McCain On Health

Who said this?

"The fundamentals of our economy are strong."

Right- John McCain (and here he is, in video below, imploding right before America's eyes!) And in addition to his views on President Obama's economic plan being taken seriously on yesterday's Meet The Press, so were his ideas on health care, a rather significant component of economic reform.

There McCain was just as superficial and clueless as he was during the campaign, telling host David Gregory:

But we're losing sight of the fact that the highest quality health care in the world is in the United States of America. That must be preserved. So the key, what we should be focusing on is affordability and availability for all Americans. I don't think that these proposals are doing that.

The first thing that jumps out is one of the GOP's key talking points: "the highest quality health care in the world is in the United States of America."

No one could figure out why the Arizona senator believes this, nor did Gregory choose to threaten the inside the beltway consensus about the American health care system. McCain did not tie his assertion, what he carelessly referred to as "fact," to anything. Admittedly, he continued

I was at MD Anderson in Houston. People--with Senator McConnell and Senator Cornyn. We did a healthcare town hall. People from 90 countries all over the world were there. They could have gone anyplace in the world. The best, highest quality health care is in America. It's the costs that's the problem.

It is unclear whether McCain was using that apocryphal story to demonstrate that health care in the U.S.A. is tops, though we have to hope he wasn't. He never said why "people from 90 countries" were at the healthcare town hall, perhaps some of them for the opportunity to see the man who almost became President of the United States and had been a war hero. Or perhaps McCain had promised him some of his famous barbecue.

Or perhaps the multitude had made the pilgrimage to the cancer center in Houston because the health care system in their home countries was subsidizing their treatment, while the health insurance industry was blocking that same treatment for Americans. The U.S. health care system is good at cancer- treatment, that is, not the less profitable prevention. A study by the Commonwealth Fund International Working Group on Quality Indicators comparing the quality of care among five different countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, U.K., U.S.A.) found that breast cancer five year relative survival rates and cervical cancer screening rates are in fact particularly high in the U.S.

However, 19 other indices were examined and "taken together, the research findings reveal that while the U.S. far outspends other countries on health care, more money does not translate into better quality of care."

It is possible that Senator McCain is unaware that the American people are being shortchanged not only by the cost, but also by the quality, of the health care system. But as the writers of dailyhowler.com note here, and elsewhere, there is a de facto line the mainstream media is not to cross when discussing U.S. health care: while acknowledging that the system is overly expensive, one must never, never acknowledge it is expensive relative to that in other nations. If crossed, that would undermine the great unwritten law of Republican (and moderate Democratic) rhetoric: ours is the best and we mustn't borrow from anyone else.

The GOP: Now Against Identity Politics

They're trying to close the barn door after the horse has bolted. And they shouldn't get away with it.

That would be Texas Senator John Cornyn and other GOP critics of Sonia Sotomayor, whose nomination to replace David Souter as an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme court hit the Senate Judiciary Committee today.

On yesterday's Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace, noting Sotomayor's remark "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life," asked Cornyn and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D.-Ca.)

But is it the right thing... for a judge to say that I think a Latina judge will — I believe would come to a better conclusion than a white man?

Feinstein first responded "Well, she said a wise Latina. I mean, as I told John earlier, I could say, "Can't you believe that a silver-haired Texan who served on the supreme court of his state might know more than whoever it is?" Sure you could. And it would..."

Senator Cornyn then said of Sotomayor

this is not an isolated comment. This was an argued point that she repeated again and again and again. The president said she misspoke. His press secretary said, "Well, maybe she should have used different words."

But this is a point that she was trying to make and has consistently made, that in some ways the quality of justice depends on who the judge is. And that just can't be — can't be true.

After which, Feinstein continued

Judges are not automatons. They are human beings. And they bring to whatever court they serve their experiences, and a variety of experiences, and a knowledge of the law and your — the human experiences that you have as an individual, I think, play a role.

You know, I've listened to the balls and strikes and, "Well, we're just umpires," and then the individual goes to the Supreme Court and does exactly the opposite. So one's experience, one's venue, one's way of looking at an issue does come into it somewhere along the line. And I think most of us have seen this over and over again.

Not bad, but a little defensive. How about suggesting that Sotomayor's take on empathy is within the mainstream of American thought- or at least the philosophy of the Supreme Court? Or maybe quote Judge Samuel Alito at his confirmation hearing, responding to a question of Senator Tom Coburn (R.- OK) by saying:

....And that's why I went into that in my opening statement. Because when a case comes before me involving, let's say, someone who is an immigrant -- and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases -- I can't help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn't that long ago when they were in that position.

