Max Boot thinks that health care reform is bad for national security. He suspects that health care reform will wind up costing more than we think, thus accelerating the trend away from defense spending and toward social welfare spending. If we aren't careful, he warns, we'll go the way of socialist, pacifist Europe. And if the U.S. is no longer a great power, who will patrol the sea lanes and kill the terrorists?
I think it's a rather weak argument to say, "We can't do anything about the uninsured today because forty years from now we might be too broke to fight a war in the Taiwan Straights." What if we hadn't enacted Medicare in 1965 on the off chance that forty years hence we'd need to issue war bonds to fight the Soviet Union? Not only would the elderly have suffered, the decision in retrospect would have looked profoundly foolish. Forty years after Medicare, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
The trend from guns to butter is undeniable, and it's a good thing.
When he was eight months old, our older son had open heart surgery to repair a ventricular septal defect. When he was six years old, he had a second open heart surgery, a double chambered right ventricle repair. He is autistic, and takes a cocktail of anti-psychotic and anti-depressant medications in order that he can live peaceably enough to remain in our home. Whether he will ever be able to hold a job of any kind, much less a full-time job with benefits, is an open question.
Thanks to health care reform, no matter what happens to us, his parents, and no matter what his prospects for employment are, he will never, ever lack for health insurance, either because he has been denied coverage due to a pre-existing condition, or because his employer, if there is one, doesn't provide health insurance as part of its benefits package.
That is why I support health care reform, and that's why you should too.
The police report indicates that the bullet, which penetrated the glass window but not the interior blinds, appears to have been shot in the air and fallen back to earth into the Congressman's office. This prompted Josh Marshall David Kurtz to quip that unless the assassin was trying to kill Cantor with a bullet bank shot off a cloud, this was clearly not an act of political violence, just another jackass popping off.
That's not the case with Perriello's brother. Tea partiers, erroneously thinking that the address of Perriello's brother was the congressman's home address, posted the address and urged supporters to "drop by" and see the congressman. Which they apparently did!
Republican lawmakers and right wing pundits have pandered for over a year to the lunatic fringe of the political right with hysterical warnings about "death panels," and "a government takeover of health care." They have sown the wind; now they're reaping the whirlwind.
Cantor's ridiculous press conference is a doubling down on the GOP's strategy of feeding the monster. Just as the segregationists of old blamed lynchings and police brutality on those "outside agitators," wingnuts like Cantor have the chutzpah to claim that the Democrats are stoking the rhetoric and the violence to advance their agenda. Way to blame the victim, Congressman.
No end of the political spectrum can claim a monopoly on political violence. An anarchist murdered President McKinley. The Weather Underground went to war against the government in the latter days of Vietnam.
But political violence in recent U.S. history has been a right wing phenomenon: Oklahoma City, the targeting of abortion clinics and providers, a plane crashed into an IRS building, and this weekend's pranks, threats and vandalism. The Right can stop Right Wing Violence by toning down the rhetoric and condemning violence.
A Facebook friend asked, "How much do you tip your servers?" I replied by shamelessly linking to some of the rants I've composed here, but as I re-read them, it occurred to me that I could have been clearer. At points it sounds like I'm trying to excuse bad service. I'm not.
What I'm trying to do is address this problem: You give good service; you like your guests, and they appear to like you; you're sure you could not have rendered better service, and they still leave you three twenties on a $55 tab and cheerfully encourage you to "keep the change."I choose not to think these people are cheap, but merely uninformed. If only they knew more about the nature of the work and the pay scale, they'd be better tippers.
So this post will describe what's hard about restaurant work, why servers deserve good tips, and also what waiters and waitresses can do to give better service (which, I admit, I haven't written about yet).
About these Democrats who voted No. So
many of them said, "This bill doesn't do enough to control health care
costs," or, "This bill is too expensive."
These arguments make no sense. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that
the bill, at a cost of $940 billion, would cut $100 billion from the
federal budget deficit over the next ten years. So the choice was between this bill, which cost $940 billion, and the status quo, which would cost $1040 billion.
Those were your only two choices! It's not like you had to choose between a bill that cut only $100 billion and a bill that cut, say, $500 billion. When you voted No, you voted for the more expensive plan--the status quo.
Everybody knows why you voted No. You voted No because your office was inundated with phone calls from geezers who trust Fox News like they once trusted Oral Roberts, who are being played for fools by Republicans who make the straight-faced argument that all the GOP wants is to stop Democrats from gutting Medicare. You like being a Congressman. You want to keep on living in Washington DC rather than being consigned to the oblivion of practicing law in Lumberton, NC or Lexington, MO (two Congressional districts I've lived in whose Congressmen voted No).
So just tell it to us straight. Say, "I like my job, and I'm gonna vote to keep it so that I don't have to live and work among the people I represent."
This post by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich situates Health Care Reform in a historical context. He argues that one can discern two trajectories in social safety net legislation. One is represented by Social Security and Medicare, enacted by FDR and JFK, in which the government collects taxes and pays benefits. In the other, represented by Eisenhower and Nixon, the government expands the safety net indirectly through tax breaks and regulation.
