but I really hope the teabag woman who thinks this is a great system, loses her health insurance and has to go get her health care in an animal stall. If she’s lucky enough to even get that. If she believes charity health care in soaking wet tents once a year is a mark of a well functioning market, she is so stupid she deserves it.

I’m not sure anymore if some of these people are even human.

h/t to TBOGG

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Lawrence O’Donnell Is Very, Very Shrill

by digby

Hasn’t anyone told him that only right wing blowhards are allowed to do that? Liberals are supposed to be polite and allow these ppeople to spew lies and then politely ask another question.

O’Donnell defiles the sacred memory of Tim “the Monsignor” Russert by behaving this way. I’m afraid Roger Ailes is going to have to intervene if this keeps up.

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We’re Number … 10?

by digby

You’d think just as a matter of national pride that Americans would be embarrassed by this:

I happened to be talking to a foreign tourist earlier today while we watched the town hall antics on the ubiquitous airport TV. He said to me, “what kind of people don’t want everyone to have health care?”

Now that was embarrassing.

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Proud As Punch

by digby

My pal and colleague Dday won the state blogger award at Netroots Nation. Seeing as he is the reigning blogospheric expert on the most undercovered catastrophe in the world, California politics (also known as The Thunderdome) I’d say it was a shoo-in.

Congratulations.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Oops! Wrong planet

By Dennis Hartley

It’s hip on the mothership: District 9

Well, it was bound to happen sometime this summer. The alien invaders have come knock knock knockin’ on the box office door to signal their seasonal pilgrimage to the local multiplex. Okay, technically, in the case of District 9, the aliens aren’t necessarily “invaders” so much as…refugees, who have the misfortune of running out of gas (in a matter of speaking) while hovering over South Africa (boy, did they make a wrong turn!).

When the film opens, we learn from the requisite montage of back story that 20-odd years have passed since the aliens first made contact; in the interim the South African government has evacuated the malnourished populace from their gargantuan mothership and introduced them to the joys of township living. The aliens, referred to derogatorily as “prawns” due to their crustacean-like physiology, develop a proclivity toward tinned cat food as a food staple, and largely resign themselves to living the slum life whilst global debate amongst the politicos drags on about what ultimately should be done about them.

In the meantime, the government has contracted a private company to micro-manage the residents of “District 9” (officialspeak for the area where the aliens are interred). The company, Multi-National United, has taken a keen interest in unlocking the secret to operating the alien weaponry that was confiscated from the mothership; much to their chagrin, the hardware does not respond to human touch. While one of the company’s officials (Sharlto Copley, excellent as the type of robotically officious, soullessly cheerful bureaucrat we all love to hate) is serving eviction notices in one of the slums, he stumbles into a life-changing situation that soon turns him into a reluctant political football in a brewing conflict between the increasingly disgruntled aliens and their human oppressors.

Writer-director Neill Blomkamp is a “discovery” by producer Peter Jackson, who originally enlisted the up-and-comer to help develop a feature film adaptation of the Halo video game (a project which appears to be on permanent hold). As you watch District 9, you glean why Jackson has banked on this previously unknown filmmaker; he certainly has an imaginative style and a definite flair for kinetic action sequences. Although the film eventually descends into a somewhat predicable flurry of loud explosions and splattering viscera, it does sport a rousing first half, thanks to the terrific production design, outstanding alien creature effects and a gripping sense of docu-realism. It’s not for the squeamish; if you were grossed out by Jeff Goldblum’s graphically depicted transformation in David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly, you might want to take a pass.

As for the element of political allegory in the film, while it can safely be assumed and is definitely implied (especially considering South Africa’s history) it is not necessarily ladled on with a trowel, either. I didn’t get the impression that the filmmakers are trying to make that the main thrust of the film (sometimes, a sci-fi story…is just a sci-fi story). On a side note, there is already some controversy and backlash brewing on the web regarding the film’s depiction of Nigerian nationals who live amongst the aliens. The characters in question are a Nigerian crimelord and his henchmen, who profit off the refugees via prostitution, extortion and black marketeering. In the context of the narrative, I thought the characters served the story (perhaps they could have done without the anachronistic witch doctor). District 9 is certainly not the first movie of its kind (nor do I suspect it will be the last), but it is one of the more original entries in recent memory.

They’re here, they’re weird, get used to it: Alien Nation, Enemy Mine, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Brother From Another Planet, Starman, Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., The Thing from Another World, The Thing, It Came from Outer Space, Strange Invaders, Invaders from Mars (1953), Village of the Damned/Children of the Damned (1960), The Quatermass Xperiment, Independence Day, Transformers, Mars Attacks, The Fifth Element, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Coneheads, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, Morons from Outer Space, Earth Girls are Easy, My Stepmother is an Alien, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, The War of the Worlds (1953), The War of the Worlds (2005), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) I Married a Monster from Outer Space, They Live, Species, Predator, Dark City, Signs, The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998), Man Facing Southeast, Simon, K-Pax.