And so it's my job to apply the law. It's not my job to change the law or to bend the law to achieve any result.

But when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, "You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country."

When I have cases involving children, I can't help but think of my own children and think about my children being treated in the way that children may be treated in the case that's before me.

And that goes down the line. When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account. When I have a case involving someone who's been subjected to discrimination because of disability, I have to think of people who I've known and admire very greatly who've had disabilities, and I've watched them struggle to overcome the barriers that society puts up often just because it doesn't think of what it's doing -- the barriers that it puts up to them.

So those are some of the experiences that have shaped me as a person.

Alito was wrong. Sotomayor was wrong. But that is a mere opinion. If Repubs choose to grandstand on the issue, Democrats should strike back, perhaps asking why being descended from Italian immigrants grants someone special insight and wisdom, while being descended from Puerto Rican migrants is less ennobling. Or perhaps, more directly and less diplomatically, they might open with: are Italian-Americans superior to other Americans?

Article(s) Of The Week

A post on dailykos by Laura Clawson and a column written by Peggy Noonan for Saturday's Wall Street Journal say most of what there is to say about Sarah Palin. No, not specifically about Palin's resignation but more generally about Palin, whose resignation, in retrospect, is just another erratic and narcissistic chapter in her political career.

The accusations among many Repubs and even members of the mainstream media about alleged sexism directed toward the Alaska governor may be ludicrous (and are), but there has been little effort to rebut them. Clawson, though, does it effectively, remarking

Sarah Palin got to the governorship of Alaska on her own. At that point, political geeks and people in Alaska knew who she was, and that was about it. Palin became a national figure because John McCain selected her as his running mate. Why did he select her as his running mate, despite having barely spoken to her and not having vetted her? Because she was a woman. Because she would shake things up and get attention and seem unexpected. Out of the hope that PUMAs would flock to her. Because, more generally, the McCain campaign hoped that having a woman on the ticket would be an adequate stand-in for taking issue positions that women would vote for.

That's where the real and massive sexism in how Palin has been treated lies, and while she was certainly affected by it, the real victims are women who have worked hard to get somewhere in politics, and women voters who were assumed by a major party presidential nominee to be stupid enough to vote for a woman without consideration of her positions.

Clawson notes that only four of 40 Republicans in the United States Senate voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Those would be the the Senate's four female Republicans, each of them more qualified to serve as Vice-President though, probably not coincidentally, none as physically attractive as the Alaska governor. Almost as if the GOP, not oblivious to the value of responding to the election as President of a serious black man with election of the same demographic as RNC chairman, would select a silly black man. Almost.

A former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and lifelong Republican, Peggy Noonan was none too amused at the selection of Sarah Palin as her party's vice-presidential candidate. Noonan repeats, much more eloquently, the common criticism of Palin:

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

But Noonan makes a more important point, demolishing the argument many conservatives make about Palin, here promoted by Ross Douthat of The New York Times:

Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

Noonan, en route to quashing Palinphile myths, explains that the Alaska governor

continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.

This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they're working class "tropes." Because, you know, that's what they teach in "Ways of the Working Class" at Yale and Dartmouth.
What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.

"She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism." This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it's included in U.S. News & World Report's top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!

America doesn't need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this.

Sure, Sarah Palin does a little better among those without, than those with, a college education. Still, there is something unsettling about conservative elites who have benefited from their educational pedigree waxing populist about political figures who didn't go Ivy League. Graduation from the University of Idaho, having a large family, or being famously incoherent does not qualify someone as symbolizing the "democratic ideal." And this is especially true if that public official has proudly voiced contempt for the lifestyle of so many hard-working Americans:

it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and “go with the flow”.

Nah, only dead fish "go with the flow."

Sarah Palin, who equates innumerable Americans with "dead fish," a feminist heroine or working-class hero? Laura Clawson and Peggy Noonan are having none of that.

Not So Fast

It certainly looks like bigotry.

Liberal/progressive blogger extraordinaire Digby posted on July 9 about the private swim club in the Philadelphia, Pa. area which invited, then un-invited, children of a Northeast Philadelphia day camp after members of the club, some apparently racially motivated, objected. Philly.com reported on July 10

A state agency is investigating a Huntingdon Valley swim club for possible racial discrimination after the club revoked a contract to let children from a Northeast Philadelphia day camp swim in its pool....

On June 29, 65 black and Hispanic children from the city camp Creative Steps Inc. made their first visit to the Montgomery County club and heard some members make racial remarks and escort their own children away from the pool, Creative Steps executive director Alethea Wright said.

Last Friday, the Valley Club refunded a $1,950 check to the camp in Oxford Circle to terminate the agreement allowing children from kindergarten through seventh grade to swim at the club.

