There you have it.....

Raison d'etre.....Part duex!

Well I have been doing this blogging thing for a a bit over a year now. Who would have thought that?

Now I could do a sort of reflective post or some such nonsense, but instead, I will point to a post by one of favorite my bloggers, Glenn Greenwald.

Who, I think, has written one of the most compelling posts on, "why he writes about, what he writes about", I have read in some time.

Anyways, I am sure somethings will piss me off some more over the next year so as always.

-Cheers

Lets talk about Race...

Okay I have had many conversations over the last few days about the Gates-Crowley affair.

We can go back and forth over whether it involved racial profiling. I have come to the sad conclusion that a persons views on this issue is mainly determined via the prism of their ethnicity (at least in the case of the media, or even in my own) .

I personally can not detach my own feelings and experiences from this situation.

But that all being said, this story is probably the greatest example of why racism/bigotry/biases are so hard to talk about.

People literally do not realize when they are doing it. This letter is disturbing on so many levels. Here are some follow up commentary by, Andrew Sullivan and Jeffery Goldberg.

And the CNN story that is sort of its coda.

A Boston police officer who sent a mass e-mail — in which he referred to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a “banana-eating jungle monkey” — has apologized, saying he’s not a racist.

Officer Justin Barrett told a local television station on Wednesday night that he was sorry for the e-mail.

“I regret that I used such words,” Barrett told CNN affiliate WCVB. “I have so many friends of every type of culture and race you can name. I am not a racist.”

Now you can form your own opinions on this. No matter what person says or does, they in the sanctity of their own mind never thinks their actions are tinged by bias.

An article that deals with some of the statistics on the racial profiling subject in Illinois. Once again the Atlantic.

-Cheers

Talking about Bipartisanship

Steven Benen crystallizes the problem with all the talk of "bipartisanship" with two fabulous posts today.

His first post dealt with the actual ideological problems with with all this talk, and puts it in the proper historical context.

David Waldman reminded me the other day that Republican opponents of Social Security and Medicare used some of the same ridiculous arguments then that we're hearing now. That's absolutely true. It's worth noting, though, that in those eras, there were plenty of centrist and center-left Republicans who rejected the nonsense and worked with Democrats on achieving progressive policy goals.

Those days are long gone. We're now watching negotiations with Republicans like Chuck Grassley and Mike Enzi, who are not only conservative, but fundamentally reject the goals the majority hopes to achieve through reform.

This is hopelessly twisted, and evidence of a political system that not only doesn't work, but doesn't know how to work. To reiterate a point from a couple of weeks ago, bills with bipartisan support have traditionally been the result of one party reaching out to moderates from the other party to put together a reasonably good-sized majority.

This really is the point of the issue. If individuals absolutely reject what you view the problem as being, they can not have constructive input. Because they do not believe the premise.

His second post, even more, illustrates how tragically broken our system is at times. Or, it could just mean someone needs to be to dick punch Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wy).

But definitely the posts are worth the read.

-Cheers

More on Healthcare....

Arguably one of the best articles I have read on the state of health care in this country and a good discussion about that article.

In the modern health-care system, there is no higher power than the insurance market. And the insurers who populate that market have grown all the stronger. The Justice Department judges an industry "highly concentrated" if a single company controls more than 42 percent of the market. By that definition, 94 percent of statewide insurance markets are highly concentrated. A recent study by the advocacy organization Health Care for America Now showed that in Indiana, WellPoint controls 60 percent of the insurance market; in Iowa, Wellmark accounts for 71 percent; and in Alabama, Blue Cross/Blue Shield holds 83 percent. In the past 13 years, there have been more than 400 corporate mergers involving health insurers.

Economics textbooks tell us that concentrated markets reduce the competitive behavior that benefits consumers and lead to outsize profits for the dominant firms. Predictably, health-care premiums shot up more than 90 percent between 2000 and 2007, while the profits of the 10 largest insurers increased 428 percent over the same period. Clinton had promised us managed care within managed competition. Instead, the insurers took control of our care and managed to effectively end competition. Neat trick.

If you do not read Ezra Klein now, you should. He is the sort of thought provoking pundit that we need more of. If for nothing else this exchange showed what it is we are talking about.

Babson Park, Fla.: Medicare is already cutting care to seniors. Does anyone know this? No payment for vaccinations are permitted. I had a friend with a puncture injury by a rusty nail, but Medicare refused payment for a tetanus shot. Is this preventive care or not? Medicare refused payment for a PSA test on an elderly man I know. Is this prevention or not? We have the best health care in the world. The issue is not care, but government waste and management. How to make the government more responsible is the question; fire all the bureaucrats and impose term limits for Congress. Why make things worse with so-called health-care reform? Health care is the best in the world, but how do we keep insurance companies from raising rates beyond affordability and disallowing payments for needed care?