Reich's conclusion: the Health Care Reform bill President Obama will sign tomorrow belongs to the second, more conservative trajectory.
Indeed. If someone had told you five years ago that in 2010 the government would reform health care by delivering millions of new customers to insurance companies and doctors in exchange for tighter regulations, AND that the pharmaceutical industry, the AMA and the AARP would endorse the bill, you'd have probably assumed that the Republicans would be the ones enacting health care reform.
Which makes a speech like this one borderline delusional:
Given what the bill actually does, Congressman Boehner's speech is cynical at best, nihilistic at worst. The massive resistance to Health Care Reform was solely about denying the President and his Democratic majority a legislative victory. The Republicans stand for nothing other than the exercise of raw political power to squash their enemies.
But they lost! And it's an irreversible defeat, no matter what happens in November. Tomorrow, health insurance becomes a right, not a privilege--as it should be. Citizens will soon take it for granted that a just society does not abandon sick people to fend for themselves, just as they take it for granted that a just society does not abandon the aged to poverty or disease. No majority will be able to muster the political capital to revoke a right like that.
In the short term right wing political violence will increase, as the tea-partiers who lament our slide into the bleak tyranny where disease doesn't bankrupt people feel more and more helpless. The bill the President will sign is not all that popular, but Obama looks a lot more reasonable that the freaks sporting tricorne hats shouting "Kill the bill" and racial epithets at Congressmen, to say nothing of the Right Wing Jihadists who crash airplanes into government buildings.
I may be wrong. Maybe Democrats will pay for this vote in November.
On the one hand, that prospect really disturbs me, given the rot in the contemporary Conservative movement.
On the other hand, if losing an election is the price you pay for universal health coverage, so be it. LBJ paid a far steeper price when he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1965. To do it, he broke the century old Democratic coalition, and consigned the Democrats to nearly a half-century of electoral weakness, but we are a better republic for it. Majorities are for governing, not for crouching.
A classmate of mine taught Sunday School this past week. She's been doing this "Prayer through the Centuries" theme, and Sunday it was Friedrich Schleiermacher's turn. Who knew that Schleiermacher had anything to say about prayer? Not I; I got my MDiv at Columbia, where Schleiermacher was the enemy.
Once you weed whack your way through the horrible dead German theologian syntax, the content is quite good. He says that true Christian prayer is that which one prays in the mind of the whole Christian Church.
My dad died of cancer twenty years ago this weekend. I think I've blogged about this before, but the whole time he was sick I took comfort from that parable about the widow who finally got justice from the unjust judge because of her persistence. I decided that no matter how bad the prognosis was, if I just kept plugging away, dad would defy the doctors.
Well, he didn't. And he knew he wouldn't. I told him once about the parable of the unjust judge and how I was praying for him, and he looked at me with a mixture of kindness and pity and said, "Pray that when it's time for me to go I'll be ready to."
That was a downer. But my dad knew his own body better than I did. He knew better than a 19-year-old that we all wind up in the grave one day or the other. And he knew that there is life after the death of a parent. Both his parents were dead.
Unfortunately I wasn't in a place where I could honor his request, but I think he was OK without my prayers. He married my mother later in life and became a father for the third time when most men his age were sending their kids off to college. There had been a brief and ill-fated first marriage which we kids only found about shortly before he died, and between that and meeting my mother, from what I gather, there was a long period of assuming that he'd wind up dying alone in some VA hospital. Listening to him talk that last week of his life, I think he was astonished that his life had turned out as well as it had.
So that's a long way of saying that when it comes to prayer, Schleiermacher is right. It's good to take a broad and long view of the situation.
Part of it is the question of celibacy, as well as the subject of
character development. And part of it is a large portion of honesty, in
the church but also in society.
I'm a married father of two, and a Presbyterian minister. Clearly I have no brief for mandatory clerical celibacy. But I would like to hear a compelling argument in favor of the discipline, because I like good arguments. (Not for celibacy in general. Nobody is required to have sex. But requiring people not to have sex as a condition for celebrating the sacraments.)
They've been made in the past. At the conclusion of Peter Brown's splendid book The Body and Society, Brown maintains that sexual renunciation by the Christian clergy marked the Byzantine Empire's decisive break with classical Rome. The Roman Empire sought to perpetuate itself by its elite classes accumulating wealth, begetting offspring and bequeathing that wealth to them. It was a heavy burden for Rome's high-born women, who had to have at least five kids simply to maintain the population, due to appalling levels of infant mortality. But in the new Christian East, dynastic continuity would have to rely on faith alone--the generosity of benefactors in the present, and the Spirit's power to call Christians to the priesthood in the future.
In the West, the big push for clerical celibacy came in the 11th century. The Gregorian reformers hated the way that clerics trolled the halls of dukes and counts for jobs for their kids. A celibate priesthood would devote themselves to the care of their flocks, not to helping their sons climb the "corporate" ladder. The demand for celibacy went in tandem with the demand that the Pope, not the local nobility, appoint bishops. In short, celibacy was part of a comprehensive effort to extricate the Church from the political economy of feudalism.
