Why I Am a Socialist

Today is a solemn anniversary for the country, but it's also an anniversary for me -- one that brings a mixture of emotions. A year ago this morning, I woke up with a headache and a curious gap in my eyesight. Several hours later, I was in the Stanford Hospital emergency room -- not a place you ever want to be -- and beginning a series of tests. The essential details of my experience are here, here, here, and here.

A year later, I'm about as back to normal as one ever gets from an experience like that. I still gulp a handful of pills (two antibiotics and a B6 tablet to counteract their side effects) every morning, just to be on the safe side. But I'm as active as I ever was (which is not very), don't tire as easily as I did a couple of months ago, and my eyesight has only a slight glitch in it. (Hard to describe. It's kind of like a little wrinkle in the peripheral vision. When I'm driving -- and yes, I drive carefully -- I have to keep scanning leftward because oncoming traffic sometimes disappears into the wrinkle.)

We still don't know what caused the abscess in my brain. It may have been tuberculosis (though I once doubted it) or nocardia. Whatever it was, the treatments -- the round-the-clock IVs, followed by the daily trip to outpatient infusion, followed by the pills -- seem to have worked. Well, one would hope three weeks in hospital, followed by two months in a nursing home, followed by nine months of medication would do something.

But the good thing is that all of this -- tens of thousands of dollars of surgery, doctor visits, MRIs, CTs, endoscopies, broncoscopies, nursing care, rehab therapy, IVs and infusions and pills -- was covered by my insurance: Medicare and an AARP supplemental policy. I'm a happy senior citizen, one who knows that he has benefited from a government program. I'm also aware that I have been paying for it for years through payroll deduction, and am still paying for it in smallish (by comparison with private insurance) monthly premiums.

Oh, sure, I have some gripes about Medicare, but they're minor ones. (For one thing, I could have had my round-the-clock infusions at home instead of having to stay in the nursing home, but Medicare doesn't pay for home treatment -- even though, given the cost of meals and other institutional overhead, it would probably save them some money.) The point is, it works -- and works well.

Which is why I'm so ardent about health care reform and so intolerably annoyed by the sound and fury that has been generated by the attempts to bring it about. Everyone deserves the kind of care and attention I have gotten for the past year, and anyone who says otherwise is a damn fool.

For the L of It

Careful, Barack, your liberalism is showing:

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Noise of the Day

John Cole on the right-wing spin on Joe Wilson's outburst.

Kind of an awesome set of rules the President gets to work with. If you point out that people have been lying about death panels for the last few months, you are “poisoning the well.” If you don’t point it out, people believe it and the rumors and lies keep spreading.

Greg Sargent on Sarah Palin's latest nonsense.

The implication is that Obama is “demonizing” victims of the war on terror — 9/11 victims included — by saying war has financial costs. Palin interprets this to mean that Obama is saying that terror victims have “had too high a price tag.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Obama's no-drama style.

We (liberals) have spent so much of our time on the losing end of the past 30 years, that the impulse is to fight every battle, and challenge every press release. Moreover, media has uncovered our inner crazy. HuffPo blasts every utterance from Jon Kyl in bold font. Politico reports every feint and jab, like it's the whole fight.

Noise of the Day

Mark Bowden points with alarm at the state of post-newspaper "journalism."

With journalists being laid off in droves, savvy political operatives have stepped eagerly into the breach. What’s most troubling is not that TV-news producers mistake their work for journalism, which is bad enough, but that young people drawn to journalism increasingly see no distinction between disinterested reporting and hit-jobbery.

Tom Friedman on why the negativity of the Republican party is so disastrous.

The G.O.P. used to be the party of business. Well, to compete and win in a globalized world, no one needs the burden of health insurance shifted from business to government more than American business. No one needs immigration reform — so the world’s best brainpower can come here without restrictions — more than American business. No one needs a push for clean-tech — the world’s next great global manufacturing industry — more than American business. Yet the G.O.P. today resists national health care, immigration reform and wants to just drill, baby, drill.

Michael Bérubé on the weird mindset of the teabaggers.

not only in the bowels of the insurance industry but also in the minds of ordinary teabagging folk, the problem is that health care reform might provide health care to Other People.

Another Republican "family values" jerk embarrasses himself.

