Christian Leftist

Want to know the difference between socialized health care in France and privatized health care in the U.S.? France screws you after you turn 65; the U.S. screws you until you turn 65.

My family received an email a couple of days ago which said that my grandmother is now completely dependent on my uncle and therefore cannot live in her apartment any longer. His family has to do what is sadly the only option left to middle- and lower-class citizens with an elderly parent: send them to a nursing home. The French government isn’t going to grant her their equivalent of Medicare until all of her children AND grandchildren submit their financial histories to them. Read: me and my brother, who is barely old enough to vote, are supposed to tell a foreign company how much we make off of Ebay because they expect us to pay until we bleed before it will consider giving her financial assistance.

Apparently, France expects its young to provide for both themselves, their own families and their parents simultaneously. I suppose it might be easier to do so if we had the luxury of job security and free health care for everyone under 65 like they do. You see, one of the many reasons why unemployment is so high in France is that employers are legally prohibited from firing most of their employees unless rare and critical requirements occur (at least , this is the impression I formed after the riots last spring over proposed changes to the rules left thousands of burnt-out cars in their wake). We here in the U.S.A. lose our jobs for reasons as obtuse as disclosing a keyword we use at a marketing firm or as petty as forgetting to tuck in one’s shirt at Blockbuster. Decent health care here is rapidly becoming as elusive to most of the country as a college education. So excuse me, Monsieur, if I sniff at the notion of paying for a service that should be entirely government-subsidized, no questions asked. Not that we’re any better off here until we receive our Social Security checks, mind you, and that won’t be a sure thing after the baby boomers wreak havoc on our economy, but for now it’s a decent system.

I was a little tetchy after hearing the news, especially since my other grandmother died less than three months ago, and the average patient at an American nursing home or hospice lives less than a year after their admittance. (My advice to those of you with folks in the ‘retirement centers’ — make sure they’re kept well-hydrated. Everything functions better with a healthy amount to fluids in the system, and it’s so ridiculously easy for nurses to overlook it until a patient’s organs start to fail.) So when I saw an article by Gary Rotstein on a study’s recommendations that home health care be funded the same way nursing home care is, I was all ears.

The Pittsburgh-Post Gazette reports, in summary, that efforts to fund home care have been insufficicient. Other states have made home care an entitlement if the senior has qualified for Medicaid and paid down his/her assets. It’s an extremely brief article, musch like any other candid conversation about why health care in America needs to be accessible to every citizen.

The AP reports that Radio Caracas Television, Venezuela’s most popular channel, will be forced off the air at midnight tomorrow because Hugo Chavez’s government has decided not to renew its broadcasting license. Miguel Angel Rodriguez was a talk-show host on Radio Caracas TV until his final segment on Friday, where he vowed, “There is no goodbye. It’s ’see you later.’” Rodriguez had been an active critic of Chavez on the air, and no doubt ol’ Hugo saw the media as a threat to his establishment and changed the laws to suit his own political agenda. Both sides plan street protests over the shutdown during the weekend.

The problem with being either too far to the left or too far to the right is that you end up in essentially the same place – a land of silence. When in college a couple of years ago, I found myself arguing with a real, dyed-in-the-wool Communist about the importance of civil liberties. He shared many social and political ideals with me, yet I argued with him more often and more passionately than I did with pro-war conservatives. He believed ( and probably still does) that freedom of speech is overrated; the first thing he would do if he was in power would be to drag all of the right-wing crazies out into the streets and have them shot. He was only half-joking. His justification for doing so was that allowing the right win a pulpit from which to preach hatred was a threat to the security of the country, and that when you know you’re right, there’s no point in allowing others to create constant turmoil in the political spectrum. I have heard the same type of arguments before; this time only the players and causes were different. My friend’s arguments were decidedly more eloquent than what I have just stated; this is merely my interpretation of his words.

I pointed out that one who is certain s/he is right should embrace criticism, not quash it, and that people have a funny habit of changing their minds, especially when one martyrs the leaders of a cause through persecution. or worse. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. He said the extreme right was no different than he; if Bush and Cheney had anything to do with it, they would probably have locked many of us anti-war activists up long ago. “The reason you are still free,” he said, “is because you are not a significant threat to their power.” It was an astute, if fallible, analysis of majority rule.

[As it turns out, the protests of eleven million people on February 15th, 2003 did not discourage Bush from going to war because, as we now know, Bush and Cheney live in a bubble floating towards the South Pole, last seen heading southeast somewhere over Texas. However, they did convince the rest of the world that if the earth were to take a vote on Iraq, our soldiers never would have left Fort Dix. Despite the unlikelihood of an incumbent 'president's loss in a second-term election, we were enough of a threat that members of the Republican National Committee rented out a comfy ex-bus terminal on Pier 57 to accommodate us during the 2004 Convention sans habeas corpus. The public did not start a revolution upon Bush's re-'election,' either, as I had predicted to my friend. But I digress.]

