Month: October 2009

Whose Country? Ctd

Dreher, who grew up in a heavily black town in the Deep South, contributes to the conversation:

Living for five years in New York City made me understand deep down how Southern I am, and that means to an unmeasurable but undeniable extent, black. Every now and then, I'd meet a black person from down South, and … I'm not quite sure how to put this, but let's just say there was an ease of discourse between us that I didn't have when talking to white (or, obviously, black) Northerners I just met. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was a food thing.

I've told the story here before about a black co-worker a couple of years ago coming upon me microwaving a bowl of turnip greens and roots for my lunch in the break room. She was genuinely shocked, and stammered that she thought only black people ate that stuff. I couldn't believe that, but it turns out she's from Indiana, and never knew white people who like what used to be called "soul food." I told her how most white folks where I grew up ate greens, cornbread, grits and the same stuff black folks ate. It's the legacy of rural Southern poverty culture. I can still see her kind face now, struggling to comprehend that she was talking to an actual white person who ate greens.

Rape As A Preexisting Condition

Another healthcare horror story:

Christina Turner feared that she might have been sexually assaulted after two men slipped her a knockout drug. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month's worth of anti-AIDS medicine. Only later did she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable.

Turner had let the men buy her drinks at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. The next thing she knew, she said, she was lying on a roadside with cuts and bruises that indicated she had been raped. She never developed an HIV infection. But months later, when she lost her health insurance and sought new coverage, she ran into a problem. Turner, 45, who used to be a health insurance underwriter herself, said the insurance companies examined her health records. Even after she explained the assault, the insurers would not sell her a policy because the HIV medication raised too many health questions. They told her they might reconsider in three or more years if she could prove that she was still AIDS-free.

Free Speech In Britain

It lives! Check out the message boards on the BBC website after the BNP leader's appearance on "Question Time" last night. Plenty of people feel that Griffin was unfairly targeted and that the format was designed to humiliate him. I find Griffin's views repulsive; I also believe he has a right to express them in contexts that are not rigged.

Why Aren’t Boys Vaccinated For HPV?

William Saletan suggests that the current policy of vaccinating girls but not boys is sexist. Dan Savage goes further:

[Y]ou have to vaccinate gay men well before we become sexually active, same as girls. Age 11 [official guideline], remember? And since we don’t know at age 11 which boys are going to be gay when they grow up, you have to vaccinate all boys against HPV in order to protect the ones who are going to be gay when they grow up.

It seems like a no-brainer and a win-win: vaccinating all boys against HPV will protect the gays ones—gay men are 17 times more likely to develop anal cancer as adults—and help protect girls and women from the deadlier strains of HPV. It would also offer some protection to girls whose parents denied them the vaccine for batshitcrazy religious reasons. That’s a win-win-win.

Last week the FDA approved the HPV vaccine for men and boys. The CDC will decide today whether to recommend HPV vaccinations for boys. They should.

Surprise! They didn’t.

Creepy Ad Watch

Tim Nudd writes:

This new British climate-change ad is drawing a large number of complaints. It shows a father reading his daughter a bedtime story in which puppies drown and rabbits are left without water to drink because of rising CO2 levels. More than 200 complaints have flooded in….  About half of the complaints about the climate-change ad involve the science presented in it. The rest of the people, according to an ASA rep, think the spot is simply too scary.

The Beck-Palin Party

Palin backs Hoffman in NY-23:

"There is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race."

She follows Mr Beck. The theo-populists are in her corner:

The election is shaping up–along with conservative upstart Marco Rubio's primary challenge to moderate Gov. Charlie Crist's (R) Senate bid in Florida–as a flashpoint in the GOP's internal struggle between conservatives and moderates. Along with the Club for Growth, conservative blog RedState, the National Review, The Washington Times, and Armey (whose group, FreedomWorks, is one of the major organizing/facilitating bodies of the Tea Party movement), Palin has chosen Hoffman as an emblem of the GOP's growing conservative voices.

The official Republican candidate is, as far as the base is concerned, "a radical leftist."

Moore Award Nominee

“For the Cheneys cannot be reasoned with. In their eyes, as in the eyes of all hardcore right-wingers, the liberals’ original sin was FDR’s expansion of government—i.e. taxes on the wealthy—and they consider this transgression just as heinous as the murder of one’s own child. Indeed, the senseless slaughterhouse of the Iraq war, the way it devours children, seems to be the Cheneys’ way of redressing the liberals’ big-government murder of “hard-earned” dollars. Think of Marx’s vision of money copulating in banks to produce interest, and it becomes easier to understand how the Cheneys might think the life of an American soldier equal to, say, ten thousand dollars earned through military contracts,” – Lee Siegel.

Talking J Street

Goldblog has a must-read interview with Jeremy Ben-Ami. It's both funny at times and also informative. One interesting nugget:

JG: You have a situation now in which the Obama Administration has obviously failed to achieve a settlement freeze.  You believe that the American government should pressure both the Arabs and the Israelis to come to the table and reach a deal. If Israel ignores the entreaties of the American president, should continuing American military aid to Israel be up for discussion?

JB: The short answer is no, but there's actually a longer explanation for the no.

The short answer is that military aid should not be on the table — this is an absolutely essential aspect of Israel's security, and it's an essential aspect of the U.S.-Israel relationship. However, the U.S. should be able to get across that, as an ally, and as a partner in this relationship with its own interests and view of what will actually move the situation forward, its voice and its views need to be listened to, and that means some serious, behind-closed-doors conversations between the president and the prime minister.

JG: But they've already had those.

JB: I don't know what took places in those conversations.

JG: Well, they didn't work yet.

What's interesting here is that J-Street's head insists that the only serious lever the US has over Israel should be taken off the table before any deal is even negotiated. This is the lefty, peacenik, goddamned hippie position! Military aid, mind you, is already formally illegal because of Israel's secret nuclear bomb program (which no American president can, you know, mention), but is retained because, well, because it would never be repealed by the Congress. And so Netanyahu knows he can do anything he wants without any real blowback from the US. And he has about as much interest in a two-state solution as I have in marrying a woman.

This leaves the US with no leverage over a central party in critical discussions which indeed affect the national security of Americans. In what other case does that apply?