Health care reform shorts: well duh!!

Hey, Democrats in Washington finally seem to be noticing the obvious:

[Democratic political operative James] Boyce said the Democrats could very well lose [their] majority next year, and if that happens "none of the reform would happen anyway, and we would have had this whole debate for nothing."

"2013 is an incredibly long time given the seriousness of this situation and the need to reform the health care industry," Boyce said. "If the Democrats aren't even willing to draw a line in the sand and make this happen while they were in charge, they should be humiliated and they would deserve to lose."

TPM

It didn't take much genius to get to that. People elected these people to make health care available and affordable. If all they did was dick around most of the year and pass something from which no one feels any benefit, they deserve to lose big simply for being incompetent idiots.

Steny Hoyer, the Party of No and us

Ezra Klein reports a speech by House Majority Leader Congressman Steny Hoyer (he's Nancy Pelosi's wily assistant and competitor for influence) about the inability of Congress to move on much of anything, mostly because the Republicans are committed to being the Party of No.

Note that his list of problems Congress can't move on suffers from the same myopia I ranted against in the last post on health care reform and the dangerous deficit. Hoyer worries about

...challenges like reforming our massive entitlement programs, controlling the growth of health care spending, and responding to climate change -- issues that are fraught with political risk and so easy to demagogue that it is almost impossible for one party to take them on alone. Those challenges are dangerously likely to stay untouched as long as at least one party is willing to be a ‘Party of No.’

Yes, it is a problem that Republicans refuse at present (and possibly forever as they recede into history as a miserable residue of white people who can't adapt to social reality) to try to solve the country's problems.

But refusing to put the real avenues toward solutions out in the light is deception by misdirection -- as much an impediment to democracy as Republican demagoguery. Insofar as Hoyer is talking about costs to the government, the problems are on the "supply side." The money exists for a safety net (the dread "entitlements") and health care, if the country can be brought to recognize a couple of simple truths about where to get it.

As I argued above, solutions begin with 1) raising taxes on people who have more than they need and 2) cutting the bloated military starting with non-essential wars. When those measures aren't part of the discussion, all we're hearing is a politician shuffling the deck before fleecing the gullible some more.***Paul Waldman makes a similar argument in an American Prospect article entitled The Spending Wars. A sample:

Wars just need to be fought; the defense budget just needs to keep growing; and we don't really care what it costs. The idea that we might ask each other to pay for war through our taxes is so ridiculous as to barely merit discussion. Domestic initiatives meant to improve Americans' lives, on the other hand, are deeply offensive to any notion of responsibility unless every penny is paid for in advance (and maybe not even then).

It wasn't always this way. ...

Just go read it.

Why we need the Copenhagen conference to succeed

This delightful experimenter [2:20] illustrates how human-generated increases in carbon and other greenhouse gases are heating up the planet. Heating up the planet means climate will change. A dependable climate -- predictable weather and atmosphere -- is the set of conditions our species, and every other, depends upon to feed ourselves, shelter ourselves and keep breathing. Muck around with it, and there is bound to be trouble.

Simple enough? Can world political leaders begin to control the human component of climate stability in the meeting at Copenhagen? Our offspring will curse us if current generations fail at this.

Health care reform shorts:Deficits matter more than people?

It has been hard to understand why, having set the health care reform train in motion, the President and administration generally have seemed unwilling to dig in and push to get a reform that people will appreciate. After all, if you take actions that presumably will change how people get their doctoring -- something folks get exercised about since for individuals this can be life or death -- you'd think you'd want to make darn sure most people liked the result. That seems an elementary political calculation. But the administration has been acting as if anything that passes that is labeled "Health Care Reform" will do the trick with the voters.

On Monday, Ezra Klein shared what seems to be the explanation for the White House's passivity.

Generally, Democrats want to reform the health-care system because they want to cut the number of uninsured. The Obama administration's commitment to health-care reform stems from their belief that it's the first step towards cutting long-term deficits.

That is, their eye is on the ball, but it isn't the ball that will provide affordable care to most people. They want reform in order to cut the federal deficit.

Washingtonians are always getting fixated on the deficit, the accumulated amount the government spends that exceeds what it takes in from taxes. And the deficit is huge -- $1.4 trillion dollars, whatever that means. I'm not going to pretend that a number that big actually means anything to me. The government gets the money that it spends but doesn't have on hand by borrowing it through issuing bonds; this costs money in the form of interest paid to the people/countries that buy the bonds.

