Someone asked . . . WHY? WHY? WHY?

By MORT PERSKY

"Why would so many people be against something as reasonable as the Dems all say it is?" (Asks another Salon letter-writer about Healthcare 2009.)

One absolutely correct but insufficient answer is that the Republicans and their big-money base have spent so much time, effort and cash-cash-cash to turn we-the-people against our very own interests.

Which, as history shows, is an old specialty of theirs -- a dirty job, but according to them, somebody's got to do it. And it's not like they don't enjoy it. Watch their eyes. Watch their lips.

The harder question is this: "Why isn't the plan as good as Obama and the Democrats promised? Why are Americans yet again NOT getting our absolutely essential Universal Health Care?"

And the answer? Because not only have the Republicans, spurred along by the fat wallets of their beloved Big Pharma and Big Insurance, sold their country down the river for many, many millions of shekels, but so have enough Democrats to clinch the deal.

And what about Mr. Hope-and-Change, who lives in the White House? Jury's out on him too, says this old Obama donor. And if that's true, I think we can write off the after-effects of Teddy Kennedy, who lived just long enough to see it all happening before his disappointed eyes.

After which they unhappily closed for the last time. As will so many other eyes, old and young, before such health care arrives. If it ever does.

He Was a Kennedy

A friend roused me from my bed to deliver the news of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination. We mourned together. We wondered together what kind of mindless hatred fosters the vile murders of not one, but two, Kennedy brothers. We wondered about the playboy kid brother, the last prince of the American Camelot. Should he retire from public life, build a Maginot Line around the Hyannisport complex, and shield himself from the forces of ignorance and hate? Or did he have the stuff in him to carry the torch?
Ted Kennedy's life, which ended just before midnight Tuesday, gave us our answers. As John M. Broder wrote in his excellent New York Times obituary:
"He was a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life, instantly recognizable by his shock of white hair, his florid, oversize face, his booming Boston brogue, his powerful but pained stride. He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy."
When the large flaws cost him the opportunity to seek the presidency, as his brothers had done, his large faith in himself drove him to become the most effective senator of his century. In the last 46 years, no piece of legislation to help the the sick, the poor, the wretched masses yearning to breathe free has become law without his stamp upon it. When President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act last April 24, we inaugurated the largest expansion of civilian service since the Depression Era Civilian Conservation Corps.
I hope legislation that establishes quality health care for every American will be enacted, and will bear his name, as well, for it was probably the greatest cause of his long and distinguished career.
Journalists' memories of Teddy tend to be associated with the Large Flaws. I directed a team of superb journalists, including the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Miller, covering Apollo 11. On the day before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren were scheduled to fly down to the moon, Miller told me that the bosses had ordered him off the moon flight. What could possibly be more important in July of 1969 than the first moon landing? "They want me to go to Martha's Vineyard," Miller said. "Teddy Kennedy's got himself into another mess. A young woman's dead." We expected "another mess" for the playboy brother. He was a Kennedy.
Similarly, we were not surprised when a Kennedy nephew hit the supermarket tabloids after a night of drinking with Uncle Ted. He was accused of rape by a woman he picked up in a bar after what he said was consensual sex on the beach at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach. A New York editor remarked to me, "it wasn't the kids who suggested that they go out bar-hopping. It was the 60-year-old guy." He was a Kennedy.
Another journalist friend remembers walking into the Sherry Netherland bar in midtown Manhattan late one night. "I sat down about three barstools from Teddy, then married to Joan," he recalls. "He was in the enthusiastic company of several girls, and surrounded as well by a band of dark-suited protectors. Everybody in the place was watching the Kennedy action, in which the three or four ladies were all vying for his attention. No mystery there, as beyond being Teddy, he was the best-looking guy in the place. " He was a Kennedy.
I remember a guy so focused on the legislative process that as he strode across the Russell Senate Office Building Rotunda one day in the 70s, two of the bevy of aides jogging to keep up with him had to steer him by his elbows to prevent his walking into a pillar. He seemed to be conducting four or five conversations at once, barking orders, questions, thoughts, dictating memos. . . .until he spotted my companion, David Rosenbaum of the New York Times. Instantly he was transformed. His smile lit the hall. He thrust out his hand in welcome in that vigorous Kennedy style. "DAY-vid, " his brogue roared. "How ARE you?" He was a Kennedy.
But what I will never forget is the venom and bile he inspired in the Republican right.
A confession: In my college days I was an officer in the campus Young Republicans. My roommate then -- and lifelong dear friend thereafter -- was chairman of the organization.
Over the years we drifted in opposite directions politically. A few years ago we had dinner in Los Angeles. As usual, we agreed to disagree, in gentlemanly fashion, on the political topics of the day. Until Teddy's name came up.
John fulminated so apoplectically that I feared he'd have a stroke. "Why do you hate Ted Kennedy so much?" I asked when he'd calmed down.
John, one of the fastest thinkers and most articulate speakers I've known, sputtered briefly. Finally he blurted:
"Because he's a KENNEDY!"

