Lost in the news buzz of last week, the EPA is moving to regulate carbon under the Clean Air Act. Megan sizes up the politics:
Cap and trade regulation is bound to be extraordinarily unpopular, and the party that passes it is going to have some 'splaining to do when voters notice higher charges on their electricity and gas bills. But if the EPA concludes that it already has the authority to regulate carbon, all the part in charge has to do is . . . nothing. That won't be popular if energy prices are rising, but it's not nearly as politically tricky as actively making people pay more for energy.
McCain argues against the release of the OLC Torture memos; but he does tell the truth: “waterboarding is torture, period.” So America’s most famous POW is on the record as saying that the president of the United States authorized war crimes. And yet we are to do nothing whatsoever about it:
I am a 25 year old 2nd year law student at a 1st tier law school in New York City. By no means a lazy person looking to benefit off others hard work. I am the son of a retired NYC police officer and a retired para-professional (essentially a professional teachers assistant for special education children). I have no health insurance.
As a full time law student it is expected we won't work, even part time, never mind a full time situation where I might get health benefits. School offers a health program, but I can't afford it and it doesn't cover nearly enough. I'm already sitting underneath mountains of debt with no job assurances in front of me, I can't afford to pile any more on even if I could. I haven't had insurance since I left my job as a paralegal at a major firm to attend school.
I will go over only the last year for you to emphasize my point. I have asthma. I cannot get my proper medication and have to rely on a friend who's mother is a pharmacist to steal sample sized daily inhalers for me. Not only is this embarrassing and unreliable, it costs all of you who do have insurance money. I have no choice. A year ago in May I was running on my treadmill to try and beat the asthma naturally and I felt a twinge in the center of my right foot. That kept me off my treadmill for 3 months. I couldn't go get an X-ray or see a doctor. It cost me a about a week at a Federal Court internship which went on my evaluation at the end of the summer, leading to a negative review. Luckily the pain has gone away and the long term effects seem minimal. I am now able to run.
Twice over the past year, once at the end of last summer and once this January, I had a terrible cough of some kind in my chest that wouldn't go away for 3 or 4 weeks no matter what over the counter drugs I tried. I could not go to the doctor. I didn't know what was wrong with me. Each time my girlfriend (a fellow law student who has insurance through her mother) had to lie to her doctor about an ear infection so that he would write her a prescription for antibiotics that MIGHT work for me. Fortunately they did and besides the chronic asthma my coughing has mostly subsided. Indeed, this is also embarrassing, unreliable and makes me feel awful asking my girlfriend to lie to her doctor. I am a firm believer in the old school theory that doctors are to be respected and trusted.
About 3 weeks ago a friend of mine was horsing around and sort of "fake" tackled me from the side. Unfortunately he didn't know his own strength and up ended me. I don't know precisely what happened but I guess in attempting to brace myself upon falling I landed awkwardly on my left wrist/thumb. It has been in severe pain ever since. I can't lift things with my left hand. I can't push of with it. What I mean is I can't get myself off the floor with it, go to the gym, push anything of weight, and it hurts quite a bit to type this to you right now. I can't go to the doctor to get it diagnosed or treated. As an athlete who has had his fair share of injuries and surgeries I fear this one might need to go under the knife. I will not be able to do that and I fear this injury will be with me in some way for the rest of my life.
Luckily, I am a law student, so I don't have to do any real hard work with my wrist (I'm referring to actual hard labor, law students work very hard, it's just not physically taxing work). However, I am forced to type all day and that is painful. But I can't complain…I am getting a wonderful education that should provide me with decent employment the remainder of my life. But what if I wasn't that lucky? I once worked in an auto parts warehouse myself. What if I needed my wrist for work? I can't help but worry about those people.
This doesn't happen in any other western industrialized nation. In those places I would have had my X-rays, got my antibiotics from my doctor, and would at minimum know what is wrong with my wrist and be treating it if it wasn't already better. Andrew, I understand your dislike of your native country's system. It is not perfect by any means. However, it's hard for a person going through these uncertainties every day to sympathize with your position. I would receive treatment there. I would be far better off there and so would tens of millions of Americans who have no insurance who go through the same things I'm going through every day. Most of which forced too because they simply can't afford it, not because they are lazy or mooching off others (I'm not suggesting you say this, but there are those that do).
I also don't suggest using the U.K. as a model. Putting aside the fact that citizens there are, if only slightly, happier with their system than Americans and that preventative care is far, far superior in the U.K., I still don’t feel it's the best system. I would use the French model of combining private competition with public guarantees of essential care. Most French do have some form of private health insurance, which leads to the competition amongst private companies. However, the government guarantees 100% of care for certain ailments and situations (asthma being one of them). This system captures the best of both worlds, innovation and price competition amongst private entities while assuring those who need care that they will have care. It is the number 1 ranked system in the world. Perhaps, that is where we should be looking.
All of these things are more bothersome than most believe. The mystery of it all, the lack of knowing what is wrong with me is the worst. Every little ache or pain creates panic because I know I can't treat it and fear what it might be or become. These injuries and illnesses…I never know if they are really serious or will be OK and gone in a week or two. It is a great source of stress in my life and embarrasses me to my core. Seems to me the ability to visit a doctor for a cough or foot pain is essential to human dignity. It saddens me that we don't give this dignity to every American.
Gabe at Videogum writes, “They should make more ads like this; visually beautiful, completely entrancing, which could stand on its own detached from its marketing purpose, and without the heavy-handedness of a jingle or even a logo.”