Only the weak and insecure must fear the birth of conflicting ideas. The more desperate one becomes, the more one tends to suppress one’s opponents by any means necessary, including the hammer of the iron fist. Putin is just as dangerous to the cause of human rights as most neo-cons; he has a nation of citizens who still remember Lenin instead of Stalin, and he has no pesky historical Bill of Rights to stand in the way of his internecine methods of culling his critics from the flocks.

That’s why I’m so pissed off at Danny Glover for actively supporting the Venezuelan president’s cause. Chavez and Bush are two sides of the same coin. All the socialist medicine in the world cannot make up for the loss of basic human freedoms. Bush may be an evil moron, but he is not nearly as adept or as capable at silencing his political foes as others are.

Yet.

I love Pennsylvania these days. We seem to be the testing ground or battleground for a number of fascinating ventures: grassroots activism (of the kind that kicked Rick Santorum out of office), illegal immigration (Hazelton, PA), intelligent design (Dover, PA), the Allegheny County smoking ban (which the Commonwealth Court just overturned on the basis that the county had no authority to enforce an ordinance on large restaurants), and Rep. Darryl Metcalfe’s nationwide campaign to pass state laws cracking down on illegal immigrants. It was only a matter of time before the ire over judicial decisions evolved into a new form of political theatre: a world in which judicial candidates can and will speak their personal opinions on legislation that might come before them in the future.

Last Monday, a federal judge in Philadelphia said that the Judicial Conduct Board cannot enforce a section of the Judicial Code of Conduct that stops candidates from voicing their positions on present or future disputed legal or political issues. The article that discusses this decision in detail is from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Why is this such a big deal? Because it is an unwritten rule within the American Bar Association that politics are best left out of judicial appointments. I know that sounds strange, but in essence, this means that the ABA wants judges appointed who are the most qualified for the bench (or maybe the prettiest). Remember when Samuel Alito refused to answer any questions on abortion during his confirmation hearings? Although the Supreme Court seems to be the lone exception when it comes to mud slinging at candidates, Alito still maintained that it would not be ethical for him to predict his decisions on cases that might come before him on the Supreme Court.

The current model is to cite experience on past cases and let voters decide how they think a candidate might vote on a subject based on past decisions. Whether or not the threat of punishment by the JCB stifles the free speech of potential judges is a murky question. The violation of the “appears to commit” clause, a section of Pennsylvania law appended after a Supreme Court decision in 2002 (in which statements that show a candidate’s likelihood to have pre-formed opinions on a subject and therefore a lack of impartiality in new cases were allowed to be expressed) is the snowball that set this recent Pennsylvania case in motion. If I am interpreting the news article correctly, the Philadelphia decision has taken the U.S. Supreme Court decision, called Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, one step further: it has concluded that the state’s amended “appears to commit” clause is illegal or unconstitutional.

Whether or not the case will survive an appeal is unclear. What is perfectly clear is the potential damage the cloud of negative campaigns that disgrace the typical political campaign would have on the justice system if state and local judges had to agree with the majority views on social issues in order to gain or keep their jobs. Instead of leaving their personal partisan opinions at the door when they don the robes, judges would carry the weight of thousands of small-minded, geographically-based, socio-economic views into the courtroom with them. You could have identical criminal cases two towns apart where the legal precedent for a minimum sentence was clear, yet one judge imposes a fine and the other imposes a 15-year sentence. The potential implications of all nationwide judicial appointments “going negative” is enormous.

Is free speech absolute in this country? No. You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded cinema or make threats to kill people. Those examples represent forms of speech that could potentially endanger lives. The political opinions of judges may indirectly threaten the lives of innocent people, but I doubt that anyone could prove it to the point that it becomes constitutionally infallible. Something to think about.

After all, that judge you’ll be standing across from for speeding shouldn’t be somebody who has promised to lock up all reckless drivers under 35.

Or should he?

At the top of my blog is this curious crapdumb of mysql code that I can’t fix. Here it is in all its glory:

Warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #2 is not an array in /home/.margo/ps34_14/christianleftist.org/wp-includes/widgets.php on line 53

…So what do I do to make it go away? It appeared after I updated to Wordpress 2.2 on my Dreamhos account, which does 1-click updates, and I don’t want to delete my blog (although I have it backed up). How do I fix this? Any help would be appreciated.

