("Slavery!Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque South Slavery of 'Life at ‘Ol’ Virginny’s Hole’ [sketches from Plantation Life] -- See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker an Emancipated Negress and leader of her Cause" -- cut paper on wall, 12 X 85 ft., 1997, collections of Peter Norton and Eileen Norton, Santa Monica, California)
I slept over ten hours of uninterrupted, restorative sleep last night. It's only now, at 5:00 in the afternoon, that I've realized today is June 19th. A day of triple significance for me.
First of all, it's Juneteenth. I wrote about it last year and will direct you to that post for what I had to say: Juneteenth.
(Bill Barnett circa 1965, Dilley, Texas, age 8)
Second, on this day in 2001, shortly after noon, my little brother Bill died, alone and in horrific pain. I've written about him, too, at William David Barnett. It makes no sense to me that he's been dead eight years.
(Alice Neel. painter, self-portrait)
Finally, it was on this night three years ago that I had my first Ginny Bates dream, the dream that launching writing a book. I commemorated the anniversary of beginning the book in last year's post Happy Birthday, Ginny.
The past is not dead. It is not even the past.
Friday, June 19, 2009
JUNE NINETEENTH ONCE AGAIN
STRONG PUBLIC OPTION: OUR RIGHT AND PREFERENCE
(Pouring Concrete V, woodcut 2000 by Linda Lee Boyd)
Everybody has to have health care. If you don't get it when you need it, you get sick or sicker. Your productivity drops, and eventually you either (a) go to a emergency room where indigent care is covered but the expenses are exponentially higher, for a condition which might have cost a few dollars if it was treated way back when; (b) you wind up on disability (if you're lucky); or (c) you die.
How can any of these options be called in the common good? More to the point, how can any of these options be called "profitable"?
Since then [2001], health costs and the numbers of un- and underinsured have increased, and bankruptcy laws have tightened. RESULTS: Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income. The rest met criteria for medical bankruptcy because they had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance. Using identical definitions in 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6%. In logistic regression analysis controlling for demographic factors, the odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause was 2.38-fold higher in 2007 than in 2001.Forget about the stock market, or even foreclosures: The economic threat to working Americans is lack of affordable health care. We do NOT have the "best health care in the world", not unless you are rich or a member of Congress whose government-funded medical plan is phenomenal.
We out here know this, of course. I'm not telling you anything you don't already lie awake nights worrying about. But the debate that is going on is, as usual, full of distortions and "compromises" that are no such thing.
Bottom line: Strong public option or else. This means if a law is passed insisting you have health care insurance (as exists already for car insurance), one of your options is to buy it at an affordable rate from a government-run program, or have it provided free a la Medicare if your income qualifies. You will not be denied coverage for any reason, such as pre-existing conditions, and your insurance will be accepted at any public facility in the nation. It will be completely portable, not linked to a job or living in a particular state.
What Republicans want is to force us to buy insurance from private companies -- the same companies who are already making millions in profits by denying us coverage, cancelling coverage if we get ill, or delaying payment so long we die before we get the care we need. The crisis in health care is currently caused by private insurance plans linked to PROFIT.
Republicans, and Democrats who work as lobbyists for the insurance industry or have major contributions from said industry (cough cough Daschle), claim that insisting on a public option will mean too many people will choose that instead of private insurance. Some of their mouthpieces are pushing a "co-op" option, knowing full well that states with small populations will never have enough clout to create co-ops that survive against private insurance. Other mouthpieces complain about the competition that will force private companies to lower rates and provide better coverage. In other words, they want corporate welfare once again.
They also claim it means a government worker will decide what kind of treatment you get. Well, currently those decisions are being made by cubicle drones for private insurance companies who receive bonuses for denying you care. Your disability and death have no impact on their bottom line. But a "government worker" will have no such incentive to keep you away from necessary treatment, and in the big picture, having more citizens alive and productive is better for the government's bottom line. You tell me which one looks more attractive.
And to help you, check out this video of the Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing on "Terminations of Individual Health Policies by Insurance Companies." Of particular interest is the practice of recission, where insurance companies are cancelling coverage for tens of thousands of patients who developed cancer or other serious conditions, a cancellation which makes these patients liable for medical expenses retroactively. None of the three insurance companies who testified -- Assurant, UnitedHealth Group, and WellPoint -- would commit to stopping the practice of arbitrary recission unless there was intentional fraud in the patient's application. [Starting at 4:48 in the video.] They all indicated they will go on putting profit ahead of patient well-being. Until we demand the government stops them, of course, or we find an alternative to their own cancerous death-grip on our medical system.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
GINNY BATES, BOOK TWO: CHAPTER ONE
Note: I haven't been able to start on editing yet. But characters keep appearing in my dreams and quiet moments during the day, demanding I write this or that. After a week of holding them off, I'm trying out the idea of putting some of it down on paper.
8 June 2020
Myra and Ginny didn't get up until almost 10:00. Claire and Leila had left for SeaTac much earlier, sharing a cab with Nate and his family. Cathy was sticking around for a couple of days, however. She was at the dining table with a newspaper and a carafe of coffee.
"Where's Sima?" asked Myra, noticing her reflection in the convection oven glass door. Fuck, was that a bite mark on her neck?
"Hanging out by the pond. I think she's wishing she had an Ecto-Containment Unit" said Cathy. Ginny burst into laughter. Cathy added "There's still cake left, are you going to freeze a piece to eat in ten years?"
