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Anne Laurie

You are here: Home / Archives for Anne Laurie

Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.

Late Night Open Thread

by Anne Laurie|  September 2, 200910:56 pm| 113 Comments

This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads

Our new foster papillon “Gloria” got turfed from her last home because she made the dog-logical mistake of attacking their tiny, elderly Queen Bee girl dog. In the three-days-and-counting she’s been here with us, Gloria has given our elderly, imperious (and much larger, tho still smaller than Gloria) Princess Buta-Hime-Sama a very wide berth, even while scrumming cautiously with our two boy dogs. This is good news for readers of the Media Village Courtiers, because it proves that a born lapdog can learn from its mistakes, given sufficient impetus.

On the other hand, Gloria doesn’t drink out of the toilet bowl, even though she’s physically capable of doing so (and let me state for the record that when I fell in love with papillons, I never expected to meet one tall enough to achieve this). So it’s possible that she’s just got more naturally discerning tastes than Dean Broder, Dick Cohen, or David Brooks…

Late Night Open ThreadPost + Comments (113)

Eeyore Is Smarter Than Pooh

by Anne Laurie|  August 30, 20098:18 pm| 74 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology

Via Scientific American, a behavioral ecologist and a psychiatrist suggest that a major depressive incident may make people better able to solve complex problems and social dilemmas :

Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.

This analytical style of thought, of course, can be very productive. Each component is not as difficult, so the problem becomes more tractable. Indeed, when you are faced with a difficult problem, such as a math problem, feeling depressed is often a useful response that may help you analyze and solve it. For instance, in some of our research, we have found evidence that people who get more depressed while they are working on complex problems in an intelligence test tend to score higher on the test.

During my scholastic career, I frequently got depressed when attempting to work math problems (took basic high school algebra three times and still don’t understand it). I’d stare at the paper until the numbers started dancing, ruminating on the problem until I reached the correct solution: “That’s it; I am sooo fvcked.”

Then I’d throw up.

Which totally makes sense now, because of course serotonin function affects the gastrointestional tract as well as that lump at the top of the spinal column.

Eeyore Is Smarter Than PoohPost + Comments (74)

The “Luck” of the Kennedys

by Anne Laurie|  August 28, 20093:02 am| 72 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Vagina Outrage, Daydream Believers

For a progressive and a sentimentalist, one of the advantages of living in the Boston television market has been its coverage of Senator Kennedy’s last public appearance. He was one of ours, and he did a lot of good for a lot of individuals and families here, apart from his many services to the welfare of all Americans. I’ve been glad to sniffle through many an anecdote from the people who came to witness the hearse carry Teddy’s casket from Hyannisport, through Boston’s Government Center and the North End streets where he first politicked, to lie in state at his brother’s JFK Library in Dorchester.

People like the couple whose son was killed in Iraq, and Kennedy not only sent a note of condolence, he found out the soldier’s father was having problems obtaining his citizenship — problems that magically disappeared within two weeks of Kennedy’s intervention. And when the couple started a scholarship fund to honor their son’s memory, Teddy sent a personal check. People like the Republican parents whose son’s last words from Iraq lamented the lack of decent body armour; they contacted Kennedy “despite our doubts” and the Senator successfully fought to change the Pentagon rules protecting Blackwater and its private-contractor ilk by denying civilian donations toward ‘non-approved’ equipment. “Teddy did more for us than any of the senators we contacted who voted for the war,” they said.

People like the 9/11 widow who’ll be standing with the Kennedy family overnight, at the coffin wake. It wasn’t just that he contacted her and the other families immediately, she said, or the “dozens of little things, stuff that was only important to us” that he’d done in the years since. “He walked me through those first terrible days, taught me how it was possible to go on, when I thought I would never get through it… He told me I could, and I knew I could trust him, because he’d had to — he’d done it himself.”

*****
And then I made the mistake of looking at Andrew Sullivan’s blog, hosting the smug and disingenuous Hanna Rosin, whose back-handed ‘tribute’ to Teddy’s public service went beyond the usual Wingnut Welfare Wurlitzer “Chappaquiddick today, Chappaquiddick tomorrow, Chappaquiddick forever” sniping to “the bigger problem of the Kennedy women”:

“If they were lucky, like Eunice Kennedy Shriver, they managed to install themselves at the head of virtuous nonprofits—“charities,” we used to call them.” — Goodbye, Kennedy Women, Double X, August 26

Rosin is treating Eunice Kennedy Shriver the way she laments Joe Kennedy did — as a mannequin, a non-person whose highest ambition was to worm its way into a figurehead position. This is a grave and willful misunderstanding, which denigrates not only Mrs. Kennedy Shriver’s lifetime of hard work, but the worth of the Special Olympics and the Special Olympians.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver was not “lucky”, she was brave.