Government wasn't the sole cause of the housing bubble, but it sure didn't help:
Governments subsidise home ownership because they think it encourages stable, more law-abiding neighbourhoods. The children of homeowners do better at school than the children of renters do. Homeowners are more engaged in local democracy. And, because homeowners must pay off their mortgages, housing supposedly encourages people to save more than they otherwise would.
Yet as our article argues, the benefits of subsidies have proved smaller than expected and the costs much greater. Home ownership may indeed instil neighbourly stability (though Germany with its high levels of stability and renting suggests the two need not go together). But who said local stability was so desirable? A stable neighbourhood may be one in which people refuse to move in search of jobs.
A libertarian blogger makes a good point about religious liberty scare-mongering:
The “victimized” Christian bigots are of course not making a thorough, comprehensive (i.e., truly libertarian) demand for full entrepreneurial freedom of contract — and its reciprocal “right to refuse service to anyone.” All they want to do is discriminate against gays. Not “anyone and everyone.” Just gays.
Which is precisely why they should not be allowed to do so. As I have blogged previously: Whether or not you approve of bans on private discrimination is not the point — we are not debating the creation of Libertopia.
"It shows somebody down in the bowels of that organization is either a convinced left winger or somebody whose sexual orientation is somewhat in question. But it’s that kind of thing, somebody who doesn’t think that we should have abortion on demand, is labeled a terrorist! It’s outrageous" – Pat Robertson, ascribing the DHS report on right-wing extremism to gay government officials.
My closet story is a little different. I had smoked pot since JR High. Smoked it all the way through college and continued throughout of much of my adult life. I never really tried to hide it except from bosses and parents. I gave it up about ten years ago because I no longer liked the way it made me feel. Anxious…and paranoid. So I stopped.
I did not smoke again for about seven years. When my wife was diagnosed with cancer in 2006 we gave it the good fight. But the chemo and steroids made her so sick, and the anti-nausea medicine did nothing to help her. Surprisingly, it was my 78 year old mother that suggested I get her some pot.
I had not even considered that for some reason, but later that night my son dropped by and I asked him if he could get us a little since all my connections were gone. That evening, when my wife came out of the bathroom after throwing up for the sixth time that day, I suggested she try it. She had never been a pot smoker. (Those few times she had tired it, it tended to make her sleepy. So she would have a Margarita when we were relaxing at home alone.)
The effect was immediate and dramatic. Not only was she not throwing up any more, she got a bit of her appetite back. And the little aches and pains from the steroids went away too. I’ll never forget that night because I took a couple of hits too. (I told her that I had to test it. She said if I use that logic I should test the chemo too. HA!!!) We laughed and giggled like kids. And we talked about things that she had not been able to talk about before. Like her regret of not going to see the grandkids grow up. And that she was going to leave me alone. I made us some hot chocolate and we talked well into the night. After we had gone to bed I woke up to find her head laying on my chest and her looking up at me. She asked if we could smoke a little more and talk. I’ll tell you Andrew, I almost started crying. She had been so closed off since the doctor told her she had cancer.
We had quite a few more evenings like that. I honestly don’t think she would have lasted the two months that she did if she had not used the pot. She used it for the last two months that she lived and was no longer apprehensive when going for her chemo. She even put on some weight. And she start sleeping through the night. I can tell you without any doubt that her life, and our relationship, was good for those two months.
It will be two years April 18th. I miss her terribly but I am so glad we had those evenings of smoking pot and talking about the inevitable. 26 years of marriage is a long time. Those evenings made us stronger. I sincerely hope you and Aaron have the kind of marriage we did, Andrew.
This is the deepest and darkest aspect of the impact of Bush-Cheney's torture program on the constitution and the future. Leave aside for a moment the policy debate over torture in the abstract. From the very beginning, that has been largely moot. Why? Because even if you believe that the president has the duty to torture terror suspects, under the constitution, he has no legal right to do so without Congress' passage of legislation repealing the laws and treaties governing such torture. The use of torture is part of the laws of war and only Congress has the constitutional authority
To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water
It can't really be clearer than that. And the reason, of course, is the colonists' memory of the power of the monarch, especially with respect to torturing and mistreating prisoners of war. Now no legal authority in human history would judge the waterboarding of a prisoner 83 or 183 times in one month as anything but torture. If it were done to a US soldier, would Dick Cheney refuse to call it torture? Of course not, although it is telling that no reporter has ever asked him this obvious question directly.
And so it is simply an empirical fact that president Bush broke the law and violated his oath of office by ordering the torture of prisoners.
Note that this wasn't an emergency moment, or a ticking time-bomb scenario. It was a decision to torture made months after the 9/11 attacks and re-asserted years after the 9/11 attack, and set up as a program, with elaborate rules, staffing and bureaucracy, to torture prisoners for the indefinite future.
Now fast-forward to February 2007 when the International Committee of the Red Cross notifies the president of the United States that it believes that his administration has engaged in what was unequivocally torture of prisoners. At that point, the president is required, by law and by treaty, to open an investigation and prosecution of the guilty parties. The president failed to do that, another breach of the law. Moreover, any president privy to that information is required to initiate an investigation and prosecution – or violate the law and the Geneva Conventions.
And so Obama's refusal to investigate war crimes is itself against the law. And so torture's cancerous route through the legal and constitutional system continues, contaminating the future as well as the past, rendering the US incapable of upholding Geneva against other nations, because it has violated Geneva itself, and giving to every tyrant on the planet a justification for the torture of prisoners.
In this scenario, America becomes a city on a hill, where the rule of law is optional and torture acceptable if parsed into legal memos that do not pass the most basic professional sniff-test.
America becomes a banana republic.
(Photo: the aftermath of an enhanced interrogation under the command of George W. Bush in Iraq, where the Geneva Conventions applied.)
These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him.
The Dish 