Obsidian Wings

Sabotage and Obamacare

by liberal japonicus

Being in a country with a working national health care system, I've thought of the Obamacare battles as the typical overwrought commentary. However, via Atul Gawande, I see that this view is all too sanguine.

Obstructionism has taken three forms. The first is a refusal by some states to accept federal funds to expand their Medicaid programs. Under the law, the funds cover a hundred per cent of state costs for three years and no less than ninety per cent thereafter. Every calculation shows substantial savings for state budgets and millions more people covered. Nonetheless, twenty-five states are turning down the assistance. The second is a refusal to operate a state health exchange that would provide individuals with insurance options. In effect, conservatives are choosing to make Washington set up the insurance market, and then complaining about a government takeover. The third form of obstructionism is outright sabotage. Conservative groups are campaigning to persuade young people, in particular, that going without insurance is “better for you”—advice that no responsible parent would ever give to a child. Congress has also tied up funding for the Web site, making delays and snags that much more inevitable.

Some states are going further, passing measures to make it difficult for people to enroll. The health-care-reform act enables local health centers and other organizations to provide “navigators” to help those who have difficulties enrolling, because they are ill, or disabled, or simply overwhelmed by the choices. Medicare has a virtually identical program to help senior citizens sort through their coverage options. No one has had a problem with Medicare navigators. But more than a dozen states have passed measures subjecting health-exchange navigators to strict requirements: licensing exams, heavy licensing fees, insurance bonds. Florida has attempted to ban them from county health departments, where large numbers of uninsured people go for care. Tennessee recently adopted an emergency rule declaring that anyone who could be described as an “enrollment assister” must undergo a criminal background check, fingerprinting, and twelve hours of course work. The hurdles would hamper hospital financial counsellors in the state—and, by some interpretations, ordinary good Samaritans—from simply helping someone get insurance.

The mind boggles. 

Kofi Awoonor and Westgate

by liberal japonicus

It is probably a measure of not only tragedy fatigue, but also the distance that Africa stands in my mind that the terror attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi didn't really loom very large. Most of my reading of world news is about Asia and my recent post about Kyrgyz has me trying to figure out all the names and places of Central Asia as well as dealing with the more mundane aspects of classes starting.

Real life and Onion convergence Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

When I saw this, I was sure it was in Onion article

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates acknowledged that the “CTRL-ALT-DEL” means of logging into your Windows PC was a mistake, although done with the best of intentions.

Ted Cruz juxtaposing Dr. Seuss and the Bataan Death March,  a bridge named after a cheese maker decides to do its impression of a slice of cheddar left out on a hot day. More examples of the fact that this is the Onion's world and you are merely visiting are encouraged.

Peaceful Stories from a Distant War

by dr ngo

Everyone who's ever been in the military has stories to tell, and I am no exception. Mine are scarcely the best around – for one thing, they occurred about 10,000 miles from the nearest combat – but they are my own, and in this telling of them, at least, they are true, to the best of my recollection. Besides, for me most of you are a new audience, though not exactly a captive one, since you can easily skip over this. (If any of you want more stories, just buy me a drink. Any drink. Any time.)

Reality Politics

by Doctor Science

Reality in the sense of "Reality TV", i.e. "not reality". A performance.

Right now I see people from Karl Rove to Paul Krugman saying that the GOP's determination to "defund Obamacare or bust" is quixotic, self-defeating, or just plain crazy.[1]

I don't think it is. I think that, for the Tea Party end of the GOP, the attack on Obamacare makes good business sense. It's just a question of what business they're actually in -- and I don't think that business is politics in the sense of law-making. Their business is performance.

Poster for The Red Detachment of Women (source.) The point isn't to be *practical*, the point is to give an inspiring performance. With guns.

Kyrgyz, Syria and the dog that didn't bark

by liberal japonicus

This post is part travelogue and part musing on world politics, though I'm not sure where one ends and the other begins. In possibly the most famous Sherlock Holmes story, the key clue is the dog that didn't bark and while it may be strange to find a non-barking dog in Kyrgyz, it's one of the things I take away.

The Birmingham 16th street Baptist Church bombing, 50 years on.

by liberal japonicus

I'm back and in the process of writing a post about my travels, but this guest post on LGM by Robert Widdell caught my eye as I was catching up. It discusses the 50th anniversary of the 16th St. Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham and specifically, it was this passage:

In this context, then, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church is less the story of an event that would further galvanize white support for the national movement and more a cruel reminder that, on the local level, Jim Crow was alive and well. In fact, Birmingham’s well-deserved reputation as a particularly violent defender of white supremacy – garnering the city the name “Bombingham” – meant that from a local perspective the bombing was in many ways business as usual.

Widdell is correct that we often think of the bombing as just a threat that hung over the black community in the whole of the deep south, but it was actually a tactic. This is from a transcript of an Amy Goodman interview of Angela Davis

But I’ve often pointed out that some of my very earliest childhood memories, are the sounds of dynamite exploding. Homes across the street from where I grew up were bombed when they were purchased by black people who were moving into a neighborhood that had been zoned for whites. So many bombings took place in the neighborhood where I grew up. And we know now that Chambliss was probably responsible. That the neighborhood came to be called “Dynamite Hill”. And of course as you know, the city of Birmingham was known as “Bombingham”. In fact on September 4, 1963, less than two weeks before the 16th Street church bombing, the home of the leading civil rights attorney in Birmingham, Arthur Shores was bombed. And that house was right down the street from our house.

This reminded me of the Kathy Ainsworth and Thomas Tarrents case. I learned about the Ainsworth case (which is notable because she was a kindergarten school teacher by day and a bomber by night) from a professor's book (Outside the Southern Myth) about his reminiscences of growing up in my hometown, but when I looked for a link to the story, the only one was to the Metapedia, a right wing nationalist version of the Wikipedia.

