Adam Green notes Mark Warner’s tiresome comments over the week-end about the need for bipartisanship and reminds us that this isn’t the first time the Democratic Charlie Brown’s have fallen for this:
Newt Gingrich on the House floor during the health care debate — March 16, 1994:
Mr. GINGRICH.
I agree with my friend, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Gephardt]. I want to reach out in a bipartisan way to pass the bill. I praise the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Bilirakis] and the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Rowland] for a bipartisan bill. I praise the gentleman from Iowa [Mr. Grandy] and the gentleman from Tennessee [Mr. Cooper] for a bipartisan bill. They are starting in the right direction to reach out.
Then minority whip Newt Gingrich (R-GA) led a politically opportunistic and stubborn conservative charge against health care reform. He argued internally that any successful bill would set back Republican electoral prospects in November 1994. At a March 1994 strategy retreat, Gingrich warned GOP senators that “any Republican concessions will be met with more Democratic demands,” and that the GOP should concede nothing.
I doubt the game plan has changed. And sadly, I doubt that these Democrats think it has either. Adam sez:
Ezra found a semi-sane Republican on the “The Dingoes Want Moy Bayby” controversy. He’s Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who turns out to be the guy who put the Soylent Green amendment in the Senate bill:
Is this bill going to euthanize my grandmother? What are we talking about here? What we’re talking about in the health care debate mark-up, one of the things I talked about was that the most money spent on anyone is spent usually in the last 60 days of life and that’s because an individual is not in a capacity to make decisions for themselves. So rather than getting into a situation where the government makes those decisions, if everyone had an end-of-life directive or what we call in Georgia “durable power of attorney,” you could instruct at a time of sound mind and body what you want to happen in an event where you were in difficult circumstances where you’re unable to make those decisions. This has been an issue for 35 years. All 50 states now have either durable powers of attorney or end-of-life directives and it’s to protect children or a spouse from being put into a situation where they have to make a terrible decision as well as physicians from being put into a position where they have to practice defensive medicine because of the trial lawyers. It’s just better for an individual to be able to clearly delineate what they want done in various sets of circumstances at the end of their life. How did this become a question of euthanasia? I have no idea. I understand — and you have to check this out — I just had a phone call where someone said Sarah Palin’s web site had talked about the House bill having death panels on it where people would be euthanized. How someone could take an end of life directive or a living will as that is nuts. You’re putting the authority in the individual rather than the government. I don’t know how that got so mixed up. You’re saying that this is not a question of government. It’s for individuals. It empowers you to be able to make decisions at a difficult time rather than having the government making them for you. The policy here as I understand it is that Medicare would cover a counseling session with your doctor on end-of-life options. Correct. And it’s a voluntary deal. It seems to me we’re having trouble conducting an adult conversation about death. We pay a lot of money not to face these questions. We prefer to experience the health-care system as something that just saves you, and if it doesn’t, something has gone wrong. Over the last three-and-a-half decades, this legislation has been passed state-by-state, in part because of the tort issue and in part because of many other things. It’s important for an individual to make those determinations while they’re of sound mind and body rather than no one making those decisions at all. But this discussion has been going on for three decades. And the only change we’d see is that individuals would have a counseling session with their doctor? Uh-huh. When they become eligible for Medicare. Are there other costs? Parts of it I’m missing? No. The problem you got is that there’s so much swirling around about health care and people are taking bits and pieces out of this. This was thoroughly debated in the Senate committee. It’s voluntary. Every state in America has an end of life directive or durable power of attorney provision. For the peace of mind of your children and your spouse as well as the comfort of knowing the government won’t make these decisions, it’s a very popular thing. Just not everybody’s aware of it. What got you interested in this subject? I’ve seen the pain and suffering in families with a loved one with a traumatic brain injury or a crippling degenerative disease become incapacitated and be kept alive under very difficult circumstances when if they’d have had the chance to make the decision themself they’d have given another directive and I’ve seen the damage financially that’s been done to families and if there’s a way to prevent that by you giving advance directives it’s both for the sanity of the family and what savings the family has it’s the right decision, certainly more than turning it to the government or a trial lawyer.
