Newshoggers.com

When Mythology Becomes Voodoo

2012-01-27T17:33:34-05:00

As anyone who reads these virtual pages knows I'm an atheist and consider religion to be nothing but mythology. Mormonism adds an additional layer of nonsense to the Christian nonsense but this sounds like voodoo to me.

Two readers have sent us confirmation that Edward Davies, Mitt Romney's militantly atheist father-in-law, was indeed posthumously converted to Mormonism by his family, despite the fact that when he was alive he regarded all religions as "hogwash."

Converting the dead - zombies in heaven. Now this is too weird but not uncommon.

[A] canonical series of rituals that Mormons undergo (in life or death) in order to qualify for admission to heaven, including baptism, confirmation, "washings and anointings," endowment, and, in the case of men, ordination to two levels of priesthood. The description seems to indicate that certain family members were present for all these rituals, in which a living male would have stood in "for and in behalf of" the late Mr. Davies.

And they have received objections before although I'm not sure why. If they convert me after I'm dead I'll still be dead.

The Mormon church has repeatedly been criticized for its practice of trawling for dead souls to convert to the faith. Catholic and Jewish organizations have expressed outrage when the names of dead popes and Holocaust victims have turned up on Mormon lists of the baptized. In 1995, the church pledged to "discontinue any future baptisms of deceased Jews" except for direct descendents of living Mormons, tacitly acknowledging that its creepy and weird to claim the souls of people who had no interest in Mormonism for their own. It's strange that the Romney and Davies families didn't accord Edward Davies' memory the same respect.

I'm not sure that anyone who believes such nonsense should be anywhere near the most powerful position in the world. This makes the craziest of Evangelical Christians look sane. A voodoo president?

New Hampshire Republicans against protecting domestic violence victims

2012-01-27T12:45:28-05:00

By BJ Bjornson

I must be missing something here. I mean, I get that generally speaking, the Republican party isn’t exactly women-friendly by any realistic measure, but going after laws that protect domestic abuse victims? Really?

House Bill 1581 would turn the clock back 40 years to an age when a police officer could not make an arrest in a domestic violence case without first getting a warrant unless he or she actually witnessed the crime. That's an exceedingly dangerous change. Consider the following scenario, one outlined for lawmakers by retired Henniker police chief Tim Russell:

An officer is called to a home where she sees clear evidence that an assault has occurred. The furniture is overturned, the children are sobbing, and the face of the woman of the house is bruised and bleeding. It's obvious who the assailant was, but the officer arrived after the assault occurred. It's a small department, and no one else on the force is available to keep the peace until the officer finds a judge or justice of the peace to issue a warrant. The officer leaves, and the abuser renews his attack with even more ferocity, punishing his victim for having called for help.

. . .

House Bill 1608 would also almost certainly cost lives. It removes judicial discretion by severely restricting when someone who has violated a domestic violence protective order can be arrested to three offenses: committing an act of abuse or an offense against the person named in the protective order, or engaging in prohibited contact.

The bill would also, law enforcement believes, remove a judge's ability to order a defendant in a domestic violence case to relinquish weapons or prevent him or her from purchasing a gun. It would also eliminate law enforcement's ability to arrest a defendant who threatens to use physical force against a victim or her children. All are changes that could have deadly consequences and make life more frightening for abuse victims and their families.

Via ThinkProgress.

I really wish Republicans would limit their foolishness to stuff like banning the use of aborted human fetuses in our food, because when they set their sights on real issues, the results are just downright scary.

The Buddy System

2012-01-26T23:40:58-05:00

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I remember a lot of things from my college days - parties, drunken field trips and did I mention parties? But I also remember hours at the chalk board doing physics home work with fellow student friends. Well that was the 60s - no calculators, no computers - the slide rule days. The academic social network was the blackboard, yes not even the white board. Times have changed - too late for me academically since at 65 I'm not academic anymore - but social networking is a part at today's students life. So why not make the blackboard of my academic life a social network? Well guess what? it's here - StudyUp. We have a link in the sidebar.

HCR -- Avishai on Paul Starr's "Remedy and Reaction"

2012-01-26T13:16:29-05:00

By John Ballard

I'm linking this splendid article in The Nation not because I think many of our readers will read it but on the outside chance that somewhere out in the Internets some policy wonk needs another push to do more homework.