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The “Luck” of the KennedysPost + Comments (72)

She worked just as hard and as long for her “virtuous nonprofit” as Teddy did in the Senate, starting in 1961 when she pressured her brother Jack into authorizing The President’s Committee on Mental Retardation, which developed into what is now Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development within the NIH. She was supposed to be another Barbara Bush, someone who’d be content supervising an appropriately large brood of future (male) politicians, a Junior League matron breaking her “fiercely competitive” golf and tennis matches at the country club with martini-and-cigarette lunches. But while she never challenged her father’s fierce chauvinism to the extent of pursuing political office herself, she never forgot how her older sister Rosemary had been traumatized, locked away, and lobotomized in a misguided attempt to “protect her from herself” — and to protect her family from the stigma of having produced a mental defective.

Over the last twenty years or so, there’s developed a certain willed historical oblivion over just how hard it was to be, or to bear, a “retarded” child in America in the 1960s. The unchallenged Social Eugenics bias taught in schools of medicine & social work since the 1890s mandated that the “best” treatment for such “defective” children was institutionalization, where the little unfortunates and their families would be protected from the stigma and social opprobrium natural to their pitiable condition. And since there was no hope of a cure, or even a meaningful life for the young victims, the diagnostic lines between “mongoloidism”, organic brain damage, autism, epilepsy, and even cerebral palsy were blurred — if the child was going to be warehoused until it died, hopefully before wasting too much of its family’s or the states resources, how much did an exact label matter? Things hadn’t progressed much since Jane Austen wrote of a family (much like her own) that “had the bad fortune to have a very stupid, troublesome son, and the good fortune to lose him before his twentieth year.” I was born in the mid-1950s, and I can remember the ladies in my blue-collar Irish-American parish discussing whether it was “fair” for Eunice to keep dragging up the “old scandal” of Rosemary’s tragedy — because it risked damaging the political & marital chances not only of Eunice’s own children, but of the Irish-Catholic tribe in general. I know people of my generation who were never permitted to meet, or sometimes even to know about, their “imperfect” siblings until another family crisis unveiled their existence. Just as adoptive parents were warned never to reveal that their child wasn’t “really” theirs, the parents of “defective” children were advised, “Put it in an institution. Tell the neighbors it died. It wouldn’t be fair to your other children, if you try to provide all the extra care and expense it’ll need.”

People today occasionally wonder, or complain, that “When I was growing up, there didn’t used to be so many special needs kids in every neighborhood.” Of course they don’t always use the polite “special needs”, because that phrase didn’t really exist a generation ago. There didn’t “used to be” so much mention of racist privilege or sexual harrassment or domestic violence, either — not because it didn’t exist, but because the concepts were so much an accepted part of everyday life that “we” didn’t have the words to describe them, even if we wanted or needed to. Changing the world to require, and accept, such a new vocabulary was a lifetime’s hard work for many, many people, a few of whom were powerful enough and prominent enough that we remember their names when honoring the work of all their unheralded fellows. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, despite Hanna Rosin’s attempt to reduce her, was never just a ‘Lady Bountiful presiding over an afternoon’s diversion for the little retards.’ She spent her life working hard, and encouraging (demanding) thousands of others to work just as hard, to give the forgotten and powerless a little more space in the world. And it is for her hard work and by the success she won, not for herself but for 3,000,000-and-counting people she never met, that she will be remembered. At its best, this was the real “Kennedy luck” — not that they were born rich and lived privileged, but that Teddy, Eunice, Jack, Bobby, and the rest of the clan sought out the hard work that would make a real difference in the world.

Time for the Teddy Kennedy Memorial Health Care Reform Bill

by Anne Laurie|  August 26, 20094:45 am| 334 Comments

This post is in: Daydream Believers, Seriously

Senator Edward Moore Kennedy (D) has died at the age of 77, after 46 years of service in Congress.

He had the good luck to be born into a wealthy and powerful American family, and the bad luck to be born the ‘caboose kid’ in an Irish-American family that imbued its every member with an outsized drive for success at all costs. The old man never let his older brothers Jack and Bobby forget that they’d never measure up to their eldest brother, Joe Jr, his martyred WWII flying ace; the rest of us never let Teddy forget that he’d never measure up to Jack and Bobby, our martyred political heroes. He inherited an orphanage full of traumatized nephews and nieces, the suspicion that his every success would owe more to sentimental nepotism than his own labor, and the undying resentment of every kleptocrat, paleoconservative, and Nixon-spawned ‘Reagan Republican’ bent on turning America into their version of a banana republic.