Don't Dare to Call it Torture

Very little of what the Associated Press sends from Washington these days is journalism in the sense the term once conveyed.
Yet the wire service is the sole source of national news for hundreds of local papers throughout the United States -- just one more factor in the American public's vast wasteland of ignorance.
Occasionally, the AP's reportage descends to the level of unintended irony, as in the following example (emphasis, of course, is mine):

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Obama administration launched a criminal investigation Monday into HARSH QUESTIONING of detainees during President George W. Bush's war on terrorism, revealing CIA interrogators' threats to KILL ONE SUSPECT'S CHILDREN and to FORCE ANOTHER TO WATCH HIS MOTHER BEING SEXUALLY ASSAULTED.

One presumes that after this bit of "harshness" they all went out for ice cream.
For reasons known only to its reporters and editors, the AP chose to focus on what some might consider the most "lenient" of the "harsh" interrogation tactics. After all, nobody was actually shot, raped or assaulted with a power drill.
Aside from the fact that the threats themselves are barbaric acts and violations of the Geneva Convention to which the U.S. is a signatory, it would be well to consider some of the other interrogation tactics divulged in official reports:
--Applying pressure to the detainee's carotid artery to the point of losing consciousness , then shaking him awake to repeat the process.
--Twice striking a detainee with a rifle butt, then knee kicking him three times.
--Forcing smoke into a detainee's lungs until he vomited.
--Using a waterboarding technique more severe than the one for which Japanese soldiers were prosecuted after World War II , under the Geneva Convention.
--Hanging detainees by their arms until interrogators believed their shoulders had been dislocated.
--Dousing detainees with water, then shackling them to a cold concrete floor in cold temperatures to induce hypothermia.
The IG report concluded that "unauthorized, improvised and inhumane detention and interrogation techniques were used." It said many of the detainees were subjected to this treatment because of "assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence."
"Harsh?"
As kids used to be taught in Reporting 101, "if you can't characterize it accurately, don't characterize it at all. Let the facts speak for themselves."

The Exceptional Matt Taibbi

There are, of course, exceptions to the post that follows this one.. Here are some recent Tweets about one of them

From Mort Persky:

Couple of Saturday night tweets re Taibbi's brand-new and still-unavailable-to-us-non-subscribers article in Rolling Stone, "How Washington Is Screwing Up Health-Care Reform." (Don't let my tweet fool you into thinking I read the piece. I only listened to his wrap-up videos online at rollingstone.com.



nzanjani "Without a public option, any effort at health care reform will be as meaningful as a manicure for a gunshot victim" - MattTaibbi
36 minutes ago from web


OnJonsMind "In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle." Matt Taibbi 12.2.08 / NYT today: http://bit.ly/qjeNS
about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck


MortPersky Uh-oh. New Taibbi piece rocks, Healthcare '09 sucks. His best outcome: this bill sinks, wiser Dems get to start over in 2010. Odds, anyone?
5 minutes ago from web

Ourselves as Others See Us

Increasingly in the last decade, the best coverage of what's going on in the United States has been provided by journalists working for media outside the United States. One of the very best is The Guardian UK, whose Ed Pilkington wrote the following dispatch:


In the furious debate gripping America over the future of its health system, one voice has been lost amid the shouting. It is that of a distinguished gynaecologist, aged 67, called Dr Joseph Manley.
For 35 years Manley had a thriving health clinic in Kansas. He lived in the most affluent neighbourhood of Kansas City and treated himself to a new Porsche every year. But this is not a story about doctors' remuneration and their lavish lifestyles.
In the late 1980s he began to have trouble with his own health. He had involuntary muscle movements and difficulty swallowing. Fellow doctors failed to diagnose him, some guessing wrongly that he had post-traumatic stress from having served in the airforce in Vietnam.
Eventually his lack of motor control interfered with his work to the degree that he was forced to give up his practice. He fell instantly into a catch 22 that he had earlier seen entrap many of his own patients: no work, no health insurance, no treatment.
He remained uninsured and largely untreated for his progressively severe condition for the following 11 years. Blood tests that could have diagnosed him correctly were not done because he couldn't afford the $200. Having lost his practice, he lost his mansion on the hill and now lives in a one-bedroom apartment in the suburbs. His Porsches have made way for bangers. Many times this erstwhile pillar of the medical establishment had to go without food in order to pay for basic medicines. In 2000 Manley finally found the help he needed, at a clinic in Kansas City that acts as a rare safety net for uninsured people. He was swiftly diagnosed with Huntington's disease, a degenerative genetic illness, and now receives regular medical attention through the clinic.
So how does he feel about the way the debate in the US has come to be dominated by Republican-inspired attacks on Britain's NHS and other "socialised" health services which give people the treatment they need even if they cannot afford to pay for it?
"I find that repulsive and an absolutely bone-headed way to go," he says. "When I started out practising I certainly didn't expect this would happen. I thought the system would take care of everybody."
Over the last month President Obama's attempts to live up to his election promise to extend healthcare to all Americans has stalled in the face of a sustained rightwing guerrilla attack. Opponents of Obama's reforms have succeeded in distracting attention from Manley and the 46 million other medically uninsured, swinging the focus instead on to the "evils" of publicly funded healthcare. The fear tactics were epitomised by Sarah Palin's wholly inaccurate claim that the reforms would set up "death panels" that would force euthanasia on to older people.
Such scaremongering has dismayed and infuriated Sharon Lee, the doctor who now treats Manley in Kansas City. "I'm very angry, very angry," she says. "Many of the people I treat have already been in front of a death panel and have lost - a death panel controlled by insurance companies. I see people dying at least monthly because we have been unable to get them what they needed."
Lee's clinic, Family Health Care, is a refuge of last resort. It picks up the pieces of lives left shattered by a health system that has failed them, and tries to glue them back together. It exists largely outside the parameters of formal health provision, raising funds through donations and paying all its 50 staff - Lee included - a flat rate of just $12 an hour.
Poverty Line
Lee has just opened an outpost of her clinic in the outlying neighbourhood of Quindaro, an area of boarded-up houses and deserted factories where work is hard to find and crack plentiful and a per capita income is $11,025. A third of the population is below the federally defined poverty line.
And yet the local health department has decided the only health centre in the area will be closed by the end of this year and moved 30 blocks west to a much more prosperous part of the city where income levels are five times higher. Before long, one of the poorest areas of Kansas - of America - will be left without a single doctor, with only Lee's voluntary services to fall back on.
Even that is academic. Many of the residents of Quindaro were unable to see a doctor in any case - because they were uninsured. In Kansas, anyone who is able-bodied but unemployed is not eligible for government-backed health insurance as is anyone earning more than 39% of federal poverty levels. That leaves a huge army of jobless and low-income working families who are left in limbo. "It's the working poor who are most at disadvantage," Lee says.
As a result, she sees the same pattern repeating itself over and over. People with no insurance avoid seeking medical help for fear of the bills that follow, until it is too late. "When people come in they are already very, very sick. They have avoided seeing the doctor thinking that something may clear up, hoping they may be getting better."
Beth Gabaree, who came in to see Lee for the first time this morning, has experiences that sound extreme but are in fact quite typical. She has diabetes and a heart condition. Until two years ago they were controlled through ongoing treatment paid for by her husband's work-based health insurance. But he was in a motorbike crash that pulverised his right leg and put him out of work.
That Catch 22 again: no work, no insurance, no treatment. Except in this case it was Beth who went without treatment, in order to put her husband's dire needs first. He receives ongoing specialist care that costs them $500 a go, leaving nothing for her. So she stopped seeing a doctor, and effectively began self-medicating. She cut down from two different insulin drugs to regulate her diabetes to one, and restricted her heart drugs. "I do what I think I need to do to keep four steps out of hospital. I know that's not the right thing, but I can't justify seeing the doctor when my family's already in money trouble."
The problem is that she hasn't kept herself four steps out of hospital. Her health deteriorated and earlier this year she became bedridden. Even then, it took her family several days to persuade her to go to the emergency room because she didn't want to incur the hospital costs. "It was hard enough without that," she says.
After an initial consultation, Lee has now booked Gabaree for a new round of tests for her diabetes and is arranging for free medication. "It's wonderful," Gabaree says. "I'm so blessed. I didn't know you could get this sort of help."
That she sees basic healthcare as a blessing, not as a right, speaks volumes about attitudes among the mass of the working poor. Also revealing is the fact that Gabaree has absolutely no idea about the debate raging across America. She hasn't even heard of Obama's push for health reform, nor the Republican efforts to prevent it. "I don't watch much television," she says.
That provides Palin et al with a massive advantage: the 46 million people who would most benefit from Obama's plans are also among the least educated and informed, and thus the least able to make political waves. All of which leaves Lee fearful about the prospects for change. She has, after all, been here before - in 1993 when Hillary Clinton's pitch to overhaul the health system foundered. That attempt ended up doing more harm than good from Lee's perspective. Many of her most important donors stopped funding the centre because they assumed that the White House was fixing the problems. After the Clinton reforms crashed, brought down by the same rightwing assault that Obama is now enduring, it took many months for the centre's funds to regain their pre-1993 levels.
Recession
Lee fears history could be repeating itself. This time round there is the recession more unemployed equals more uninsured people who come knocking on the door of Family Health Care. Last year Lee and one other doctor between them dealt with 14,000 visits, and the numbers are rising daily. All of which leaves Lee part despairing, part determined to fight even harder for the bare minimum of human dignity. The frustration is that every day she must beg and plead with other health providers for simple treatments for her patients. "It drives me crazy with frustration," she says.
She rattles off a litany of horror stories. There was the man who walked into the clinic with a brain tumour. It took Lee three months to get him an MRI scan and another two to get an appointment with a neurosurgeon. Or the patient whose nerves in his neck were pushed against his spinal cord so that he lost use of both arms; by the time Lee found a way of getting him an MRI he was so sick he had to be operated on immediately. Or the woman who had such heavy periods she would wind up in ER every three months requiring a blood transfusion. What she really needed was a hysterectomy. "It took us almost a year to beg hospitals until she finally did get a hysterectomy," Lee says.
These are the stories, the broken lives, that have been obscured by the fury generated by the Republican rump. Unless Obama finds a way to regain the political initiative, to remind Americans that only nine months ago they voted overwhelmingly for change, then the future of millions appears bleak.
"Here's what I'd like to ask Palin," Lee says. "People without health insurance are dying, here in America, right now. So I'd like to ask her: how does that fit into your vision of good and evil, Sarah Palin?"
Obama's Plan: Health of the Nation
What is Obama trying to do?
The goal is to increase access to healthcare by regulating costs. His plan would guarantee all citizens eligibility for care, but the government is not proposing a "single-payer system", like the NHS. Instead, private health insurers would continue to operate under new rules that would lower premiums and remove loopholes that allow them to avoid paying for treatment when it is most needed. Per person, healthcare costs are higher in the US than in any other country, and have been rising faster than the level of inflation. The quality of care is less of an issue - although citizens with solid insurance may be frustrated by the paperwork and costs associated with the current system, they have fewer complaints about their doctors and hospitals.
Who's opposing Obama's plan?
Those who fear the government would introduce congressional "death panels" to make end-of-life decisions for the elderly. The insurance industry is worried about their bottom lines. Members of Congress and voters on the left and right are concerned about the future tax burden. Many Americans also object to any increase in government involvement in their personal lives.
How can healthcare costs get so out of hand?
Many insurance plans do not cover "pre-existing conditions", so it can be difficult for people who have a chronic ailment to secure cover. Loopholes allow insurers to refuse reimbursement even if the policyholder did not know they had a particular condition when they took out insurance. "Lifetime caps" allow insurers to set a maximum amount of cover.
Who are the uninsured?
Up to 46 million Americans are uninsured, because they are unemployed, or their employer does not provide cover, or because they do not qualify for existing government-funded healthcare. People 65 and older can qualify for Medicare, the poor can qualify for Medicaid, veterans and members of the military can qualify for Veterans Health Administration and Tricare and children can be covered under a programme called SCHIP. Those overlooked by the system include the young just entering the workforce, the self-employed, the unemployed and people who work for small businesses.