However, it seems like bombing was a tactic. Elsewhere in the book, my professor notes Hattiesburg, which makes an appearance in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, there was 'plenty of racial turmoil in the 60's=some murders, at least one racial rape, some bombings'. More digging reveals it was tactic rather than threat.

In this age of data crunching, rather than treat the Church bombing as an isolated incident, a better memorial might be to go thru the records and create a map showing the locations of all the bombings, not just in Birmingham, but across the south. 

Not all Jews who wander are lost

by Doctor Science

Last week, Corey Robin wrote about Jews Without Israel:

In shul this morning, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the rabbi spoke at length about the State of Israel. .. I remember the rabbi first taking up the topic in earnest in 2011 (or was it 2010?), almost apologetically, saying that we in the shul had been too quiet about Israel. It was time to talk. And by talk, she meant defend. Israel was under attack, politically and ideologically; its status in the culture could no longer be taken for granted. We had to speak up on its behalf.
... it’s not the goyim the rabbis are worried about; it’s Jews. And not merely anti-Zionist, middle-aged lefty Jews like me but also younger Jews who are indifferent to Zionism.

Robin doesn't seem to have noticed what I wrote about in my High Holy Days post last year:

the non-Orthodox majority of American Jews are finding Zionism-as-she-is-practiced less and less compatible with our beliefs about what we, as Jews, are called to do. American Jews are not becoming more secular, we are becoming more religious -- but in a different way than Israeli Jews.

Both American and Israeli Orthodox Jews (and secular Israelis) seem to be mostly missing the fact that non-Orthodox Jewish practice seems more *right* to us. We don't reject halacha because we're lazy or sloppy, but because we feel called to focus our religious energies on what's really important. We aren't interested in just being halachically "good" Jews, we want to be good people who are Jewish.

We look at Israeli Orthodoxy and we see the same behavior and attitudes we see in Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists. We do *not* see them displaying the true foundations of our Jewish religion:

• Hillel's "one-leg Torah" (aka The Golden Rule): "What is hateful to you, do not do unto others."
• teshuva: Repentence, which *must* involve not just feeling bad about something you've done, but action to redress it.
• tikkun olam: repairing the world. This involves both a commitment to social justice and social welfare -- for non-Jews as well as for Jews -- and also a commitment to environmental concerns, to repairing or taking care of the physical world we share.
• wrestling with G-d: what makes us Jewish is that we don't accept *any* pronouncement as a "given", they all have to be examined, discussed, argued about, meditated upon. I've given an example of how this works in a post about Jewish and Christian readings of Bible verses about the conquest of Canaan.
• An openness to "others", regardless of race, family background, sexuality, or religious history. We let strangers into our congregations because we do still know the feelings of the stranger.

It's hard for me to hear about Jews like Robin's rabbi and not think of a battered woman who hasn't yet gathered what it takes to leave. Robin's rabbi is Conservative and female: she would have no respect in Israel, she would have less freedom to practice her religion in Israel that she has in the US. For her to ask her congregation to defend Israel is really sad and painful to watch -- and probably won't work, either, any more than they'd take the side of any other abuser just to "save the marriage".

I think we're watching many Diaspora Jews quietly turning away from Israel and the security it purports to represent, and heading out, once more, into the desert. We may be wandering, but we're not *lost*: we're still together, and we're still following our Guide, pillar of fire and pillar of cloud.

Clouds (Rain Clouds over Oregon Desert) by American Impressionist Childe Hassam. Not the worst place to wander, all things considered.

Open Thread: Syria? The NSA? Alabama vs. Texas A&M?

by Ugh

Not sure LJ is putting one up for Friday given his current location (although he's closer than Voyager 1) so for y'all's enjoyment, here you go.

That Syria thing sure took a turn.  I think it essentially reflects that Obama, at bottom, really didn't want to bomb them, although he was clearly going to do so.

The NSA revelations keep on coming, including:  We were illegally searching Americans stuff because no one knew how the surveillance program operated and thus we didn't WTF we were doing; so don't hold us in contempt of court!  But also this program is critical to Keeping America Safe^TM.  Feh.

'Bama favored by a touchdown over A&M in the latest NCAA hypocrisy bowl.  Hope it's at least a good game.

David Graeber's Debt and balancing the books: Libra, Michaelmas, the Days of Awe

by Doctor Science

In my last post I mentioned some things I was disappointed by in David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years, but that's not by any means my opinion of the book as a whole. Indeed, I found it fascinating, mind-opening and for the most part convincing in its core thesis: that money did not arise out of barter, as the story is usually told, but out of debt. Graeber argues that debt as a social obligation is much older and more universal than money, and he demonstrates it with wide-ranging knowledge of history and anthropology.

One of the many insights I got from the book was into the nature of the Jewish High Holy Days, the "Days of Awe". Not because Graeber discusses them specifically, but because of this passage, describing Early Modern England (based on the work of Craig Muldrew):

In a typical village ... everyone was involved in selling something, however just about everyone was both creditor and debtor; most family income took the form of promises from other families; everyone knew and kept count of what their neighbors owed one another; and every six months or year or so, communities would hold a general public "reckoning", canceling debts out against each other in a great circle, with only those differences then remaining when all was done being settled by use of coin or goods. [Debt, p.327]

Graeber notes that "the circular cancellation of debts in this way seems to have been quite a common practice in much of history" [p.400-01], though he gives no other details.

When I read Graeber's description of a yearly circular debt cancellation, I immediately recognized the Days of Repentance.

Book of Life painted metal sculpture by David Kracov.