All this sounds scary, but it shouldn't. Compared to the overall size of the U.S. economy, those numbers aren't so large. And their scale is not unprecedented as this chart shows.


But the real reason that deficit concerns shouldn't be constraining what sort of health care reform we're allowed to have is that the deficit would be easy to fix if the country stopped operating on one or both of two nonsensical premises we are trapping ourselves in. There are obvious solutions that break through false constraints we pretend limit our options.

• We could raise more taxes from people who have more than they need. We used to. In the Eisenhower era, all these Wall Street rip-off artists who've been robbing us blind would have been taxed at a 91 percent rate. In 1986, they would have paid 50 percent of income. But thanks to the best Congresses and Presidents that their money could buy, nowadays they pay only 35 percent of their income for the common good. They could pay more -- really, does anyone need more than $250,000 a year? I doubt it.
  

• We could cut our bloated military budget. In 2009, what with two wars of dubious use to us, some 900 bases around the world, nearly 1.5 million troops, dozens of weapons systems in use or development, and the management structure to keep track of all this, the military sucked up somewhere between $900 billion and $1.1 trillion. Or at least that's more or less what they tell us -- since a lot of secrecy prevails, actual costs may be more, much more. Expenditures on our war apparatus are something like six or seven times those of the country with the next largest military (China). If we really wanted to pay down the federal deficit, we could probably cut half of this without noticeable loss of security. After all, the last set of folks who actually injured a large number of people in this country did the deed with box cutters and scheduled airline flights. This war budget is "patriotic" waste that lines the pockets of "defense" industries and the politicians they buy -- but keeps us from attending to the actual needs of the people.

But no, the federal deficit constrains action on health care for all. This is kind of sickening to contemplate, actually. Everything for greed and war; pennies for sick people. That's not an attractive picture, but it is the country and apparently the administration we have today.

For my Episcopalian friends ...

This afternoon I had a truly traumatic experience. Because I have terrible teeth, I go to the dentist frequently. Fortunately, I have a wonderful, friendly dentist, so the experience is not quite as awful as it might be.

My dentist has a flat screen TV system that looms over you as she drills, scrapes and bloodies your mouth. When she first got it, it was turned to cable news, usually Fox. But she has taken pity on her patients and acquired a set of Discovery Channel environmental videos. Now, blanking out in the chair involves scenery and animals.

This afternoon was going fine -- I was even slightly distracted by scenes of lions on the Tanzanian plain. And then, and then, something awful came on screen, a familiar pair of bushy, pointed eyebrows.


Can't we please escape from this burdensome Archbishop? Apparently not.

The film is Planet Earth: The Future, Environment & Conservation. I'm sure the good Archbishop of Canterbury had meaningful things to say, but right now I really didn't want to see his familiar mug.

(If any of my non-Episcopalian friends want to figure out what this is about, I recommend Sapphic Suffragan Shutdown.)

U.S. isn't going anywhere; Welcome to President McCain's 100 year war!

Just in case anyone was confused about what Obama meant in his Afghanistan speech, assorted poobahs went on TV today to to set the citizenry straight; their message amounted to: "don't go taking the President at his word about that 2011 withdrawal date; it's just talk."

The Obama administration sent a forceful public message Sunday that American military forces could remain in Afghanistan for a long time, seeking to blunt criticism that President Obama had sent the wrong signal in his war-strategy speech last week by projecting July 2011 as the start of a withdrawal.

In a flurry of coordinated television interviews, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top administration officials said that any troop pullout beginning in July 2011 would be slow and that the Americans would only then be starting to transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces under Mr. Obama’s new plan.

New York Times, December 6, 2009

Wouldn't want mere citizens to think the generals' excellent Afghan adventure might end anytime soon -- or perhaps ever.

If we're stuck with this quagmire for the next couple of decades, we better get used to what it costs. Here's a summary from Travis Sharp of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

In 2010 alone, U.S. military spending on Afghanistan will equal nearly one-half of total spending on the war since 2001.

The United States will spend 92 percent more on military operations in Afghanistan during 2010 than it did during 2009.

In 2010, the troop increase in Afghanistan will cost each individual American taxpayer $195 dollars. (IRS)

In 2010, the troop increase in Afghanistan will cost $2.5 billion per month, $82 million per day, $3.4 million per hour, $57,000 per minute, and $951 per second.

In the time it takes you to read this post, the troop increase in Afghanistan will have cost $85,500.

