Friday, September 26, 2008

Ministers to defy IRS

According to a New York Times article, a group of ministers are going to defy the IRS, challenge the law, and endorse a presidential candidate. This takes place after the IRS seriously investigated the liberal All Saints Episcopalian Church in Pasadena, CA for supposedly endorsing John Kerry by having a sermon critical of the Iraq War immediately prior to the 2004 election.

I hope these ministers go forward with their plans, wielding their power to influence the weak of mind who can't make their own decisions. But then maybe we can start taxing their, and everybody's, religious organizations who feel the same way. I'm sorry but Rick Warren and the Catholic Church are not not-for-profits. And in 2004, the Catholic Church tacitly endorsed George W. Bush when it sought to deny Kerry, and other like-minded people, communion because of his pro-choice stance.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Where was the welfare plan when we needed it?



The list of things I wish my tax money did not pay for is so long, war in Iraq, Afghanistan, most of the defense department, most of the corporations that work for the defense department, etc. What I don't mind paying for, public education, road repair, social security, medicare, and welfare, are the things half the country seems to hate paying for. My question now, as President Bush himself warns of economic disaster, is do I really want my tax money paying to bail out these huge investment firms. I do not. Having read and listened to other significant economic thinkers on the subject (like the wonderful 9/19/08 program on Bill Moyers Journal), I am not certain our tax dollars can actually save the faltering financial system. Oddly, I find myself sounding like a more traditional Republican, we should allow them to go out of business because the time to use the $700 billion has passed. Where was that money when ordinary people were losing their homes? Where was corporate welfare when it could have saved ordinary people and not Wall Street? A year ago we could have saved this financial system if we also brought in tools for greatly increased regulation. But since we have a deregulated financial system, it should be allowed to fail in a deregulated fashion. More than that, I am certain that several people have done some illegal things somewhere, so CEOs and other prominent executives of these companies should be arrested, their assets liquidated, and all that money should be put toward bailing out the industry they screwed up with their idiocy and greed. But greed is human nature, which is why some people aren't libertarians - human greed cannot be trusted to moderate itself. The time to pass this sort of reformation on the finance industry also has passed, and as Ron Suskind reminds us, the warning bells were Enron if only we had had an administration who would listen. But at least their colossal screw-up allowed me to be amused by this phony spam message.


If we do bail out the financial system, as we inevitably will since both political parties are owned by Wall Street, let's hope it's with careful government oversight that builds in safeguards against corporate and government greed. This government must do more than bailout the current financial system; it must rebuild it as something other than it has been.

By the way, I bet you wish we hadn't gone into Iraq now because where are we going to get $700 billion? China. And then we are in debt to a not-very-nice rising superpower, throughout our generations forever.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Denying women's rights to equal healthcare

As a woman, I have often stated I would have no interest in living in most of the world before New York in 1968. My reasons for this are pretty straight forward. Most women throughout the recorded history of the world did not have equal rights before the law, and in the modern world they have certainly been denied equal rights to health care and health research. It is only in startlingly recent times that the medical establishment figured out that women might get heart disease for reasons different than men and that maybe they needed to research women as well. While I don't want to deny there were probably some societies and some wealthy women within certain societies that had privileges that equaled or exceeded that of some men within those societies, I do not feel that is true of most of my ancestors, and I am concerned about how little access to fair healthcare women get today.

Most disturbing to me at present is the death throes of the Bush administration and its attempts to deny women equal healthcare on the basis of "morality." Hillary Rodham Clinton and Cecile Richards described this attempt today in a passionate and important editorial for The New York Times. A pharmacist should, as described by the great Stephen Colbert, be allowed to dispense viagra unchecked but can choose not to fill a birth control prescription. That's no big deal if you live in Manhattan because there is bound to be another pharmacist who will, but if you live in the middle of Mississippi or Western New York or any other place that is more sparsely populated, you are out of luck in having the freedom to choose the pill. And the birth control pill is not just useful as a contraceptive. I was a teenage girl who had incredibly irregular and painful periods, and the pill straightened that out. The pill has also been proven to help prevent certain forms of cancer.

But that's not the point, the point is that taking the Hippocratic Oath means you must provide me the healthcare I request and not what suits your morality, if that morality conflicts with healthcare if that healthcare is necessary and broadly approved by my own cultural and moral traditions. What if a white supremacist doctor felt that all non-white people didn't deserve healthcare treatment, that morally he was degrading the world's population by helping them live? We would have a problem with that wouldn't we?

So, that said, I want to at least leave you with Stephen Colbert's now, to me, classic meditation on this subject.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Thank you Saturday Night Live!

They captured so many things I had been thinking. And Tina Fey is brilliant. But now, I hope we can all follow Arianna Huffington's suggestion. Let's stop talking about Sarah Palin and instead focus on the issues that really matter, like the collapsing finance industry.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Sarah Palin runs for student council vice president



At the end of my college years, I found myself having dinner with the president of the student council. We chatted as he discussed his own plans to go on to Washington and eventually, hopefully, head into elected public life himself. I can't remember all the details of the conversation, but I remember being left with a strongly depressing realization. The leaders of our nation didn't get there because they felt any special call to serve and help other people through public policy. Basically they were all previous student government members who decided to move to something bigger because winning popularity contests was what they did. And while student government no doubt helps you sense if politics is for you, isn't it disturbing to think how few members of Congress may recognize the substantive difference between legislating the U.S. government and allocating student organization funds on a college campus?

I was reminded of this last night as I watched Sarah Palin, certainly the most energetic member of the Republican party, campaign for point guard of her high school basketball team (yes, I read that posting on several newspaper sites by a Wasilla resident). I don't think her qualifications are at issue for me, but her lack of quality as a human being certainly is at issue. Her speech took what BBC reporter Justin Webb described as "parliamentary-style jabs" at the Democratic Party.

First of all, what is so wrong with being a community organizer? I know it doesn't qualify as "executive experience," but it shows a desire to help people fight for what they know they want; instead of assuming you can just tell people how to live their lives as Governor Palin seeks to do. Community organizing also demonstrates a character of community service, something sorely lacking in Governor Palin's own record, which demonstrates a history of serving her ambition and her personal vendettas. And how is Harry Reid's hatred of John McCain an endorsement of him for president? That's a good joke for a blog post but completely unsuitable to a responsible public speech. Of course, all the Republicans act a bit medieval in their tendency to boo and laugh publicly and disrespectfully (and this at a convention who lauded how nice people are in Minnesota and in "America" in general - really all I was reminded of was my own Midwestern childhood, where people are nice to you when they need you but happy to stab you in the back if it helps further their own agendas. That's not nice; that's crueler than just being rude from the start). But what I learned most about Governor Palin last night is not that she is some Reformer who is being criticized because she's a woman outside the Washington mainstream. Her cold ambition, cruel jabs, and pure partisan focus should help her fit right in with all the other Republicans in D.C., the rest of whom never figured out that serving the people of the United States of America is a bigger task than being student council president.

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image from about.com