More Bill

Can't get enough of that Bill Moyers:

Apparently there was apoplexy in the right-wing aerie when I closed the broadcast one Friday night by putting an American flag in my lapel and said -- well, here's exactly what I said.

"I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven't thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

"Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart's affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother's picture on my lapel to prove her son's love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

"So what's this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag's been hijacked and turned into a logo -- the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration's patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao's little red book on every official's desk, omnipresent and unread.

"But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They're in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

"So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don't have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash.) I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it's not un-American to think that war -- except in self-defense -- is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country."

Amen, brother.

You Know Who You Are

Bill Moyers brings it on:

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil. I mean the people who turn faith based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s okay to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.

What's Wrong With The Wacky Health Care System in the USA?

In another, private forum, Reductio had this to say:

Broadly stated, the problem appears to be that compared to other industrialized nations, we spend more and get less.

In round numbers (a few years old I think, and from my memory so take with a grain of salt please), the USA spends around $6-7 grand annually per capita on health care, Canada $4.5 grand or so, and Britain around $3 grand and change in US dollars. As I understand it, Britain and Canada (and just about every other industrialized non-US nation) have socialized medicine, with Britain's socialized version being widely regarded as dramatically underfunded, (making it hard to get a dentist). Britain also has a non-socialized private sector that cares for those who can pay, so not all of that very low spending level even goes to the government program.

Teeth pulling and extended MRI delays aside, Canada and Britain, and substantially every industrialized nation, have lower infant mortality rates and longer life expectancies than we do in the USA, while spending less than we do on health care, funding their expenditures primarily through taxation.

To the extent that we are not confident that the US government could successfully administer such a program, that belief just reflects an underlying distrust of our form of government. If every other governmental system in industrialized nations can successfully run such a program, but the USA can't, it can only mean that our system of government is somehow deficient - which I find disquieting, and would prefer not to believe.

I think part of the problem is the fanatical misguided belief in the USA that private markets are always efficient and that government programs are always wasteful. There are areas where well regulated private markets can perform nicely. But markets are almost never effective at broadly delivering a common good; it is simply not what they are designed for.

As to the causes of the current situation:
Private health insurance companies paying their employees (including CEOs) to add no value to the health care delivery process, but rather to deny care whenever possible, and refuse payment after the fact when care cannot be denied
outright. Also, they are paid to identify those who are likely to need care, and strip them of coverage. Like I say, the private sector is not so efficient at delivering broad common good; it does reward insiders (CEOs) and extract value from the process to deliver it to insiders and owners though. That is what markets are good at.

Drug companies also figure into the mix. In the USA we pay dramatically more for drugs than anyone else, and the recent transfer of collective wealth to the drug industry (also euphemistically known as the Bush Medicare prescription benefits plan) is just a particularly bad example. But more globally, the whole misguided free market thing comes into play here too. By not having a central negotiator for drug purchases that can enjoy monopsonic (or often legal price fixing) power, nor a list of independently tested and approved covered drugs ranked by cost and effectiveness, and a national protocol for administering them as part of a treatment regimen, we leave what should be sound medical decisions to the whims of the market. This is why the drug industry spends something like 40% of its operating expenses on MARKETING in the US. Yes, there is a tiny fraction spent on R&D, but almost half of the cost of the drug industry in the USA is due to marketing. Further, since only the most expensive drugs are marketed (even if better cheaper alternatives exist) and they are often marketed directly to consumers, generating uninformed end user demand, the cost of drugs in this country are further driven up, while the efficacy of treatment is driven down.

General care, which dramatically increases the common good, is considered commodity-like and undervalued by the market, while specialist care, which is really valuable when you need it, but adds less to the common good, is overvalued. So the market misallocates medical resources from a medical perspective, but allocates them appropriately from an economic return perspective. Which is what markets do.

So, is socialized medicine the answer? I don't know. Looking at our model vs. socialized medicine, ours seems to be ubstantially lacking. Of the models out there in the world, socialized medicine has a better performance. So I think it is worth considering, assuming we want our system of medicine to cost effectively deliver low infant mortality rates
and long life expectancies. If we want it instead to deliver large drug company profits and advances in cosmetic procedures and advertising strategies, we should stick with exactly what we have.

There may also be some better third way, but I have not seen it in operation anywhere.

