Jammin' With The Banned - adampayne's Blog - Bakersfield.com

Pick Your Poison

A few weeks ago Brit Hume announced he was leaving the anchor desk at Fox News. I heard an interview with him on NPR where he described the yearning to spend more time with his family and further explore his faith as two of the big reasons for the timing of his departure. Other big reasons included today's poisonous toxicity of politics and his wearied realization of having history begin to repeat itself in his eyes.

I sympathize with his take on what the political and philosophical process have degenerated into in the world. Politics has become strictly an arena of debate charade, which present only a series of big lies, Hobson's Choices, false dichotmies, either/or propositions and straw men arguments that polarize the public and distort the problems we confront. I am tired of seeing the silly arguments repeated endlessly to no good use.

We need to reject the whole pathetic cliche of having to make a choice between two negative positions on an issue. The world is filled with more than 6 billion shades of gray in trying to define any issue. If life were strictly a battle between good and evil we could immerse ourselves in Tolkien book, or play shoot-em-up video games and solve every world problem without much effort. The planet doesn't work very well when you allow the only choices to collapse into a spy versus spy discussion.

The Funny Papers

Got the Sunday edition of TBC this morning, and immediately found some of my fave comics going bye-bye. No shock. TBC has been gutting every intelligent thoughtful strip from the daily delivered fish-wrap for the past five years. The paper's crack staff goes on a voter poll binge with bizarre categorizations to help whittle down the Funnies ( the hilarious euphemism used as the reason for this process is to keep "them vibrant and interesting") on a regular basis.

The paper got worse when it decided to drop Doonesbury. It gets more irrelevant when it keeps dead strips like Peanuts and For BetterOr For Worse.

The poll results today that Frazz gets the boot is really discouraging. Also seeing Brewster Rockit disposed of while keeping Dagwood is just wrong from my perspective. It is too bad that more comics are not offered in the paper, but less always wins these days in the era of cost cutting and consolidation.

The newspaper business is going through a difficult period of time with shrinking readership and revenue sources. Less is less, and decisions that continue to shrink perspectives only result in fewer readers.

Another Example of Why We Need Health Care Reform

Here is a very recent column from the Washington Post about the chronically ill in America, and the price they are currently paying with our broken health care system. Check out the estimated number of chronically ill Americans in the following story.

Chronically Ill U.S. Patients Often Skip Care Due to Costs

By Steven Reinberg

HealthDay Reporter
Thursday, November 13, 2008; 12:00 AM

THURSDAY, Nov. 13 (HealthDay News) -- Chronically ill patients in the United States spend more out-of-pocket money, skip needed care, and report more medical errors than patients in seven other industrialized countries, a new survey finds.

"This is a time of economic crisis around the world, but also a time of crisis in the U.S. health-care system," Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, which conducted the survey, said during a teleconference Tuesday. "The survey findings provide a basis for action toward reforming our health-care system."

Noting that the U.S. spends more on health care than any other country, Davis said: "We cannot afford not to reform our health-care system. Investment in our health-care system will pay dividends in terms of a healthy workforce and economically secure families."

Results of the survey were published online Nov. 13 in the Commonwealth Fund journal Health Affairs.

For the survey, researchers interviewed 7,500 people who had at least one chronic condition. The countries in the survey were Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United States.

All of those surveyed had recently been hospitalized, had major surgery or a recent serious illness, Cathy Schoen, the Commonwealth Fund's senior vice president, said during the teleconference.

An estimated 138 million people in the United States suffer from chronic health conditions, Schoen said. "The 23 percent of Medicare recipients who suffer from five or more conditions account for 68 percent of all Medicare spending," she noted.

The survey found striking differences across the eight countries, Schoen said. "Overall, the United States stands out for chronically ill adults reporting the most negative experiences. They are far more likely to go without care because of cost, including not filling prescriptions, [or] following up on recommended care," she said.

Patients in the United States are also more likely to report poorly coordinated care that puts them at risk and wastes their time, Schoen said. And they're significantly more likely to report prescription and diagnostic test errors, she said.

"Not surprisingly, U.S. patients hold the most negative system views, with a third calling for rebuilding the health-care system," Schoen said. "In short, U.S. patients are telling us about inefficient, unsafe and often wasteful care. The lack of access and poorly coordinated care is putting these patients at very high health risk and driving up costs of care."

The uninsured face the most risk, Schoen said. "They have a high risk of errors, of poor coordination and not getting in because of cost," she said. "A startling 82 percent went without care because of cost."