He survived in the Senate, for eight terms and counting, because he was renowned for his scrupulous adherence to the all-politics-is-local wisdom of “constituent service”. Even his fierciest local critics, the Chappaquiddick Chorus, admit that Kennedy’s office would go the extra mile to untangle the red tape obstructing every missing Social Security check or family-member visa petition. But he earned his “Lion of the Senate” title by fighting to ensure that every American could enjoy some basic level of human dignity, even those without access to a Senator of power and influence.

When his fatal illness was announced last year, a lot of the professional cynics in the “mainstream” media were shocked at how many people, of all political affiliations and income levels, had been touched by Teddy’s kindness while their loved ones were undergoing treatment in Boston’s great medical institutions. Going back to the early 1970s, when his son lost a leg and almost lost his life to bone cancer, it seems that Teddy had done a thousand small kindness for the families of cancer patients, especially pediatric patients — visiting devasted parents and terrified children, arranging special daytrips, setting his staff to battle recalcitrant insurance companies for the benefit of people who’d never have the chance to vote for him, under circumstances where no favorable publicity would accrue to him. The man did some terrible and many very stupid things in his life, but he also spent half a century in service, public and private, as atonement.

The glee of Senator Kennedy’s enemies and ours will be unbounded over the next few days. I’m sure the birfers, astroturfers, industry shills, talibangelicals, Blue Dog DINOs, glibertarians, neocons, and general malefactors of great wealth will weep crocodile tears as they lament that Teddy’s death should not be used as an opportunity by crass liberals to pass the kind of serious health care reform he spent the last thirty years championing. And that, my friends and President Obama, is why it’s time to come back after Labor Day with a single coherent Senator Edward M. Kennedy Health Care Reform Bill, and to twist whatever arms, ears, or other parts are necessary to get a good strong comprehensive bill passed and signed, NOW. We owe the memory of a great man no less.

Time for the Teddy Kennedy Memorial Health Care Reform BillPost + Comments (334)

Late Night/Early Morning OT: Soft Target

by Anne Laurie|  August 25, 20091:34 am| 87 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Daydream Believers

Unless I have fallen for an unusually elaborate hoax, Ralph Nader is about to release a novel …

“In a high mountain redoubt above the Alenuihaha Channel, seventeen megamillionaires and billionaires sat on a wide balcony overlooking the lush green island of Maui and the far Pacific Ocean. They were alike in only three ways: they were old, very rich, and very unrepresentative of humanity, which they intended to save from itself. The man behind the gathering, the richest of them all, was Warren Buffet, who had rented the entire premises of a small luxury hotel for that January 2006 weekend… ” — Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

“Since the Progressive Era, Ralph Nader has done more than anyone else to protect American consumers. With this utopian fantasy, he shows us how good he thinks things could be.” — Warren Beatty

“A high-spirited visionary romp melding the wisdom, humour and imagination of Ralph Nader. May it inspire action.” — Patti Smith

Also among the Seventeen Meliorists are Paul Newman, George Soros, and Sol Price. The book is 736 pages long, and will be “backed by a major promotional budget.”

Possibly funded by a previously-hidden TARP clause, to be known as the Satirists’ Full Employment Act.

Late Night/Early Morning OT: Soft TargetPost + Comments (87)

Late-Night Open Thread (Don’t Look, John!)

by Anne Laurie|  August 24, 200912:14 am| 69 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

Picked a big popcorn bowl full of ripe tomatoes from our two dozen plants, first real bounty of the summer, and only a month behind the usual ETA.

Pleasant surprise of the season, so far, is the Black Pear, replacement for the Black Prince plant I couldn’t find even through the Dave’s Garden website.  It’s one of the ugliest useful plants I’ve ever seen — looks like somebody was trying to breed organic Truck Nutz, creepy potato-leafed vines crowded with clusters of twin & triplet fist-sized, sac-shaped fruit ripening to an angry, transluscent maroon-purple with lime green highlights.  But the flesh is succulent and delicious, not too tart, not too sweet, with rich flavor undertones.  They’re so delicious fresh, on burgers or rye bread, that I haven’t tried slow-roasting yet, but that may change tomorrow.

