Month: October 2009

A reader writes:

I certainly agree with you in theory, however, in reality I have to tell you that I am really nervous.  I am 64 and am currently employed and have insurance.  I am retiring in January and will continue with my current insurance until April when I turn 65 at which time Medicare kicks in.  Here’s the rub.  I wanted to change docs and guess what the first question was when I gave them my date of birth.  You got it – what insurance do you have?  Hmmmm wonder if they would have taken me as a new patient (or will keep me) when I am on Medicare.  Asking the docs to take a 20% hit on Medicare patients is not exactly incentive to take anyone over 64.  Do you have an alternative suggestion?

Another writes:

The Medicare bill that failed yesterday was far from a bribe. It was an attempt to fix an accounting error that could cripple the primary care system for seniors.

The Sustainable Growth Rate formula that determines payments to physicians (but not to hospitals) has required physician payments cuts for the last several years. The formula is complicated, but one of its biggest flaws is its failure to account for the rapid rise in the costs of providing care. Congress has understood this for the most part and voted to stop smaller scheduled cuts many times before. Many physicians are small business owners, and when their costs are rapidly rising out of their control and their payment is being forced downward, they often stop taking Medicare patients or adjust their practice styles in other ways.

The difference between yesterday’s bill and previous interventions was that instead of just passing a one-year fix, Congress was finally trying to find a long-term solution. The can has been kicked down the road so long that physicians are facing a 21% cut in Medicare payments in January. That won’t happen because it would be disastrous to the healthcare system. The shock of such a financial hit alone would be disruptive, plus you’d probably have a lot of physicians dropping Medicare. Instead, once again Congress will slap a Band-Aid on the SGR, freeze payments for one year to avoid a 21% cut, and have to address the problem again and again and again until a long-term solution is found.

The politics of it were indeed sketchy, and you’re right in calling for pay-go funding, but I thought you might be interested in some in-the-weeds details about why the bill mattered in terms of policy.

Just find a way to pay for it, that's all.

A bright spot for unemployed journalists just opened up.

Michael Kraft contributes:

The Iranian President said the “Campaign against terrorism would yield fruit only through the presence and joint cooperation of countries in the region," according to Xinhua, the Chinese news agency. […] This is the height of chutzpah from a leader not known for understatement. Iran has been behind major terrorist attacks against the United States, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. It is a major backer of Hamas and helped create Hezbollah, terrorist groups whose trademarks are suicide bombings and firing of rockets against Israeli civilian targets.

But it certainly seems to be the case that the mullahs and Revolutionary Guards are feeling a little heat these days. It's hard for them to fight on two fronts – domestically and internationally.

DiA counters Richard Bernstein and Col. Richard Kemp:

Mr Bernstein has little concrete to say about allegations, substantiated by the UN's Goldstone commission, by the Israeli human-rights organisation B'Tselem, and by HRW, that the IDF committed war crimes in Gaza. He writes that it is hard for human-rights organisations to "know" whether crimes took place because they rely on testimony from possibly self-interested witnesses. This is a very strange thing for someone who once founded a human-rights organisation to say, though I can well imagine it coming from representatives of the regimes they criticise.

In my experience working with them, HRW's researchers have been rigorous and scrupulous in their evaluations of testimony and evidence. Mr Bernstein then cites Colonel Richard Kemp, a former British Army commander in Afghanistan, who last week told the UN Human Rights Council that the IDF in Gaza "did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare."

Neither in Mr Kemp's presentation to the UNHRC nor in a longer address he made at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in June did he make any serious effort to substantiate this claim. It strikes me as pandering to Israeli exceptionalism. And it strikes me as all too familiar. I can't hear someone say something like this without hearing the echoes of my sorely misguided older relatives and friends, during my childhood, telling me that no country had ever treated its enemies as well as Israel had—which, of course, was not true.

Pomplamoose (and her Creepy-Chan eyes) struck Internet gold with their cover of "Single Ladies" a few weeks back, but some of the duo's other tracks are equally good. Here's a classic you'll recognize:

More videos here.

Seyward Darby does some reporting:

Maine's gay marriage opponents recruited Frank Schubert, the p.r. strategist behind last year's Proposition 8 advertisements in California, to employ his signature tricks–including telling voters that, if the law remains as it is, gay marriage will be taught to schoolchildren. The law includes no language about altering school curricula, and last week, Maine's attorney general confirmed that her "analysis of the issue reveals no impact" on what students are taught. But Yes On 1 is still pressing the point–and hard.

Brian Brown, executive director of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which is backing the Yes On 1 campaign, told me there's plenty of evidence that the law will allow gay marriage to infiltrate classrooms. "We don't have to guess or create hypotheticals. We already know," Brown insisted. "Let's not argue about the fact that this is what same-sex marriage proponents want."