Even U.S. patients with insurance have higher costs than patients in other countries, Schoen noted. Uninsured and insured U.S. patients experience the same level of poorly coordinated care, she added.

Dutch patients reported the most positive health-care experiences, Schoen said. "Dutch patients stand out with few access concerns, rapid access when sick and after hours, low exposure to high costs and comparatively more positive coordination experiences," she said.

Among the survey's highlights:

More than 50 percent of U.S. patients went without care because of cost. Dutch and British patients rarely go without care due to costs.One third of U.S. patients encountered poorly coordinated care -- significantly higher than all other countries. One third of U.S. patients reported medical errors, double that of the Netherlands. U.S. patients have higher out-of-pocket costs than other countries. Forty-one percent of American patients spent more than $1,000 a year on out-of-pocket expenses. Such costs were much rarer in Britain, France and the Netherlands.U.S. and Canadian patients reported difficulty getting same-day access to doctors when sick. More than half of Dutch, New Zealand and nearly half of British patients get same-day appointments.Fifty-nine percent of U.S. patients were seen in emergency rooms. Many U.S. patients reported difficulty getting "after-hours" care. Dutch patients said it was easy to get such care. U.S., Dutch and German patients get to see specialists quickly. British, Canadian and New Zealand patients have longer waits for specialists.

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, thinks this survey provides more evidence of the need for universal health care in the United States.

"For Americans with serious chronic illness, access to medical care is quite bad, both absolutely and in comparison to other developed nations," she said.

It's hardly surprising that costs prevented 82 percent of uninsured American patients from getting needed drugs, treatments or doctor visits, Woolhandler said. "What is surprising is that nearly half (43 percent) of insured patients also reported access problems, a higher rate than in any of the other seven countries, all of which spend less than we do and have universal national health insurance."

Mark Morford Is My Hero

After reading so much bogus stuff on both Barack Obama and Proposition 8 I found a column today from someone who has had enough of hate, Mark Morford, who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle. Here is his take on this election. It is so nice to post this after the blatantly racist blogpost put up by our local radio bigot, Jaz McKay.

Hate's last stand

It's racism and homophobia, neck and neck, down to the wire. Can they hang on?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Let's not get carried away.

Let's not go so far as to suggest we're about to enter into some sort of fluffy utopian tofu puppy happyland where nipples fly free and consciousness expands and the fetid rivers of racism and homophobia that course through the American heartland like acidic sewage somehow magically vanish, somehow become dramatically curtailed, should the twin forces of progress known as President Obama and a vanquished California Proposition 8 somehow come to pass.

Let's not be naive. Just because it looks like the Western world is about to get its first black intellectual president, just because the nation's most influential and populous state could very possibly decide, finally and forevermore, that two adults of the same gender can get married without the cruel hammer of religious ignorance crashing down upon their heads, well, this can't possibly be a sign that racism and homophobia, two of our three most revered national pastimes (don't forget the sexism!) are going away anytime soon.

Unless it can. Unless some of our darkest cultural demons could finally be up for a major exorcism. Could it be true? Could this vote, at the very least, be one hell of a giant step forward in the fight against two toxic beliefs that have poisoned the American mindset for ages? Let me suggest: You're damn right it could.

Maybe you're not convinced. Maybe you need a sign, some sort of indicator of what's truly at stake, something that proves we are at a turning point not merely of tax brackets and energy strategy and foreign policy, but of the very tone and flavor of who we are and what we value as a nation. Yes? Easy enough.

Here it is: Just listen to the screaming.

Can you hear it? It is the Grand Rule of Bigotry, same as it ever was: Prejudice and fanaticism tend to yell loudest and cling on the hardest when they are most threatened, when they know their worldview is slated for imminent demolition.

Just look. As I write these very words, big-money ultraconservatives are joining churches and temples and sad, sad priests nationwide in extolling their fearful throngs to send huge portions of their life savings straight to the gaggle of pro-Prop. 8 extortionists, in an attempt to ban gay marriage and crush what essentially amounts to a type of love they cannot, will not understand.

And because they cannot understand it, they fear it. And because they fear it, they do as paranoid, fear-based religions have done since the dawn of a man-made God: They try to kill it.

The screaming is downright deafening. Right now, the Prop. 8 fight is second only to the presidential race in sheer dollars raised. The good news is, the homophobes are being outspent by the non-terrified by about four to one, with major corporations like Apple and Google coming out very publicly against it. The bad news is, the religious right is panicking, rallying, pulling out all the stops to get Prop. 8 passed, no matter what.