Second best for us, so far, has been the Juliet  ‘salad tomato’, which I remember from last year as prolific but not extraordinarily tasty.  This year, a rainy overcast June and July encouraged lush foliage but kept even my “emergency backup” plants — one Early Girl, a Roma, a Sweet Million cherry tomato — from setting fruit.  Only the Juliet and the Sun Gold, an orange (low-acid) cherry type, have been producing since the second week of July, when the Ripeness Rush usually starts around here.  And the Sun Golds just have not been up to most year’s standards, but the Juliets are sweet & flavorful.  Only problem is that they’re a little thick-skinned for my tastes, but after the last few weeks they have moved up next year’s shopping list from “dependable, not striking” to “must find.”

On the other side of the ledger, my basil plants — one Genovese, on small-leaf globe — have gone to flower, overnight, without ever reaching a decent size.  Fortunately, my taste buds aren’t so refined that I can’t make do with supermarket or even frozen basil cubes…

How’s everybody doing at the end of another hot,  sticky weekend?

Late-Night Open Thread (Don’t Look, John!)Post + Comments (69)

Roseanne the Riveter & the New Guilted Age

by Anne Laurie|  August 21, 20094:53 am| 234 Comments

This post is in: Media, Politics, Vagina Outrage

Looks like the new Media Village talking point has been distributed:  Americans don’t deserve a decent health care system because we are disgusting fat pigs. 

There’s a point (around 3:00) in the MSNBC  clip John posted earlier where Taibbi talks about America’s relatively high infant mortality rate and low life expectancy, and Maria Bartiromo interrupts  to snarl, “We’re OBESE!” with the same combination of loathing & denunciation that a televangelist would use for “We have sinned!”  Bartiromo, of course, is not obese — her television contract is based on her meeting certain standards of attractiveness, and I’m sure it includes clauses covering the personal trainers, gym memberships, nutritionists, and whatever other outside assistance is required to keep Bartiromo up to those standards.   But the rest of us, well, how can we expect our babies to stay alive if we insist on being willfully, knowingly “obese”?

Then, in the WSJ op-ed John linked later in the evening, anesthesiologist and anti-happiness crusader Dr. Ronald Dworkin complains that Obama’s threatened health reforms will drive skilled professionals like himself out of the medical business, because taxes are too high and Medicare compensation is too low and frankly, smart people don’t want to work that hard.  Also,  “Americans have grown very fat. This complicates anesthesia tremendously. Putting in IVs, spinals and epidurals is harder. Inserting breathing tubes is much more dangerous. “   True enough, but then,  he’s getting paid somewhere north of $300k a year to deal with those complicated fat people.  “Quality of care will inevitably decline. That decline will come first in obstetrics… “  Go away, fat people, or the laboring mothers and their babies will suffer!

Granted:  Being too fat is a genuine medical problem.  Obesity, or the yo-yo dieting too often connected with obesity, leads to higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, joint problems, yada yada yada.   But it’s also a very “resistant” Medical Issue, with roots in everything from genetics to modern suburban planning to the way industrial agriculture is subsidized by tax dollars but local farmers markets are not.    In modern America, for all these reasons and more, it often costs more to be thin than to be fat.  And it sure costs more to stay healthy, so — more and more often — poor Americans are fatter and less “fit” than wealthy Americans.  It does not seem coincidental that one of the memes leaking upwards from the anti-reform astroturf has become  “America’s medical system hasn’t failed American citizens — American citizens have failed its medical system.” 

Us fatties  are using up too much health care,  taking up too much room in the emergency rooms, just like we take up too much airline seat space and use too many resources to fill our swollen gullets and cover our bloated hides.  And women, of course, are particularly susceptible to this kind of guilt-tripping.  Feminist, post-feminist or anti-feminist, some very large percentage of  all American women, whatever their actual medical BMI, will always have to fight an inner voice suggesting that we could stand to lose a few (more) pounds.   There is nothing so unfeminine as taking up too much space, using up ‘more than one’s share’, attracting too much attention.