The figure for total U.S. current military spending in 2010 is around $700 billion. Remind you of anything? -- oh yeah, it is roughly the size of the stimulus package that Congress grudgingly passed in January, the only thing that is keeping nearly 650,000 people in jobs who would otherwise be looking for non-existent work. (USAToday, 11/18/2009)

And how about that "expensive" health care reform we're supposed to be so worried about? It is projected to cost $900 billion over 10 years (and to be fully funded by savings achieved by its provisions.) With inflation, over the same ten years, the military budget will cost something like ten times the amount we might have to spend on health care - and those military costs will have to come directly out of our pockets in taxes.

Something is wrong here. I certainly didn't hear the President articulate any reason to keep throwing the wealth created by our labor down a rat hole for the rest of our lives, yet apparently that that is what our poobahs project. There have to be cheaper ways to work for security -- perhaps by removing the occupying troops that serve as provocations for terrorism.

We can't afford our Cadillac military establishment or its endless brushfire wars.

A jaunt through the hills

These feeding deer didn't bother to run away as I approached through the late afternoon shadow near Rodeo Beach.


These crows didn't see any reason to fly away from a lumbering human either.


I wasn't expecting to find evidence of the stimulus on the trail, but I'm grateful for it anywhere it turns up. The boggy patches I've been dodging around for five years had been filled in a little further up this dirt road. Good. Guess they needed better conditions to get in their tree trimming equipment.


Aside from a few hikers and the "recovery" workers, here's what probably benefits most from the reduced fire danger in cleared parts of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. This new house with a sod roof on the park boundary looks out across a magnificent vista of public land.

The incredible shrinking health care reform

According to Brian Beutler, Democratic Senators for and against the public option met last night.

"It was a good meeting, we're making progress," [Iowa Senator Tom] Harkin said. "There's two sides and there's a middle and that's where we're going to wind up."

It's very hard to feel these people are worth their keep.

For most of us, health care reform is about whether we'll be able to go to the doctor without spending our life savings, if any. For these guys, it's about kicking the can down the road until it is invisible. They make me sick, all of them.

It's NOT such a wonderful life!

Apparently the Capra movie is not under copyright. That's good. George Bailey is a national treasure; Mr. Potter was not as slick as contemporary Wall Street moguls, but his ethics would have fit right in.

Gotta keep an eye on Congress. The President may be in hock to Wall Street, but Congresscritters sometimes feel the heat.

However the system itself is stymied. Take a look at this explanation from Jeff Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute. He laments that we live under

a system of governance that for the last three decades has been incapable of dealing with the future because its most important financiers are still profiting from the present.

The whole article is a must read to understand where we've gotten to -- and worse, where we are probably going. We ain't seen nothing yet.

Friday cat blogging

It's been a week of hard topics. Let me introduce someone who doesn't give a bird's tail feather about any of them.



Billie only wants lots of cat food and to be admired. If you are cautious, you can scratch his belly, though your hand might be taken for a toy and treated as a pin cushion. I get to visit Billie many Sundays in the fall because his people watch football on TV and invite their friends. Often Billie comes in to receive homage from the guests.

Muslim civil rights report issued

Zahra Billoo, program and outreach director of CAIR-San Francisco Bay Area introducing CAIR's new report: "The Status of Muslim Civil Rights: 2009."

Thursday the national Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a study of complaints it has received of discrimination, anti-Muslim violence and harassment over the last year. In 2008, CAIR recorded 2778 complaints, a 3 percent increase over the previous year. The highest number came from California, Illinois, New York, Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Texas, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. Eighteen percent of incidents occurred in California of which over 200 were in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Zahra Billoo has only worked in the Santa Clara-based CAIR-SFBA office for a few months. But she has noticed a pattern in her work. Many calls to her office concern problems Muslims experience in workplaces about negotiating time off for Friday prayers or wearing head coverings or beards. Muslim kids have reported their teachers in the schools saying insulting things about their faith.

But an additional category of apparent discrimination happens all too often. F.B.I. agents have been turning up at the doors of families in Muslim communities, without warning or warrants, and asking to come in and just talk. Since there can be dangerous legal consequences for immigrants and others from what seem like simple conversations, part of her work has been finding lawyers to advise these families and perhaps be present if they do talk with the F.B.I. People who want lawyers, or who don't want to talk with law enforcement at all, are within their rights, but people often don't know they have such rights.

The printed report's recommendations speak to this situation:

Law enforcement authorities have every right to follow up on legitimate leads in any investigation, but a "round up the usual suspects" approach will only serve to intimidate those whose cooperation is sought.