I have occasionally wondered if a Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) in the health insurance industry might help, like Fannie MAE in the mortgage industry. If it is big enough to wield disproportionate market power, it can essentially set rates and protocols (like Fannie does) forcing the markets to move in the desired direction, without nationalizing the industry. If you make it big by putting all government employees on its plan, plus all Medicare and Medicaid, then create tiered plans say option zero, establishing a minimum coverage for all otherwise uncovered Americans (paid for by taxes), then different tiers for Medicare, Medicaid and government employees (with premiums paid for by the government). Then also offer those
plans to employers in the market. Some costs can be controlled by no need for marketing, exerting monopsonic and legislative powers to compel lower drug prices and require all practitioners to accept the payment schedule etc. Maybe a partnership approach to the higher tiers, where the basic plan is wrapped by a private provider, so the GSE can concentrate on basic cost-effective service provision. In fact a requirement for offering any insurance plan could be to wrap a GSE plan so that private insurers cannot simply poach the healthiest among us, but instead must offer a real benefit on top of the GSE plan in order to attract profitable business. Which gets us most of the way toward socialized medicine anyway.

Just a thought. It might be quicker and easier to just socialize.

Idle Hands

Good news on severed goat heads: Satan not involved

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - A lazy worker, not a satanic cult, was responsible for severed goat heads that caused a scare at a Vancouver-area school, Canadian police said on Monday.

Police were called in after goat heads were twice found on a bench outside a school in nearby Chilliwack, British Columbia, prompting fears in the suburban community that it had been targeted by a satanic animal killing.

A 19-year-old worker at a local slaughterhouse has admitted he took the two heads with the intention of having them mounted, but then changed his mind and left them at the school in hopes a janitor would dispose of them.

"(Police) want to reassure the community that there were no satanic intentions in relation to these incidents," the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said, adding that the man "should have known better."

So should we all.

Another tip o' the blog to Red.

Well, That's A Relief

Schwarzenegger not mad at moon

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger does not want to destroy the moon.

A U.S. political commentator has admitted he failed to check his facts when he erroneously reported on the MSNBC cable news network last month that Schwarzenegger had jokingly advocated doing away with the moon.

In one of the stranger mea culpas from a major U.S. news outlet in recent years, the commentator, Joe Scarborough, a former congressman, acknowledged on Friday that the governor's purported lunar outburst on the nationally syndicated radio show of Howard Stern was actually a spoof.

Citing a British newspaper, Scarborough had quoted Schwarzenegger on the air as saying: "If we get rid of the moon, women, those menstrual cycles are governed by the moon, will not get (pre-menstrual syndrome). They will stop bitching and whining."

Scarborough chided Schwarzenegger for insensitivity, saying: "Hey, governor, way to make 50 percent of California's voting population turn frigid toward you.

"I don't know how it works in Austria, but let me tell you something, friend. Jokes about such matters, (are) not laughing subjects to women in America."

It turned out the remarks Scarborough attributed to the Austrian-born governor were actually made by a Schwarzenegger impersonator who regularly appears on Stern's show as part of a running call-in gag.

Eleven days later, Scarborough admitted on the air that he had been duped and apologized to viewers and Schwarzenegger "for my terrible mistake."

"By quoting erroneous information from that (newspaper) article, without checking it out ourselves, we, too, got pulled into that hoax," Scarborough said.

"We".
That would be you, Joe.

Thanks to Red for the link to the full article under the post title.

3rd In Command

Maybe not.
The high-profile bust of Al Qaeda's supposed 3rd in command is maybe not so much:

Dubai, 9 May (AKI) - Abu al-Faraj al-Libbi, the alleged al-Qaeda leader arrested in Pakistan last week, is not the terror network's N. 3, according to European secret service sources, quoted by the pan-Arab daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. After he was captured in Mardan by Pakistani security forces, al-Libbi was presented by Pakistani officials and later by the Bush administration, as the third most powerful figure within the al-Qaeda hierarchy.

An unidentified "senior" European intelligence source told Al-Sharq al-Awsat that there had been a case of mistaken identitiy - he argued that the real N. 3 was Abu Anas al-Libbi, not Abu al-Faraj al-Libbi. This theory first appeared last week in Pakistani newspapers close to extremist groups but it is disputed by Pakistani officials who maintain that Abu Anas, is yet another name used by Abu al-Faraj.

I'm sure a little torture will uncover the truth here.

See No Evil

John Tierney's column today is such a target-rich environment I can't help but reprint it and snark along the way.

Bombs Bursting on Air

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: May 10, 2005

If a man-bites-dog story is news and dog-bites-man isn't, why are journalists still so interested in man-blows-up-self stories?

I admit, the occasion may appear to be repetitious, but all the victims are actually DIFFERENT dead people than the previous bombing. They all are, in fact, unique individuals who had hopes and dreams before some whack-job decided to make a quick argument with a large quantity of explosives. How about we honor their memory by giving them two minutes of our attention? I guess that's too much to ask from a busy, important Times columnist.

