Why health care reform is hard

Health care reform is not morally complicated. Unless you like your country ruthlessly selfish and amoral, the issue is clear: guaranteed access to affordable health care should be a right for residents of the richest country on earth. Every other country that can afford this does it. The United States should to. How complicated is that? There are implementation issues, but there should be no question about policy objectives.

What turns out to be complicated is that our political system makes it very difficult deliver what should be a simple imperative. This post is a catalogue of the obstacles from an old campaigner. The obstacles can be overcome, but the list reveals a lot about the incompleteness of our famous democracy.

The President: this Obama guy's attachment to "bipartisanship" was probably a necessity to get where he is today. A Black man couldn't win by just replicating the behavior of the many politicians who win constituents by "doing their hating for them." (That's Rick Perlstein's phrase describing a Nixonland style of politics of resentment.) He has a lifetime of convincing skeptical people that he's a safe, rational guy. But in this, as in everything, he's up against the haters who are mobilized against him. So, as Paul Krugman points out, he's been coming off as

... weirdly reluctant to make the moral case for universal care, weirdly unable to show passion on the issue, weirdly diffident even about the blatant lies from the right.

He needed that rational affect to get elected -- it hurts him in pitched battle over his policy agenda.

The Senate: the geniuses (that's sincere) who cobbled together our system of government put the Senate into the Constitution to temper the populist passions (mostly assaults on property) they feared would hold sway in the House of Representatives. It also mollified small state leaders who feared they'd be swamped by large states. So a couple of guys from North Dakota and Montana, who together represent about the same number of people who live in the city of Philadelphia, can gum up the works for the whole country as Max Baucus and Kent Conrad are currently doing.

The Senate has undergone several waves of reform (direct election; lower standards for filibusters; less power to seniority) since it was invented. If it blocks health care reform, look for more pressure to change the rules. Senate reform may be a reform whose time has come. As it stands, we get Ezra Klein writing stuff like this at a Washington Post policy blog:

The main thing we could do to improve the functioning of the legislative process would be to dissolve the U.S. Senate. Its composition is wildly anti-democratic, its rules are aggressively anti-majoritarian, and its culture holds all this aloft as a good thing.

The House of Representatives: if the problem with the Senate is that Senators get to live above the fray, the problem with the House is that, having to campaign for office every two years, they tend to come cheap for the funders of campaigns. They scare easy at the prospect of a challenger; in a sea of undistinguished colleagues, most of them come off as empty suits buffeted by competing demands, but ever alert for the calls of funder and lobbyists. Still, they are the closest to the people of any part of our government and they've shown it in the health care reform debate. If we want to get reform done, we need to support those who support us. See my post here.

The merchants of confusion: There are, of course, people who don't want you to think health care is a moral issue. In fact, they want you to believe you couldn't possibly understand the issues. Mostly, they are folks who make a profit from selling medical care, drugs, and above all insurance. (Aside from the insurers and the drug companies, some of them also do care if you are sick and try to help you, if it is not too costly for them.) For them, health policy is complicated, because they are continually redesigning the system so they can make the most money out of it for themselves. They are fighting for survival and will do anything they have to do to hang on to their profits.

We're living through a test of our democracy: can it overcome the selfish private interests of the health profiteers in order to achieve health care reform? They have always been slippery, deceitful and vicious in holding on to what they have; can we pry some fairness away from them?

We the people: did you know that there is almost a one to one correspondence between those people who have health insurance and those who vote? That creates some friction, because we the voters can get scared by the idea that bringing into the system all the 45 million folks or so who are now without health access might somehow mean we have less access. We know that health care costs more and more and that staying insured is more and more chancy and arbitrary. That last is true even if we are old enough to be on Medicare: what if the country decides caring for old people costs too much?

We the voters have a choice -- it's the basic choice that always confronts a democracy. Do we want to use the political influence our participation gives us to hang on to what we have? Or can we dare to believe that sharing what we have will mean that we all will live more abundantly? Like all major social choices, the health care reform debate is about a choice between fear -- a death grip on our existing entitlements -- or hope -- risking change in the belief that a better society is possible. Last November we chose hope over fear; will we persist in demanding change or will timidity prevail?

Democracy is a lot of work.

This post is my contribution to Elders for Health Care Reform Day.

Elders For Health Care Reform Day

Over at Time Goes By, Ronni Bennett is linking all the posts reported so far. To prime my own pump, I just read through some. Some snippets [my emphasis]:

Health care reform without a government option is worse than the status quo. At least with the present system we have Medicare, a single payer government plan. That covers those of us over 65. Without a government option for the rest of our population they will inevitably raid Medicare and Medicaid.

20th Century woman

For Ronni, health care reform is a moral issue:

Here is my question for elders who have Medicare and younger people who have private coverage who oppose health care reform: why is it all right for you to be well cared for by your physician while tens of millions of other Americans are not? How do you justify that?

Ronni Bennett

For some elders, this debate raises up the truth they'd prefer not to think about.

Modern medicine is both wonderful and cruel, amazing advancements have been made over the years, but we have outlandish expectations for miracle cures. We are all living longer and the way the health service works will have to change. Illnesses such as cancer, once considered fatal, are now becoming chronic. Joints and internal organs can be replaced, but there is no such thing as a free lunch… the price is often with (like me) constant reviews and extra medication all costing the state and our pockets to stretch a very long way. We seem to have forgotten that we must die at some stage. I would like to live for another ten to fifteen years, but please don’t keep me hanging on like a vegetable, for another twenty, thirty or forty years, somebody show mercy, open the door and push me outside the igloo!