But here's the tragic part: They don't really know why they're panicking. They don't really know what the threat is, exactly. Except for the loss of their own power. And control. And cultural relevance. Besides that, I mean.

But they do know one thing: If California goes all-in for marriage equality, it's a slippery slope indeed until other states eventually follow suit, and before you know it the entire country will have to let love in and recognize scary gay people as valid Americans -- you know, just like we did not so long ago for those awful black people.

Ah yes, the racism. Not so easily parsed, and not so easily answered by a simple legislative proposition, given how much more deeply it infects, how much more nefariously it's woven into the very fabric of the nation.

Right now, even more than the homophobes, the racists are out in force. Nauseating indeed have been some of the e-mails readers have passed on to me in the past year or so, often the result of someone forwarding one of my pro-Obama columns to a conservative friend or relative they once deemed capable of ideological flexibility -- or, at the very least, respectful disagreement -- only to receive back a note crammed like a shrapnel bomb with the very kind of venomous language you want to believe doesn't exist anywhere except maybe our most hateful rural backwaters.

It's a repulsive portrait of Obama indeed. References to Nazis, radical socialism, Muslim terrorists, a new black uprising, interracial marriage, gangsta rap, and of course lots and lots of the N-word, all wrapped in layers of hate and ignorance so rancid it's like some sort of xenophobic fantasia where Rush Limbaugh interbreeds with Michael Savage in Ann Coulter's personal vat of battery acid and pain.

But these are not merely the usual hot little spews of hate from the expected places, like the rural Midwest and the South and dumb-as-dirt skinheads from Tennessee. The race baiting has gone upmarket. From Sarah Palin's carefully worded Caribou Barbie flirtations with white small-town America, to the attempts to link Obama directly to black '60s militants and domestic terrorism (and don't forget those "radical" black churches), if you have any doubt whatsoever that McCain's Rove-trained team of jackals isn't trying every trick in the how-to-bait-a-racist handbook, you haven't been paying much attention.

So then, I am not here to suggest the impossible. I am not declaring that President Obama and a DOA Prop. 8 will somehow instantly put a cap on the fire hoses of discrimination and intolerance that regularly spit their bile across the land. This is not really the point.

The point is, once again, all about energy. About tonal shift. A deeply intelligent black American president changes the racism game forever, at a very deep level indeed. And a resounding defeat of intolerance in California sends perhaps the most powerful message yet to the conservative screamers across the land.

The message is this: You do not have to change your beliefs. You do not have to budge an inch on your views. You are still free to hate black people, still free to fear gay people (or demean women) all you like. It's simply that we as an Obama-led, gender-inclusive nation no longer have any real use for your brand of poison. We are done with you.

And if that's not a magnificent jolt of progress, I don't know what is.

Broken Record, Broken Health Care

The LA Times is doing a three part series on health care this week. Anyone on the fence about the issue, or looking for good information on our current health care crisis, owes these articles a once over.

For all the Libertarians, and those who continue to argue that health care should not be mandated, or that this is a liberal commie conspiracy designed to rob hard working real Americans of more of their money while helping to heal the growing deadbeats and freeloaders among us, please read the following quote from the CEO of Blue Shield of California.

"Bruce Bodaken, chief executive of Blue Shield of California, says that universal coverage is the answer.

Bodaken says government should mandate that everyone obtain health insurance and that insurers sell to all comers regardless of their health -- similar to a plan proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and defeated in the state Legislature last year.

The rationale of universal coverage, the norm in other industrialized countries, is that costs are manageable when everyone is covered because the risk pool includes the young and healthy to offset the older and sicker.

"One of the basic goals of universal coverage should be to change the health coverage business from avoiding risk to balancing health risks and focusing primarily on quality, service and cost-effective delivery," Bodaken wrote recently in the policy journal Health Affairs.

In the absence of such a system, and with group coverage increasingly unavailable, more and more Americans are left to rely on individual health policies. They are more expensive for all but the young and healthy and often provide fewer benefits."

I can hear the teeth gnashing from the unconvinced who argue for more open competiton and the keeping government out of the health business. How about those health savings plans as the answer, which is the plan advocated by John McCain. Here is today's headline from the LA Times story:

Health insurers reinvent themselves as money managers

Here is why managing your money is the real goal and not managing your health by the insurance industry, er banking industry.