I realize that we have a duty to report suicide bombings in the Middle East, especially when there's a spate as bad as in recent weeks. And I know the old rule of television news: if it bleeds, it leads. But I'm still puzzled by our zeal in frantically competing to get gruesome pictures and details for broadcasts and front pages.

Wouldn't want the American people to see the extended consequences of their invasion, would ya? Must be why we don't get to see the flag-draped coffin parade of our dead soldiers coming back. Out of sight, out of mind, that's how we like our wars.

During the past decade I've seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of articles on suicide bombings,

But so few on the antics of puppies and kittens!

...but I read to the end of just three of them, and that was only because I wrote them.

And NOT because I'm hopelessly self-absorbed or have the gnatlike attention span of my fellow Times columnist, David Brooks.

Those bombings occurred in Baghdad and Kurdistan during the summer of 2003, when they were still a novel phenomenon in Iraq, but even then there was really nothing new to say.

Good point. I mean, why report on the President's press conferences or legislative proposals, when they could be summarized by the sentences "Lying again." and "Let them eat cake."?

As I intruded on grieving relatives...

(unable to suppress my own insatiable appetite for gruesome details)

...at the scene and wounded survivors in hospitals, I didn't see what good I was doing for anyone except the planners of the attack.

Since it wasn't as if I was showing compassion or sympathy or anything, or even fetching a victim a glass of water. Dispassionate observer, people!

It was a horrifying story, but it was same story as every other suicide bombing, from the descriptions of the carnage and the mayhem to the quotes from eyewitnesses and the authorities.

I mean, the ragheads are pretty much interchangeable, aren't they? Seen one haji with a couple of limbs blown off or a burkha-wearing grieving mother, you've pretty much seen them all.

When the other reporters and I finished filling our notebooks, we wondered morosely if we could have done a service to everyone - victims, mourners, readers - by reducing the story to a box score.

Interesting idea. Could work for our GIs, too, and to think of all that wasted Times newsprint on the pictures and biographies of 9/11 victims! What were we thinking?

We all knew the template: number of victims, size of the crater, distance debris had been hurled, height of smoke plume, range at which explosion was heard.

Statistics are my passion. I love baseball. Just like George Will.

There was no larger lesson except that...

I can't give a damn about dead brown people with no money.

...some insurgents were willing and able to kill civilians, which was not news. We were dutifully presenting as accurate an image as we could of one atrocity, but we knew we were contributing to a distorted picture of life for Iraqis.

Which pretty much has been chocolates and roses since the Americans showed up. Remember the parades? The Iraqis putting palm fronds down in the path of our troops? The cheers, the joyous weeping? The bulldozing of the prison at Abu Ghraib? Remember?

The standard advice to newly arrived journalists at that time was: "Relax. It's not nearly as bad here as it looks on TV."

"We only get here AFTER the bomb goes off."

Correspondents complained that they'd essentially become cop reporters, and that the suicide bombings took so much of their time that they couldn't report on the rest of the country.

Chocolates and roses, people.

They were more interested in other stories, but as long as the rest of the press corps kept covering the bombing du jour, that was where their editors and producers expected them to be, too.

And we wouldn't want to confound the expectations of people removed from the situation by thousands of miles and layers of distraction.

You could argue that their bosses were simply responding to their audiences' visceral urges.

Which is our job.

Everyone rubbernecks at car accidents; cable news ratings soar when there's a natural disaster or a heinous murder. But how much shock value or mystery is there anymore to suicide bombings?

I'm bored already.

How intrigued are people by murders when the motive, the weapon and the murderer's fate are never in doubt?

Apparently, editors and producers aren't "people" in the conventional sense, since they continue to find these stories intriguing. Or at least they have certain "expectations" in this regard.

I suspect the public would welcome a respite from gore,

and Lieberman, for cryin' out loud

...like the one that New Yorkers got when

Saint

Rudolph Giuliani became mayor. He realized that even though crime was declining in the city, people's fears were being stoked by the relentless tabloid and television coverage of the day's most grisly crime. No matter how much the felony rate dropped, in a city of seven million there would always be at least one crime scene for a live shot at the top of the 11 o'clock news.

Mr. Giuliani told the police to stop giving out details of daily crime in time for reporters' deadlines, a policy that prompted outrage from the press but not many complaints from the public. With the lessening of the daily media barrage, New Yorkers began to be less scared and more realistic about the risks on their streets.

You think John's seen local NYC television news?