Digby comments:

I assume that most of you have heard by now about the bigots at the Philadelphia swim club who wouldn't allow the white kids to swim with the African American kids. It takes me back to my childhood wonder years in 1960s Mississippi.

And later:

But here's something that is rarely focused on in all the stories about the appalling behavior of these awful people.

To her credit, Digby spares us the obvious, but unhelpful and meaningless, irony: in her native state of Mississippi lies Philadelphia, Mississippi, home to the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, and to a black elected mayor 45 years later. (It's not Tom Paxton, but this video, below, will have to do.)

No doubt Digby would be- appropriately- skeptical of the altruistic claim of the club member who pleaded "We have people who are black, people who are Asian, and Russians and Jewish people" and of the club, which maintained its leaders are "deeply troubled by the recent allegations of racism, which are completely untrue." Unfortunate, then, that she seems to accept uncritically the statement of the club's executive director, of whom the Philadelphia Inquirer writes

While the campers were swimming, Wright said, three of them came up to her and said they had heard club members asking what African Americans were doing at the club.

I don't know Alethea Wright any more than Digby does. But suppose she is black (and the same would hold true, to a lesser degree, if she were not): would three white people come up to her and complain that African-Americans were at the club? Not surprisingly, there is no direct quote to that effect from Wright- nor would I make such a claim if I were her.

Notwithstanding that people at a private club, looking for a quiet morning or afternoon, probably would be nonplussed at the arrival of 65 children of any race, it would be dangerous to conclude that bigotry played no role in the uproar.

But that really is beside the point, unlike Digby's reference to "the bigots" and "these awful people," individuals she makes no claim ever to have met or to know anything about. (And continuing her uncharacteristic inattention to detail, she refers to the "Philadelphia swim club," though the Valley Club is in Huntingdon Valley, not Philadelphia.)

And as if to cement the image of the privileged left, Digby chooses to criticize Vice President Biden over application of stimulus funds:

“No swimming pools!” he implored. “No tennis courts!” he begged. “No golf courses!” he pleaded. “No Frisbee parks!” he exhorted.

Biden was referring to construction of swimming pools, not permitting middle class or lower class children to swim. And tennis courts? Golf course? I suppose in some upper class communities, they may be considered necessities; not so in most middle class (and obviously lower class) communities.

From the days that the right coined the term "limousine liberal" to the present time, conservatives have charged liberals with being "elitist," thereby doth protesting too much. Now a prominent blogger of the left generalizes, jumping to the conclusion that a group- not one or two specified individuals, but a group- is "awful." A heck of a strategy for the left-if the intent is to elicit resentment among the American people.

Health Care Here And There

With data current as of July, 2008, NPR contrasts health care in seven industrialized nations- France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, and the U.S.A. Among the indices listed are coverage, health spending per capita and as portion of gross domestic product, and life expectancy at birth. It finds that health spending per person ranges from $2358 annually in Japan to $6402 annually in the U.S.A.- and as portion of gdp from 8.4% in Japan to 15.35 in the United States. Coverage is indicated as 100% in Japan and France, "all citizens and legal residents" in Germany, Great Britain, Holland, and Switzerland, and in the U.S.A., 82% of people under age 65, 100% (thank you, Medicare) of people 65 and over.

The comparison indicates that life expectancy at birth in the United States is lower, at 78.1%, than in those of the other six nations. In an article explaining the lessons our nation might learn from the relative success of health care in France (11th) and the Netherlands (5th), Jonathan Cohn includes a similar, yet different, index. Referring to a 2003 ranking of 20 advanced countries, he notes

....the U.S. finished 16th when it came to "mortality amenable to healthcare," another statistic that strives to capture the impact of a health system.

Cohn knocks down a few myths propagated about health care by conservatives, who particularly delight in pointing to longer waiting periods for elective operations in Canada (a nation not included in the NPR study) than in the United States. Usually left unexplored is a major reason for the longer rate, suggested in Cohn's remark about the two countries he studied (emphasis mine):

Dutch and French patients do wait longer than Americans for specialty care; around a quarter of respondents to the Commonwealth Fund survey reported waiting more than two months to see a specialist, compared to virtually no Americans. But Dutch and French patients were far less likely to avoid seeing a specialist altogether - or forgoing other sorts of medical care - because they couldn’t afford it. And there’s precious little evidence that the waits for specialty care led to less effective care.

Frightened away by cost, Americans frequently avoid the treatment they need. And still health care is way more expensive here than in other comparable, or remotely comparable, nations. But if consumers and doctors are unsatisfied with the system as it is, the health insurance industry is quite pleased, thank you. And to too many Repubs and centrist Democrats, shielding private insurers from competition is all that really matters.