"Among the signs of the change is the growth in health savings accounts, which allow individuals and families to pay out-of-pocket medical expenses from tax-exempt savings. As with individual retirement accounts and 401(k) plans, the money in HSAs tends to sit for long periods and can be invested in mutual funds and securities.

HSAs are different from flexible spending accounts, which allow employees to set aside tax-free dollars to pay deductibles and other medical expenses. At the end of the year, any unspent money in a flexible spending account is lost. In contrast, money in an HSA can carry over year after year indefinitely.

Federal tax rules for HSAs were liberalized in 2003, making them very attractive to well-heeled taxpayers. Commercial banks such as Bank of America and Mellon Bank, seeing the opportunity to collect management fees on the accounts, jumped into the business.

"Every bank wants to increase its share of HSAs," said John Casillas, director of the Medical Banking Project, a Franklin, Tenn., organization that helps medical administrators develop financial service systems.

"There's fees for managing the account, transaction fees, fees for investing the funds," Casillas said. "You're going to see many billions of dollars moving from premium payments to professionally managed investment funds under HSA rules. Some people think that banks are going to threaten health plans by replacing them in the marketplace."

Hence the rush by medical insurers to open their own banks."

Your health is now their wealth.

If you are interested in this thought provoking and highly informative report go to www.latimes.com

It's The Economy.....Again

This post finds an opinion piece from the Christian Science Monitor explaining how our country has historically fared under Republican Presidents and Democratic Presidents. Not this op-ed will change many minds, but it does offer excellent food for thought if you choose to nibble at the contents. Please feel free to add your two cents, which is roughly the amount all of our comments are worth these days.

Why the economy fares much better under Democrats

By Larry M. Bartels Larry M. Bartels – Tue Oct 21, 4:00 am ET

Princeton, N.J. – John McCain is a maverick and Barack Obama is a postpartisan problem-solver. But you wouldn't know it by looking at their economic plans. Both candidates' proposals faithfully reflect the traditional economic priorities of their respective parties. That makes the track records of past Democratic and Republican administrations a very useful benchmark for assessing how the economy might perform under a President McCain or a President Obama. The bottom line: During the past 60 years, Democrats have presided over much less unemployment and much more robust income growth.

The $52.5 billion plan Senator McCain announced last week includes $36 billion in tax breaks for senior citizens withdrawing funds from retirement accounts and $10 billion for a reduction in the capital gains tax. Those are perks for investors, most of whom are relatively affluent. (McCain is also proposing a two-year suspension of taxes on unemployment benefits, but that's a fraction of the plan's cost.) He also favors broader tax cuts for businesses and wants to extend President Bush's massive tax cuts indefinitely, even for people earning more than $250,000 per year.

McCain's proposals reflect the traditional Republican emphasis on cutting taxes for businesses and wealthy people in hopes of stimulating investment – "trickle down" economics, as it came to be called during Ronald Reagan's administration. But will proposals of this sort really "stop and reverse the rise of unemployment" and "create millions of new jobs" as McCain has claimed? The historical record suggests not.

President Bush's multitrillion-dollar tax cuts, which were strongly tilted toward the rich, could not prevent (and may even have contributed to) significant job losses. On the other hand, when Bill Clinton raised taxes on affluent people to balance the federal budget (while significantly expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit for working poor people), unemployment declined substantially. Under Clinton's watch, 22 million jobs were created.

Prefer a broader historical comparison? In the past three decades, since the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries oil price shocks of the mid-1970s and the Republican turn toward "supply side" economics, the average unemployment rate under Republican presidents has been 6.7 percent – substantially higher than the 5.5 percent average under Democratic presidents. (The official unemployment rate takes no account of people who have given up looking for work or taken substantial pay cuts to stay in the labor force.) Over an even broader time period, since the late 1940s, unemployment has averaged 4.8 percent under Democratic presidents but 6.3 percent – almost one-third higher – under Republican presidents.

Lower unemployment under Democratic presidents has contributed substantially to the real incomes of middle-class and working poor families. Job losses hurt everyone – not just those without work. In fact, every percentage point of unemployment has the effect of reducing middle-class income growth by about $300 per family per year. And the effects are long term, unlike the temporary boost in income from a stimulus check. Compounded over an eight-year period, a persistent one-point difference in unemployment is worth about $10,000 to a middle-class family. The dollar values are smaller for working poor families, but in relative terms their incomes are even more sensitive to unemployment. In contrast, income growth for affluent people is much more sensitive to inflation, which has been a perennial target of Republican economic policies.