After World War II, American economists decided that in order to keep unemployment at an appropriate level, the women who’d been “enticed” into paid employment while “their men” were overseas needed to be sent back to the kitchen and the nursery.  A deliberate part of this campaign was the argument, repeated at every level of the media from the radio soap operas to the Harvard Business School research journals, that “bored housewives” and “novelty-seeking co-eds” who insisted on keeping their high-paying office or technical jobs, or demanded slots at the better universities, were “taking jobs away from the heads of households (men), who wouldn’t be able to feed their families”.   All the old reliable anti-womanist slogans were also revived (‘career girls’ were unattractive, sterile, neurotic spinsters who couldn’t ‘get a man’, probably because of their sexual abnormalities), but this new meme really sold.  Any woman who wanted a job more interesting or better-paid than retail clerk or primary-school teacher was a selfish, self-centered, unpatriotic monster who didn’t mind taking food out of the mouths of starving children.   This re-branding worked so well that by the mid-1960s, even women who “had no choice but to work” — women who were themselves heads-of-household — often felt compelled to wear their “excuses” like a badge, or a mark of shame.

Today, American economists are facing a new re-structuring of a nationwide industry, the health-care system, that uses almost one dollar out of every five available.   Our current system works very well for the top economic tier, less well and far more expensively for the middle (voting) tiers, and badly / catastrophically for the expanding bottom layer.   Suddenly, out of every media outlet, from the morning talk shows to the political blogs to the Wall Street Journal, comes a new slogan:  Americans get less health for more dollars than any other industrialized nation because we don’t deserve good health.  We haven’t earned it, and if we insist on using it anyway, we’ll be depriving other, more needy fellow citizens of their fair share.   And the mark of our selfish unworthiness is that we’re fat.   Any good citizen, especially any woman, who “knows” that she should be eating better and exercising more (if only there were more hours in a day, or she could afford a gym membership, or vegetables weren’t more expensive than mac’n’cheez) gets the subliminal message:  She can’t afford a mammogram, much less  treatment for breast cancer, not because the World’s Best Health Care System is broken, but because she’s selfish even to want such luxuries when she hasn’t earned them.

Roseanne the Riveter & the New Guilted AgePost + Comments (234)

Bleg: Reality-Based Milblogs?

by Anne Laurie|  August 18, 20099:13 pm| 98 Comments

This post is in: Military

A long-term acquaintance on a small group mailing list chose this week to move from a steady drip of more-or-less-ignorable libertarian/objectivist statements into Full Frontal Wingnut.  After circulating a long, badly-written, tediously unfunny “humorous letter” about the Self-Proclaimed So cia list President Obama’s Nazi-Inspired Campaign to Trick Innocent Americans Into “Flagging” Their Neighbors for Thought Crimes Against IRS Death Squads of the So-Called-Health-Reform Task Force to Destroy the World’s Best Medical System, they were rebutted with great patience  by fellow members from all points of the political spectrum.   Amidst the ensuing squid-cloud of butthurt, rules-lawyering, and accusations of bad faith, Acquaintance announced that they get all their news from four “smart, unbiased” online sources:  Instapundit, Google, and two “trustworthy” milblogs, Winds of Change and Blackfive.

I know nothing of military blogs or bloggers, but I suspect that if Glenn Reynolds is the measure of  smart & trustworthy, then these two may bear the same relationship to military news as Icanhascheezburger bears to veterinary science.  Can the better read among you, especially the veterans, provide some recommendations for sane milblogs that won’t be too frightening to someone with a bad case of Starship Troopers Syndrome?

Bleg: Reality-Based Milblogs?Post + Comments (98)

Late Night Open Thread: Gubmint Suxx, and Then You Die

by Anne Laurie|  August 18, 200912:58 am| 123 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing

There sure has been a lot of hand-wringing today, hasn’t there?

A commentor on an earlier post complained:

Believe me, I would love to have a realist-libertarian party that I could vote for.

Then go run for your local school board, or find a similarly-minded Realist-Libertarian you can support to do so. Srsly. The “Permanent Republican Majority”, such as it was/is, came about because the Republican true believers spent 30-plus years finding & supporting anti-science school board candidates and anti-choice city council candidates and anti-government state drainage commission auditor candidates. These tiny community nuisance larvae, nurtured by wingnut welfare and protected by low-information-voter apathy, eventually pupated in state legislatures, before emerging as full-blown leeches, ticks, and lampreys battening on our misfortunate nation’s lifeblood during the anti-Clinton congressional “Class of 1994” and the Bush/Cheney Kleptocracy. (It also bound the sane conservatives into a death pact with the Insane Klowns Posse, but that’s their problem to solve, or not.)

The Realist-Libertarians — and their counterparts on the other axis, like the Greens — believe they can find a magical all-purpose Savior Candidate, like Ralph Nader, whose enormous logical appeal and sheer personal charisma will make all us disaffected voters smack our foreheads and change our party registration. And also possibly bring in a whole! new! wave! of former non-voters enchanted by the MESSAGE, which has never before been so brilliantly embodied. This is like trying to change the Titanic’s direction by tying Leonardo DiCaprio to the bowsprit — no matter how much media attention it may attract, the laws of political physics will not work in your favor.