Defections from The Base

When the opinion polls showed that George Bush's support from the American people was plummeting, it was Democrats and Independents who drove the charts down.
Now that Barack Obama's poll numbers are plunging -- it's Democrats and Independents who are driving the charts down.
Bush's far right wing base remained steadfastly loyal to the bitter end, even as a second Great Depression threatened to envelope the land.
These same people are as vacuously and steadfastly opposed to Obama as they were before the election results came in. What has changed is that the President's support among independents has eroded, and his support among thoughtful progressives has virtually vanished. The defections are so widespread that in only eight months in office Mr. Obama may already have sealed his fate as a one-term president.
Perhaps this is symptomatic of his lack of experience at the national level: his time in the Senate was not sufficient to educate him in the art of reading the opposition the way, say, LBJ could.
Or perhaps Mr. Obama really believes that bipartisanship is possible in Washington today. How such a belief could possibly have survived the campaign he faced from the McCain-Palin-Fox News ticket defies logic. Probably he thinks, or has been convinced by Rahm Emanuel, that he has been following a "pragmatic" course.
His most compelling task was the economy. Reaganomics and the Chicago school acolytes of Milton Friedman had failed miserably; millions of retirees saw their life savings go up in smoke; millions more lost their homes to foreclosure.
Mr. Obama could have chosen to put any number of world renowned and respected economists in key economic posts -- Joseph Stiglitz, Dean Baker, Paul Krugman, Simon Johnson to name just a few. Instead he chose Timothy F. Geithner, a Republican who as ninth President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank presided over and indeed encouraged the very Wall Street misdeeds that brought on the economic collapse; Lawrence H. Summers, who as a Clinton administration official engineered the economic policies that created what Ross Perot rightly called "the great sucking sound of American jobs vanishing" and a squadron of Goldman-Sachs alumni who have done a great job of enhancing their old firm's profits, but given little beyond a used band-aid to their new employers, the critically wounded American public. One of his closest friends and advisers is Cass Sunstein, a Friedman acolyte.
The President's Department of Justice has argued in court to continue the Bush administration's unconstitutional arrogation of executive powers. Mr. Obama himself spoke against torture but continued extraordinary renditions to countries that are known to torture. His attorney general has left in powerful posts as U.S. attorneys the right-wing mouthpieces Bush appointed after Karl Rove orchestrated the politically-motivated firings of Republican attorneys who dared to refuse to play partisan politics with the law,
Each of these follies cost Mr. Obama the support of large numbers of thoughtful progressives. A trickle became a waterfall. The waterfall created a flood. What broke the dam was his Dance of Seven Veils on health care. Democrats by the thousands realized that when the last veil --a so-called public option -- was removed, their emperor had no clothes.
Mr. Obama's strongest campaign theme was change and its keystone was a pledge to provide "quality health care for all Americans."
Like his predecessor in the lead-up to war, Mr. Obama, in the lead-up to congressional action on health care, has misled, fabricated, weasle-worded, reneged, waffled and wriggled around the truth. Those who trusted him to provide leadership out of the Dark Ages of Bush have been given a mess of pottage.
Perhaps they were naive to expect more.
Meanwhile, as Sen. Baucus and his five colleagues collude to create a milksop they will call health care legislation, it becomes increasingly clear that the President will throw his support to whatever they come up with. Thus will six senators, who represent 3% of the U.S. population but whose campaign chests swell with millions from the health insurance industries, dictate, in effect, which Americans will survive severe illness and which will not.
Talk about "death panels!"