In a community subjected to much suspicion and hostility in the last few years, it is not surprising that many interactions with authorities feel like "religious profiling" unless prior trust has been established.

According to the national organization's press release:

...the report also offers recommendations for action by the Obama administration, Congress and American Muslim institutions.

The Obama administration is asked to 1) review and revise guidelines issued by then Attorney General Mukasey in late 2008 that allow racial and religious profiling, 2) to reduce the size of the watch lists, and 3) to implement effective means by which travelers who believe they have been profiled may seek redress. President Obama is also asked to visit an American mosque.

CAIR is recommending that Congress pass the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA) and the Fair, Accurate, Secure, and Timely Redress Act of 2009 (FAST Redress Act of 2009), and not offer a 'legitimizing platform" to anti-Muslim bigots.

The full report can be downloaded as a pdf from CAIR.

Where's the hope?

An acquaintance works for the Salvation Army in the Tenderloin, San Francisco's densely packed skid-row-cum-immigrant-tenement-housing-cum-drug-market and human dumping ground, where culture and life struggle against urban neglect. At this season, she is registering families to receive toys for their kids at Christmas.

This is San Francisco -- they are NOT questioning the immigration status of the families, as has been charged about the charity in Houston.

But she reports a huge change among the African-American folks she interacts with (she's Black herself.)

Last year they'd come in. Whatever it was about, the talk would always go round to Obama. They were still on the streets, but Obama was in. Obama meant things would get fixed.

Now it's so different. I think they are in denial. Or afraid they'll feel ashamed for their guy.

The programs get cut and cut. And they never mention Obama anymore, just never.

No wonder Democrats are beginning to wonder where their voters went. There are hurts out there that go far deeper than a smaller disability check or an over-crowded food pantry. And those hurts fester.***UPDATE: Five Thirty Eight highlights a poll that suggests this anecdote may illustrate a widespread reality.

The racial demographics, however, are perhaps even more striking. Whereas 68 percent of white voters told Research 2000 they were definitely or probably planning to vote in 2010, just 33 percent of black voters did.

Although whites have almost always turned out at greater rates than blacks, the racial gap has never been nearly that large, and indeed was at its smallest-ever levels in 2008 with Barack Obama on the ballot.

That's a lot of pain.

A president chooses more war; people yearn for peace

Sadly, our brilliant President has embraced the oh-so-human fantasy that war, once unleashed and escalated, can be controlled. What we've seen over the last few months of "consultations," culminating in the speech at West Point, is war's evil dynamism running away with well-intentioned people. The Bush-Cheney regime grabbed the bait Bin Laden set for them in 2001: they responded to outrageous provocation not by enlisting the peoples of the world to use the force of law against terrorism, but with the blunt instrument of invading and occupying other people's countries. Horror ensued and no one is safer. Much of the world can not see any justice in U.S. wars. Now a successor President finds no way out of the dead end journey of hatred the last administration left him with.

Code Pink in San Francisco marked this sad moment with a press conference at the Federal Building on Tuesday that brought together some of the people who know better.


San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos talked about his seven year old daughter. The Afghanistan war has been underway since before she was born. Will she ever know peace? He fears President Obama has lost his path.


Eddie Falcon served two tours of military duty in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. He fights flashbacks. "This is about OUR humanity."


Samina Sundas founded American Muslim Voice after 9/11 to work for peace and understanding between all of us in this country. She has recently visited in Pakistan where she has many relatives. People are frightened, of terrorist bombings, but also of U.S. drone attacks that kill many from the sky. She described Obama's Afghan war as a "shortcut that will crush other countries." She fears that war and more war prosecuted by this inspiring President will "destroy the hopes and dreams of people around the world."

I fear that too.

In the form of commentary on Psalm 137, Melissa Harris-Lacewell writes about the sadness of war on a Nation magazine blog:

I believe we have already destroyed too much of ourselves and of our so called enemies. I mourn this decision to feed the dogs of war and to bash the heads of babies against the rocks.

***Hundreds of events in response the Afghanistan escalation are planned over the next few days. Check these sites:

United for Peace and Justice (national)
Code Pink (national)

Empire assimilates Obama

What's hard about watching Obama cave in to the imperial military project in Afghanistan is that he has given ample evidence that he's smart enough to know better. Our previous ruler, you could never be sure: maybe he was just excited by flight suits and believed the nonsense Dick fed him.

But this one -- you know he knows that Afghanistan is hopeless. The local clans don't have the military capacity to throw us out. But unless we are prepared to make Afghanistan the 51st state, they can pick off our forces for a long time, keep the place ungovernable, and wait the latest invaders (us) out.