He’s so going to be in trouble.It turns out that Isakson got the point on the Schiavo mess too. Oddly enough it turns out that the wholoe state ofGeorgia is a hotbed of euthanasia activism:
Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson will kickoff Health Care Decisions Week Monday, Nov. 7, 2005, at 10 a.m. in the Capitol South Atrium. Senator Isakson will publicly sign a personal “Directive for Final Health Care” to urge Georgia citizens to talk with their families and loved ones about their personal wishes for final health care. The “Directive For Final Health Care” is a recognized form of advance directive, used for legally documenting final health care wishes. Joining Senator Isakson in signing a Directive For Final Health Care will be State Representative Nan Orrock, State Senator Judson Hill, Gary Nelson, President of Healthcare Georgia Foundation, Dr. Jack Chapman, Board Chairman of Medical Association of Georgia, and Maria Greene, Director of Georgia Division of Aging Services. Isakson said the Terri Schiavo case is a wake-up call to how important it is to sort out end-of-life decisions “I believe it is every person’s right and responsibility to make sure their loved ones are prepared to make decisions on their behalf by discussing and documenting their wishes,” he said. “It is my sincere hope that all Georgians will join me in following the lead of the Georgia General Assembly’s Resolution and make their final wishes known.”
Why is the state of Georgia trying to kill your grandmother? Where will it end? .
For those of you still looking for info on the Town Halls and where you can go to participate in this exercise in “raw democracy” FDL’s got everything you need and even created a handy widget you can embed in your own site. (Just go here to get the code.)
Also, Glenzilla’s on vacation and so I’ve contributed some of my scribblings to his site today. If you’re interested in reading about latest on torture and tasers, it’s all there.
Oh good God. If even putative liberals are seeing the Soylent Green Police behind the extremely benign and useful Medicare counseling for living wills in the House health care bills then we have gone so far down the rabbit hole that it’s become the equivalent of the contraception hissy fit in the stimulus package. Remember this?
Christian Defense Coalition calls Speaker Pelosi’s decision to add contraceptives to the economic stimulus package bigoted, racist, elitist and anti-child.
It is unthinkable that the Speaker of House would try to stimulate the economy by seeking to reduce the number of children.
Our political leaders should do all within their power to protect, support and encourage America’s children, not crush and destroy them.
This policy would lay the foundation for racism and eugenics because it would seek to reduce the number of children to the nation’s poorest economic groups, which tend to be persons of color and other minorities.
It is now becoming clear that the Democratic leadership intends to use the economic crisis to push forward a radical anti-family social agenda.
The hissy fit is as predictable as John Boehner’s orangish glow.
The solution to this is obvious. The Democrats should always put something really outrageous into every bill to give the wingnuts something to rend their garments over. In the stimulus they should have set aside a couple million for illegal alien subsidized beachfront housing. In health care they should have put in a tax on guns to cover plastic surgery. When the nutters predictably go bonkers, they can reluctantly “give in,” thus leaving perfectly mainstram, useful items like contraception and counseling for living wills alone.
I don’t know what else to do about this but give them a hissy fit. They’re going to have one no matter what. Might as well plan for it.
In your free market wonderland everyone somehow manages to get healthcare, even those who are poor or live in isolated areas, though the poor and isolated in your own state required assistance from the federal government.
And despite all of this, you appear blithely unaware that the free market healthcare system we have now does, indeed, have “death panels.” I’ve been part of a death panel conversation. I know about death panels.
You have no idea what it’s like to be called into a sterile conference room with a hospital administrator you’ve never met before and be told that your mother’s insurance policy will only pay for 30 days in ICU. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be advised that you need to “make some decisions,” like whether your mother should be released “HTD” which is hospital parlance for “home to die,” or if you want to pay out of pocket to keep her in the ICU another week. And when you ask how much that would cost you are given a number so impossibly large that you realize there really are no decisions to make. The decision has been made for you. “Living will” or no, it doesn’t matter. The bank account and the insurance policy have trumped any legal document.