So in the past, sexual renunciation has been part and parcel of renouncing society, or a particular relationship between Church and society. It's hard to see how that's the case today. Sure, one could argue that clerical celibacy stands as a protest against the off-the-chain sexuality of the post-60s West, but the Church has an older remedy for sexual license than that--marriage: "[B]ecause of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband" (1 Cor. 7:2).
Lacking a compelling argument, I can't help but think that the Roman Catholic Church's obstinacy on this issue isn't unlike trying to root out fraternity hazing. "If I had to go through that, then everybody who comes after me has to go through it too!" Or maybe it's the price tag that would come with having to pay clergy a sufficient salary to support a spouse and family.
I realize that the Catholic Church is a battleship, not a kayak. It takes a long time and a lot of space to turn an institution around. But if this scandal really does go all the way to the top, it may not be so much a matter of changing course than saving the danged thing from sinking.
Last month Eric Bergman, an Episcopal cleric who's jumped ship to Rome, said that the Reformation is over and the Catholics have won:
He believes Anglican Use may mark the beginning of the end of the
Reformation. There will be "a flourishing of this throughout the world,"
he says. "Wherever there are Anglicans, there will be people who want
to enter Holy Mother Church." As he told a rapt audience at St. Mary's,"If
we look at histories, heresies run themselves out after about 500
years. I believe we are seeing the last gasp of the Reformation in the
mainline Protestant groups."
Here's a great example why you shouldn't make sweeping historical pronouncements based on the day's headlines. For given this week's headlines, which ominously implicate the Pope himself in the ever-widening Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal, it would appear that the Reformation is over and the Protestants have won. Seriously, where is this great mass of people who are going to flood into an institution with a Kremlin-like penchant for secrecy, run by leaders who manifest a Nixonian paranoia and willingness to cover up the criminality of their subordinates?
The other day I was thinking out loud with my professor about Pannenberg's assertion that history is the proving ground of religious ideas. To maintain his divinity a God has to prove himself anew in changing historical circumstances. Those who fail the test of history are no gods at all. This assertion appeals to me because it establishes some rational grounds for testing the validity of religious truth claims, and it also forces all religious adherents to adopt a posture of modesty. After all, history ain't over yet, which means that your and my claims about the truth haven't been decisively validated.
What this means in relationship to the Reformation is that neither side has the truth. Bergman is wrong; most heresies die long before their 500th birthday. The fact that Protestants haven't gone the way of Donatists and Albigensians validates the movement to reform the Church along the lines the reformers laid out. At the same time, Rome hasn't crumbled either (to my astonishment, I must admit). Which means that each side in some sense needs the other, and history waits for the Holy Spirit to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Or maybe not. Maybe a vacuous Protestantism and a corrupt Catholicism are destined for the ash heap of history, to be replaced by Glen Beck's Randian brand of Mormonism. Maybe the "Christian" man of the next century will stride the world like a John Galt colossus, his three or four wives in tow.
If that happens, I can only hope that my great-grandchildren have the decency to convert to Judaism or Islam, both of which are genuinely monotheistic and in their own ways maintain a commitment to social justice.
You probably aren't a political junkie. Most people aren't.
But if you walk around with a vague sense of disquiet about matters of sickness and health:
that the job insecurity of this economy means health insurance insecurity,
that your insurance costs too much,
that the insurance companies are playing gotcha with you regarding what they'll cover, only it's not a game,
then today's the day you ought to move the dial on numbers of times you've contacted your Congressman from zero to one.
We have two choices, and only two:
Do nothing and live with that vague sense of disquiet and hope it doesn't develop into a full-blown crisis, or
reconcile the health care reform bills that have already passed the House and the Senate, and sent it to the President for his signature.
Really, the second option is far, far better. Health care reform will cover millions of uninsured Americans. It will prevent the insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will reduce the budget deficit over time.
It requires people to buy coverage and provides subsidies for those who can't afford it. This isn't an undue burden. You already have to buy auto insurance if you drive, and health insurance if you are enrolled in any numbers of colleges or universities. This mandate is necessary to keep enough healthy people in the insured pool to keep the overall cost of coverage from rising. It encourages personal responsibility.
Everything you've heard about death panels and a government takeover of the health care system is nonsense. Your doctor won't become a government employee. If you like your insurance, you get to keep it. If you think that the government really would cut health care costs by killing off your grandparents, well, you probably stopped reading this a long time ago.
Congress either will or won't pass this reform in the next few weeks. Whether they do or not is up to you. Unified Republican opposition has made the legislative process a bit tricky. Democrats in the House are skittish about having to vote for a bill with details that will make for great attack ads this fall, in return for the promise that the Senate will send them a second bill to fix those things.
I don't feel sorry for them. I'd much rather face the prospect of losing an election than face the prospect of losing my health insurance, which is what ordinary people will face if this reform isn't passed. That said, they don't need scolding; they need encouragement. So go to Organizing for America where they make calling or emailing your Representatives and Senators easy.
You really need to do this. Just this once. Even if you aren't a political junkie.
And because heath care reform is coming down to the wire during March Madness, AND because I'm feeling nostalgic:
Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA), I am a Ph.D. student at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, a husband, and father of two red-headed boys.
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