The last few months have provided an endless stream of evidence that the Karzai "government" is a corrupt, illegitimate sham. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi pointed out last week, "we don’t have a connection to a reliable partner..." (Wonder if she'll backtrack out of party loyalty or represent her overwhelmingly antiwar constituents for once?)

For goodness sake, Pakistan -- a real country with a real army on the ground and support from the vast majority of its citizens -- can't control the parts of its own territory that are much like Afghanistan. Thinking that throwing more of our troops and some contractors and some reluctant Europeans into the mix is going to change things is delusional. And you know Obama is smart enough to know this.

The best description of the "consultations" Obama has been conducting about Afghanistan for months now came from Rory Stewart, a Brit who is a professor of human rights at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Working for the British Foreign Service, he served as governor of a province in occupied Iraq and also walked across Afghanistan in 2002. He describes the experience of "being consulted."

They listen politely, but in the end, of course, basically the policy decision is made. What they would like is little advice on some small bit. I mean, the analogy that one of my colleagues used recently is this: it's as though they come to you and they say, "We're planning to drive our car off a cliff. Do we wear a seatbelt or not?" And we say, "Don't drive your car off the cliff." And they say, "No, no, no. That decision's already made. The question is should we wear our seatbelts?" And you say, "Why by all means wear a seatbelt." And they say, "Okay, we consulted with policy expert, Rory Stewart," et cetera.

Unhappily, the realities of the Afghanistan situation -- and having a President who is capable of understanding them -- are having next to no impact on the inertial forces of empire. Once involved, our elites believe the U.S. can and must prevail. Any Democrat must prove he's not a wimp. Upholding the myth of U.S. capacity to shape the world to our elites' liking must outweigh over any realistic assessment of national interest. The military budget must never be reduced. Most countries do better by trying to get along with others, but that's not for U.S.

We'll get some pretty words. Maybe the long suffering women of Afghanistan will be dragged out again as a pretext of occupation.

We can count on Obama to thump his chest and threaten Al-Qaeda. He's shown that he knows that making peace with the Islamic world would undermine these guys more than any number of brigades. But that wouldn't satisfy the drive to domination; empire wins.

Regardless of what cover Obama tries to give himself in the way of "off ramps" and "timetables" and "metrics," the reality remains simple: the way out of Afghanistan begins with not going further in. Every escalation, every new tactical innovation, every hopeful development scheme our military comes up with will only lead this country further in. The way out requires turning back. It usually does when you've gone down a wrong path.

Since apparently we don't have a President who will get us out, once again the people will have to take the lead in opposition to a ruler who chooses empire over us. Oh yes, the U.S. will leave Afghanistan -- that's only a matter of time and national bankruptcy. The people's job (and interest) is to make withdrawal happen sooner rather than later.

Health care reform shorts: Data exchange

Best news of the day:

VA, Kaiser to exchange digital patient data
The Veterans Affairs Department will begin exchanging patient medical records this month with Kaiser Permanente as part of a demonstration of large-scale health data exchange, agency officials announced.

The pilot program connects Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect and the VA's electronic health record system (EHR), known as VistA, two of the largest electronic health record systems in the country.

The VA is participating in a dialogue with industry on the possibility of making VistA available to the private sector.

Federal Computer Week

Experts seem to agree that the VA has the best data system currently available. And as a Kaiser patient, I can testify that the system's medical records capacity is wonderful and avoids all sorts of potential for error. When a doctor needs to know what tests you've had and what drugs you take, it is all there. If you are in any other system, think of the time that would save ...

H/t Craig Newmark's twitterfeed -- [down as I post this.]

Health care reform shorts: The "war on cancer"

Perhaps it's because two people in my orbit -- my partner's father and a dear friend's son -- have died of cancer recently, but I found Dr. John Marshall's oped, "Fighting a smarter war on cancer," in the Washington Post yesterday one of the more challenging pieces I've read during the reform brouhaha. Here's a taste:

Cancer medicine is often regarded as an area of significant progress and clinical research, so we should be able to tell without much difficulty what kinds of treatment are valuable and what kinds aren't. But given that 80 percent of my patients will die of their cancer, it's clear that we have not found an "optimum" therapy.

... Most poor countries do not support any cancer care; most developed countries highly restrict it because of its cost and limited effectiveness. The United States is the only place on Earth with relatively unfettered access to cancer care, including the latest medicines, sophisticated scans and high-tech radiation, all of which are very expensive. But despite their more limited access, cancer patients in other high-income nations may live longer and with a higher quality of life than patients in this country.