If this isn’t a “death panel” I don’t know what is.
There are death panels being held everyday in hospital corridors and living rooms across America. It’s how we currently ration health care: by who can pay. Unfortunately, because we spend so much health care money on profits for the health care industry, costs are still skyrocketing so that we are going to have to “ration” even more.
But since Good People, Real Americans, have health insurance, only bad people have to worry about this, which is how it should be. The problem is that if the government takes over they’re going ration by taking away the Good People’s health care and giving it to welfare queens and illegal immigrants who don’t deserve it.
I don’t believe them. Beck and Palin urging that wingnuts not get violent calls to mind those ever-so-outwardly-pious 19th Century warning guides to vice in New York City which urged their readers to avoid like the very Devil Himself the southwest corner of Bowery and 3rd because there’s a large whorehouse on the third floor that disgracefully offers free wine to the first fifty men who use the password “Johnnie sent me.”
It seems to me that the far right is genuinely expecting something truly violent to happen and only pretending to be concerned; they’re egging their morans on at the same time they’re covering themselves from charges of incitement.
Paranoia? Maybe. Then again, days after Beck urged his brownshirts – sorry, I mistyped, I meant to write “his insane followers” – he was back on the air joking that he poisoned Nancy Pelosi’s wine. Note to comedy lovers: That’s not funny.
Meanwhile, Holy Horse Has Left The Barn, Batman! House Democrats have finally gotten around to setting up a “war room” to push back against the thuggery on the right. That’s nice, kids. Be home by 5:00, ok?
I was going to write about this reprehensible Robert Samuelson column, but find that there’s no need since Jonathan Cohn already took him downtown. These conservatives really do believe that taxation is more immoral than allowing people to die for lack of health insurance in the most prosperous nation on earth.
Cohn concludes his post with this:
Even if everything Samuelson said about cost control were true, how on earth does that qualify as defending the status quo? Last time I checked, the status quo means that tens of millions of people have no insurance while tens of millions more have insurance that doesn’t cover their needs. The reforms Obama supports would mean everybody get could comprehensive insurance at a price they could afford. Samuelson doesn’t contest this. On the contrary, he sees it as part of the problem. Note the quotes around “right” and “moral” in his column. The people who end up going “bankrupt” or watching loved ones “die” because of unaffordable health insurance might beg to disagree.
I actually am finding this health care debate quite clarifying. After the years of sanctimonious garbage about “compassionate conservatism” these people are finally being forced to say what they really believe: they just don’t care about anybody but themselves. If anything should happen to them personally, or they fail to get wealthy, the government should help them because they are deserving. Others (and I think you know what I’m talking about) simply aren’t worthy. After all, if you acknowledge that someone else has a “right” it means you’ve lost yours. There’s only so much life, liberty and happiness to go around.
Recently, the UK Food Standards Agency published a review of the available studies on the nutritional and other health benefits of organic food. Their conclusions:
An independent review commissioned by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) shows that there are no important differences in the nutrition content, or any additional health benefits, of organic food when compared with conventionally produced food. The focus of the review was the nutritional content of foodstuffs.
Gill Fine, FSA Director of Consumer Choice and Dietary Health, said: ‘Ensuring people have accurate information is absolutely essential in allowing us all to make informed choices about the food we eat. This study does not mean that people should not eat organic food. What it shows is that there is little, if any, nutritional difference between organic and conventionally produced food and that there is no evidence of additional health benefits from eating organic food.
Needless to say, foodies instantly jumped all over the report, retorting that they didn’t look at the harmful effects of pesticides, etc., etc.