Sea my friends

A boy and his, er, anthropomorphic fish

So, if you are not particularly in the mood to watch alien viscera exploding across the screen in a sea of gore, I do have an alternative suggestion. The newest film from anime master Hayao Miyazaki has finally reached U.S. theatres (in limited release right now).

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea is a slight but lovely tale in the Hans Christian Andersen vein, infused with the lush visual magic we’ve come to expect from Studio Ghibli. A young boy named Sosuke, who lives (wait for it)…on a cliff by the sea discovers little Ponyo (an amorphous ocean creature with vaguely humanoid features) floundering on the beach one day and lovingly nurses her back to health. Imagine his surprise when the little fish begins to show an aptitude for mimicking human speech (at the point where she says, “Ponyo loves Sosuke!” I couldn’t help but wonder if Miyazaki was paying homage to the classic “Fa loves Pa!” line from Day of the Dolphin). His affinity and kindness toward his “pet” is soon reciprocated by an interesting transmogrification (sort of a puppy-love take on Wings of Desire). Things get more complicated when Ponyo’s dad (a Neptune-like sea god) registers disapproval by unleashing the power of the ocean (he’s very strict).

Although many of Miyazaki’s recurring themes are on display, they are less strident than usual; still, I think this is the director’s most accessible and straightforward storytelling since My Neighbor Totoro. I’ll admit, in the opening scenes I was initially a bit dismayed that the animation seemed more simplistic than usual (at least by Studio Ghibli’s own standards); but as the film unfolded I came to realize that the use of soft lines and muted pastels is a stylistic choice that meshes perfectly with the gentle rhythms of its narrative.

I would hope that you don’t pre-judge the film based on Disney’s rather twee TV promos. My review is based on a screening of the Japanese PAL DVD that is already available. I still anticipate catching it on the big screen (always preferable), especially for some gorgeous and amazingly detailed underwater milieus, and a powerful sequence of an ocean tempest that features the most breathtaking animation I’ve seen in quite a while. Overall, it may pale when compared to, say, Spirited Away, but in my experience, there is no such thing as “mediocre” Miyazaki. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

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The History of Soylent Green

by digby

As a member of the generation who is becoming deeply enmeshed with issues of end of life care with our aging parents, I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to have the issue so distorted by the wingnuts, misreported by the press and basically relegated to a political football when it’s such a heart wrenching personal issue. I deeply resent the fact again that these people think they have a right to dictate their personal beliefs to everyone else. I honestly don’t care if they believe they have to be cryogenically frozen through millenia so that they might be reanimated by our alien overlords when they return to earth and I would really appreciate being given the same autonomy and respect.

One of the effects of this outrageous nonsense is that we are going to have to relitigate, at least in the political dialog, something that has already been settled.

Here’s some history of the issue from the California perspective:

Medical decisions near the end of life have provoked national controversy for many years. Historically, doctors persisted (from personal conviction or professional obligation) in keeping patients alive by artificial means, regardless of the expressed wishes of the patient or family.

To its credit, California was the first state in the country to pass the Natural Death Act in 1976, allowing patients to indicate in writing if they did not want their life prolonged when they were terminally ill. Later, the durable power of attorney for health care allowed people to choose a surrogate who could make decisions for them.

In 1991, Congress passed the Patient Self-Determination Act, which not only reinforced that adults (or their designated surrogates) have a right to accept or refuse medical treatment, but also required most health care organizations to provide information to patients about these rights and about advance directives.

California’s advance directive forms have continued to change over time, more attuned to the needs of patients and their loved ones. But the intent of these forms is unchanged: the rights of patients to decide when medical treatment is more burden than benefit.

Yet the interface of personal wishes, medical practice and legal authority is never simple. In the early 1990s, a new controversy arose when some doctors and nurses objected to providing endless life-prolonging interventions to dying patients whose families insisted on “doing everything.” Where families saw hope, health care professionals saw torture and futility.

Facing two different dilemmas – doctors who did not give patients the options they needed and families with unrealistic expectations – Sacramento began in 1994 what became the first large-scale community-based project in the country to seek a broad consensus on the decision-making process for terminally or irreversibly ill patients.

Called ECHO – Extreme Care, Humane Options – this two-year effort involved committees of health care professionals from every hospital in the region. Nearly 1,000 local residents also provided their input on the changes needed to assure that treatment decisions reflected the wishes of informed and involved patients and families.

In early 1997, the ECHO Community Recommendations were published with specific strategies for hospitals, health professionals, health plans and medical groups. Endorsed by local hospitals, these recommendations advocated communication, education and decision processes designed to respect, not defy, the values of patients and families without undermining the professional standards of physicians and nurses.