Ezra Klein: No. We don't have the best health care in the world. Not on any broad measure or metric. We don't have the most cost effective health care in the world. We don't have the best outcomes in the world. We can't even manage to give everyone access to health care.

That said, there are certain diseases, like breast cancer, that we are uniquely good at treating. But then we lag on diseases like diabetes. It's a mixed bag. And it's a mixed bag that we are spending twice as much as most other countries on. So it's important to say this clearly: We have a very, even uniquely, bad health-care system. Not for every individual. But in the aggregate. As a country, we spend far too much and get much too little.

If people are interested in the evidence on this score, T.R. Reid's new book

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care

is an extremely good, and extremely readable, explanation of how our system compares to those of other countries.

(emphasis added, mine) There is no point in facile nationalistic verve on this issue. Our system is not that good. And other countries systems are not that bad. We should stop fooling ourselves. We are bankrupting our future and not getting particularly good medical care in the bargain.

The whole debate on "Health Care Reform" has been completely one-dimensional in my estimation. We have allowed ourselves to be absolutely consumed with costs and have not really diagrammed what the root causes are, or the sorts of solutions necessary to meet our goals. We are quibbling over the jellybeans when we do not even know the size of the jar. That seems like a bad way to go about fixing a problem.

-Cheers

A good read....

This Op-Ed piece by Frank Rich is as good a critique and homage of the mainstream media, and Walter Cronkite as I have read.

Echoing Glenn Greenwald in some ways.

It truly gets at the pervasive and pernicious nature of our media today.

Also Dr. Krugman brings the knowledge on an important aspect of the healthcare debate.

-Cheers

Crowely and Gates

I have tried to my best not to blog about this issue. Mainly because your views on the issue are so radically affected by your ethnicity.

Biases are hard to explain, and transparent. No on thinks they are a bigot. In the abstract we all agree that racial profiling takes place, but when any particular incident happens the individuals involved are always exceptions. The studies on the issue are incontrovertible in a variety of fields from law enforcement to medicine.

But stepping aside from that, Ta-Nahisi Coates actually distills the issue down to its most salient point.

The rest of us are left with a country where, by all appearances, officers are well within their rights to arrest you for sassing them. Which is where we started. I can't explain why, but this is the sort of thing that makes you reflect on your own precarious citizenship. I mean, the end of all of this scares the hell out of me.

A bit about my perspective on these issues. I have a brother who is a police officer, yet despite that I have been pulled over for "DWB" as well as followed around stores. The looks I got, when visiting Mike in Washington MO, with my girlfriend of the time, have colored my world view.

So it is hard to explain to somebody who does not have that sort of experience, what it is like. The very idea that "sassing" a police officer can land you in jail is offensive. Police officers are vested with some of the most awesome powers any individual citizen can have and take incredible risks on our behalf. Yet they are not infallible. They are possessed of the same moral slants as the rest of society, except for the fact that they deal with some of the worst segments of society. Also police have a disturbing habit of covering for each other no matter what.

So I am sympathetic to both sides. But I can not deny the experiences I have had.

If you ever wonder what bias looks like or how it is expressed, we can generally just take a walk around town to illustrate it. If you have never seen a lady clutch her purse just a little tighter or roll up her window up a bit when you walk by. It may be a little harder for you to understand how this situation may feel. I have never been arrested. I have had one traffic ticket for speeding in my life and that is the sort of reaction I have come to expect.

That is the world we live in, and that is the context in which these things must be taken into consideration.

I highly recommend reading Mr. Coates various pieces on the issue. This is the sort of dialog we should be having. Not the reflexive, "cops are wrong, cops are right" milieu.

In closing there is this pieces by Andrew Sullivan in the Times online, that does as good a job of addressing both aspects of this issue in an even handed fashion as I have seen. But I think this would be the most revealing comment.

Equally, I’d wager that if the policeman had seen an older white man wielding a cane through the glass door of a posh house, he would not have demanded that the man come out onto his porch and identify himself. He would have knocked, explained the reason for his visit and instantly accepted a white man’s explanation. Is this racism? If it has never happened to you, no. If it has, yes.

On the web, the comments sections on various blogs and stories were the most honest. Here is one view: “Butt the hell out Obama. You don’t know the facts of the case, you weren’t there, you’re friends with the douchebag, you’re black. Taking Obama’s word is the same as judging a criminal by a jury of his fellow gangster peers.”

Here is another: “Professor Gates might not have been arrested if he’d been more submissive — let the cop win the masculinity contest. Every brotha has played that game as well: you don’t look the popo in the eye, you do say ‘sir’ a lot and maybe you won’t get locked up. Then you go home and stew in the stuff that gives African-American men low life expectancy.”

-edit added an additional article, and I need maps!

I think the implications here are clear enough.

-Cheers