I'm not advocating official censorship,

even though that would probably be an excellent idea, so we can get back to convering the puppies and the kittens

...but there's no reason the news media can't reconsider their own fondness for covering suicide bombings. A little restraint would give the public a more realistic view of the world's dangers.

Chocolates. Roses.

Just as New Yorkers came to be guided by crime statistics instead of the mayhem on the evening news, people might begin to believe the statistics showing that their odds of being killed by a terrorist are minuscule in Iraq or anywhere else.

Not that those odds are gradually climbing, or anything.

Terrorists know the numbers are against them and realize that daily bombings will not win the war.

Not like we're "winning" in Iraq, anyway.

All along, their hope has been to inspire recruits and spread general fear with another tactic, the bombing as photo opportunity. For some reason, their media strategy still works.

Chocolate. Roses. Puppies. Kittens.

Supply Side

Those who endured pre-Iraq war verbal Boring Diatribes may remember that with a GDP of $30 billion, I proposed that the United States hire every single person in Iraq to like us. With what we've spent so far ($300 billion) the United States could have had 10 years of friendly Iraqis extolling the virtues of the United States to the entire Arab world. And hey, maybe they'd export some oil, too.

That's as far as my idea went, but Darksyde over at Kos has nailed down the mechanics:

They say money can't buy love, but if we throw out sacks of money to the Iraqi people it will be Valentine's Day 365 days a year in Baghdad. The best part is the Iraqis would start loving us right away. My God the Iraqi's will be naming their kids after us! They'll be shouting the virtues of America from the rooftops. They'll build statues of us. And the economy, well I mean talk about Supply Side Economics! This is not a fiscal stimulus, this is a fiscal orgasm. It's like an anti-tax. Reagan could come back to life from this kind of thing. It would explode into almost instant prosperity taking away even more terrorist ammunition and giving them a shot at a real self sufficient modern nation. The money would stream to outlying provinces and work it's way into the local economies throughout the region. And although the Iraqi's would be free to choose whom they wish to help rebuild the infrastructure and get the oil a'flowin, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if American firms, from the country who is showering the populace with currency, were given special consideration.

Between Darksyde's plan and the Haliburton Protection Act (give Haliburton $6 billion dollars instead of going to war) we've got a solid plan here to protect the folks at home and get some of that good foreign policy mojo working.

And cheaper.
And your sons and daughters don't walk around on robot limbs that can't feel anything.

What's not to like?

Unbeliever

At the risk of offending my religious friends (which constitutes just about all of them) I'm compelled by recent news events to point out that there's as much evidence that the universe in all its complexity was excreted by a gigantic gopher twenty minutes ago as there is that some vast, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent being made out of love existing outside of time decided to create a universe of 10 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars each, most of which may have planets of one form or another, just so I could trudge into a large building once a week and recite some inferior prose and poetry some tiny fraction of my species has been mouthing for the last few decades.

Religion is a collection of fairy tales. Slipshod, illogical stories and obvious aphorisms assembled by primitive peoples in hopeless circumstances. Sure, stories have power. Certainly, they affect behavior and therefore help shape the world by shaping humanity, but so does any Big Lie. That doesn't make them true.

I could construct a religion tomorrow based on the notion that people born in Milwaukee are God's Chosen, and it would have exactly the objective, verifiable value of any other set of fanciful notions hallucinated by starving lunatics in the wilderness and elaborated to Byzantine convolusion by generations of thinkers with nothing better to do (cure diseases, measure the earth, rescue the endangered) than to write story after story after story, all made up, about how some Infinite Being gives a tinker's cuss what happens on a tiny, insignificant speck of dust spinning in a backwater galaxy in one corner of infinite emptiness.

We care about us, and that only just.

Fairy tales are for children. They comfort and they teach, and sometimes they inspire some of the the greatest works of art and literature and sacrifice the world has witnessed, but they're a crutch. If you need religion to have some love for your species, or to treat your fellow humans with kindness and empathy, you're a child, and you need to grow up, because there's too many of you now, and you're using your stories to hurt one another too much, and the world can't always coddle you and protect you while it waits for you to start using your senses and your brain instead of your glands.

That big sound in the sky isn't a bigger gorilla beating on a bigger tree than you've ever seen. That's thunder. It happens when electrical charges between the atmosphere and the earth equalize and disturb the atmosphere. All that "guidance" and "destiny" you're noticing? That's coincidence. It happens. Get used to it. Your brain has evolved to optimize pattern recognition, and every now and again you're going to come up with a false positive. See something in the Rorschach blot? That's an inkstain on a piece of carboard.

Wake up. Grow up. See the world for what it is. Your fairy tales are killing us.