Grannymar

We can't fight off time's changes forever (and may not want to), but right now we can show the President we want real health care reform:

Get involved. Sign the message to the President at this site.

Thanks to The Tempered Optimist for that last link.

Alternatives to helpless rage

This morning I'm working up a good rant for tomorrow's Elders For Health Care Reform Day. Fury comes easily.

But I don't like living with fury. And I've lived long enough to know the remedy: don't just fume -- DO SOMETHING.

So today (while I get adjusted after traveling 3000 miles yesterday) I want to pass on a few suggestions to folks who are frustrated that the process of winning meaningful health care reform has gotten stuck in the August political doldrums.

• If you are internet-inclined, bookmark and hook up with the campaign for health care reform at FireDogLake. These folks have taken the lead on trying to ensure that progressive Democratic politicians keep pushing for something real from within their ever-so-tepid coalition. We need this kind of street heat! Sign the FDL petition and check out their event listings. It's a great place to get connected.

• If you relate to more conventional advocacy, there's the usual union and liberal suspects at Health Care for American Now. They feel a little stodgy, but we need them too.

• We know the health profiteering lobbyists will donate generously to kill reform. Bundled together, our dollars can count too. Let's reward the Democratic members of the House of Representatives who have told the President and the centrists that, if "reform" is watered down to nothing, they won't vote for it. This keeps reform pressure on. ACTBLUE has set up a donations page for this purpose.

Don't just fume -- DO SOMETHING.

On the road today

Our progress looks something like this:

It takes at least 12 hours, often far more. If the Vineyard weren't such a lovely place to be, we wouldn't put ourselves through this so often.

UPDATE: It took 16 hours. I'm pooped.

Meanwhile, the Island awaits the hullabaloo next week.



It's nice to see even the tourist establishments feel the need to support health reform.

Wesley Clark spouts nonsense about Vietnam

Retired General Wesley Clark is a respected former commander of NATO; nonetheless he is writing downright ignorant things about U.S. war in Vietnam as he cautions the Obama administration on its war in Afghanistan. This paragraph is simply nonsense:

The similarities to Vietnam are ominous. There, too, an insurgency was led and supported from outside the borders of the state in which our troops were fighting. There, too, sanctuaries across international borders stymied U.S. military efforts. There, too, broader political-strategic considerations weighed against military expansion of the conflict and forecast further struggles in the region.

The United States may have thought North Vietnam was a foreign country "invading" South Vietnam -- the Vietnamese never did. The vast majority of them thought they lived in one country arbitrarily divided by foreign invaders.

Like the nationalist Vietnamese, many Pashtun Afghans and Pakistanis apparently have no truck with the "border" bequeathed to them by the departing colonial empire. Taliban "sanctuaries" in Pakistan probably look like where Uncle Mohammed lives in his family compound to many Afghans. The area got by, insofar as it did, when central governments in both countries left people alone and didn't attempt to impose an outside hegemony. If local governments couldn't prevail in these mountains, how likely is it that a foreign power 15000 miles around the world can establish control?

"Broader political-strategic considerations" perhaps should have "weighed against military expansion" in Vietnam -- but once a series U.S. leaders got in further and further over their heads in a hopeless morass, U.S. troops and bombers managed to devastate and destabilize all the countries of the area. It took those countries -- Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam -- a generation to get back on anything like an even keel. We're drifting in that direction once again -- in the middle of a region dominated by two hostile nuclear powers.

Escalating in Afghanistan is simply foolish -- and for General Clark to be misrepresenting the U.S. experience in Vietnam won't help.

Health care shorts: Get the picture?

The flow chart above was created by Nicholas Beaudrot at Donkeylicious. Chris Hayes gave him the idea. I'm visually oriented as I think many people are. If you look this over carefully, you can begin to understand what the proposed health care reform might do for (or to) you.

It's not surprising that I wish the reform were in place today, since I reside in the lower right hand corner of the chart. Click on the picture for a larger image.

Pols find walking and chewing gum too hard

A blogging friend pointed out a scary Bloomberg headline:

Climate Change Measure Should Be Set Aside, U.S. Senators Say

Aug. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Senate should abandon efforts to pass legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions this year and concentrate on a narrower bill to require use of renewable energy, four Democratic lawmakers say.

"The problem of doing both of them together is that it becomes too big of a lift," Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas said in an interview last week. ...

"Doing these energy provisions by themselves might make it more difficult to move the cap-and-trade legislation," said [Peter] Molinaro, [head of government affairs for Dow Chemical Co. which supports the measure.] "In this town if you split two measures, usually the second thing never gets done."

Thought for Food summed up what this means:

Imagine for a moment that some how, some way, the White House and Congress cobble together a civilized public health care system. Within a decade, Americans are healthier than they’ve been in a generation. Preventative care available to everyone has led to fewer ER visits and fewer instances of chronic, avoidable diseases, like diabetes, heart disease, and some forms of cancer. We have more money in our pockets because we’re not paying for inefficient, privately-controlled health care. More and more of us are spending it on healthier, fresh food, and the obesity epidemic is finally turning a corner.

Guess what? We’re still fucked. Because the Senate decided one crisis is enough.

As far as the galloping climate crisis goes, maybe we should be happier if they don't enact health care reform. More of us would then live less long; given the detrimental effect every living American has on the planet's carrying capacity, slightly fewer of us might be a gift to the world's other peoples.

Yup, the system is looking more and more broken. The unrepresentative, sclerotic Senate is the obvious culprit -- too many old guys who represent hardly anyone have too much say over everything. But the House isn't really much better; Congresscritters need to run every two years and they welcome the campaign cash that listening to lobbyists can win them.