Hypocritic Oafs

A sweet little Republican lady stood up at a local town hall with our congressman and said health care is a good thing, but we cannot afford to make it available to EVERYONE because of the huge federal deficit.

Typical of the deathbed re-conversion to fiscal responsibility among Republicans. Also utterly hypocritical.

These are the same people who -- when George W. Bush was turning an inherited budget surplus into a record deficit to finance his unholy wars -- assured us that Reagan "proved that deficits don't matter."

The sweet little Republican lady believed it.

I said "sweet" not "smart."

Because the essence of the Republican argument she was parroting is this:

Deficits good when used to kill more than 4,000 U.S. military personnel and more than a million innocent Iraqi civilians in war based on WMDs, yellow cake and nuke tubes that did not exist.

Deficits bad if used to improve quality of health care for Americans, provide health insurance for 50 million Americans who can't afford it now, and cut per-person costs of quality health care in U.S.

Go figure.

I'm Afraid Fear Has Gone Too Far

The link between ignorance and fear is well documented in human history.

From ancient Rome. . .


 “Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth.” Publius Cornelius Tacitus.

. . . .through The Enlightenment. . .

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” Edmund Burke.

“Fear always springs from ignorance.” Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“The slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. " Thomas Paine.

. . .to modernity.

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.” Bertrand Russell.

"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear." Bertrand Russell.

“Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.” Albert Camus.

“Misunderstanding arising from ignorance breeds fear, and fear remains the greatest enemy of peace.” Lester B. Pearson.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Those who would seize and abuse power have always known that fear is a valuable tool in manipulating the ignorant masses. Mounting evidence suggests that the American far right has been more successful in exploiting ignorance and fear to its own ends than any political organization in human history, including the National Socialists of Germany in the 1930s.

Katie Couric (fear and ignorance among the town hall mobs) and Tom Ridge (Rumsfeld and others pressured him to ramp up the fear level) are only the latest messengers to remind us of this political phenomenon.

The optimists among us believed that the tactic peaked in the Bush administration and that the election of Barack Obama and a Democratic-controlled congress effectively brought it to an end. The optimists were wrong.

When the President sought to reverse the policies that had engendered incredible hatred of the United States in the Arab world, the far right told us to be very afraid because he had weakened our country, made it more vulnerable to another 9/11-like attack.

When the President sought to reduce our dependency on foreign oil and put us on a path to energy efficiency from renewable sources, a new industry that would provide new jobs, the far right told us to be very afraid because energy costs would skyrocket to the point that we couldn't afford to run our air-conditioners or drive our SUVs, and jobs would vanish.

Now the exploiters of fear and ignorance are telling us that a law to provide health insurance for all Americans would somehow euthanize Grandma.

Ignorance and fear have been called the twin pillars of bigotry. The bigotry that has lurked in the white American soul since slavery undoubtedly accounts for the sheer meanness, the ugly passion, with which Obama's critics have attacked his efforts to fulfill his campaign promises and electoral mandate. Ignorance, fear and low self-esteem fuel these passions -- and there'sa black man in the White House. A black man!

One progressive soul in Arizona wrote recently: "The key to removing discrimination is the banishment of bigotry and fear. And the only way to do this is to remove ignorance wherever it’s found."

Surely some right wingnut in his neighborhood said that he was advocating frontal lobotomies for those who disagreed with him, and that if he had his way we'd all become lobotomized zombies.

Then again, maybe "we" already are.






A Bird to Reckon With

The longer I live in New Mexico, the greater my admiration for the state's official bird, the roadrunner.

What a tough, adaptable, self-reliant, feisty little creature he is, and has to be to thrive in his harsh desert habitat.