Of course Green and Libertarian candidates do sometimes run for one of those humble bottom-level civic offices, and even win. But all too often, prospective third-party Political Leaders leave the field, if not the party, after their first loss. The voters are too stupid, apathetic, or abused to appreciate one’s political genius, so they don’t deserve a second chance. Or the Entrenched Interests are too evil and/or powerful to understand that immediately surrendering their picayune personal fiefdoms to the New Perfect Goal is the only logical choice if they are not to be swept into the dustbin of history. Compromising, horse-trading, persuading other individuals (many of them self-involved greedy hacks and nutbags of dubious intellect and no obvious achievements) to vote in favor of the New Paradigm is tedious and soul-soiling.

It’s much easier to stomp off the field and then sit on the sidelines bitching, but Rush Limbaugh only achieved his current status because thousands of other Republicans were willing to expend their efforts in the actual political game. Even President Obama’s “overnight” success came as the culmination of many years of not-obvious-to-the-mainstream-media work and planning on his part and that of hundreds of other Democratic professionals and committed amateurs.

*****
On a semi-related topic, I found this particular one-star review
of Duck for President entertaining:

“America has a broken electoral system, a polarized electorate, and a dysfunctional Congress, yet somehow this book is amusing?
The book could be construed as funny if we ignore the fact that we have a representative form of government. When we remind ourselves that we’re a self-governing society, we are reminded that what we now call Duck is what we used to think of as a citizen in public service.
In a representative democracy we are all Ducks. And while it may not be fair to judge a light-hearted children’s book on the basis of underlying sociopolitical assumptions, it’s our responsibility as citizens to accept that we are ultimately responsible for the what’s wrong in government, not just teach our children to blame it on Duck. We have met the Duck, and it is us.”

Late Night Open Thread: Gubmint Suxx, and Then You DiePost + Comments (123)

Monday Morning Open Thread

by Anne Laurie|  August 17, 20095:45 am| 63 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, The War on Your Neighbor, aka the War on Drugs

Medicare for all Americans!

Because anything that ticks off Dick Armey can’t be all bad!

Sure, it’ll cost money, but a couple of retired cops have an idea about saving some bucks …

Having fought the war on drugs, we know that ending the drug war is the right thing to do — for all of us, especially taxpayers. While the financial benefits of drug legalization are not our main concern, they are substantial. In a July referendum, Oakland, Calif., voted to tax drug sales by a 4-to-1 margin. Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimates that ending the drug war would save $44 billion annually, with taxes bringing in an additional $33 billion.

Monday Morning Open ThreadPost + Comments (63)

Two Cheers for Jim Webb

by Anne Laurie|  August 17, 20094:52 am| 31 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs

I’m glad to read that another American “hostage” has been released:

Burmese authorities have released the American whose uninvited visit to the home of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi led to her being sentenced to 18 more months of house arrest, allowing him to leave the country Sunday with Sen. James Webb (D-Va.)…
John Yettaw, 54, a Vietnam War veteran who suffers from epilepsy and post-traumatic stress disorder, was sentenced last week to seven years in jail for swimming across the lake behind Suu Kyi’s house to warn her that he had had a vision in which she was killed by terrorists.
Webb, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, is the most senior U.S. official to visit Burma in more than two decades. He used his rare meeting with the government’s leadership to ask for Yettaw’s release on humanitarian grounds, for a visit with Suu Kyi and for her release.
“They granted two of those three requests in the meetings. They have not yet communicated on the third,” Webb said Sunday.

Let us all hope that Webb’s third request will be granted. Aung San Suu Kyi really, really doesn’t deserve to be punished any further because, gosh, us Americans just love to be helpful, whether or not the targets of our helpfulness appreciate it.

But I’m curious: Why do some news stories turn into Major Media Narratives — for example, North Korea’s recent release of two American journalists — while fairly similar stories like this one remain under the radar? Is it because two female journalists are more interesting than one aging nutter-cum-missionary? Is it North Korea’s status on the “Axis of Evil”? Is Bill Clinton just sexier to the Media courtiers than Jim Webb?

And if “we”, including Suu Kyi, are still paying for America’s disastrous incursion into Vietnam… what kinds of wonderfulness do future generations look forward to, as the veterans of our current Iraq and Afghanistan deployments return home, many of them (we have been warned) with subtle forms of brain injury?