Scientists have for quite a while felt as hemmed in by idiocy as do those of us who are confronting birthers and deathers raving against health care reform this summer.The Reveres published an essential essay over a year ago and brought it out again last month. Just one excerpt from Why the Right Wing attacks science:

Refuting the arguments of environmental skeptics is usually easily done but the volume of their assertions is so large and so indifferent to counter-argument that cutting off the heads of the [Conservative Think Tank] hydra has become a major distraction for environmental science and a significant cost in time and money. ...

Yes -- refuting the right is a major time sink. The folks at Real Climate pointed out the good that going over the arguments yet again can do:

However there is still cause to engage -- not out of the hope that the people who make idiotic statements can be educated -- but because bystanders deserve to know where better information can be found.

Unfortunately, on health care and on climate change, opting out is impossible. Giving up means people and the planet die. Human beings seem hard-wired to resist our own extinction, though not necessarily to be sensible about how we try to do it.

All of this is to introduce a new widget I'm adding to my already crowded blog side bar. This one, from CO2 Now, (as is the large illustration at the top of the post) reports a running tally of the number of parts per million of carbon dioxide currently in the earth's atmosphere. Thanks to human industrial activity and the burning of fossil fuels, that CO2 level is now the highest it has been in the last 2 million years. Climate scientists think humans can avoid the most devastating results of global warming if we can get the CO2 level below 350 parts per million. We haven't been that low since 1988. As I write this, the widget reports 387.81 ppm.

That's what the bill the Senators can't get their minds around is about. It's not perfect, but if the U.S. doesn't contribute to reducing carbon emissions we can't very well expect anyone else to. One more thing to batter the politicians about ...

Health care shorts: What about immigrants?

For people who care about democracy, it ought to be axiomatic that we don't create two- (or more) classes of persons. If you haven't committed a crime, and you are part of this country, you are part of this country. If you are a citizen, you are a citizen, with the same rights and responsibility as anyone else. Pretty simple, really.

The current health care discussion uncovers too many instances in which we don't seem to know that.

• Item: Massachusetts has made an effort to cover all its residents with health insurance. But at present, as the recession cuts state tax receipts, it is running into the failure of the federal government to reimburse it for covering all residents. So 30000 legal immigrant residents have begun receiving letters informing them that their state-subsidized health insurance is ending Aug. 31.

• Item: naturally, the nativist faction in politics think this is just fine. They want to write a provision into the health reform bill that would exclude future legal immigrants from whatever emerges from Congress. Adam Serwer points out who would be victimized by such a provision:

  Why would an employer hire an American citizen, for whom he will have to provide health coverage, when he could instead hire a perfectly legal new resident, who is exempt from health insurance mandates?

  That's right -- low income folks who are current citizens will be discriminated against if nativists succeed in creating a two-tier health reform.

Of course any sane health reform would cover anyone in the country, regardless of citizenship. The Brits do. What's wrong with us? More haters? More fearful people? I sure hope the people of this country are not so weak as to go for this. We not only hurt the direct victims; we hurt ourselves when we construct complicated exclusions.

McNamara partially unfogged

LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto

I just got around to viewing Errol Morris' film Fog of War. I've been hanging on to the DVD so long its subject, Robert McNamara, died while it sat in its Netflix wrapper.

As Secretary of Defense (War) in the early and mid-1960s, McNamara was one of a trio of political figures -- along with President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk -- who I hated as war criminals during those awful years when they were sending guys my age off to die in their war to eradicate Vietnamese nationalism. I didn't find the old man's apologia for that horror particularly appealing or enlightening, even today.

But there were a couple of moments in the film that opened up possibilities I'd not thought much about.

For one, if McNamara hadn't been lured to Washington by President Kennedy, this country might still have an auto industry. He had just been made president of the Ford Motor Company. His claim to fame was introducing a small car (the Fairlane; my parents had a series) to compete with the VW Beetle. A guy in the center of the auto industry back then who was smart enough to compete with the Beetle could have set U.S. manufacturers on a different path.

Also, the film shows McNamara reduced to looking like a stammering, simmering little boy when being awarded a Presidential medal by Lyndon Johnson. This was after Johnson had fired him from leading a war effort that he claims to have known was doomed from early on and that was destroying Johnson's reputation.

Lately I've been trying to understand more about Johnson. Back then, I hated him so much because of the war, I didn't appreciate his accomplishment in getting both our core civil rights legislation and Medicare through a Congress probably more conservative than the one we have today. Johnson was apparently a very unpleasant, bullying legislative genius. He seems to have had a knack for making powerful grown men dependent on his approval. The scene (contemporary footage) showing McNamara pathetically grateful to this seemingly indifferent President is searing. No wonder Johnson beat Congress into submission -- and no wonder he couldn't imagine a people that would hold out against U.S. firepower.

Worth seeing.

Barack honors Harvey

Okay -- I know giving Harvey Milk a medal posthumously was a sop to the LGBT community from a President who has offered some access but little substantial accomplishment toward our goals. But you got to love this from the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony last night:

His name was Harvey Milk. And he was here to recruit us, all of us, to join a movement and change a nation. For much of his early life he had silenced himself. In the prime of his life he was silenced by the act of another. But in the brief time in which he spoke and ran and led, his voice stirred the aspirations of millions of people. He would become, after several attempts, one of the first openly gay Americans elected to public office. And his message of hope, hope unashamed, hope unafraid, could not ever be silenced. It was Harvey who said it best: You gotta give 'em hope.