... How did we end up here? The answer is simple: Cancer patients are scared for their lives and will accept what is offered, and we oncologists want to offer improved outcomes and recommend the best treatments we can. Insurance will pay for these treatments. A portion of fees collected by cancer doctors and hospitals is based on how much chemotherapy we administer. So the more drugs we give, the more radiation we give, the more we collect from health insurance. The incentive system makes it less lucrative to talk to patients -- to counsel them, to help with their decision-making -- than to treat them, regardless of the value of the treatment.

Dr. Marshall believes that medicine can move beyond shoving poisons that mostly don't work (though they may briefly extend life) into cancer patients. Health care reform for him involves collecting national data, including genetic data, on cancer outcomes into databases and encouraging more patients to participate into clinical trials, a choice that current insurance practices usually discourage. The current bills go some distance in these directions.

These aren't the stuff that has dominated the political arguments, but whether and how reform implements these seemingly-peripheral details will have a lot to do with whether all the sound and fury proves worth it.

Seen in the 'hood

The decommissioned former gas station at 23rd and Valencia has a new, LARGE sign.


I didn't actually see any cameras. Possibly they are well hidden. San Francisco police complain that the city owned cameras don't do them much good because they can only consult them after a crime has been reported. On the buses, half the cameras don't work.

But that sure is a big sign.

Seasonal musings

Today is the first day of the Advent season in the Christian calendar -- a sort of New Year's day, though not much celebrated as such. The new season calls the faithful to heightened awareness. What's past is past; what's to come will come, a future we must await with both some anxiety in "fear and foreboding" and also with "joyful hope." For Christians the annual wait has a short gestation: at the end of the month we celebrate the joyous arrival of the child who signals that God's love runs through this broken creation.

The Advent season works well in the northern hemisphere. Soon the days will stop getting shorter and there will be more light. More light helps. I've never lived Advent in the South -- somehow I suspect the season has different resonances.

Recently I've been reading Diana Butler Bass' A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story. Bass is trying to provide some answers for folks who can't explain what we value in Christian tradition; after all, we're up against the all-too-well supported reality that the loudest "Christians" in our society are bigots, obstructionists, misogynists and scientific ignoramuses. Some of them even bless "greed is good" in a "Prosperity Gospel." That's a lot of dreck in the way: is there really anything to value in all that old stuff?

Bass says yes. Consciously modeling her work on Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States, she introduces her readers to all sorts of interesting moments in the Christian past, most of them more in tune with contemporary notions of justice, peace, and inclusive love than commonly encountered in our culture. Unlike Zinn, she doesn't try to structure an overlying edifice for the historical story. She settles for cherry picking events and trends that matter to her and probably to us. I suspect she is confident that the narrative structure of Christian history already exists without much tweaking from her, however dimly we perceive it.

Bass includes a nice section about how the early Jesus movement

began to celebrate time in a different manner than did their neighbors. ...having a cycle of their own time marked the Jesus community in a unique way, providing their festivals and spirituality with alternative rhythms to those of both Judaism and pagan religions.

That speaks to what I like about Advent. It's a reminder to Christians that we profess to live in a different time -- or perhaps an additional, concurrent time as well as in our society's sociality-constructed ostensible time.

The center of the Christian year (in history and now) is not Christmas, but Easter -- the far more mysterious observance of life's repeated triumph over death. (That, too, might seem quite different if we observed it on the way to the winter solstice. I have to wonder about that ... I don't expect to ever see it in the Southern hemisphere, but who knows?)

I have enjoyed dipping in Diana Butler Bass' Christian history. For the historically minded, it's a solid, clearly written, popular introduction to some interesting Christian possibilities

A working harbor hunkered down for winter

The summer visitors -- cabin cruisers and almost yachts -- are long gone.


Much of the jetty is empty. There's neither sport nor commercial fishing this time of year; the season is over.


A few rusted fishing vessels are getting their winter maintenance.




The sea has taken its toll.


Buoys wait for the new season. Cheerful, aren't they.


A lobster trap makes a nice perch.


Come summer, perhaps there will again be fish to weigh.

A tortured Christmas carol

Actually, I think the outcome is in the hands of the administration and the Congress would follow strong leadership. But if the people don't repudiate torture, the executive is not going to offer that kind of leadership. This is not a set that stands up for principle unless pushed.

So, as we enter the Christmas season, do we care?