A species of ground cuckoo, the southwestern roadrunner is famously capable of killing, and eating, rattlesnakes. He can run up to 17 miles per hour. He has adapted to his sere habitat by evolving a method of reabsorbing the water in his feces before excretion. As an avian carnivore, he feasts on the moistest available diet in the desert.
He doesn't eliminate salt through his urinary tract, but more efficiently, through a gland in his noise. He's energy efficient: cuts his activity rate 50% in the heat of the day. He's so deft and quick that he can snatch a dragonfly or hummingbird out of the air.

That's the secret to his predation of the rattlesnake. He uses his wings the way a matador uses his cape, and his lightning speed is faster than the snake's strike. Roadrunner snaps up a coiled snake by the tail, snaps it like a whip and repeatedly slams its head against the ground. He eats his prey whole, even rattlesnakes, but sometimes can't consume the entire snake at one time. That's why you often see roadrunner prancing through the desert brush with something icky dangling from his beak.

Roadrunner can fly for short distances, especially when going downhill, but prefers to run, building up speed until he can soar a short distance simply by spreading, not flapping, his wings. Energy efficiency.

He adapts quite nicely to humanity's inroads into his habitat. A friend has a roadrunner who spends every winter atop his porch light, where the bulb provides warmth and the roof provides protection from predators. A big, cocky roadrunner lives around my house and loves to taunt my dog, Saxon, by strutting along the top of the patio wall. It's comparable to the way a feral cat taunted him when we lived in another state, strutting back and forth on the other side of a sturdy chain-link fence while Saxon barked in frustration. Feral cats and roadrunners share an attitude gene, I think.

I spotted a smallish roadrunner the other day, hopping slowly across the street where I live as if he had only one leg. I've seen him several times since, and once got close enough to see that he does have two legs. One of them must be injured, because he doesn't move with the customary roadrunner speed. Deprived of his principal asset, how does he survive?

I can't answer that, but I know one thing. With a pre-existing condition like that, he'd better not try to get health insurance.

Health Care Reform? Who Needs It?

The 12-year-+old boy and his little sister were waiting for the school bus in their New York suburban community one cool, clear morning. The boy felt dizzy and queasy. "I'm going home to puke," he told his sister.
He didn't get home. He collapsed on the doorstep. There was blood. His family rushed him to a teaching hospital not five minutes away. The senior neurosurgeon and his entire support team happened to be making rounds. They cleared out two operating rooms and spent the next 16 hours saving the boy 's life.
They hadn't had time for finesse. To vacate the massive cerebral hemorrhage as quickly as possible, they simply sawed out a piece of his skull. When he was out of danger they replaced the bone with a plate of surgical steel.
The entire episode was enormously costly, but the boy's father's employer provided good health insurance and major medical coverage. It cost the family only $8,000 out of pocket.
A triumph of private health insurance in this great country.
Twice over the ensuing years, the boy's body rejected the plate in his head, which had to be replaced with new space-age materials. The boy came to know the rejection symptoms well.
The replacement procedure is a relatively simple one. Private insurance paid all the costs.
The boy became a young man and got a job and got married. His employer provided HMO health coverage.
The rejection symptoms returned., The young man went to his HMO doctor. "I'm rejecting my plate," the young man said. "I need to see a neurosurgeon." Dollar signs spun in the doctor's eyeballs. He gave the young man a bar of soap and told him to wash his head. The young man asked to see another doctor. Against the rules.
The young man went home and called the neurosurgeon who had treated him when he was a boy, covered by his father's insurance. "How much to replace my plate if I'm a private patient?" he asked. The doctor told him. The price was far beyond his reach. "Tell your HMO doctor to call me," the neurosurgeon said. "We can work something out."
The HMO doctor didn't call the neurosurgeon. Two days later the young man collapsed at work. At the emergency room of the local hospital, the doctors recognized a neurological emergency they couldn't handle. The young man was rushed by helicopter to an urban medical center 100 miles away. The young man was near death
The senior neurosurgeon and his entire support team cleared out an operating room and worked 14 hours to save his life. Save him they did, but the entire episode was enormously costly.
The HMO munificently offered to cover one-third of the bill.

Only in America

Every Friday night, young folks from miles around jammed the place. There was a dance floor, but it was too crowded to dance. You'd hug your date and swing and sway, shoulder to shoulder with the couples around you, to Adderly, Coltrane, Rollins and Monk; to Mingus, Roach, Gillespie, Mulligan and Clifford Brown; to Kenton, Parker, Bellson, Jamal and Dave Brubeck. It was the only place to be, man, with that juke box and that crowd.

The whole crowd was there one Friday in September of 1957, the same week Ike sent the army in to Little Rock to escort the black kids into Central High School in defiance of Gov. Orville Faubus and his Arkansas National Guardsmen.

One fellow, well-fueled by the elixir du nuit, was loudly praising Ike and disparaging Faubus, making himself heard over Miles or Duke or whoever was blaring from the Wurlitzer. The pert little blonde who was with him kept shushing him.