Harvey was right -- and this President was right to say it. Now let's get to work.

LGBT people want a lot from the ascendant Dems. Victory on a hate crimes enhancement statute is in sight; it is hitched to the Defense Department authorization bill now in conference. A fully inclusive (that means transfolk are in) Employment Non-Discrimination Act has been introduced in House and Senate. We want Don't Ask, Don't Tell revoked -- that takes passing a law also.

And as soon as possible, we need the mis-named Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) repealed. That's the one that prohibits the Feds from recognizing our marriages, even though more and more states let us get legally hitched. Without doing away with DOMA, we usually can't share health insurance with our spouses if we're covered or ensure they can inherit without expensive legal arrangements. For sure they cannot receive our Social Security benefits when we die as heterosexual partners would. DOMA has to go as a simple matter of justice.

A wise friend of mine says we should hope; she has lobbied on Capitol Hill for several years:

It's so different [than under the Republicans]. When we went in to lobby, it was like fresh air. They won't do our work for us. But there are people there who are creating an openness so that we can do our work.

I like that. If we want something from these people, we have to do the work. Harvey certainly knew that.

Vacation musings

As I ditz around the blogosphere this morning, I'm struck by how many folks I regularly read report they are "on vacation". I know August is sometimes described as "the vacation month", but that association is not strong for me. This is particularly the case since kids now seem to return to school during this month, instead of staying blissfully free past Labor Day, as we used to. Sorry, kids.

Nonetheless, I too am "on vacation". And I am realizing there's an almost physical relief when I say that.

For the first summer since 2001, I am not living this August with a nagging fear that my quasi-democratic government will do something aggressively, intentionally vicious. Cruel, perhaps. (Well, certainly). Stupid, maybe. But not something of the sort that means I am morally bound rise up in horror at the actions of my country. I could be mistaken about this, culpably complacent even. I hope not.

This chance to take a bit of a vacation in the midst of citizenship is what the Obama election and Democratic majorities mean to me, even as I try to find the right mix of support and criticism of this administration's numerous shortcomings.

The screaming townhall meeting crowds obviously feel differently. I note they mostly seem to be afraid of potential evils, while by mid-2002, I believed I was living in the backwash of far too actual ones. (That was the year we ramped up anti-war work, the year we found ourselves on the no fly list.)

I wish the screamers could feel safe enough to take a vacation, to just chill a bit. But obviously they don't dare.

***The new photo on the "masthead" of the blog dates from the summer of 2001, from a vacation that included hiking a few of Colorado's 14000 foot peaks. It is the view from the summit of Grays, looking over to Torreys. Yes, we tromped across the ridge and them barely avoided a lightening storm by running down the mountain.

The pastoral scene at the head of this post is an experiment with the new blog template.

If anyone has trouble with the new set up, please email me and I'll try to fix it.

Good news, smart decision

Equality California, the 800 pound gorilla at the hub of the gay and lesbian marriage fight in the state, has made a sensible decision:

After reviewing all the information, research and feedback from our coalition partners and the community-at-large and in view of our aggressive determination and dedication to win marriage back as soon as possible, we support committing our energy, resources and leadership to helping the community win a ballot initiative to restore marriage at the November 2012 election.

That is, they haven't let themselves be stampeded into trying to go back to the ballot in 2010. Cheers for good judgment!

• The electorate in a Presidential year is likely to be younger and more progressive than next year.

• With some luck and good management, the economy may be stronger. Voters are much more open to innovation when they aren't so scared about their own situations.

• Waiting will give the individuals and communities that need to get to know each other better a longer window to do that.

• Potential donors needn't shell out again immediately.

• Some of the current, slightly hostile, electorate will no longer be voting.

That last item is important. This struggle is already won in society, at least in California. Gay marriage is simply not an issue among younger people. It is going to happen. The only issue is when.

Healthcare reform short: Time for Elderbloggers to weigh in

On Thursday, August 20, older people can take part in a demonstration that elders are not credulous, selfish nitwits -- so secure in their government-provided Medicare that they can be persuaded to serve as shock troops against health care reform for everyone else. Read all about ELDERBLOGGERS FOR HEALTH CARE REFORM. And if you've got a blog, join the day of blogging!

Our age cohort -- beginning at about age 50 and working up -- are out of sync with the rest of the country.

And convincing [older people] of the need for change is proving to be an uphill battle. Last week, a CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll found that a majority of voters over 50 opposed the healthcare overhaul effort, while most voters under 50 supported it.

Los Angeles Times
August 12, 2009

None of the proposed reforms would cut Medicare -- part of what reform would try to do is lower costs and consequently save this vital government program.

Opponents have seized on a reform proposal to pay doctors to talk with people about their wishes for end of life care -- to ask delicate questions like, do you want to be hooked up to feeding tubes and breathing machines? At present, you are not going to find doctors asking these things -- they get paid for hooking us up, not listening to us or helping us understand options. Opponents label the availability of such conversations with medical professionals a form of euthanasia. I'd call them offering us dignity and choices.

But then, since I think we need health care reform (almost certainly far more than we'll get), I must be a Nazi or a Communist or something.

Healthcare reform short: If we brought guns to rallies, they'd shoot us

Parallels are being drawn between the current health care protesters and the anti-war protesters of the Bush years. There's at least one difference, though: The Democrats were protesting killing people, and the Republicans are protesting healing people.

Jack Bog's Blog

Healthcare reform short: a democracy -- or not?

Blogging here will be a little different over the next week, I hope. You see, I'm really on vacation in one of the most beautiful places in the world. And if I have any energy for the blog, I want to put that energy into some behind the scenes work to make this place function a little more cleanly.