I’m in no position to debate knowledgeably the technical details of the study, or the rebuttals. I do know that in my experience, organics (especially local organics) usually, but not always, taste much, much better than the factory farm stuff that’s shipped who-knows-how-many miles to get dumped into my supermarket. Likewise, the factory stuff I’m offered in Manhattan is usually, but not always, lacking in interesting variety while ranging in quality from the tasteless to the more-or-less acceptable.
However, Marion Nestle has a characteristically knowledgeable and nuanced take on the study and its meaning:
I have long argued that functional foods (in which nutrients are added over and above those that are already present in the foods) are not about improving health; they are about improving marketing. Evaluating foods on the basis of their content of one or another nutrient is what Michael Pollan calls “nutritionism.” Nutritionism is about marketing, not health.
I am a great supporter of organic foods because their production reduces the use of unnecessary chemicals, antibiotics, and hormones, and favors more sustainable production practices. Yes, some organic foods will be higher in some nutrients than some conventional foods. But so what? Customers who can afford to buy organic foods are unlikely to be nutrient deficient. What’s at stake in the furor over this issue is market share. What should be at stake is the need to produce food – all food – more sustainably.
That seems to make a lot of sense to me. I’ll focus on the first point in her post, the issue of “nutrtitionism,” and leave for a later time, the other, equally interesting, concerns she brings up.
From what I can tell – ie, your mileage may vary but from my own experience and how I understand that of others, including Pollan and Mark Bittman – if you eat really good food, and by that I simply mean food that tastes great, you really don’t have to worry too much whether you’re getting enough protein, b-12, omega-3’s, or [insert latest ginned-up food fad here]. Of course, learning about the nutrients in your food can make for an interesting hobby, but in general, there’s no reason to sweat the details if you’re eating good stuff. Michael Pollan’s famous semi-tongue-in-cheek mantra, “Eat food, not too much. Mostly plants” probably is about all that most of us without specific dietary problems need as a guide in order to eat for our health.
The trick, of course, is to recognize what really good food tastes like… and also how to eat it!
Sadly, that’s not so easy in modern America. Americans have been trained since birth to eat cruddy-tasting food and think it tastes great. It’s not that burgers taste bad: they don’t, they can taste great. It’s rather that the burgers – and the fries, and the shakes, and so on – made available to the typical American taste awful, with fake flavors that pretend to taste good. But once you have, say, really great chocolate – and, hard as it is to believe, few of us have – you’ll never, ever go back to the fake or adulterated stuff currently marketed as “chocolate.” Other foods are harder to taste than chocolate, of course, but the principle’s the same.
Now it’s not just The Man’s fault. True, big corporations have done an extraordinary job of feeding us huge piles of crappy-tasting slop (and also “disappearing” good food). In doing so, they’ve guaranteed that their owners will make enough of the other green stuff that they’ll never have to eat their own lousy products. But that’s only part of the problem.
If your parents were like mine, you never knew what broccoli could taste like when it wasn’t cooked down to mush, or even how awesome a simple tomato salad could be. Incredibly, if we want to enjoy good food – something other cultures take for granted (and not just Europe!) – we actually need to learn, starting from square one, what it tastes like and how to cook it. That’s how clueless most Americans are about food. (I’m not talking haute cuisine here. I’m talking about what’s come to be called “ingredients:” produce, dairy, meats, seafood. You know: the stuff that was once called “food.”)
That’s not all. We have to learn how to eat good food. Pollan, in one of his most important observations, notes that Americans, when they’re asked about the food they eat, default to touting the health benefits, or lack thereof. We eat oatmeal because it’s good for us. Chocolate is sinful and decadent: we crave it. But once you think about it for a moment or two, this puritanical attitude, which is epidemic in the United States, really is profoundly weird. Health is first and foremost a moral imperative? Pleasure is a degenerate sin? What’s that about?