They closed the bar and accompanied a group of friends to an all-night restaurant for ham and eggs and coffee and sobering up. They filled a large booth; other groups from the bar filled other booths. The blonde girl said she had to get home, she had to get up early Saturday to drive to her parents' home across the state, so she and the guy with the mouth left early. They paid no attention to the six young men from another booth who left shortly afterward. The guy with the mouth paid no attention to the car that followed them to the girl's place, and again after the good-nights as he drove to his own apartment. Once there, they jumped him before he could close his car door. They gave him a nigger-lovin' lesson . That's one of the things they called him: nigger-lover. He awoke in the hospital with a concussion, nine stitches, a broken collarbone and uncounted aches, pains, abrasions and nicks.

And this wasn't a state where the Klan rode. This was Iowa.

* * *
Iowa wasn't a racist state 51 years ago. That town with the bar with the great jazz on the jukebox had always had Negro students in the schools and thought nothing of it. Why, one year the captain of the high school track team was a Negro kid, state champion in the 440. Folks in town loved to tell the story about how Coach would say to that boy, "You learn the proper way to pace your splits, son, and you'll break the state record." "Pace? Splits?," the kid would reply. "Coach, Ah jes' wins!" Guys at the Elks Club never tired of telling that one. The captain of the track team and the other black kids couldn't go to the local public swimming pool, of course. The best paying factory jobs were down at the sugar house, and they had five or six Negroes working there, but they were janitors and trash collectors and they couldn't belong to the union. Hadn't ever been a black man, or a hispanic, for that matter, on the city council or the school board or in the Chamber of Commerce or the country club. But it wasn't a racist town and Iowa wasn't a racist state. Why, some of the town's leading citizens would even drink a Bullfrog beer or two with the darkies fishing for carp down by Beaver Slough on a really hot, muggy summer day. Kept the fish flies away.

* * *
Here in post-racial America, there's a black man in the White House. His unlikely political run to the Oval Office began in Iowa, the very same state where, 51 years ago, a guy with a loud mouth got busted up pretty badly by half a dozen young heroes who didn't like what he had to say about admitting black kids to public schools.

But this is post racial America.

A black man and a white cop can agree to disagree over a beer in the Rose Garden, right?

Only in America.

And the voices of hate? Limbaugh and Beck and Dobbs and O'Reilly and their ilk? Racist? Nah. Outspoken, maybe, but, hey, that's why we got a First Amendment, right?

Only in America.

And the Republicans? In post-racist America, they'd never play on deep-seated racism among their "base" for political ends, would they? Nah. Those mobs at the town hall meetings, at the Palin rallies, toting signs depicting a black president as Hitler, filling the internet with watermelon patch "humor," the so-called "birthers" -- they're patriots, man. Not a racist bone in their bodies.

Only in America.

I had occasion to drive across the Deep South earlier this year. Sure enough, in Mississippi of all places, right there in broad daylight, a black man and a white man, sittin' side by side on a river bank, drinkin' Bullfrog beer and fishin' for carp, keepin' the fish flies away. And the white guy is tellin' the black guy, "I'm gonna marry a Lesbian nigger gal and live like a king off the gummint the rest of my natural born days."

Only in America.

Citizens toting everything from an AR-15 assault rifle to 9-millimeter Beretta sidearms have been detained in crowds at town halls across the land, several outside the building where President Obama was speaking in Arizona, one of those pack heat legally states. And in Hagerstown, Md., a man appeared at a town hall meeting hosted by Sen. Benjamin Cardin with a sign that read 'Death to Obama' and 'Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids.'"

Only in America.

About those town hall mobs

Surely Nancy Pelosi misspoke when she called the actions of the town hall mobs "unAmerican."

She might have chosen more apt words, among them being uncivil, ignorant, rude, addled, disrespectful, screeching, despicable, bad-mannered, impertinent, ugly, troglodytic, impudent, churlish, illiterate, benighted, ill-informed, dyslaliac, thuggish, bullying, ominous, prattling, boorish, stupid, malicious, deranged, mad, disturbed, revolting, bellicose, unhinged, irrational, crazed, demented, berserk, lunatic, hyperbolic, wacko, rowdy, spiteful, barbaric, malevolent, vindictive, vengeful, heinous, mean, brutish, nasty, hurtful, bitchy, untruthful, dyscrasic, maladjusted, pin-brained, frightened, loathsome, loutish, frightening, alarmist, obnoxious, alarming, racist, protodawic, out of control, misled, vicious, coached, vacuous or imbecilic.

But unAmerican? Alas, the opposite. In this terribly polarized nation, the mobs' behavior has been quintessentially American.

To our everlasting shame.

A New Nation, Conceived in Greed




In these United States, the myth of the president's election by "the people" persists, but in fact the office always goes to the candidate who raises the most money for pursuing it. The myth that the Congress makes laws also persists. In fact, legislation is written by people called lobbyists, who are paid handsomely to shape the law of the land to the will of the oligarchs who really run the country.