But on the other hand, a titanic struggle of over healthcare reform seems to be playing out this August around the country. And that struggle raises all sorts of issues this blog deals in -- issues of campaigns, how public opinion gets formed and gels, ultimately, of how much of a democracy we have in this country and can we have more of one?

I could try to write some thoughtful tome on this stuff. There are oceans of material, scads of interesting angles. But I've got other stuff to do. So I'm going to throw out occasionally short posts about the healthcare reform brouhaha, not asking myself to think particularly deep thoughts, but just hoping to share some light into corners that catch my eye.

And you may get some pictures and thoughts from vacationland too.

***

This woman, seen at a community march in the San Francisco Mission district, knew what she wanted.

Here's an oddment: one of the best summaries of the impetus behind healthcare reform from the ordinary person's point of view that I've heard was from a Heritage Foundation economist, not usually where I'd go for an overview that I can agree with.

I think there are some basic problems that we've got to solve. One is, of course, that there are millions of Americans who literally don't have adequate access to the health-care system because they don't have insurance coverage.

Even those with insurance in the United States are often very nervous that they are going to lose that insurance if they change their jobs, maybe if their child graduates college and doesn't have a job, then they can't be a dependent, so they're not under the family plan. So even people with insurance are nervous.

And I'd say thirdly that the cost of coverage, the cost of medical care in this country is enormous, compared with what we spend on other things and what other countries do, and yet we don't seem to get the value for money.

So I think it's value for money, I think it's uncertainty for people who've got coverage, and gaps in coverage. Those are the three big things that we've got to solve.

Stuart Butler,

Speaking with Terry Gross, July 28

Yes -- we, most all ordinary folks in the United States, need access to healthcare and we fear not having it when we need it. The current "insurance" system creates all sorts of lunacy. If you get insurance from your job, you are stuck in your job for fear of losing your doctor. If you get healthcare through a spouse's insurance, you are stuck with your spouse for fear of losing your doctor. If you think you were injured by a doctor (or any individual or business with "deep pockets"), you almost have to sue because getting taken care of is going leave you with the dread "pre-existing condition" that makes you uninsurable and leads to bankruptcy. Then all the rich individuals and businesses have to insure against your likelihood of suing them which raises their costs and makes them every more eager to avoid insuring you ...

What we have is quite simply, NUTS. But you don't hear that from President Obama and our democratic leaders -- we hear "unsustainable" and "smart investment." Healthcare reform might be doing better if they'd honestly name the lunacy.

But that would put in play the question of whether we have enough democracy to enable our leaders to sell change to a workable majority of the people by telling the truth. Unfortunately, that is an open question.

What's it like to fight and die for nothing?

Over 20 soldiers from the Welsh Guards' unit of the British Army have died in the current offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Independent (UK) has published what amounts to a wail of grief over the loss of these men in a conflict which an anonymous captain in their unit sees as endless and unavailing.

We are dealing here with a tenacious and stubborn enemy. Despite our dropping bombs on compounds that the enemy is using as firing-points, the very next day, new enemy fighters are back. ... Their numbers seem to stay constant, as opposed to decreasing --- all of which gives a strong indication that we will not be able to reduce their numbers to a level where they are tactically defeated.

It seems increasingly true that a stable Afghanistan will only be possible with some sort of agreement, involvement or power-sharing deal with the Taliban.

However, as the British Army units here are increasingly sucked into the turmoil of the latest "fighting season" there seems little evidence that anything is happening on the political and diplomatic stage. In the meantime, tour follows tour, during which the most intense fighting appears to achieve not much more than extremely effectively inflicting casualties on both sides, whilst Afghanistan remains the sick man of Central Asia.

The author is a veteran of two tours in Iraq, but somehow fighting in Afghanistan is more debilitating. He describes his reactions to fellow soldiers dying:

With each death I think each of us experiences a feeling of total shock, powerlessness and impotence. Within your mind you feel you have to do something, especially if you knew the individual. Back at home that might be to jump in the car and drive to some secluded spot where you can get out and scream at the top of your lungs to let out all the anguish. But here nothing of the sort is possible. You are all enclosed within your camp or patrol base; there is no refuge, no private corner to go to, to deal with your grief.

Around you everything else has to continue, and cannot stop. The radios still have to be manned and answered, the patrols still have to be planned, the convoys have to be organised. It is not as if you can take a day off to deal with the grief, to come to terms with it. And even if you could, what good would that do?

... I am just speaking for those of us who deal with the deaths and injuries in Afghanistan indirectly, as an explosion in the distance, followed by a report on the radio, then a helicopter coming in to pick up the casualty.

As for those who deal directly with the deaths and injuries, who have to go into the Viking vehicles after the explosion to pull out the casualties, who have to tourniquet the remaining stumps after both the legs of a person have been blown off, those who have to pick up the leftover pulpy fragments of a disintegrated body and put them into a bag, I am not sure how they react.

I would imagine in a similar way to the rest of us: you put it aside as soon as you can, as there is nothing to be achieved in thinking about it. All you will do is think yourself into a corner, where you are faced with the absurdity and horrid waste of it all. And if you let that take a hold, how are you meant to perform, drag yourself out of your tent at 4am after just three hours sleep, to go on another foot patrol, another 18-hour convoy, another 12-hour shift in the operations room?

How long will citizens of the United Kingdom be willing to keep sending their people into this fruitless hellhole? The Netherlands will leave Afghanistan in 2010 and Canada in 2011. Eventually Afghanistan will be a solely U.S. war, without an understandable mission and costing billions this country doesn't have. Just why is the United States so committed to this futility? Can't all the genius of the security apparatus be put to figuring out a less costly, in lives and money, way to ensure that some wackos in caves in distant mountains don't pull off another 9/11?