From later in the post:

"I don't think that parents want their kids as young as kindergarten being taught about same-sex marriage, period, whether the teacher thinks it's appropriate or not," Brown said.

In other words, in the minds of Yes On 1 supporters, teaching gay marriage can mean merely saying that it exists, although, inevitably, gay-loving teachers will go further and tell children it's a good thing. And the Maine law does nothing to prevent this. "I'd like to see that in writing, guys. Show it to me that it's not going to be taught in schools," Marc Mutty, chair of Yes On 1, said this week in a local news segment. "I dare you to guarantee me that this subject will not come up in schools. I don't think they [No On 1] can do that."

I'm fine with the law as it is. But I dare Mutty to guarantee Maine voters that, if the legislation were amended to forbid discussions of gay marriage in classrooms, Yes On 1 would end its this-will-harm-children crusade. I don't think he can.

Yglesias mixes it up with Noah Pollak (who also attacks me):

I really have to say that it makes me extremely angry when I need to read this kind of bullshit written in which wild and implausible views are attributed to me. What I’m saying—and I don’t think this should be controversial—is that whatever you think about Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel still has obligations under international humanitarian law and many credible investigators have reached the conclusion that Israel violated those obligations.

This isn’t the only important issue in the world. It’s not the only important issue in the region. It’s not even the only important issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it’s an important issue. And there’s a set of people in the United States who are determined to avoid talking about this issue and to instead engage in a lot of imputation of bad faith to the people trying to raise it.

Here's one snippet from Pollak:

[N]o, for the record, Israel did not commit war crimes in Gaza. Watch Richard Kemp’s remarkable UN testimony if you disagree. You won’t see his presentation debated on Sullivan’s blog because it does not provide an opportunity for obnoxious and empty moral posturing.

Except Pollak just used Richard Kemp's testimony for "empty moral posturing." For a little background on this neutral observer, here's the Wikipedia entry on UN Watch, the hard neocon group Kemp is representing. My defense of the post Pollak takes issue with here.

A reader writes:

Great series of posts on Buchanan and how black America really is. If I can recommend a book to put the literary angle into the mix (along with the music and pop culture):

Was Huck Black?  Mark Twain and African-American Voices by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. (OUP 1993).

This book examines the personal and cultural roots of the one literary character most often held up as essentially American, and the Great American Novel that somehow simultaneously describes and creates a sense of our national identity.

Fishkin shows how the personal and linguistic origin of Huck as a character could be found in a piece Twain wrote for the New York Times called "Sociable Jimmy," about a servant in a hotel where Twain was staying. This was the first child narrator Twain used, and the character sounds like Huck not in terms of dialect, but in structural ways (use of verbs, coining new words, characteristic discursive practices–voice v. dialect). Furthermore, African-American oral and linguistic traditions of "signifying" and the figure of the trickster come into play throughout the novel.

Money quote, her conclusion:

How will Americans respond to the news that the voice of Huck Finn, the beloved national symbol and cultural icon, was part black?

… Will the forces of reaction demote Huck form his place of honor in the culture and relegate him to a lesser role in the national consciousness–the equivalent of selling him down the river… ?  Or will Huck become an emblem of a society that is now, and has always been, as multiracial and multicultural as the sources of the novel that we have embraced as most expressive of who we really are? 

Early in Huckleberry Finn, Huck complains about the food at the Widow Douglas's:

"When you got to the table you couldn't go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn't really anything the matter with them.  That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself.  In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better."

Twain's imagination was closer to Huck's barrel than to the Widow Douglas's separate pots.  As he "mixed up" black voices with white ones, the flavors "swapped around" deliciously.  America's taste in literature would never be the same.

This book changed the way I teach that novel, understand my nation, and myself. 

To be American is to be, in some way, African-American.

A reader writes:

On the question of whether HRW focuses grossly disproportionate resources to target Israel, simply counting publications from the Middle East division is very misleading. Some HRW statements are "fire and forget", while others (mainly when Israel is the target) are accompanied by major marketing campaigns. HRW issued four lengthy and largely fictitious "research reports" condemning Israel in six months — each with a press conference at the American Colony Hotel (the hub of the Palestinian media campaign) in Jerusalem, numerous one-on-one press interviews, and meetings with diplomats. In contrast, most of the statements on the Saudi, Egypt, etc. are quickly buried, with no UN investigations , sanctions or ICC action.

The token report on Hamas rocket attacks (HRW's artificial "balance" and involving no research) appeared six months after the war ended, with no mention of Iranian support and weapons. A week later, HRW held another press conference which generated far more attention via the sensational (and fabricated) charge that the IDF killed Palestinian civilians waving white flags. The Hamas rocket report, like HRW's criticism of Hezbollah in 2006, was immediately forgotten.

As I said in the original post, maybe Bernstein was referring to something more than the actual reports on the website. But this is getting somewhat subjective.