Two Cheers for Jim WebbPost + Comments (31)

No Honor Among Kleptocrats

by Anne Laurie|  August 13, 20096:35 am| 76 Comments

This post is in: Assholes, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.

Dick Cheney is writing his memoirs, and <A HREF=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/12/AR2009081203306.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR>informants say</A> that he is deeply, deeply disappointed with You-Know-Who:

“In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him,” said a participant… “He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming. It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times — never apologize, never explain — and Bush moved toward the conciliatory.”

The two men maintain respectful ties, speaking on the telephone now and then, though aides to both said they were never quite friends. But there is a sting in Cheney’s critique, because he views concessions to public sentiment as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end.

Apparently omerta has its limits.   I know a lot of us DFHs feared that the horrors of the Cheney Regency would never receive a public airing, if only for fear of the War Crimes Tribunal, but perhaps vanity will achieve what mere human decency and the rule of law never could.

Some old associates see Cheney’s newfound openness as a breach of principle. For decades, he expressed contempt for departing officials who wrote insider accounts, arguing that candid internal debate was impossible if the president and his advisers could not count on secrecy…

“If he goes out and writes a memoir that spills beans about what took place behind closed doors, that would be out of character,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as White House spokesman during Bush’s first term.

Yet that appears to be precisely Cheney’s intent. Robert Barnett, who negotiated Cheney’s book contract, passed word to potential publishers that the memoir would be packed with news, and Cheney himself has said, without explanation, that “the statute of limitations has expired” on many of his secrets. “When the president made decisions that I didn’t agree with, I still supported him and didn’t go out and undercut him,” Cheney said, according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. “Now we’re talking about after we’ve left office. I have strong feelings about what happened. . . . And I don’t have any reason not to forthrightly express those views.”

Of course allowance must be made for an agent tasked to sell a hard-Right neoconservative apologia in a down market, and Cheney has no reputation for honesty.  But the urge to settle scores burns in many a heart pacemaker long after all other human emotions have expired, and much of the worst we know about Cheney’s first and foremost mentor was inadvertently revealed over Nixon’s twenty-year crusade to rehabilitate his own reputation as a statesman and great leader.   I look forward to further revelations with interest, and popcorn.

No Honor Among KleptocratsPost + Comments (76)

Stephen Hawking Is Shrill (Also)

by Anne Laurie|  August 12, 20095:23 pm| 123 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links

Via <A HREF=http://wonkette.com/410461/>Wonkette</A> :

“I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”

Stephen Hawking Is Shrill (Also)Post + Comments (123)

Open Thread (Erisian Edition)

by Anne Laurie|  August 1, 20094:03 am| 63 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

Late-night wacky overdosed-on-Obamacare-MSM-chatter thought experiment…

Since the H1N1 “None dare call it swine” flu stubbornly refuses to disappear, even though we’re all really bored by the whole thing now, the Obama Administration Medical Death Squad uses a previously obscure provision of the Patriot Act to declare a national emergency. In order to prevent the next wave of the pandemic from completely overwhelming America’s aging and underfunding public health system, Secretary Sibelius announces that full Medicare coverage will be offered to any American citizen who agrees to be vaccinated against both the seasonal and H1N1 flu strains. Vaccination tents, staffed by volunteer medical personnel with the assistance of the National Guard, will be opened in every state and large city, and travelling medical caravans will also be dispatched.

The imminent-but-not-yet-available H1N1 vaccine is currently being <A HREF=”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/health/30flu.html”> “prioritized”</A> for approximately half the population, including pregnant women, health care workers, children between the ages of 6 months and 18 years, those caring for children under the age of 6 months, otherwise healthy young people between the ages of 18 and 24, and those between the ages of 24 and 64 with pre-existing conditions medical problems like asthma, diabetes, and heart disease. Since healthy 18-24 year olds, adults with other medical issues, and the grossly underpaid people who work in daycare centers, nursing homes, and as home health providers probably constitute a good portion of the current uninsured 47/50 million Americans, extending Medicare coverage would presumably capture a lot of “volunteers”. People over 64 seem to have an unusual immunity to the new H1N1 strain, but those people are already covered by Medicare.

And of course there is the issue of whether “enough” doses of the vaccine can be produced in time to beat the predicted next wave… but since only about 40% of the target population gets the seasonal vaccination in any given year, either a similar percentage will shirk the new Pandemic Special, or we’ll discover there are a lot more people desperate for medical insurance than Betsy Mcaughey & Bill Kristol  (http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2009/07/31/bill_betsy/index.htm)  would have you believe.