One gets the sense that our military is hamstrung by its procurement successes: got weapons of massive destruction, must use them. Hammer, meet nail. There has to be a better way.

Confessions of a former anti-immigrant activist

Robb Pearson got hooked on being noticed -- and then he got over it. He realized that the attention he'd gotten for agitating against immigrants had morphed into across the board anti-Latino racism. And that wasn't where he wanted the country he loved to go.

Given the incitement to racial rage at the President we're seeing these days from opponents of Obama's healthcare reform, Pearson makes an inspiring model of how good people can figure out they've gone off track and find their way back to community values they thought they were defending.

H/t Citizen Orange.

Lest we forget that people die ...

This sign marked the path to the Gay Head Light on Martha's Vineyard island, where, every year on August 6, people concerned about peace and nuclear weapons greet the dawn in memory of the Hiroshima bombing.

The determined band of peaceniks who attended might be heartened by the findings of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs 2008 opinion survey on our attitudes about foreign policy. Seventy-three percent of us think preventing the spread of nuclear weapons is very important. It's not clear from the report, whether respondents understand, as Cora Weiss, President of the Hague Appeal for Peace, said during the August 6 gathering: "If we won't get rid of them, others are going to want them and get them."

But it is clear in the same survey that, by and large, people in the United States are not gung-ho about aggressive military action all over the world.

President Obama is going to run into this reluctance as the war in Afghanistan heats up. Already, CNN reports that 54 percent of us oppose this effort, a gain of 9 points more opposition than showed up in May. That's after about 30 days of an offensive and 50 or so dead Americans. This is not a war that people think is necessary or are willing to give patient support to. George W. Bush used up and wore out whatever trust many had that Uncle Sam knows why our guys should die in faraway places.

The good folks from Peace Action West have been talking with Congresscritters about the Afghan war. Our representatives aren't exactly aggressive about protecting our interests. Rather, they floating along in a skeptical holding pattern:

While few members of Congress were eager to mount a strong opposition to the current approach in Afghanistan (especially against a president of their own party), I did not hear anyone strongly defend the strategy either.

There's room for constituent pressure to push more of them over into active opposition by the end of the year.

That seems the least we could do for Afghans and U.S. soldiers who are dying for no discernible purpose.

OFA, healthcare, and playing defense

The emails (and fund appeals) are flowing in. Those of us who've kept up a connection with the current iteration of the Obama campaign machine are being called to action in support of our President's healthcare reform. I think it is going to be a tough sell for the organizers. Some of the obstacles:

• At the meetings I've attended, many folks made it pretty clear that they are fans of single payer, government-run, healthcare reform, of doing away with insurance companies. Our guy took that option off the table before this round started and that remains disappointing.

• Congress has been muddling with this process for months, but we still don't know quite what is in it. That's a big problem; it's awfully hard to mobilize folks for something that seems nebulous.

• Moreover, whatever allegiance OFA inspires is in Obama, not in Congress. If anything, activists want their guy to pound some sense into dithering Washington hacks. But they aren't seeing him do that, on health reform, or anything.

• Because there's been so much process and so little substance, the other side has scored some hits. What will this thing cost? Will it chip away at existing healthcare coverage? This last one is ridiculously easy to sell to the public because gradual erosion is what almost everyone has experienced in dealing with the existing exploitative system.

• Obama activists don't fully believe this stuff, but nagging questions reduce their energy. After all, the President himself talks all the time about how we have to get health care costs under control. It's not hard to imagine that might mean cutting something we have that we like.

Ultimately, Obama's activists are CHANGE people. The campaign knew that and sold it. Now OFA is trying to mobilize the same group for modest, reasonable, incremental benefits. This is a tough sell; I'm not surprised that the other side is being more visibly successful in turning out anxious, fearful Obama opponents.

And yes -- I'll put in some time agitating for Obama-care, unless I think it has warped into something actively hurtful to access for most people. But this campaign is not a happy one; it is pure defense. If the right kills whatever half-assed healthcare "reform" we end up with, it will cripple many of the possibilities opened up by Obama's election and the hard won Democratic majorities in Congress.

But saying that is a far cry from the joy of last November. The prospect ahead is a long slog up a tough hill toward what may be a false summit, not a glad community dance.

Unsolicited testimonial

Today an electric hiccup swept through the hard drive of my laptop and swallowed my address book. Suddenly all nearly 1100 or so folks I've corresponded with or talked with over the last 15 years were gone. The section called "ALL" was simply empty, an 8Kb data shell.

Happily, I didn't have to freak out completely. Over a year ago, I had read about a company called Mozy that performed automated back-ups into online storage. So long as you were connected to the internet, your computer would be backed up. For a small fee, that seemed good insurance, in addition to my sporadic backups to an external drive. So I signed up.

Set up was not exactly a breeze. I was working from a slightly flaky wireless connection at a location where I was a temporary visitor. The instructions said the initial back up might take a while. I have a lot of data...


Soon I was getting this message:


But the connection kept failing. I'd see screens like this:


That is almost certainly illegible; here's an enlargement of the right panel:


As you can imagine, I was not encouraged. What did the electronic demon mean by "this should never happen"?

But I had a lot of time that week, so I kept restarting the process... Each time I'd see this:


Finally, after 13 days (!), Mozy report it was done.