Sharpton, Still Outrageous

At the July 7 memorial in Los Angeles to Michael Jackson, Al Sharpton addressed Mr. Jackson's children and said, to cheers:

Wasn't nothing strange about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with.

Sharpton apparently "forgot," as reported online by the Times of London:

In 1993 Jackson was accused by the parents of 13-year-old Jordan Chandler of sexually molesting their son during sleepovers at his 3,000- acre ranch. The family dropped the case after reaching an £18.5 million financial settlement with Jackson. No charges were brought.

And in November, 2002

....Jackson provoked outrage when he dangled his baby son, Prince Michael II, over the balcony of a Berlin hotel and appeared briefly to lose control. As a result of that incident officials in Santa Barbara County are already considering the launch of a formal investigation into the father of three’s fitness to be a parent.

Just what would Al Sharpton believe is strange? Fortunately, Sharpton's standard of normalcy is not as destructive as his infamous hostility toward small business owners, such as Korean-American grocers.... or New York State law enforcement personnel, such as the Attorney General (whom he equated with Adolph Hitler while trivializing the Holocaust) investigating an obvious hoax. Yes, that was the racial huckster; this, fortunately, is only someone who believes inappropriate (let's be generous) behavior toward young children is acceptable.

I'll Blame It On Iraq

Appearing at an Independence Day Tea Party in the Houston area, Samuel Wurzelbacher declared

I believe we need to spend a little more on illegal immigrants get them the (expletive) out of our (expletive) country, and close the borders down. We can do it.

We’ve got the greatest military in the world and you’re telling me we can’t close our borders- that’s just ridiculous.

In January, President Bush rejected an Israeli request to fly through Iraqi airspace, controlled by the U.S.A., to bomb Iranian underground nuclear facilities. On Meet The Press last Sunday, Vice President Biden, while asserting that Israel is a sovereign nation with a right to attack Iraq, refused to reveal whether the Obama Administration would give Israel the right to fly over Iraq to attack Iran. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reluctant to seek permission, given that it probably would be denied and it's highly unlikely Tel Aviv would undertake such an attack without U.S. authorization.

It's not as if Iran's nuclear program poses no threat. In early June, shortly before the "election" in Iran, the International Atomic Energy Agency noted Iran had increased its supply of low-grade enriched uranium by 30 percent to nearly 3,000 pounds since its last quarterly report. The low-grade variety is used in nuclear reactors but

Scientists say 3,000 pounds of low-enriched, or reactor-grade, uranium of the type Iran has would be more than enough to build a single nuclear weapon if Iran were to boot out international inspectors, renege on treaty obligations and further refine its supplies....

The agency (the U.N. Security Council, which has passed several resolutions asking Iran to stop enriching uranium) report also says that Iran continues to deny it access to the heavy-water reactor near the west-central city of Arak and has not yet provided it with design information for a planned nuclear power plant near the southwestern Iranian town of Darkhovin. Iran says that under its treaty obligations, it need not provide such information until just before it introduces nuclear material to a site.

And the BBC reports "The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency says he believes Iran is mastering nuclear technology and it wants the option of a nuclear weapon." (Iran wants the option of a nuclear weapon as Sarah Palin has opted out as governor of Alaska in part so she can maintain the option of a presidential run in 2012. No parallel, but never waste an opportunity to tie Iran to an enemy of the U.S.A.) And el Baradei (who has stepped aside as director but supports engagement with Iran) is not to be ignored, given that in early 2003, while Condoleezza Rice was dreaming of mushroom clouds, he warned the world that Iraq did not have an active nuclear program. (Unfortunately, that was pre-1/09, when we had a President who did not believe we were part of the world community.)

Perhaps there would be no Israel and/or American air strike upon Iraqi facilities anyway, given the possibility that some are underground and the likelihood they are scattered. Still, it is sobering that the misbegotten war in Iraq has limited the options of the free world in dealing with a more important nation, Iran. That was headed by genocidal tyrant Saddaam Hussein, who probably would have loved to see bombs rained down on Iran and reportedly was contemplating a "security agreement with the US to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region."

Which brings us back to illegal immigration, which populist liberals everywhere recognize (or should recognize) lowers wage rates and benefits for workers in the U.S.A. More personnel at the border would enhance the effort to stem the tide (temporarily reduced because of recession), as President Obama recognizes. But as for the U.S. military, as Joe the Plumber advocates? Sorry, Sam- it's in Iraq in a war which has proven a boon for terrorism and Tehran.