Yes, you heard me correctly: those crazy Kansans are going to make a comeback – unless you want to do something about it. I don’t mean on their state school board, where voters ousted them from power in 2006 after they redefined the meaning of the word ’science.’ I mean on the National Association of State Boards of Education, where Kenneth R. Willard, a Republican who voted with the Kansas school board’s conservative (read maximalist zealous anti-evolution) majority in 2005 to teach intelligent design in the classroom, is poised to take the helm. The New York Times article politely describes intelligent design as “an ideological cousin of creationism.” Yessir.
This is one of those stories that will fly under the radar of most Americans because it’s a nonprofit group and not a nomination that involves heads of state like Bush or Gonzales. But this is exactly the plan of the extreme right wing maximalists: to slowly win local and state elections that have lasting influence on the education of future voters and to slowly worm their way into the very fabric of rational society that they seek to destroy.
Mr. Willard is an insurance executive from Hutchinson, KS. (Great, I dislike him even more now.) He retained his seat even when voters kicked out many of his peers for subscribing to the same ‘beliefs’ as he did. As president-elect of the NASBE, he will take office in January of 2009.
As stated on the national nonprofit group’s website at www.nasbe.org, the organization’s purpose is to work to “strengthen state leadership in educational policymaking.” Read: instead of being able to control a state’s direction in teaching science, one of the creationists will now be able to influence all school boards on a national level.
Mr Willard’s sole opponent withdrew from the race for personal reasons after the nominating period had ended, which made it impossible for another state board member to win a nomination and compete against Willard. Each state has one vote in the election. Scientists who oppose Willard’s views are urging state school boards to write-in a different candidate in the hope that one or other names will actually receive more votes than the intelligent design advocate. Last November, a retired businessman named Sam Schloemer won a seat on the Ohio school board when scientists organized to defeat creationist candidates there. He is the first nominee mentioned as a possible write-in candidate.
When asked, Willard said he believes that the teaching of evolution and/or opposing theories is best left up to individual states, but he admitted to his opinion that alternatives to evolution like intelligent design should have a place in science classrooms. Of course, the conclusion that one can draw from this is that while evolutionary debates have so far stayed within the confines of state school boards, with Mr. Willard’s appointment to a national school board leadership position, that will change dramatically.
In other words, there is still time to influence the votes of the individual states on this, and I bet plenty state boards are none too happy about the Kansan’s stance on evolution. But they will need to reach a consensus on one alternative to Willard in order to be able to defeat him, and that means we need to act by contacting them NOW.
I’ll quote the New York Times article on the subject in closing, because it says in two sentences what a frightening number of American citizens have yet to accept:
“There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on Earth. Courts have repeatedly ruled that creationism and intelligent design are religious doctrines, not scientific theories.”
Period.

Well, that’s what President Bush will essentially say if and when he vetoes his third and fourth bills, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would make persecution and discrimination of employees based on their sexuality illegal, and H.R. 1582, also named the Matthew Shepard Act, which would enhance existing hate crime legislation. Current hate crime laws state that violent crimes committed with motivations based on race, gender, religion, etc. are especially heinous and therefore subject to stiffer penalties; the House bill that has just passed would add sexual orientation to that list.

Of course, the anti-gay hate speech, which is still perfectly legal in this country as long as it doesn’t incite violence, has flared surrounding the issue, with several right-wing groups urging Bush to veto both bills. They argue that the legislation would forbid preachers from citing biblical references to homosexuality as a sin.

This whole issue makes me furious, but I’ll refrain from saying exactly how I feel about these people. Instead, I’ll quote Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese from an article on Southern Voice:

“It’s no surprise the religious right is so concerned about hate speech — for them, hate appears to be a cottage industry,” Solmonese said. “But they have nothing to fear. Even after the hate crimes legislation is passed, the religious right will continue to have the federally protected right to preach hatred from the pulpit.”

Pwned.

The problem to me is, how can you reconcile teaching ignorant, gullible parishioners to hate their fellow citizens and human beings and still claim to serve the will of God?

There are probably a ton of people writing to the DHS concerning the enforcement of the so-called REAL ID Act, so I’m not going to pull out a bulletpoint presentation. All I’m going to say is that if for no other reason, placing all of one’s personal, private information like one’s social security number, bank statements, birth certificates, and passport information into a national database accessible by thousands of underpaid local employees is about as secure as posting that information on a billboard on a Nebraska highway. It only takes on unscrupulous passerby to notice and steal it.

If the government can’t even protect us from information brokers who selfishly expose our names and information to corporations and their own employees to turn a profit, why in the hell would I want any DMV Joe with a basic understanding of computer programming to have access to my birth certificate? People I’ve never even met would have an easier time accessing records that verify who I am as a person than I ever would.

Genealogists can’t even receive birth certificates from 200 years ago if they can’t prove a direct link to a family member. Information that is technically ‘free’ to the public, like census records, aren’t even available online unless through a paid subscription on a private site. Yet the US government wants to make information on the living that they need to work, accept payments, and receive medical care open to the Department of Motor Vehicle’s equivalent of an airport baggage handler.

What is wrong with this picture?

To write the DHS before 5pm EST on May 8th, go to http://www.realnightmare.org/actioncenter/109/