President Eisenhower called them "the military industrial complex" but we ignored his warning. Now they are enormously more powerful and exponentially more sinister than they were when he left office. The United States of America we knew, whose government, in Lincoln's immortal phrase, was "of the people, by the people and for the people," may soon perish from the earth.


In its place today is rising the United States of Goldman Sachs, whose government is "of the rich, by the very rich and for the obscenely rich." Its motto is "In Capitalism We Trust" and it has a state religion: the worship of Profit. It is dedicated to the proposition that big companies are more equal than small ones. And the people? It ignores them, save for using the fruit of their labor to feed the maw of corporate greed.


If the old USA was the very model of successful democratic government, the US of GS is the very model of oligarchy successfully masquerading as democracy. It maintains token trappings of democracy -- a bicameral national legislature, a judiciary and a chief executive. 

These vestiges of a former democracy are but window dressing on the work of the lobbyists. They carry large sums of cash and other rich emoluments from office to office on Capitol Hill, giving the representatives of the people their instructions on what to legislate.
Lobbyists and their oligarchs are the interchangeable parts of government of the rich, by the very rich and for the obscenely rich. They head the bureaucracies of the executive branch, dictate to the legislative branch and fill the judiciary with lawyers beholden to them.

The oligarchs determine which corporations are "too big to fail," and squeeze the people for taxes to assure that they don't fail, no matter how badly managed. Detailed explanations of how this works can be found by Googling "bailout," TARP or Geithner.


Lobbyists coach the elected representatives of the people in how to appear to heed the voice of the people while in fact ignoring it. In the Oval Office, this is done through well-crafted speeches that say one thing while appointing cabinet officers who do the opposite. Google "Summers," "Brennan" or "Gates" for examples. On Capitol Hill this is done by a process called "markup" which takes place "in committee." Here's how it works:


A). The people clamor for, say, cleaner and cheaper energy, cleaner air and water and genuine efforts by government to address the scientific facts of global warming. Advocates write a bill whose provisions might in fact achieve most of those goals.


B). The bill is assigned to "committee" for "markup." The oligarchs of industries that would be affected by the bill's provisions then summon their lobbyists, instruct them in how to eliminate those provisions and substitute provisions that would serve to increase the industry's profits at the cost of the health, welfare and interests of the people. The lobbyists write new versions of the bill, take their bundles of cash and emoluments, and go from office to office in Washington. The representatives of the people "mark" the lobbyists' changes into the bill.


C).The "marked-up" bill is sent to the floor of the House, or the Senate, for debate. But the god of Profit is supreme and corporate greed is limitless. Those representatives of the people who received the largest bundles of cash, the richest emoluments, from the lobbyists for the oligarchs, dominate the debate, abetted by the media, who give equal weight to every bleat no matter how ludicrous.
D). A final bill even worse than the marked-up bill eventually passes. The representatives of the people trumpet their work as another masterpiece of democracy in action. The corporate accountants, who were in on the joke all along, continue chortling in glee. 

E). Profits rise. God is happy. The elected representatives of the people once again have successfully opposed the people's interests without appearing to oppose the people's interests.

 The United States of Goldman Sachs has one of the worst health-care systems in the industrialized world. Its oligarchs have the best health care in the world. Their lobbyists have superb health care. The elected representatives of the people have their choice of a number of truly excellent health care plans, provided and administered by the U.S. government.

 It's only the people -- 46 million of them -- who don't have health care because they can't afford it. And what of the millions more who have health-care insurance that only covers people who aren't sick, or haven’t been sick yet? Or have health insurance written by companies that employ tens of thousands of people to find reasons to reject claims for benefits? Or whose insurance companies won't pay health-care providers who are "out of network," or do not participate in the HMO? Or who dare not quit a low-paying job for a higher-paying one because they'd lose their health insurance?


The people clamored for something better. Their elected representatives pledged to enact legislation to reform health care in the US of GS. They wrote bills, which are now in various committees for mark-up. The bought-and-paid-for representatives of the people, instructed by their fat cat speech experts, began to prattle about "socialist agenda," "government takeover," "rationing," "denial of choice" and "death panels." Their blather bestirs many in the voting class, including those who need government-run health care most, to oppose it with blind anger. The language that achieved this counter-intuitive result – fooling the people into opposing their own interests -- continues to be deployed until the real point of the debate is lost in hot air and smoke.


You can guess what happens next. But why guess?


It cost the energy industries just over $202 million in lobbying money to emasculate the energy bill as “marked up” by the two houses of Congress.
The very profitable health industries have already spent nearly $300 million lobbying against health-care reform. They are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation, or any nation so dedicated, can long endure. They are met on a great battlefield of that war, called health-care reform. They can spend millions more on that field, without beginning to tap the last full measure of their devotion to Profit.
Sorry, Citizen, but those who are Too Big to Fail have decided that you're too small to succeed. Take two aspirin, go to bed, and if you're not better in the morning, there's always an emergency room -- somewhere.