That was over a year ago. Ever since, nearly every day, despite weeks of travel and all sorts of internet hook ups, Mozy has indicated it had updated my backup over night. Once or twice it seemed to have stopped; on each occasion tech support replied to my inquiries promptly. Though I never quite understood what they (or I?) did, it always resumed backing up.

And so, today, when my address book disappeared, I wasn't all that scared. And I was right. Within an hour I had all 1086 people back. Mozy had worked exactly as it claims to.

Now I need to figure out whether this episode means my aging laptop is on its way to electronic obsolescence...

A great year for fungi

It's been a terrible year here on Martha's Vineyard for tourism (what with the recession) and even for beach sunning (what with the endless rain.) But it has been a great year for mushrooms.


Since so much of what I do here is tromp around on trails, I'm having a marvelous time noting the considerable variety.


Apparently about 170 kinds have been catalogued on the island.


I wouldn't consider eating any of them -- too ignorant for that. But this one strikes me as ominous.


Something else has been eating this one. Probably an insect. Current climatic conditions are also healthy for many biting bugs.


These look a little like something I might see in a store, but I doubt it.


Quite quickly, they seem to rot into the forest carpet.


This looks like a fungus, but it is not, exactly. It's a Ghost Plant, Indian Pipe, or Corpse Plant, a parasite on fungi. It doesn't live on chlorophyll and usually grows in dense forests. I saw this specimen on a roadside. It's been a heck of a wet summer.

Bomb anniversaries

Sixty four years ago the Untied States dropped a (small) nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and killed some 70,000 people instantly and perhaps 140,000 more over the next few years. We can still hope to draw lessons from that catastrophic event. And we need to.

Fourteen years ago, Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell tried to capture some meanings of the nuclear bombings (we also blasted Nagasaki and another 200,000 souls two days later) in Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. The book doesn't seem to have made much of a splash; you can get a copy today on Amazon for less than a buck. But some of it speaks loudly to the present moment.

Our shiny new President (actually he's getting a little tarnished these days, but he's still newish) says he wants nuclear disarmament. Thank goodness -- only a fool wouldn't. Lifton and Mitchell write thoughtfully about American presidents:

No one is more overburdened than a modern American president. As historians have pointed out, he must be both chief executive and king. ...

Harry S. Truman was a good man, a loving man, who made a decision to use the cruelest weapon in human history on a heavily populated city and then spent much of his remaining years defending that decision. ... Truman, we believe, experienced an atrocity-producing situation, a psychological and political environment structured so as to motivate the average person to engage in slaughter, in this case an unprecedented dimension of slaughter. ...

Our view is that, yes, Roosevelt could possibly have taken a different turn -- which means it was at least possible for Truman to do the same. One must add, however, that such an act on the part of either would have required an extraordinary combination of courage, moral vision, and capacity to step back from immediate pressures (on behalf of a commitment to humankind) -- a combination sufficiently rare that it should discourage all of us from creating situations in which it is required of any president.

That last point is to some extent the crux of it for people in the United States. We live in enough of a democracy so we have substantial responsibility for our politicians. We can't expect to ensure we always have moral geniuses at the helm of our political system. (We've demonstrated all too recently that we may not be able to assume even a normal level of brains in these guys.)

And so, to the greatest extent possible, it becomes the duty of citizens of a country that possesses the capacity to blow the planet away to encourage policies that value moderation and equanimity. We must strive not to put our leaders in situations that might lead them to commit atrocities.

And from that perspective, Lifton and Mitchell highlight an aspect of what was going on in 1945 that has far too nasty echoes in recent U.S. experience. They make no bones about observing that, in part, U.S. leaders felt justified in frying Japanese cities to get revenge against a racially inferior enemy.

[There were] elements of racism (strong on both sides) and revenge. Images of Pearl Harbor were still vivid ...

Interestingly, 50 years after the bombing, when the Smithsonian tried to present a retrospective about the bomb, what riled veterans was any mention of "vengeance" as a motive for the decision to go ahead. These U.S. G.I.s had experienced the nuclear blasts as reprieves from further combat, from the awful prospect of invading the Japanese islands. Yet it is hard to dismiss the revenge component. We've all lived bathed in it in recent years. A similar emotion rallied support behind George W. Bush's irresponsible war of choice on Iraq -- and lingers, underlying the unconsidered acquiescence President Obama is still getting for his Afghanistan folly. "They attacked New York and the Pentagon. We'll show 'em."

With the power of nukes, the destructive potential of war making has advanced beyond what the planet can survive. Revenge is no longer an allowable luxury. We have to create the conditions that enable leaders to give it up. *** A Londoner ruminated wisely about overcoming "terrorism" on the fourth anniversary of the bombings in his city's underground trains in 2005:

Four years on, the level of fear in London is back to what it was on 6th July 2005. People carry on their lives quite happily. The underground is packed with people not even giving a thought to the possibility of being blown up on the way to work. The majority of commuters this morning will not even remember that today is the anniversary of those deeply unpleasant events.

This is the best memorial.

Yes.

Truth in advertising?

Why the U.S. Navy would think it could recruit "sailors" by offering a chance to drive an armored vehicle down a desert road littered with roadside bombs is beyond me. I assume they tested this ad's efficacy.

It appeared in that bastion macho cool, Outside. Click on the picture to see the ad larger; hit your browser's "back" button to return.

Last name leads to watch list

During my long-past brush with the "no fly list," I remember feeling just as Amanda Malik does. What does the government mean by sticking miscellaneous citizens on a "watch list"?

Usually I only quote bits of stories that appear elsewhere on the net. However this is such a clear account of what it means to a very ordinary, middle American individual who finds herself enmeshed in the workings of the "Homeland Security" regime that I want to share a lot of it.