Within several years, every hospital in the greater Sacramento region began palliative care services, physicians were taught communication skills and community members attended workshops on advance care planning. In 2001, a local coalition was formed to help sustain and expand these educational programs.

Obviously, it’s time to turn back the clock. Everything’s gotten just a little bit too rational and the need to expand this humane and necessary approach to the end of life decisions in this era of advanced must be stopped:

What does it have to do with the current controversy? The proposed legislation requires that Medicare compensate physicians for their time talking with patients about advance care planning – in effect, their goals and values, treatment preferences and who they would want to speak on their behalf if they cannot make decisions for themselves. It provides incentives for physicians to become more skilled in end-of-life care and encourages palliative care programs for patients needing and wanting those services.

All of this is voluntary, not mandated.

This legislation would not be wasted. In a telephone survey sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation in 2006, 67 percent of Californians would want to die at home, yet only 27 percent actually do. Eight out of 10 people say it is “very” or “somewhat” important to write down their end-of-life wishes, but only 36 percent actually have written instructions.

And these right wing neanderthals want to make sure that doesn’t change. These hysterics don’t care what the elderly actually want — if these poor people have to spend weeks hooked up to machines in sterile hospitals, in misery and horrible suffering, alive only in the most expansive definition of the term, it’s worth it because Obama is a Kenyan Hitler and they have to “break him.”

It’s enough to make me want to go to a Town Hall and yell at somebody.

h/t to bb

Sure

by digby

Does anyone actually believe that this is the real reason Dick Armey had to resign from his lobbying firm?

Isn’t it more likely that he appears to be on a three day bender every time he appears in public and they were just looking for an excuse? Exhibit A:

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Torture For Money

by digby

There was a fascinating article in the New York Times last week about the torture regime, highlighting the architects of the techniques, two psychologists named Mitchell and Jessen, about whom I’ve written before. The story wasn’t all that new, obviously; Jane Mayer had written about them extensively in The Dark Side. But the story about their “consulting business” and the money they made teaching torture techniques was new to me and lent it another layer of moral corruption.

However, it appears it isn’t the whole story by a long shot. In a three part series over at FDL, Jeffrey Kaye delves into who hired Mitchell and Jessen, a question elided in the NY Times article. And naturally the answer is that it was a result of even more corruption.

Part I
Part II
Part III to come today.

One of the things that still remains to be sorted out about the GWOT period is the extent to which corruption drove military policy. The amount of money that was spent, with no accountability is staggering. And how much the profit motive guided policy is a question that should be asked. Whatever happened to the idea of a new Truman Commission? Or would is looking in the rear view mirror and playing the blame game too?

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No Fury Like Vice Scorned

by batocchio

If you’ve missed it, Barton Gellman’s latest Cheney article, “Cheney Uncloaks His Frustration With Bush,” is worth a read:

In his first few months after leaving office, former vice president Richard B. Cheney threw himself into public combat against the “far left” agenda of the new commander in chief. More private reflections, as his memoir takes shape in slashing longhand on legal pads, have opened a second front against Cheney’s White House partner of eight years, George W. Bush.

Cheney’s disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.

“In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him,” said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. “He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming. It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times — never apologize, never explain — and Bush moved toward the conciliatory.”

A president, showing independence from his vice-president? Dangerous stuff. I’d note, though, that this is perfectly in line with the neocon idea that Bush was an empty vessel and Palin was a “blank page” to fill with their ideas. (Hey, ya gotta know your market – no one bright would buy the neocon ideology, all the more so after its huge disasters.)

Back to Gellman, near the end of the piece:

“If he goes out and writes a memoir that spills beans about what took place behind closed doors, that would be out of character,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as White House spokesman during Bush’s first term.

Yet that appears to be precisely Cheney’s intent. Robert Barnett, who negotiated Cheney’s book contract, passed word to potential publishers that the memoir would be packed with news, and Cheney himself has said, without explanation, that “the statute of limitations has expired” on many of his secrets. “When the president made decisions that I didn’t agree with, I still supported him and didn’t go out and undercut him,” Cheney said, according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. “Now we’re talking about after we’ve left office. I have strong feelings about what happened. . . . And I don’t have any reason not to forthrightly express those views.”

Liz Cheney, whom friends credit with talking her father into writing the book, described the memoir as a record for posterity. “You have to think about his love of history, and when he thinks about this memoir, he thinks about it as a book his grandchildren will read,” she said.

I’m sure they’ll especially enjoy the torture scenes. Still, amazingly enough, Liz Cheney may have inadvertently done something good (assuming the raw, unvetted-by-criminal-defense-lawyers version can get out).