As the OC Weekly reports, 
Duvall has "blasted" efforts to promote gay marriage, and got a 100 percent score from the Capitol Resource Institute, which describes its mission as to "educate, advocate, protect, and defend family-friendly policies in the California state legislature". In March, a spokeswoman for the group called Duvall "a consistent trooper for the conservative causes," adding that "for the last two years, he has voted time and time again to protect and preserve family values in California."

Noise of the Day

Jim Sleeper on corporations' "free speech" Supreme Court challenge, and why the ACLU is on the wrong side.

TV ads telling us how deeply oil companies care about the environment aren’t part of open give-and-take; they’re efforts to cash in on a consensus that might not have emerged at all had corporate money dominated our elections and debates more than it does.

Matt Taibbi on what went wrong with health care reform.

By blowing off single-payer and cutting the heart out of the public option, the Obama administration robbed itself of its biggest argument — that health care reform is going to save a lot of money.

John Amato on the new Republican talking point: Parents should be afraid of Obama because he's too charismatic.

I'm waiting for conservatives to ban their children from ever watching an Obama speech or interview. Republicans have become freaks since they've let the teabaggers take over their party.

What I'm Listening To

Benjamin Britten, Death in Venice. Peter Pears (Gustav von Aschenbach); John Shirley-Quirk (The Traveller, et al.) Members of the English Opera Group, English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Steuart Bedford.

Is it boorish to wish that Britten and Pears had been a little less devoted to each other? As in Billy Budd, it seems to me that the vocal writing in Death in Venice is superior for every part except the one composed for Pears. Here, it's the multiple roles for John Shirley-Quirk and the chorus of minor characters that make most of the vocal impact. Yes, Pears is dramatically intense, but if his voice had had more range and flexibility, mightn't the part have been given more musical challenges, resulting in a greater emotional variety? Still, this is a fascinating opera, here given what must be a definitive performance -- so why is it hard to get in the States?

Fired Up

This is why I voted for the guy. Maybe if he can keep this up, he can get things done.

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Thoughts While Waiting for the Clothes to Dry

When did "mic" become the dominant spelling for the short form of "microphone"? I see it everywhere in newspapers and online: e.g., "He grabbed the mic out of my hands" and "Tuesday is open mic night at the comedy club." When I was editing stuff, I used to change it to "mike," which seems to me a better spelling because it looks like words it rhymes with: "bike" and "hike" and ... well, "like." But "mic" seems to me like it should sound like a derogatory word for an Irishman. And other words spelled with a final -ic, like a ballpoint pen brand name and another racist word that unfortunately comes to mind, are pronounced as if they rhyme with "pick," not "pike."

Noise of the Day

TPM Muckraker on the extremes of the extreme:

It's basically impossible for the "respectable" leadership of the Tea Party movement to ensure that their ranks don't include the kind of people who call Obama both Goebbels and Mengele in the space of a few days. And that's because, frankly, unhinged crazy people simply make up too great a proportion of the movement to be kept permanently at arm's length.

We lose Ted Kennedy and are left with ... Max Baucus?

After months of frustrating deliberations, and a threat from the White House that President Obama would write his own legislation, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has finally circulated a draft of a health care bill--one that does not create a public option, but allows for the creation of health care co-operatives.

John Aravosis is convinced that Obama is going to wuss out on ... well, everything.

We worry that every time Obama refuses to fight, in the spirt of bipartisanship, he lets a problem grow, and inspires more Republicans to push him even harder, further polarizing the country, further damaging the very bipartisanship he claims he's trying to promote.

The New York Times reports on the rise in homelessness among schoolchildren.

While current national data are not available, the number of schoolchildren in homeless families appears to have risen by 75 percent to 100 percent in many districts over the last two years, according to Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, an advocacy group.

David Neiwert puts Glenn Beck's success in ousting Van Jones in perspective.

Probably the most ironic -- no, make that flat-out bizarre -- aspect of Glenn Beck's ultimately successful campaign to force out Van Jones is that it was predicated on Jones' supposed indulgence in extremist rhetoric ideas. ... Beck's history of indulging in extremism -- not just turning a blind eye to its presence, but promoting it outright to an audience of millions -- is so deep and wide that whatever indiscretions Jones might be guilty of fade into total insignificance.

Couldn't Have Said It Better Myself

Hunter gets to the point:

America, its discourse and its governance has, to put it as tersely as possible, become all but enslaved to the stupidest, most uneducated, trashiest, most fanatic, most incompetent, most mentally unbalanced, most flat out fucking dumb set of people to ever manage to walk upright.