"It has to do with your last name."

At those words, I burst into tears. My husband, Mike, and I were standing in the airport in Islip, Long Island, trying to check into a flight on Southwest Airlines. The attendant behind the counter was filling out a form that said "Watch List" at the top.

My husband and I were the subjects of profiling.

To most, Malik looks like Ma-leek, which in Arabic means "king." It is a very common Arabic name. To us, it looks like Ma-lick, a Czech name that we share with many who are Eastern European. But because of our Arabic-looking name, we are now on the terrorist watch list.

To those who have been discriminated against because of their ancestry for their entire lives, this story might sound naïve. And I freely admit that up until this point, I was naïve. But I have a new sympathy and respect for people who have dealt with this for their entire lives, because I'm here to tell you that it is humiliating. Right down to the core. It is one thing to suspect that you are being discriminated against. It is another to be told flat-out that you are. This is a new and very unsettling experience for us, but one I'm afraid we're going to have to get used to. ...

Mike and I have always had to have a rather nonchalant attitude when it comes to airport security. Since Sept. 11, we've always been searched what seems like more than the average person or been pulled aside at the metal detector more than seemed to be normal. We've had our bags searched. I've had a rather large female security guard pat me down and feel underneath the underwire of my bra. We always joked that it was because he and, more recently I, had an Arabic-looking last name.

Apparently we were right.

It was funny until it was true.

It's embarrassing to have people look at you with suspicion when you have done nothing wrong. Innocent until proven guilty doesn't apply to the Homeland Security Watch List. You're at the mercy of a government agency that doesn't have to tell you anything about anything. ...

From now on, Mike and I will always travel with our passports and copies of our birth certificates. My fear is that someday we won't be allowed to board a flight or we will be detained by security for having the wrong name. It's so sad to me that in an effort to make it's citizens feel safer -- even if they actually aren't -- the U.S. is treating what I can only assume is millions of its citizens this way.

Amanda Malik has an advantage in taking on "Homeland Security" that most citizens don't have. She is a copy editor for the Lafayette-West Lafayette Journal and Courier where this was published. When my partner and I found ourselves on the no-fly list, we happened to be traveling to visit the sister of a pretty senior journalist. He took an interest in our experience. What do people without such connections do? Probably just shut up and know there is little they can do.

Professor Gates amid anxieties -- personal and social

When Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. fulfilled a long-standing commitment to read at the Martha's Vineyard Book Fair this morning, he drew a crowd.

And many cameras.

The good doctor is something of a known quantity here, but his recent celebrity thanks to Cambridge's Officer Crowley has kicked media interest in him up many notches.

His project -- tracing African American family trees -- embodied in In Search of Our Roots, both highlights the peoples' history in those ancestries and reveals the polyglot genetic origins of this country's population.

Rather to my surprise, Gates talked about aspects of his recent unpleasantness I had not known about. Apparently when a Black man attracts that much attention in a racially charged situation, the consequence is angry phone calls and death threats. (The Cambridge police department published his private, unlisted landline and cell numbers in their public report.) Harvard is urging him to move; his home has become dangerously visible to cranks.

A reporter asked Gates what the arrest brouhaha had meant to him personally. He said he was still trying to figure out. But he did say that the night before he went to DC for the White House visit, he dreamt he was arrested at the White House. Guess this sort of thing can throw you, even if you work at Harvard.

***Frank Rich had an insightful column on the Crowley-Gates circus in today's New York Times. He chalks up the extraordinary media enthusiasm for the story to commercial media exploitation of white anxiety caused by the demographic fact that this is ceasing to be a white country.

What provokes their angry and nonsensical cries of racism is sheer desperation: an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for.

This Californian wants to point out that, despite its other problems, the experience of my state suggests that we might get through this transition more rapidly than the national media fixation would suggest.

In the mid-1990s, seeing the California electorate whipped into a racist frenzy by Republicans who exploited fear of immigrants and affirmative action to keep some waning power, some of us warned, "California is becoming the new Alabama." And so it seemed.

But after doing pretty well for a couple of turns, the purveyors of racial fear have completely marginalized themselves; aside from the Terminator's freak show election, Republicans haven't won statewide office in ten years. Not only are more people of color claiming their rightful place in the process, but also a significant fraction of white Californians have got over their expectation that their country will look like them. It never got as bad as it looked like it might -- perhaps the whole nation can also come to terms with reality more rapidly than we think. Perhaps that's why we elected Obama.

Voices from the recession

West Tisbury Flea Market, Martha's Vineyard, MA

Two vendors comparing notes:

"This month is supposed to be better, right?"

At the grocery store, two merchants meet and greet:

"How's it going?"

"It's slow."

"Me too; it's getting scary ..."

It's tough times here in this once booming bucolic playland. Summer business has to carry many residents through the whole year.

Waiting for electricity

Laith took that picture of a Baghdad sand storm on July 29. He reports that the high temperature that day was 109F -- perhaps falling to 83F overnight. And he wonders, why, after six years, his city still only gets about 5 hours of electric power a day? No electricity means no air conditioning.

I don't know what the Iraqi ministry of electricity was doing during six years since the invasion but definitely it did not implement any project because the power supply did not improve, on the contrary, it became worse. As an Iraqi man, I can not trust any more what the Iraqi government say about rebuilding this country.

Laith works for a U.S. newspaper; he's certainly no fan of the bad old regime. But he does remember expecting his city to have electricity. Before. Before the U.S. came marching in.

On top of the physical insecurity, this is what we're leaving Iraqis.