Although McCain portrays Senator Obama as a "job killing" tax-and-spend liberal, the new $60 billion plan Obama unveiled last week also has a tax break as its centerpiece – a tax break specifically tailored to create jobs by offering employers a $3,000 tax credit for each new hire over the next two years. Obama's proposal would also extend unemployment benefits by 13 weeks for those who remain jobless, as well as match McCain's in suspending taxes on unemployment benefits.

Obama's new proposal complements $115 billion in economic stimulus measures he had already announced, including $65 billion in direct rebates to taxpayers and $50 billion to help states jump-start spending on infrastructure projects. All of this is squarely in the tradition of Democratic presidents since John F. Kennedy, who have relied on public spending and tax breaks for working people to stimulate consumption and employment during economic downturns.

These and other policies have produced not only lower unemployment under Democratic presidents but also more economic output and income growth. In fact, over the past 60 years, the real incomes of middle-income families have grown about twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they have under Republican presidents. The partisan difference is even greater for working poor families, whose real incomes have grown six times as fast under Democratic presidents as they have under Republican presidents.

Of course, past performance is no guarantee of what will happen when the next president takes office. However, given the striking fidelity of both presidential candidates to their parties' traditional economic priorities, the profound impact of partisan politics on the economic fortunes of American families over more than half a century ought to weigh heavily in the minds of voters.

• Larry M. Bartels directs the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics in Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is the author of "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age."

What's Up? Not This Site

Have any of you noticed the "Sound Off" archives being published all day long with thought provoking commentary several months old?

Are you tired of seeing multiple "Breaking News" blog posts on the most mundane and un-news worthy wastes of time being published ad-nauseum every day?

Do you notice that "Politics Anyone" has a tendency to post stories that have been talked about by other bloggers' posts repeatedly before they decide to add their contribution to the fray?

Are you tired of having everyone banished for a little a language faux pas in response to hot button issues?

Has anyone noticed there are no views now for two days for any blog post. but comments abound?

This blog site is deteriorating very rapidly. Fix it or lose it!

I am going to copy this post and repeat it for emphasis, because I believe that only then will it catch some intern's attention to pass on to some middle management coordinator who can then tell an editor who can decide to tell a managing editor that something has come unglued on the web site. Possibly a decision maker can pull a committee together to study the problem before a consultant is called to actually make a decision to fix the web site.

Thanks for your attention to this minor inconvenience.

What's Up? Not This Site

Have any of you noticed the "Sound Off" archives being published all day long with thought provoking commentary several months old?

Are you tired of seeing multiple "Breaking News" blog posts on the most mundane and un-news worthy wastes of time being published ad-nauseum every day?

Do you notice that "Politics Anyone" has a tendency to post stories that have been talked about by other bloggers' posts repeatedly before they decide to add their contribution to the fray?

Are you tired of having everyone banished for a little a language faux pas in response to hot button issues?

Has anyone noticed there are no views now for two days for any blog post. but comments abound?

This blog site is deteriorating very rapidly. Fix it or lose it!

Thanks for your attention to this minor inconvenience.

What's Up? Not This Site

Have any of you noticed the "Sound Off" archives being published all day long with thought provoking commentary several months old?

Are you tired of seeing multiple "Breaking News" blog posts on the most mundane and un-news worthy wastes of time being published ad-nauseum every day?

Do you notice that "Politics Anyone" has a tendency to post stories that have been talked about by other bloggers' posts repeatedly before they decide to add their contribution to the fray?

Are you tired of having everyone banished for a little a language faux pas in response to hot button issues?

Has anyone noticed there are no views now for two days for any blog post. but comments abound?

This blog site is deteriorating very rapidly. Fix it or lose it!

Thanks for your attention to this minor inconvenience.

What's Up? Not This Site

Have any of you noticed the "Sound Off" archives being published all day long with thought provoking commentary several months old?

Are you tired of seeing multiple "Breaking News" blog posts on the most mundane and un-news worthy wastes of time being published ad-nauseum every day?

Do you notice that "Politics Anyone" has a tendency to post stories that have been talked about by other bloggers' posts repeatedly before they decide to add their contribution to the fray?

Are you tired of having everyone banished for a little a language faux pas in response to hot button issues?

Has anyone noticed there are no views now for two days for any blog post. but comments abound?

This blog site is deteriorating very rapidly. Fix it or lose it!

Thanks for your attention to this minor inconvenience.