As a layman I have done just enough homework about health care to be dangerous, having followed the issue since before Hillary Clinton's efforts crashed and burned way back when. Along the way I have come across two names that are not household words but whose analytical writing and insight are two of the anchors of the policy debate.

One, Alain Enthoven, whose views on healthcare will not make Progressives happy. He, nevertheless, an acknowleged expert, sometimes called the father of insurance exchanges. But this post is not about him. I only include the references by way of sharing what I have come across in my journey to learn as much as possible about a topic that some of the smartest people argue about. I learned long ago that when scholars argue it is best that laymen, particularly politicians, keep their mouths shut and pay attention.

The other, Paul Starr, literally wrote the book about health care in America, appropriately named The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982)

Starr has now published a sequel to his first book and Bernard Avishai, in A Spoonful of Sugar: On the affordable Care Act, is my way of learning what Paul Starr says without reading the book. Some would say that's cheating, but I already admitted to being a layman, calling my knowledge just enough to be dangerous, so for that I don't apologize. (If I were twenty year younger I would have a different attitude, but one of the vices of getting old, I have discovered as a caregiver for other old people, is not having to get too disturbed about what might happen two or three decades out.)

Here are a few snips...

Starr learned his lessons the hard way. He closely advised the Clintons on health strategy in the early 1990s (he still knows and has debriefed key Congressional staffers). The centerpiece of Remedy and Reaction is a long section, full of illuminating asides, on the frustration of the Clintons’ plans. Starr shows that, even as Bill Clinton submitted his bill to Congress, some 70 percent of voters subscribed to the principles embodied in the legislation he proposed. Yet the bill didn’t come close to being enacted. True, Clinton was losing altitude by then, but to suppose his failure was largely a matter of leadership—you know, that he didn’t use his bully pulpit forcefully enough, the sort of gripe heard relentlessly on MSNBC, the Huffington Post and Daily Kos about Obama and the “public option”—is to suppose that willows really weep.

Obama’s actions were cannier than Clinton’s, but they also amounted to a profile in courage. When Obama came into office, Starr explains, only 11 percent of Americans thought reform would have a “negative personal impact,” but by August 2009 this segment of the population was trending to 31 percent. Both Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden were urging retreat. Starr writes, “Obama not only resolved to go ahead; in September and again in the new year, the president took charge of the effort to steady the health-care initiative and prevent it from careening off the tracks.” Nor was the final bill anything less than what might reasonably have been expected, filling as it did the negative space left by four generations of government programs and serial compromises. Starting with clean sheets of paper was never realistic when one-sixth of the economy was at stake.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Each era had its champions, but Starr is particularly good at explaining the permanent counterforces that were salient on Washington’s political landscape by the time Obama inherited it. First is the inherently conservative nature of Congress.----

The second, and even more important, counterforce is accumulated material incentives. The tax reforms and IRS clarifications of the Eisenhower years—during which modern medicine and research hospitals rose in parallel with employment in large corporations—enabled businesses to deduct nearly all sums spent on employee group health insurance. Accordingly, businesses began to offer employees healthcare as a matter of routine in order to lure and retain talent in a hot employment market.-----

A third counterforce is regional lobbying. Starr reminds us at the start of his book that “every dollar spent on health care is also a dollar that someone earns from health care.” ----

Fourth, and finally, are the politics of the not-quite-ideological sort: the egos of senators who expect to mark up bills (and slide in parochial advantages), Congresspeople who would not feel safe endorsing something that has not been demonstrated to work (which, for Obamacare, meant pointing to satisfaction rates in Massachusetts) and so forth. In this context, Starr emphasizes that Republicans under Obama became an all-but-monolithic party with a singular ambition: to regain the presidency. Starr implies, but does not say, that mainstream journalists have inadvertently colluded with Republicans by scoring politicians more on their electoral guile than on their public policies. Republicans have thus plausibly assumed that Obama would be blamed for any economic difficulties, even if they created or deliberately worsened them. Republicans were eager to subvert the administration’s healthcare plan, never mind that Bob Dole (and, more recently, Mitt Romney) had pretty much designed it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For the first African-American president, surely the cruelest charge from the left was that in pursuing healthcare the way he did, he had wasted an “FDR moment.” Unlike Obama, presumably, Roosevelt had summoned the courage to take a radical case to the people against Congressional resistance—to be transformational, not merely transactional. Starr’s review of the New Deal refutes that myth, reminding us that Roosevelt avoided a healthcare fight almost from the start, not only because he didn’t want to take on the doctors but also because he didn’t want to ruffle the feathers of Southern Democrats. Indeed, FDR’s entire reform strategy depended on holding together a coalition that required him to ignore, if not pander to, the grotesque racism of the South. He got Social Security (and other bills) passed by appealing to immediate and universal pocketbook interests, and with a larger Senate majority, which reserved the filibuster mainly for civil rights; to appease Southern Democrats, he agreed to exclude domestic servants and farm laborers (e.g., sharecroppers) from the initial Social Security program.

