tales of copper city

"We're Not All in this Together."

Paul Krugman makes the painful point that the class war aspect of our politics was part of the 2012 victory, and also part of the current debate over the Fiscal Cliff. Leave it to our leading economist to wake us up to the reality of class in America.

I think this is also something that all interested in public health might remember; values matter, and while public health stresses the health of the community, this does not mean that we're all in this together, in the struggle to improve the nation's sorry standing among other democracies.

The paradox of public health is a double one: the health of all of us together depends on improving the health of the least of us, the health of the poor and the lower middle class. The double paradox is that by increasing their health, the health of those who are better off within the income ladder improves also, but somewhat less dramatically.

"The Crackpot Caucus"

Timothy Egan's column, "The Crackpot Caucus" should be read by every voter in America.  It won't be, of course. It's in the New York Times.  And it's in an opinion column rather than featured as hard-core news.  The media is the "unidentified co-conspirator" in the swing to a more conservative democracy over the past decades. The media doesn't have the guts to run this story often enough to finally sink it; we are becoming the laughing stock of the modern world.  Some of us think that's okay. Many of us think is tragic and sad. But the great mass of the American voters simply are uninformed, both as to what is going on in our politics, and where it is headed and what it is costing us in meeting the needs of all the American people.

Goodbye Gladwell?

I have just read a rather startling expose by Yasha Levine of the work of Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer who writes so well, notably with The Tipping Point, and as it may turn out, writes to schill for the powerful health insurance lobby. Levine's article is published at TruthOut, and it may be the beginning of the end of Gladwell as one of our leading social critics. 

The end of policy?

I'm teaching my course, "Advanced Public Health Policy Analysis," this fall, probably for the last time. The idea of the class is to teach people how public policy comes about, the principal actors, the process, and so forth. 

I have been teaching a version of this class for several decades.  As someone trained in political science, and also someone who has worked as a senior official in the nation's largest state health department, it has been a mainstay course for me. 

"This Republican Economy"

Paul Krugman hits the nail on the head; the biggest campaign issue President Obama has is the sluggish economy he's forced to live with by the GOP.  And the GOP wants to be in the White House to continue their no-growth policies.  Here's the catch: if the President speaks the truth, the GOP will say, "There they go again...more government spending." And far too many among the public will buy it. Go figure.

 

"Flapsville"

I don't want to get into it over Gay marriage; it never has seemed to me as anything other than sane or sensible.  Why shouldn't gay couples be married? Why shouldn't we admit the diversity of sexuality and extend committed and legal relationships like marriage to gay couples?

But what drives me nuts is that we've turned this issue into another huge "flap." We love it, that is to say the media loves it, because another flap starts and the public turns on their laptops and spends huge amounts of time reading and view what others are saying, and on and on it goes for about four or five days, and then it dies down. And the media uses all of that coverage and public attention to justify advertising revenue.

Politics increasingly seems to be one episode of "Flapsville" after another. We no longer have any kind of extended, sustained comment or criticism of President Obama, the GOP and the House of Representatives, the upcoming election and its importance. What we have is a series of "flaps," each one vying with the last for maximum attention, the sound and the fury, signifying nothing.

Frankly, I've lost my place. I have no idea any more where we are as a nation or a society.  I'm waiting for the next "flap" to tell me.

The irrelevance of it all

George Orwell once wrote, "To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." No kidding.

One of the things that I hope someday will happen---a kind of "national epiphany" that I wish for all of us about what kind of nation we truly are--is that we will look back on this Constitutional showdown at the Supreme Court over health insurance reform as the supreme irrelevancy that it truly is.  

I hope that some day we will look back and recognize how blind we were to what is going on in front of our nose regarding health care reform, health insurance, and all that.

By that I mean we could have done something different, something that the Court couldn't touch, but no, we chose the long way home out of the spirit of compromise. We could have faced the fact that we will not control health care spending, nor adequately protect the American public until everyone has health insurance, and, more than that, the health insurance I have in mind is Medicare.  

We should have national health insurance in this country, and that insurance should be Medicare.  

Is Obama Care headed for a train wreck? Maybe, maybe not

Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's veteran watcher of the Supreme Court, thinks that the Solicitor General Donald Verrilli had a dismal day today, defending President Obama's health care law.

On the other hand, Walter Dellinger, a former Solicitor General under President Clinton, argues that, despite the harshness of Justice Kennedy's and Justice Alioto's questioning, there is still a chance that the Court will uphold the law as a legitimate exercise of the Commerce Clause but on different grounds.

Religion is poetry

Today is Christmas and I'm a little disappointed that I started out with bloviating about liberalism.

On this day, after a Christmas Eve celebration at St. John's with so many people I love, Carole and I find ourselves talking about what we believe and what we don't, and I nearly always wind up with one person, James Carse.

Carse is a student of religion generally, which is why I think he goes further than anyone else in capturing the dilemma of those raised as Christians or Jews but who balk at a lot, a whole lot, of the theology (in the case of Christianity).  Here ia a recent interview with Carse on Salon that captures where he's coming from.  

And what's missing from that interview is his profound spirituality, a spirituality of everyday life.  I have written a lot about him in the past (see the entries under "Carse" as a category, listed on the first page of the blog), and he has helped me enormously, encouraged me to keep on trying to make sense of things "religiously", when the conventional ideas of "God" just don't help anymore.

 

"When in doubt, shout!"

Social psychologists have long known that people who are convinced, who have made up their minds, and who are confronted with strong evidence to the contrary, don't change their views but raise their voices, dig their heels in, and start looking for others who agree with them.  

Does this sound familiar?