P.S. Did we mention the vaccine is still “untested”? And it’s the first swine-derived vaccine since 1976 and the <A HREF=”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/09/health/09vaccine.html?fta=y”>Guillain-Barré</A> scare?

Also, it will contain <A HREF=”http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/07/30/eveningnews/main5199450.shtml”>thimerosol</A>!

Open Thread (Erisian Edition)Post + Comments (63)

An American Disgrace (not AS or MM)

by Anne Laurie|  July 29, 20099:34 pm| 107 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Seriously

Stan Brock may be a bigger saint than Mother Teresa.  But the fact that his  Remote Area Medical program, originally conceived to provide volunteer medical, dental & vision care to destitute villages in the heart of the Amazon Basin, is currently devoting 60% of its mission to helping Americans  is a national godsdamned disgrace. 

Stan Brock / RAM in Appalachia

STAN BROCK BRINGS HEALTH CARE TO AMERICANS WITH REMOTE AREA MEDICAL PROGRAM from R2 Studios on Vimeo.

 

P.S.  I am fully aware that MI HTML SKILLS   R  FAIL.

An American Disgrace (not AS or MM)Post + Comments (107)

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Johngcole avatarJohn Cole@Johngcole·
3h 1203983293710028802

New Post added at Balloon Juice - Monday Morning Open Thread: Seasons' Greetings -

Balloon Juice | Monday Morning Open Thread: Seasons' Greetings

I chatted today with the pastor of a Claremont church which erected a nativity scene depicting Jesus, Mary and Joseph as refugees separated in cages h...

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Johngcole avatarJohn Cole@Johngcole·
3h 1203977603230699522

New Post added at Balloon Juice - On The Road - Wag - The Wilson Group, Part 1 -https://www.balloon-juice.com/2019/12/09/on-the-road-wag-the-wilson-group-part-1/

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Johngcole avatarJohn Cole@Johngcole·
9h 1203889031832113152

the drainage in this hotel sink sucks guess I will have to find another way to dispose of the body

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Johngcole avatarJohn Cole@Johngcole·
9h 1203881556957417472

why can't we do this over here our presidential elections look like the soviet politburo in the 80's

Finland's Social Democrats name Marin to be youngest ever prime...

Finland's Social Democrats name Marin to be youngest ever prime...

Finland's transportation minister Sanna Marin was selected by her Social Democratic party on Sunday to become the country's youngest prime minister ev...

reut.rs

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Johngcole avatarJohn Cole@Johngcole·
9h 1203880861260759041

yes

Linda Ronstadt Confronts Mike Pompeo, Says He Should "Stop Enabling Donald Trump" at Kennedy Honors Dinner

Linda Ronstadt Confronts Mike Pompeo, Says He Should “Stop Enabling Donald Trump” at Kennedy Honors Dinner

In the hours before the Kennedy Center Honors Sunday night, Linda Ronstadt had some strong words for Mike Pompeo.

www.spin.com

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GaryLegum avatarGary Legum@GaryLegum·
13h 1203825054036959232

@DevinNunes @foxandfriends @CNN Sir, blink twice if the reporter was mean to you, three times if you need a diaper change.

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Johngcole avatarJohn Cole@Johngcole·
10h 1203878388215287811

my man @DevinNunes shaking like a leaf he is so guilty and knows he is going to answer for his behavior

MOOO

Devin Nunes on Twitter

“This guy stalked me in hotel lobby after my appearance on ⁦@foxandfriends⁩ Saturday AM maybe he was in Vienna with @cnn #goodnightVienna&...

twitter.com

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Johngcole avatarJohn Cole@Johngcole·
10h 1203877399013842945

my first act as president would be to make election day a four day paid federal holiday with voting starting saturday morning at 12:01 am and continuing up until 5 o’clock on Tuesday and the results would be announced 10 pm est 7 pm pst

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Johngcole avatarJohn Cole@Johngcole·
10h 1203875264545079296

one of the best aspects of staying in a hotel is after showering just throwing the towel on the bathroom floor guilt free and thinking someone else can deal with it

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10h 1203873184287735808

New Post added at Balloon Juice - Greetings From the Middle of Nowhere, Virginia -

Balloon Juice | Greetings From the Middle of Nowhere, Virginia

So this morning I popped up, drove from Charlotte to Charleston, SC, and got my car and my parents care unloaded and the folks settled in. They went o...

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