Toward the end he ties up his points with a reasonable (indeed, obvious) reference to how tax policy will be essential to what happens next, concluding with "Americans will soon decide whether or not to leave in place a president who, among other things, will leave the act alone. It would be a shame, Starr warns, if the president who husbanded this once-in-a-lifetime legislation to victory is beaten by a Republican claiming the need for “leadership” in the White House—a double shame if misinformed Democrats, nursing their “disappointment,” continue to help make that need seem plausible."

The more I read about health care reform the less enthusiastic I become, not because the future is bleak but because of indifference and outright hostility on the part of both professionals and citizens. Articles such as this should not need to be written.

Roubini -- U.S Has 1929-Style Income Inequality

2012-01-25T20:26:02-05:00

By John Ballard

Let no one say we were not warned.
He says next year is becoming a perfect storm.

I'll Be Back

2012-01-24T23:23:59-05:00

By Steve Hynd

I seriously needed a break from blogging these last few months, but I've successfully recharged my batteries and I'm ready to start writing again.

Only there's a twist - as from February 1st I will be the new Editor In Chief of the Agonist.Org blog as the long-time editor there, Sean Paul Kelly, heads off for new horizons.

Obviously, I'm super-exited about this post, but I'll still be cross-posting content here at Newshoggers and getting involved in the comments threads here again. I'm looking forward to picking things up again and also to re-engaging with the 'hoggers readership. See y'all on February First!

Save the Planet

2012-01-24T20:40:16-05:00

By John Ballard

Old news in new form. No matter how much we say it, every time we hear it, repeat it and pass it on I like to think one more person gets the message.

At a protest on Capitol Hill this afternoon, hundreds of people dressed as referees called "foul" on members of Congress for supporting the Keystone XL pipeline while taking millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry. The protest was the first of many similar actions across the country as reformers go on the offensive against Big Oil and its political allies in Congress who have given billions in handouts to fossil fuel companies while slowing down progress on the nation’s transition to 100 percent renewable energy.

Bill Moyers on Crony Capitalism

2012-01-23T20:25:54-05:00

Posted by John, this needs no introduction.

Moyers & Company Show 102: On Crony Capitalism from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

HCR -- Crunch Time for Private Insurance Waivers

2012-01-23T20:13:44-05:00

By John Ballard

My guess is that most seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage and other private plans have no clue what will happen as provisions of the Affordable Care Act go into effect. One way or another the costs of medical care in America will go down. This post by Naomi Freundlich offers a snapshot of what is in store.

...30% of seniors are now enrolled in private Medicare Advantage plans, while 23% of Medicaid enrollees receive coverage through a private managed care organization. Another 15 million Medicaid recipients receive care through managed care plans that are a mix of private and public insurers.

What does this privatization mean for health care savings in the long term?...

A loooonnnnnggg GOP primary season

2012-01-22T19:45:45-05:00

By Dave Anderson:

Just a quick note before I have to put a very silly bug to bed.

This morning as I was driving to a wrestling meet, I started the drive with a sports talk radio station on. The second commercial I heard was from the Gingrich supporting super-PAC slamming Romney's vampire capitalism.

Ten minutes later, I had flipped the dial to a classic rock station, and heard another add from the same super-PAC that used Michelle Bachman's words to praise Gingrich in an attempt to claim the Clinton legacy.

Both stations have demographics that lean male, white and older than the median voter, so it makes sense to have a conservative advertising on them. The surprisign thing was the timing. The Pennyslvania primary is not until mid-April.

Pass the popcorn.