"My god, no" said Ginny. "I wouldn't eat it in ten days." Myra was distracted from examining her own neck by the idea of cake for breakfast. With pancetta, she thought.
HUBBLE THURSDAY
(Bright knots of glowing gas light up the arms of spiral galaxy M74, indicating a rich environment of star formation. Messier 74, also called NGC 628, is slightly smaller than our Milky Way. Click on image to enlarge.)
Every Thursday, I post a very large photograph of some corner of space captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and available online from the picture album at HubbleSite.
We circle around, we circle around
The boundaries of the earth
We circle around, we circle around
The boundaries of the earth
Wearing our long wing feathers as we fly
Wearing our long wing feathers as we fly
We circle around, we circle around
The boundaries of the sky
~~traditional Arahapo song
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
REVIEWING MY PRESIDENTIAL WISH LIST
(Five Paths, sculpture by Richard Long 2002 at New Art Centre, Roche Court, England)
Let me be up front: Lesbian/gay marriage is not one of my top 10 issues. Nor even in my top 20. I support it, as I support all human rights causes, but I don't believe marriage represents the ultimate expression of love and commitment, and I'd rather the state get out of the marriage business altogether except for a few basic rights accorded in civil unions for EVERYBODY.
The problem with the recent DOMA brief is three-fold for me, none of which really are about supporting lesbian/gay marriage. First, written into this brief is hate: Hateful lies and arguments which will be used by the Right for possibly decades to come. Second, either Obama is not in charge of policy decisions on a hot-button issue or he's lied in a major way about his intentions. Third, the alleged "Constitutional expert" is flat-out wrong on this issue, where law has been perverted to support politics in order to keep one segment of the population separated from Constitutional rights everyone else enjoys.
Believe me, if this kind of language and stance had been taken with regard to any other population in our country, I'd be just as outraged. More to the point, so would be a lot of people who are currently trying to explain it away as either an accident or some kind of "President's sekwet pwan to whip inflation".
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
HOWARD DEAN TALKS WITH RACHEL MADDOW ABOUT OBAMA'S DEEPLY OFFENSIVE DEFENSE OF DOMA (AND OTHER UPDATES)
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Quotes from Governor Dean in this interview:
"Of all the things that were done during sort of the anti-gay period, the electioneering period engineered by Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich and people like that, DOMA was probably the most offensive. And this, I think most people believe, never should have been signed. The language in this brief is really offensive, and it really is a terrible mistake. I doubt very much the President knew this was coming. I don't think for a minute this represents the President's position. But he is now going to have to dig himself out of this, because people are really upset about this, and they -- not just in the gay and lesbian community, but in the community of people who are interested in equal rights."
"You cannot talk about gay Americans the way that gay Americans were talked about in this brief."
"I do think it's bad that this kind of language was used in a Justice Department brief, presumably without the President's knowledge. That is really -- you just can't do that. You can't -- It is true that the Attorney General has the obligation to defend the law of the land whether the law of the land they agree with or not. But there are some times when the law of the land is so noxious -- This is not a bill to legalize same-sex marriage. That's not what this does. If DOMA gets repealed, that does not legalize same-sex marriage in places like Alabama and Texas which may not want to have same-sex marriage. But it does recognize the constitutional reciprocity of contracts from one state to another, and that is a basic Constitutional right."
LOLCATS WEEKLY ROUND-UP, 16 JUNE 2009
Here's the weekly best of what I've gleaned from I Can Has Cheezburger efforts. There are some really creative folks out there. As usual, those from little gator lead the pack.
Monday, June 15, 2009
TIME-LAPSE MONDAY
Here's your weekly time-lapse video showing a fascinating natural event. Hat-tip to WordWeaverLynn for the original link, and Wired Science for the article which brought them all to our attention.
Corn Growing, created by mindlapse.
Time lapse sequence shot using Pentax K110D and Harbortronics DigiSnap 2100 set to take a frame each 29 minutes 45 seconds. The time lapse spans 10 days. Two 90 watt compact floresecent lights where used for both the camera shooting light and the grow lights. The lights were on for 24 hours. Check out the interesting mold growing on the kernels, it did not seem to bother the corn. Amazing how fast the corn grew - for scale, the pot in the last part of the video is 5 inch. Music by Tony Rice Monroe's Hornpipe (The Bluegrass Guitar Collection).
Sunday, June 14, 2009
WHO OBAMA PICKS TO KEEP DOING BUSH'S WORK FOR HIM
(Poster from Austin Cline.)
W. Scott Simpson is the Bush-appointed senior trial counsel whose name appears as one of three Obama Justice Department lawyers who wrote and filed the vile DOMA brief this week. Renee S., a commenter at Dykes To Watch Out For, has done some research about his background, and turned up the following:
Federal justice department lawyer W. Scott Simpson said that there is no evidence that extraction abortions are safer than any others and that they cause great and unnecessary pain to infants. Further, he said, "the evidence supports Congress' finding that partial-birth abortion is never necessary to preserve the health of the woman." Finally, Simpson said, "there's no elephant in the room. There's a baby. Congress can prohibit partially delivering that baby only to kill it."
Simpson replaced an attorney during the proceeding regarding FOIA, The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. National Archives and Records Administration, in which Simpson was protecting Bush's interests regarding missing governmental e-mails. Here's a timeline on this case up through March 2009.
Also, for further information about his Mormon background, check his biography at a genealogy-related home-page.
Clearly, when evisceration is on the agenda, Obama's DOJ is able to find the right hyena to do it.
[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]
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