Month: April 2009

“It’s now my great duty to promote the tea parties. Here we go!” – Fox News host, Stuart Varney.

I've never seen anyone this excited about business cards:

A reader writes:

"Matron" implies married, usually with children. At first sight, I guessed that Susan Boyle had never married. My suspicions were correct:

 Miss Boyle told presenters Ant and Dec that she lived alone with just her cat Pebbles for company. She said: ‘I’ve never had a boyfriend. I’ve never even been kissed.’

If you click on one link today, make it this one.

An internist who works in the hospital acknowledges that Medicare is unsustainable and lists various forms of rationing. He advocates “lifestyle rationing”:

If you smoke, be prepared to be denied access. If you do crack, be prepared to be denied coverage.

If you fail to join lifestyle modification classes or fail to show improvement in basic exercise tolerance tests, be prepared to be denied coverage or pay more for lifestyle associated disease process. Rationing of resources will be made. Be prepared for this possibility. We already deny liver transplants to those actively drinking. Scarcity of resources we say. Of course the [Medicare] is a scarce resource already, we simply chose to look the other way. At some point we will have to look back and stare rationing down right between the eyes and deny coverage for poor lifestyle choices.

Follow-up here.

Mexico's ambassador urges the decriminalization of marijuana as a way to weaken the cartels. Domestic production is way up. Mexico's Congress is considering decriminalization. Cultural mainstreaming, especially in the thirteen states that allow for medical use, is gaining pace. Any day now, sanity threatens to break out.

A reader responds to Megan:

Another reason that health care costs consumes so much of our GDP is that we have complex, sophisticated technology and Americans expect access to that technology for their illnesses regardless of cost.  Our ethical decision-making has not kept pace with our technological development.  Therefore, extremely premature babies and the elderly for example, who have very little chance of surviving their health care challenges with any kind of quality of life, consume significant resources before eventually succumbing.  This raises the specter of rationing, which is politically intolerable.  So if all Americans want access to all technology, it's going to be expensive.   Even if the inefficiencies are remedied, and excessive costs are brought under control our expectation will still be very expensive to satisfy.  Someone needs to explain the trade-offs between cost and access involved in lowering the cost of health care, and then facilitate a national, informed discussion about our choices as a nation.

Mark Thompson says they were:

 The concept started out as a relatively small idea organized by a handful of libertarian activists.  Movement conservatives saw an opportunity to co-opt it – and they did.

To them, the Tea Parties aren’t just an outlet for expressing frustration over the recent orgy of government spending, they are an opportunity to complain about gay marriage, affirmative action programs in government hiring policies, and just about everything else that movement conservatives oppose even more vehemently now that they’ve been beaten – badly – in consecutive national elections.  Never mind that the original point of the Tea Parties, so far as I can tell, was completely libertarian in nature and was to be as much a protest of the Republicans as it was of the Democrats.

Of course, if the Tea Parties had remained the sole province of a handful of libertarian activists, they never would have received the national attention they’re now able to receive, and thus would have had even less impact.  By accepting the involvement of the movement conservative multitudes, the originators have lost control of their message even as the message has access to an ever-larger platform.  The result?  An incoherent jumble of protests that is going to wind up resembling the same sort of incoherence that has characterized large-scale protests and demonstrations for decades.

National Journal's national security blog is debating whether we should have a truth commission on torture. Brian Michael Jenkins is against the idea:

A truth commission on torture could be ruinously divisive. It would smack of political vendetta and fuel narrow partisan agendas on both sides. It would lead to spectacle, not edification. It could end up giving rogues the aura of martyrs. Let history be their judge.

To which the only response can be: have we decided as a nation that war crimes should not be prosecuted if they are committed by members of the American government? Are we formally going to withdraw from the Geneva Conventions – or just violate them with impunity while pretending that we take them seriously? Those are the actual questions: not policy matters, but core legal issues that tell you whether a country is governed by the rule of law or not.

Under Bush and Cheney we were not a country under the rule of law. Is that now to be sustained indefinitely? Col. W. Patrick Lang, who favors a commission, makes a good point about the effect of torture on the torturers:

A particularly strong argument against torture is the effect it has on the torturers and abusers. Professional military leaders know that allowing (or commanding) men who have been trained to fight and kill to engage in behavior that breaks down the bonds of discipline and pride in self or unit is a dangerous thing to do. After engaging in such acts, soldiers (or anyone else) lose the capacity to judge right from wrong and degenerate into self-indulgent violence and a brutal nihilism. As this happens they become more and more dangerous to their leaders and unwilling to see their duty in terms larger than themselves. In other words, using soldiers to do such things rots the very fiber of an army and disgraces its members and spirit. Douglas MacArthur (and my father as well) spoke of the “ancient and honorable profession of arms.” That notion is incompatible with soldiers who torture and abuse prisoners or anyone else.

Wilkinson counters Justin Barnard:

This morning, like every morning, I had some coffee. I wasn’t thinking of it in quite these terms, but “cogntive enhancement” was part of my aim. I daresay I use coffee responsibly, but in doing so I presuppose nothing in particular about “mental life considered as a whole.” I recently bought new running shoes, which I certainly hope will (responsibly!) enhance my ability to run, but I do not therefore presuppose that the single good of physical life as a whole is to run as fast as possible. You can do lots of things with your body. You can do lots of things with your mind. Why not do them a little better?

Greenwald doesn't spare Obama:

I'm not searching for ways to criticize Obama.  I wish I could be writing paeans celebrating the restoration of the Constitution and the rule of law.  But these actions — these contradictions between what he said and what he is doing, the embrace of the very powers that caused so much anger towards Bush/Cheney — are so blatant, so transparent, so extreme, that the only way to avoid noticing them is to purposely shut your eyes as tightly as possible and resolve that you don't want to see it, or that you're so convinced of his intrinsic Goodness that you'll just believe that even when it seems like he's doing bad things, he must really be doing them for the Good.  If there was any unanimous progressive consensus over the last eight years, it was that the President does not have the power to kidnap people, ship them far away, and then imprison them indefinitely in a cage without due process.  Has that progressive consensus changed as of January 20, 2009?  I think we're going to find out.