The Poor Man Institute points out:

…Consider this: By the time Cheney grew disenchanted with his protege, Bush had already started two wars against the dirty Moslem horde, deployed a mercenary army with a twisted religious sadism, authorized widespread torture, sanctioned indefinite detention and kidnapping, implemented a program for illegal wiretaps/surveillance of US citizens, signed-off on illegal settlement expansion in the occupied lands, endorsed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, supported Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia, stoked a bloody (if unsuccessful) coup to topple Hamas in Gaza, and numerous other atrocities to warm the defective heart of Dick Cheney.

So the question is what, exactly, did Bush refuse to do that led to this increasingly messy divorce?

That is one of several big questions. In late July, after high profile pieces on the Libby pardon and Bush’s consideration of deploying the military domestically broke, Digby made a similar point:

Reading this thing about the Tanks of Lackawanna, something has become clear to me that wasn’t before: the excesses of the Bush administration, the war, the torture, the wiretapping, were the result of compromises between the sociopathic Cheney faction and the merely dull and incompetent remainder of the administration, including the president.

(The “Tanks” link points to DDay’s post on this. If you missed them, I’d also recommend the Glenn Greenwald and Scott Horton posts on the military story, and Emptywheel’s post “The Bush Fairy Tale on the Libby Pardon.” When it comes to the Bush administration, as horrible as they’ve often appeared, subsequent revelations have almost always revealed them to be even worse.)

Commenting on the Gellman story and Cheney’s plans to write a book, Anne Laurie writes:

Apparently omerta has its limits. I know a lot of us DFHs feared that the horrors of the Cheney Regency would never receive a public airing, if only for fear of the War Crimes Tribunal, but perhaps vanity will achieve what mere human decency and the rule of law never could.

Here’s hoping. Still, the rule of law would be nice, if “quaint” in the view of Alberto Gonzales and the rest. I remain a fan of pitching the idea that the only thing that could possibly exonerate Cheney and the gang, and win them the accolades they so clearly deserve, is a full, unfettered investigation into the torture program (and the surveillance program and…).

I keep on plugging it, but Gellman’s book Angler is one of the very best on Cheney and the Bush administration out there. As it is, he’ll have to update it or write a sequel because some of what’s come out since is even more nefarious. But if you’re looking for a Cheney primer, you can read Angler excerpts here and here. Gellman’s piece on “the Cheney Rules” is also a useful overview, and Scott Horton conducted a good interview with Gellman. Work by Jane Mayer, Ron Suskind and others give a much clearer picture of the Bush administration as well. Meanwhile, the Frontline episode “Cheney’s Law” is one of several good pieces they’ve done on Cheney and the Bush administration.

Ah, the sweet smell of vanity and towering hubris. These guys have a warped view of the world, but their self-images are distorted as well. Remember, back during planning for the Gulf War, Cheney was repeatedly pitching crazy military plans to Norman Schwarzkopf. It’s almost impossible to overstate how arrogant Cheney and his gang are (Addington’s one of the worst). Cheney’s approach showed an utter contempt for the American people, the entirety of Congress (including his own party), and even key members of the Bush administration. As I wrote in an earlier post, Cheney felt he was wiser than the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Geneva Conventions, the Federalist papers, the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Constitution, and the Boy Scout Oath. In the Scott Horton interview, Gellman describes Cheney as “a rare combination: a zealot in principle and a subtle, skillful tactician in practice.” In Cheney’s battle over whether to protect his proud legacy versus his instinct for self-preservation from prosecution, I’m hoping he pulls a Libby and the vain, arrogant zealot wins out.

Cheney thinks he’s Jack Bauer. Part of him must be itching to go Colonel Jessep and yell the ugly truth at us all.
 

Ain’t Nothing New Under The Sun

by digby

Perlstein points out that right wing lunacy is more like a chronic American disease than an unpredictable, spontaneous eruption. It’s just how they roll:

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers — these are “either” the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president — too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters’ signs — too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don’t understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can’t understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as “20 years of treason” and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House “found in the files a blueprint for socializing America.”

Read on, it’s great stuff.

Perlstein is an unparalleled historian of the conservative movement and I expect him to know these juicy details from 40 or 50 years ago. But I would also expect Washington politicians and political media to know that many of the same people are who ginning up the lunacy and acting like hysterical freaks right now are not only acting in the conservative tradition, they are also the very same people who pulled this stuff just a decade ago.

I guess everyone thought that that whole ‘vast right wing conspiracy” thing was something Hillary made up in her head because Tim Russert told them so.

Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak were interviewed yesterday at NN by Susie Madrak and Ari Melber. Specter made some news when he revealed that from the beginning the Republicans had circulated among themselves that they were going to “break Obama” — and it didn’t originate over health care, but even before the stimulus. They never had any intention of acting in good faith. This didn’t surprise me either. But it certainly seems to have surprised the administration, or at least they thought they could win them over anyway. But they can’t.

It’s an illness that health care reform can’t cure. You just have to find a way to live with the problem and not let it kill you.

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