That’s not necessarily how folks from other cultures describe how they eat (and there are exceptions here, too, of course). Eating delicious food can be, to a great extent, an aesthetic act, a source of pleasure, joy, and the honing of one’s skills of discernment. People in many cultures spend an enormous amount of time – by our standards – eating meals together. Somehow, they manage to eat simply for pleasure without killing themselves en masse. And we think they’re weird for sitting down to lavish meals – often with (gasp!) birth=defect inducing libations – that go on for hours.
Naturally, I’m not suggesting we be more like Italians, or drink ourselves into a coma, or ignore the (few) important scientific facts we really need to know about our diets. No. What I’m saying is that the reason it would be a damn good idea for Americans to learn to spend more time together cooking and eating is not because it’s “good” for us, or “useful” – fuck the Puritans! – but because it can be so incredibly enjoyable.
Let me state two self-evident truths with incredibly far-reaching implications for a society habituated to thinking about what constitutes a good life solely through the dreary prism of the ubiquitous, and hypocritical, prigs who dominate our discourse. In a different culture, these truths would be so obvious as to be thought simple-minded. Not here in 21st Century America, boyo:
First and foremost, food should taste great. Equally important: we should enjoy the act of eating it.
Told you they were obvious! But think for a minute about what they really mean. Not that food should be nutritious – it simply is nutritious. Not that food should be profitable at the expense of taste: beans are for eating, not counting. Not that food should be fast: good food, like all great pleasures (translated: sex) is best enjoyed nice and slow. What makes this attitude so radical is that it places human joy back at the center of a central human experience. Not morality, not profit, not ginned-up trivial jolts. Pleasure.
Getting back to organics… of course, our food should be as organic and local as possible. That should go without saying, like, of course we should put on warm clothes when it’s cold. Or, of course we should properly fund the arts and, of course, we should have universal healthcare. But, of course, we don’t.
Nestle’s post has an important implication. Studying the relative nutritional merits of organic vs conventional misses all the most important aspects of food. Even if conventionals were more nutritious, it matters not a whit. They just don’t taste as good and that’s what really matters, or should.
In a future post, I’ll address why I believe this is not an elitist attitude. Just the opposite, in fact.
“You are asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there are clearly people in American who believe in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards.”
Why the Democrats haven’t found a way to use the Schiavo mess to their advantage on this, I don’t know. The people of this country viscerally understand why end of life care is complicated and why people need living wills, which can, by the way, specify that they require every machine and extraordinary measure be used to keep them breathing as long as possible if that’s what they want. Very few people actually want that, but without a living will the medical professionals have to keep them alive by every means possible or the family has to try to read the patient’s mind and make the difficult decision themselves. It’s an awful situation and completely preventable if everyone just specifies their wishes in advance.
It’s despicable that these people are using demagoguery on a matter such as living wills. Nothing is more difficult and important when you are dealing with a dying loved one and its despicable that they are actually going out of their way to make this more difficult than it should be for purely political reasons. They are actually trying to get old people to be scared of having a living will and it is going to result in horrifying suffering among them and their families.
Once again, I sencerely hope there is a hell because all these jackasses are going to burn for enternity for the things they have done. The depths to which they’ve sunk in this health care debate is so awful I honestly don’t know if they can go any lower.
David Brooks says that Limbaugh’s Hitler characterizations are insane:
Good for Brooks. But it does strike me as odd that Brooks hasn’t heard about Limbaugh’;s ravings this week.
Oh wait, that’s right. The newspaper for which he writes forgot to mention that in their fairnbalanced report on what’s going on at the Town Halls. And good bipartisan villagers don’t dirty their beautiful minds with any of the riff raff media because it’s all partisan and biased and shrill.
This is the same Rush Limbaugh who’s been out there spewing noxious bile and outright lies for decades and who is so powerful the entire Republican Party is forced to kiss his ring or risk him turning of the mob on themselves. While Brooks and the rest of the villagers were all tittering over the odd naughty Rush quote, he’s been out there creating a subculture of know-nothing zombies.
Welcome to 21st century politics Bobo. Hope you enjoy what you’ve wrought.
